[monkmartinez]

> College doesn't teach you about your job, it teaches you about the wider world.

Playing devils advocate for a second...

How does college teach you about the wider world? By taking a bunch of tests on subjects being taught by TA's (if you are lucky) or professors that sometimes struggle with English?

Or

Cramming for tests and writing papers you don't want to write is learning about the wider world?

Find me the Engineering major that would rather take 2 semesters of humanities|Literature|etc or graduate sooner!

Find me the doctor students that wish undergrad was a like 2 years shorter! Fuck it, make it 4 years shorter and call it a day! Strait to med school if you have the aptitude.

> but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built like it is.

One semester of finance is craptacular, you wouldn't learn much. Better if you had said Accounting... but most students don't pick accounting. You would do far better listening to Dave Ramsey for a month, IMO. Seriously, where in the bulk of College majors outside of Finance can I find the requirement to take a finance/accounting/econ classes? I'll answer, NO WHERE!

The fact that you bring up finance is interesting because fully half of the Colleges today would go bankrupt if their students knew ANYTHING about money! Why would they go into such crazy debt for what they get in return? The subset of college majors that actually have promising career futures ahead of them are miniscule in comparison the "majors" offered at universities.

[michaelmrose]

Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't actually gone to college.

This isn't to say you are yourself less intelligent but perhaps you lack perspective?

[wtetzner]

> Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't actually gone to college.

I've gone to college I agree with the GP that most gen. ed. college courses are mostly useless. Just the way they're structured usually means you never get a good picture of what you're learning and why. Instead, you usually learn to do a bunch of exercises, with little context about what the point of the exercises are.

[cossatot]

They also introduce you to a lot of topics you may not have studied on your own, and give you the opportunity and resources to take them as far as you'd like. I spent a lot of years in universities and I never met a teacher who wasn't willing to spend at least some time with an interested student, or point them in the direction of materials for additional self-study.

Certain classes (particularly the calculus series and chemistry) were pretty exercise-laden but I don't remember anything else that wasn't somewhat obvious what the purpose was, or really many classes beyond science/math/foreign languages with much exercise-type homework. It's obvious with language classes why you're doing rote memorization. Calculus is pretty clearly an engineering weed-out gauntlet, and I have no idea why university chemistry is universally terrible. The context of humanities courses (kept separate from the occupational relevance) was usually obvious. Want to learn what different kinds of buildings are called? Take an architecture history course. Etc.

Mostly I remember undergrad classes as a bunch of 19 year olds who did about 2/3 of what they were assigned, and most of them took zero initiative. Sure, the first floor of the library was packed at night, but there aren't any books there. The stacks were basically ghost towns, and that is where the real learning goes down.

[monkmartinez]

One finance class? Unless we are talking about someone majoring in finance, I don't think one class will get you very far. Look at the classes required for the finance major at USC, for example[1].

Uhh... ok, if you want to do finance for a corporation or similar, great! I don't see much there about managing personal finances... do you? Perhaps if we had more personal finance and less about leverage, in the USA at least, we wouldn't have the crazy debt problems we have. Perspective.

Real world is managing both personal and professional. College isn't great at either.

[1]http://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/fbe/curriculum/undergrad...

[freehunter]

Did you go to college? I ask because when I went, I had two semesters of accounting, one finance class, both macro and micro economics, and a personal finance class. All of which were required for my Computer Systems degree. You could also take more as electives if you wanted to go deeper.

Your definition of "real world" is extremely limited.