Comment by sightbroke
20 days ago
I started college at the CC level (having no HS diploma) to get into a State school. And from a series of poor choices and ignorance on my part needed to take a several years gap before returning to finish up.
I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.
CC students have always felt more motivated in my opinion. But good Lord the quality of the education at the State level is abysmal. I am not saying there aren't quality professors and classes. There are.
There is however an alarming high number of poorly designed classes, nearly broken technology, poorly edited and badly written assignments, and questionable instruction.
I have to compare the quality and price with what I experienced in CC and it just makes me sad and depressed.
The higher the level of education, the less attention paid to pedagogy. I had better teachers in high school than in college.
This was my general experience as well. The very best quality education I ever received was in my 7th grade math class, followed closely by my 7th grade English class.
I did have some very excellent university classes (including ones that were so good that I audited them without receiving credit), but I also had a lot that were positively abysmal, taught by professors who were experiencing severe mental health issues (one who'd had a stroke and could no longer comprehend the material, another who was going through a mental break and stopped teaching us altogether, etc.) or extremely stressed grad students who were not fluent in English and spent class time trying to catch up with their PhD workload.
My best university-level education actually came after I graduated and got a job working in a lab at my university. During that time, I worked closely with the professor and grad students, and it was such an amazing learning opportunity that I will never forget for the rest of my life — sadly cut short by the 2008 financial crisis.
If you look at how most professors and adjuncts are rewarded and paid, it makes sense. You can't get quality instruction from a adjunct who is only a half-step away from sleeping in their car, especially when they know they might be gone mid-semester due to a budget cut. Even the full professors are trying to bring in enough grants, oversee enough RAs and TAs to do the work for the grants, get some of their own research done, and barely have time to teach. Teachers in high school have a high teaching load relative to colleges and universities, but they are doing a job and generally are paid at least middle class wages.
I had a math prof who didn't speak English.
Didn't matter, one of the best courses I ever took. He made the math look beautiful on the old fashion chalk board. Absolutely wonderful and enlightening equations.
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> I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.
I'm actually somewhat inclined to agree with this. I also started at a community college first, so I got to see a lot of adults trying to do career switches into tech.
Many of them were frankly the same if not worse than many of the young students you see in college today. One could definitely attribute some of that to the fact that they have more responsibilities to handle impacting them, but even just overall demeanor was noticeably worse. I frequently had adults 15-20 years older than me throwing their hands up and asking me to just give them the answers to what were ultimately very simple programming problems.
It was great for me because I took it as an opportunity to reinforce the material we were learning, but I knew I was doing them a disservice, so at some point I would stop enabling the poor behavior.
Honestly, to me the biggest thing impacting everyone is the inundation of information from technology today. I know it sounds cliche, but it's making academics a billion times harder than it needs to be. It's also making it less enjoyable and satisfying, thus people take the shortcut to get the grade they're looking for.
What the college tuition debate overlooks is that for costs to go down, so does the quality of the experience. this means college is more barebones and less handholding, like in Europe.
Maybe for the costs to go down, the administrative fat could be trimmed instead.
Especially when you consider that it's gotten to the point where at many schools with the worst and most extreme administrative bloat, there is one non-teaching, bureaucratic administrator for every student.
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I'm saying the opposite has been my experience.
There's plenty of ways for Universities to lower costs without hurting quality.
There are plenty of open resources nowadays. Many of the paid online only textbooks with inconsistent tooling and accessibility for starters could be eliminated.
Expensive corporate software contracts is another. Access to MS office is nice in theory but in practice many students rely on Google instead AND there are open alternatives that don't have unreliable authentication problems.
University tuition here is state sponsored, the difference is not that great (everything over 10k a year is a cashgrab anyway) You have the "institution rate" aka real cost + milk foreign students tax, and the European cost aka affordable. The university gets a yearly allowance per European student plus a lump sum on graduation (yes this brings graduation rates up and quality down).
The end result is that the average money received is about 60% (give or take 5-10 percent depending on left or right wing politics) of the institution rate so you now know the foreign "tax". If you are over 32 you should also pay the institution rate but it is almost fully tax deductible.
Costs have been increasingly hard to justify given the wealth of information the internet provides, for some time now. Often, a sufficiently motivated person can piece together a lot of material themselves, given a general "structure" of topics/material.
Lots of textbooks floating around out there too.
LLMs add another layer to this. In many cases, the whole thing is looking a bit silly (at least at the state level)