[xyzzyz]

- there should be 4 semesters a year, not 2, people should graduate in 2 years, not 4+

At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the way I've been beat down to just wanting to get "the piece of paper" and be done. It's been a long three years and each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own.

The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well. Thus, don’t give up, the paper certifying it is more important than the “education” you are getting.

[BeetleB]

>The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well.

In my career, everyone I've worked with had at least a Bachelor's. Most had a Master's and a few had a PhD. Only one did not finish undergrad.

I can assure you, people who hold a university degree are not particularly conscientious or consistent. I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work"). And the management doesn't care either (automating boring work will not help you in your career).

I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter.

Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role.

I went to a low ranked undergrad and a top 5 grad school. My experience mirrors this person's if you substitute community college for undergrad and undergrad for grad. At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them.

There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.

[lol768]

>At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them.

As someone who's spent a few years in undergrad CS at a decently ranked Russell Group university, I'd have to agree that this appears to be the case in the UK too. For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Overcrowding is a pretty frequent issue and organisation is generally poor.

I've come to the conclusion I don't really care if the university is "research-intensive" because I've seen very little benefit from it. How much of a fundamentals course on data structures or software engineering is going to involve cutting edge research?

The TEF scores (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/what-tef-r...) over here have been pretty interesting too. A lot of the lower ranked institutions have come away with much higher results than some of the traditionally 'better' universities.

[foldr]

>For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately.

Well yes, of course. People don't go into academia because they want to teach. Academics are also not rewarded significantly for good teaching.

[BeetleB]

And "of course", this is one argument not to go to a top ranked research university for undergrad.

BTW, the low ranked university I went to was a research university. Professors got tenure/promotions based on that and not based on teaching. They still cared about teaching. It is at some level a matter of culture. If a top ranked university is worse when it comes to teaching, the reality is the university doesn't value education. Let's not use research as an excuse for poor education.

[foldr]

The point is that you can't expect academics to necessarily love or enjoy teaching, as they're not selected for that trait. Of course people should do their jobs to an acceptable standard. But expecting academics to routinely do more than that is expecting something you wouldn't expect of people in other professions. Do you expect your accountant to do your accounts with enthusiasm?

[learc83]

I went to a middle ranked university for undergrad, but it was ranked top 2 in the country for undergraduate teaching.

Undergraduate teaching ranks should be weighted more in overall rankings since that's supposed to be the school's primary function and all.

[lol768]

>Well yes, of course. People don't go into academia because they want to teach. Academics are also not rewarded significantly for good teaching.

When student tuition fees make up the bulk of a department's income, is this reasonable and fair to students? Are they getting value for money?

Some institutions have separate teaching and research promotion tracks mapped to equivalent salary grades.

[foldr]

> When student tuition fees make up the bulk of a department's income, is this reasonable and fair to students? Are they getting value for money?

It's difficult to say, isn't it? How does one determine how much a university education "should" cost?

I don't see any easy solution. If we convert research-focused universities into teaching-focused institutions, what happens to the research? If we create new and separate teaching-focused institutions, who pays?

[watwut]

I don't want to work again with people who literally hate boring tasks, because when they can't automate them, they just don't do them of half ass them.

I don't particularly love those tasks either, but having to do them all because the alternative is to let project fail is something I don't want to go through again, ever.

[BeetleB]

I wouldn't want to work with them either.

There is a middle ground between the extremes :-)

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to work with people who insist on doing the same work manually that takes an hour, that could be scripted to take 2-3 minutes. And then they oppose your writing a script to do it. And I'm sure you wouldn't want to work there if your manager tells you that it would be awesome if you can automate it, but please understand our compensation policy will not allow us to reward you for increasing the team's productivity.

[watwut]

I never encountered such people. I would automate anyway if it would affect me. Different companies have different dysfunctions I guess.

Except the manager, wherever I worked I had fixed salary and no special compensation for anything. Once in a while I would negotiate salary raise, but that is it. So it is kind of normal to me.

[xyzzyz]

I can assure you, people who hold a university degree are not particularly conscientious or consistent.

What matters is not whether they are very conscientious or consistent, but rather how conscientious or consistent relative to candidates who didn't earn the degree. Employers use this signal to perform statistical discrimination on their pool of applicants. The situation here is similar to the statistical discrimination that happens when you are shopping for car insurance: women pay lower premiums not because they are particularly safe drivers, but rather because they are safer (or less costly) than men, on average.

This kind of statistical discrimination, that is, using educational attainment to make hiring decision, is often somewhat illegal (based on straight reading of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., e.g. for most BA in History graduates it is hard to argue that their diploma is "reasonably related" to the jobs they are doing, but the employers will happily choose the graduate over someone with only high-school diploma). To my knowledge, however, nobody ever made an actual legal challenge, so employers happily keep using it.

