[layoutIfNeeded]

>They, or some of them anyway, may be glad they learned about the subject.

What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free. SciHub is free. Whole semesters worth of lectures are available for free on YouTube.

It would be stupid to take out loans for a degree that will never break even, when more knowledge is out there for free than ever before in human history.

[Mediterraneo10]

> What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free.

I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia. (And not a "useless" humanities subject, but something that does bring desirable job prospects.) The vast majority of literature in that subject is not available online. More recent publications might be created in PDF format, but for the most part students will need to hit the library shelves, even at the undergraduate level.

Sure, I have scanned and uploaded a great deal to Libgen myself, but I appear to be the only volunteer doing so for this entire field. Most volunteers on LibGen or r/Scholar don’t want to undertake any more effort than downloading already-digitized materials from behind paywalls and then uploading them to Libgen, they don’t want to do the hard work of scanning thousands of pages. I suspect there are a lot of academic fields where it would take decades for the handful of Libgen volunteers to adequately upload the standard publications in that field.

[dsfyu404ed]

>I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia

I'd guess former bomber pilot but the rest of your comment makes me think otherwise.

[rimliu]

How about subjects that need some lab work? My subjects were chemistry and physics and believe me we spent a lot of time in the labs.

[opnitro]

Humanities courses often thrive on discussion sections. These are hard to replicate with just books.

[povertyworld]

I think the people who live their life as a series of income maximizing transactions aren't really the humanities type anyways.

[mamon]

And hard science, like mathematics or physics relies on teacher helping you get unstuck. Learning the same thing from books takes significantly more time.

[watwut]

Most people dont know they exist. I surely did not just a few months ago about libgen.io.

More importantly, while I can use thesearch to learn something I know quite a lot about already, I would not know where to start in things I know nothing about. And let's not start about things that I don't know they exist (which my school covered).