ctl over at ctl.idealog.info has a link to a story on the worthlessness of college and his own thoughts on the subject.

I think he’s mostly right. College has become a commodity – a lot like high school. everyone goes to high school just so they can get a job. Now, the job market is tougher, and so they all finish college as well. Some of the classes I attended as an undergraduate were full of people (those who bothered to show up in the first place) that could care less about learning. I think to some extent that’s the fault of the college. I was an engineering major, but I was required to take PE, economics, sociology, all kinds of stuff that had absolutely no bearing on my degree, and I wasn’t interested in. In fact – I showed up for my econ class for the exams, and that was it. I didn’t learn anything – and I didn’t learn because I wasn’t interested. I did attend all of my CS, engineering and math classes – I found them interesting. I even took graduate level classes for reasons outlined in ctl’s thoughts – the people in those classes cared about what they were learning.

I think it also depends on the school. At Texas A&M, the classes were different than they were for CMU. This is probably a fact of A&M was a state school, CMU was a private school. Anyone in the top 10% of their HS class was admitted to A&M, CMU was much more selective. When I was teaching at CMU, more of the students were interested in the class, coming by my office outside of class to ask questions. Maybe that’s part of why those students were admitted to CMU in the first place – I don’t know their admissions standards.

I also think that he’s slightly wrong in that all learning occurs outside of the classroom. I am trying to learn Japanese. And while I can do a lot on my own, attending the class at MC really helped me a lot. It may also have been that I had an “outside” motivation for taking the class – I wanted to learn.