I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work").

This may be true for people in highly-skilled jobs requiring high intelligence, which probably describes most of HN readers, but many other employers will value consistently slogging through mundane tasks over creativity and innovation.

I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter.

So do I, but, as you noted, the management doesn't value these very much.

Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role.

Precisely. This is more important, considering that less than half of college students are proficient in reading (NAAL 2003), and the rest only has intermediate level or worse. The point here is that people tend to forget most everything they learn in school, so what they learn exactly doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.

Right. My understanding is that while teaching quality in low ranked schools is lower than in high ranked ones on average, there are still plenty of low ranked schools with high teaching quality, better than most high ranked ones. One might ask themselves then, why then are they lower ranked? The truth is that the education quality doesn't matter that much, what matters is student selection.

[lordnacho]

> The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace

Aren't you on holiday for a lot of those 4 years?

I went to uni for 4 years, and it was 3 terms of 8 weeks each, per year. In other words, 96 weeks.

Throw in the occasional rest week and it should really fit in two years.

[telchar]

What part of the world is that? In the US it's typical to have 2 16-18 week semesters per year, usually with a job or internship for 10-12 weeks in the summer.

[nostrademons]

One of my college classmates (at a very expensive U.S. liberal arts college) used to quip "The more you pay, the less you stay." We had two 13-14 week semesters per year (1-week break in each, Thanksgiving in the fall and mid-semester break in the Spring), with a 6-week optional January term between and 14 weeks for summer. Sticker price was $45K when I went there and is now $70k.

[learc83]

Minor quible, the most common system in the US has 15 week semesters for fall and spring.

[juiyout]

Univ. of Washington had 3 quarters per year. Don’t know about now.

[lordnacho]

Oxford and Cambridge. Probably a few other old unis in the UK.

[telchar]

That squares with what I have heard before about UK university degrees being shorter than US degrees. What do you do with the rest of the year?

[lordnacho]

Internships. Or work, or study. Up to you. You have an informal exam when you get back and if you annoy the profs enough they'll kick you out for failing it. But that's pretty rare.

[laurencerowe]

Time spent per year is roughly equivalent. UK degrees are shorter than US degrees because we spend only three years at university for a bachelors degree. Depth is similar but there's less breadth - we only study our major, so as a CS student all my classes were taught by the CS department apart from a handful of math classes.

[ams6110]

If you take a full load of summer classes you can get a four year undergraduate degree done in 2-ish years.

[fhbdukfrh]

Not if you care what classes you take. Lots (most?) of the higher level year 3/4 courses are not taught in the summer in my experience (three different unis and i did my masters course work year round). You can pick up the more generic courses or a breadth requirement though.

[munchbunny]

That really depends.

If you're just trying to get trained for a vocation, then yeah, you don't need 4 years. However, I do think a 4-year degree is a unique opportunity, and it shouldn't be seen as a screen for people who can slog so much as a fit question of "do you need the other things that come with a 4-year degree?"

I'd guess that a bit less than half of my 4 years was spent on academics, of which it was 2/3 CS degree and 1/3 liberal arts. The rest was summer internships, hobbies, personal projects, engineering teams, research, and just playing around as an 18-22 year old.

I agree with the parent poster's advice though. Outside of my academics, I learned skills like writing, speaking, organizing, diplomacy, etc. which you often learn anyway through work experience. People returning to school need that much less than people who never worked do, so there's no need for them to pay the time tax on extracurriculars.

[nostrademons]

The 4 years is supposed to change the way you look at the world, on an unconscious level.

I've found that every major personal change I've gone through - college, entering a career, moving cross-country, working at Google, being an entrepreneur, and even my relationship with my wife - took about 4-5 years before I was really comfortable on a gut level with my new life and could accept it as part of my identity. The actual technical material takes much less time to master - I found I was pretty competent at Javascript after 6 months, I could make major changes to Google at a year, I knew where most of the important things in the Bay Area were within a year, etc. But that's not really the point. The point is that when you go about your daily life, without thinking too much, have you internalized the value system and worldview that you're being educated into? It's the transition into unconscious competence.

Now, whether the university system teaches a worldview that correlates well with what you need for success in the rest of the world is another question. Just a couple months ago, the President of the U.S. was tweetstorming about academic brainwashing in universities. And depending how you squint, that may even be accurate - a worldview looks like brainwashing to people outside of that worldview. But the fact is that the vast majority of people in positions of wealth and power have been through those 4 years and have adopted that worldview, and doing so yourself will significantly reduce the friction as you interact with them.