[vaksel]

its not really the student's fault. Its the parents/society's. There is this idea, that if you don't go to college after highschool that you are some sort of loser.

When in reality you can self-teach yourself everything they teach you in college. Take programming for example, is it worth going into debt up to your eyeballs, if you could have learned everything on your own?

[ensignavenger]

I wouldn't say everything- if you get a really good teacher in a really good program, you can learn a lot in a short amount of time from an expert that you may never be able to learn (or it may take a long time to) on your own.

[eznet]

Very good argument - unfortunately, it likely is non-applicable in many (if not most) of the universities in the U.S. From my personal experience, I found mediocre teachers who primarily seemed to be present for class for attendance - like many of their students. I had hoped that this appearance was superficial, and that in reality they wanted a student to inquire and ask for assistance beyond the covered material, but alas, this was not the case. In reality, my questions were usually greeted with being "irrelevant to the course material and not related to what we were covering" - even when the material was clearly an extension of the course material and was presented by me as a means to engage the teacher and hopefully learn more than how to write a C++ application to parse a txt file... This said, my Java and ASM teachers were great and did welcome this interaction - but the majority of my professors seemed disinterested (at best) in talking about anything other than the verbatim script out of the book. But that was just my school - mileage varies.