| I went to a University of California some 15-20 years ago for undergrad and none of your 4 points are true in my experience. > Listening to a professor speaking to himself from a distance of 10 meters is an awful experience compared to a video recording that you can stop/rewind. It's not an awful experience, in fact, you can often ask questions during or after lectures. It also has the benefit of being similar to the stage of life you just came from (high school, for most students), so you're not switching to a different mode of learning. > For labs it's not like you get any help either. You just have to follow some instructions point by point and if you do not understand something, tough luck, the professor has already moved to the next exercise. All labs sessions I've had always had a TA present. I've gotten countless help from the TAs during lab sessions. The only times they're not there is if you start early or stay late and they've left. TAs also lead discussion sections. In general they are a huge help and it's their job to help students because a professor can't always be there. > The worst part is that you have to spend 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week like this and then you still need to find online materials to actually learn the thing. Some people have to work too. This is simply false. I was a full time student and took a full 15+ units per quarter (which is more than average) and it was barely 2-3 hours of lecture a day on average over 5 days, plus ~1 hour of discussion section per day on average. Most of the rest of time is intended to be for homeworks, studying, lab sessions, etc. Maybe I'm too old and times were different, but we've never had to find online materials to accompany anything we learned over classes, in all of my classes (computer science or others). Everything we needed was included in textbooks, notes from the professor, or discussed in lectures/classes. Also, I know I might be of the minority opinion here, but I actually did find much of the knowledge from computer science classes helpful for future work (been a software engineer for 15 yerars now). > Did I mention 2 hours of commute time every day? I don't know what it's like outside the US, but in the US it's common for students graduating high school and going to college to leave their hometown and rent an apartment in their new college town. Commutes are typically under 15 minutes by bike/walk/bus in my college town. You could live literally in any part of that (small) city and be within 15 minutes from campus one way or another. |