Opinions on college education

[celandine13]

 The extremes on this debate are absurd.  College is not useless; it has many benefits to students. On the other hand, it would be surprising if the most efficient way to provide those benefits was exactly the social institution of college in America as it exists today.

The signaling function of college works pretty damn well.  Yale/Princeton/MIT

Comments

[xuenay]

But how much more valuable is a video lecture course than a textbook at the public library?

Hmm. I wonder if the primary benefit of video lecture courses might not be so much the information, but getting people to realize that this kind of study is possible. While the textbook self-study option has always been there, most people have been taught to think that if you want to learn a subject, you have to earn a degree in it. It's not that they've considered the autodidact option and rejected it, it's that it has never occurred to them in the first place.

It took me several years of university to realize that hey, I could study most of this stuff on my own just as effectively, and without needing to jump through as many arbitrary hoops. And even if I am doing self-study, the course materials on university webpages sometimes still help a great deal.

There are also some other things that the online courses have in their favor over textbook autodidactism, such as the opportunity to talk with coursemates while it's going on, and the certificate that you get for completing the course. Unless you're very strongly self-motivated, working through a single textbook might not seem like that much of an accomplishment, since it's just one book amoung countless of others. A little bit of external validation for having accomplished something can work wonders to keep one's motivation up.