[herge]

> However, the VIM trick that I picked up at work today is NOT the sort of thing I would have been happy with a professor 'challenging' me on during my courses.

University teaches you the things that you cannot learn on your own.

[bguthrie]

University may expose you to concepts that you might never have encountered on your own. But there's nothing that you can't learn on your own, and in fact the history of learning is full of the contributions of self-educated savants.

[qw]

The problem with self-education is that it's too easy to ignore those subjects because they don't seem interesting or relevant. Someone who is interested in web programming may not see the need for learning assembler, but most of those who learned it would probably say that it was not a useless experience.

[moonchrome]

That's a lot weaker statement than "things you cannot learn on your own".

Unfortunately most discussions about college education is rationalizing rhetoric - college is such a broad term, and can vary from diploma mill to top level educational instutions. Anyone willing to argue for or against it in this vague concepts is just rationalizing their beliefs. Second, as a person who wen't to college to get my degree after working in the industry for years, I noticed a lot of people don't realize that the time you go to college is the same time you start to grow up, get independent, thinking differently, associating with different kinds of people, all those changes people attribute to "college experience" in classic lines such as "college changed my way of thinking" or "college taught me how to learn" "I started socializing with different people" etc. are actually natural changes you will experience even if you don't go to college at that age, so I think people arguing for college from reflection are actually misattributing the cause.

[swalsh]

I consider myself a mostly self educated person. the total sum of my college experience probably totals just over a year at various intervals. The majority of my education comes from reading books, watching lectures online, and just plain doing things wrong. I don't typically learn something purely for the practical benefits. I have a drive to learn. When I learned assembly, it was only because I was interested in learning more.

[einhverfr]

I have been trying to teach myself spherical trig on my own. I am struggling but the big issue I think is actually that with my ADD, I struggle to do some kinds of problems. I figure I will get it though. Why am I doing this? Because it is a challenge.

I would probably benefit from some mentoring, but that's not forthcoming.

I think a lot of this is the same for coding. You can learn whatever you want to/need to on your own. What a university gives you ideally is a level of mentoring and collaboration that can bring you to the next level (yes that includes, say, learning assembly, something I have taught myself the basics of but never gotten to the point where I feel comfortable in it).

For all this though, I agree that college is supposed to teach you the one think you can't learn on your own: critical thinking. I don't see how one can learn critical thinking on one's own, or at least not well. Not saying it can't be done outside of college. Just saying it can't be done in isolation.

From the sound of the original article though, it sounds like the author didn't feel like he was getting this, and that's kinda scary.

[omaranto]

In some idealistic sense it's true there is nothing you cannot learn on your own, but in practice there is loads of stuff no-one ever learns except by doing a PhD.