[justeleblanc]

> A semester long class is about 45 hours of learning.

Assuming your semester is twelve weeks long (as is the case at my university), that's less than 4h/week. I'm guessing you're only counting lectures as learning. If you only go to lectures for learning and don't do any kind of work on your own, no tutorials, no office hours, no revising for exams, no practice exercises, no homework, no discussions with your peers, nothing... Yeah, you'll probably feel like your first two weeks at the job is a crash course. But I'd say you failed at taking advantage of learning at a university to its fullest.

[Acceptance]

You are totally right, but I would add that even people who take advantage of university also still are only going have been able to hit very few subjects deeply by the 5th or 6th semester.

They are still only 21 years old, and just literally haven't had as many afternoons to spend tinkering.

[skeaker]

All of that together still hardly changes things. Even if we're very generous and say that you managed to spend an unrealistic 16 hours a week on one topic in university (unrealistic as you are rarely doing only one class in uni), that's still tiny compared to the mandatory 40 hour work week that you will have at a full time position.

[msmenardi]

The difference is at a university you have to learn ~5 different subjects at once. On the job you only learn one. It's more of a "Breadth first" approach.

[hinkley]

And have you seen tuition and housing costs?

When I was in school mostly the poor kids and lower middle class had jobs, but I wonder if that's still the case.

[cryptonector]

What you learn on the job is largely up to you. You can choose to focus narrowly on your job and learn nothing more. Or you can stick your fingers in more pies to learn much more.