[_cbsz]

College students meet each other in ways that exclude non-students. For example, a significant portion of the top EECS undergraduates at Michigan spend a good amount of their social lives with a particular honor society. This society is, of course, entirely closed to non-students. Another group that doesn't leave campus all that much? Graduate students.

You can't just waltz into University buildings and be all "sup dawg???". People are at least pretending to do work, you won't be able to access the network, you won't have common classes to complain about together, etc. etc. We're somewhat suspicious of non-students, too.

[derefr]

> People are at least pretending to do work, you won't be able to access the network, you won't have common classes to complain about together, etc. etc. We're somewhat suspicious of non-students, too.

Those are social-status problems [and thus, I could answer snarkily, amenable to social engineering.]

A University is a clique of people who pay a lot of money to attend a University. If the only technical advantage everyone gets from paying the money is access to the lectures, and in the long run the lectures aren't what matter, then why is anyone paying the money?

"University", in that sense, seems to be a Prisoner's Dilemma set up by lecturers to rob students. No one individual can stop paying, because it excludes them, even though the group as a whole would be better off if they all just rented a few apartment buildings together instead of paying massive amounts of tuition.

[_cbsz]

It may not be just the lectures that matter, but I definitely learned a lot and developed technical maturity as a result of my courses. Could I have learned them on my own if I had known exactly what to study? Maybe. Were there bad courses along with good ones? Yes. Are there bad students that still get degrees? Yep. Was it worthless? Absolutely not.

Example experience that could not have been had outside college, by definition: after taking the introductory computer science with perhaps more enthusiasm than was wise in my first semester, I TAed the course for my remaining 5 semesters. Obviously, my experience was not typical. On the other hand, if your experience is typical, then you certainly need to learn from courses rather than trying to do it all through self-study.

[hga]

"after taking the introductory computer science with perhaps more enthusiasm than was wise in my first semester"

That'll teach you ^_^.

MIT's new core courses are so teaching intensive the department is enlisting undergraduates to help and I think it's generally been possible for a few undergraduates to get some formal teaching experience of that sort.

I've always done some teaching informally and found the experience to be extremely valuable, it teaches you all sorts of things including a much better understanding of the subject itself.

[tsally]

Or instead of independently reinventing the wheel while living in communal apartments we could just choose to learn from people smarter than us who have already invented the wheel. I'd rather spend an hour of my time learning reductions from a really smart person than four hours independently stumbling through the problem. Indeed, the more complex the problems get, the less likely it is that the problems are even solvable independently. Seems like you are trivializing the process of learning. The time savings I get alone from having access to professors is worth the cost of tuition. Not to mention the research opportunities.

[derefr]

I do agree with you; I was just taking the idea that "the value of attending university is in the connections you make" as assumed by the root of this thread, since I inevitably see that comment be used as a summary of these discussions. That idea implies that, if you don't care for the connections, self-teaching or learning in industry is somehow "good enough." And that thought implies that you could get the same connections, and therefore the same value, by just shacking everyone who would be attending the university together and letting them simmer in their own intellect.

While it's probably true in the marginal case—the 10x increase in tuition to go to an Ivy League school certainly doesn't cause a 10x increase in education, but it may well cause a 10x increase in connectivity—it's false in the general case. To simplify that: some university is good, but more university is not necessarily better. And you could probably get all the learning you wanted from just having your "apartment building" hire lecturers, and establish a good working relationship with professional research institutions (supposing most of the Ph.Ds, displaced, would end up working at Bell-Labs-like places.)