[cdf2theworld]

Student here - I was struck by the "summer learning loss" quoted in the article. Everyone I talk to has this, myself included. The greatest reason for this, personally, is subject diffusion. This is especially true from freshman to junior year; we are required to take a dizzying number of classes that not only have nothing to do with our job field, but also have nothing to do with each other. I understand that it's important to "gain broad interests", but I retained very very little until my junior year, when all of the irrelevant courses had been completed. This issue may be coupled with the signaling problem, in that not only is the senior year the only year of college that employers care about (because you get handed a credential), but also because you take so little away from school until that point.

I'd say that paying for college should be scaled with the earning benefit it imparts, freshman year costing very little, and senior year costing a majority of the total degree. Thoughts?

[kiba]

If there's "summer loss"? What about when you leave high school and college?

What happened to the notes you took for your classes at the end of the semester? I suspect that they are thrown away and never seen again.

I suspect part of the problem with education is that we don't learn how to learn, and that we done very little work on how to retain those skills and connect them to our world.

[cdf2theworld]

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are getting at. With the internet in it's current state, notes from college years 1&2 are useless... I could go on Wikipedia and YouTube and get the same, if not higher quality, information about those subjects. FWIW, I still have all of those notes. The understanding and intuitive development is what suffers, not having the information available.

[kiba]

You do not develop understanding by merely looking up resources and reading about it.

Reading something alone will create not create fluency and understanding.

That is why we take notes. They serve both as records of what we learned, a learning tools, and a place to synthesize knowledge and understanding.

I also use wikipedia and lookup youtube videos, but I don't merely read or watch about it. I engage in an active process of learning and synthesizing information.

[zanny]

> I understand that it's important to "gain broad interests"

Its important, but I definitely agree with the OP its not ~40k a year and 3 prime years of your life important.

Its also something high school should be presenting. Its the literal last step that the state has in producing productive members of society from its curriculum, and they waste it on Shakespeare driving generations to "hate" reading than trying to diversify their students interests to get them excited about career prospects and opportunities they can rise into.

Its evident in how totally directionless and lost most college freshman are. They did what they were told in gradeschool, don't remember a fraction of it, and are now being drilled with the same kinds of banal "diversification" classes of lecture and monotony they have toned out for a majority of their life at that point.

Experiencing diversity is something that requires a desire to experience it in the first place. Forcing people to do it when all they want is a job that pays them a living wage is at least disrespectful to their self determination.

[bjs250]

Here's the way I look at it: learning loss is almost inevitable, but I think it's less of a problem than it appears.

What I think we should instead pay attention to is the rate of re-learning. Something may take significant time and effort to learn the first time, and after say a year or two, one may forget it. But when re-introduced to the concept (when you may actually need it), I think one can re-learn it quite rapidly.

[cdf2theworld]

Information loss is inevitable when that information isn't used enough to become inately retained. When we focus on a particular area of study, what we learn is self-reinforcing. If I study calculus and discrete math, my understanding and retention increases in each subject, because the overlap between them connects mental pathways. If I study calculus and eastern Asian religions, retention suffers because my brain cannot make meaningful connections between the two. This lack of coherence in what I'm learning means that I'm wasting my time with one of those subjects ;)