[Scienz]

they cannot afford to throw people out.

Not always true. I flunked out of my last school due largely to depression issues and extreme isolation which led to heavy drinking and low grades. My advisor, who I'd only talked to once before when switching into that major, was so happy to see me go he wouldn't even speak to me when I needed him to sign a form so I could drop out, instead of failing out. Instead just told me he was busy and left me sitting outside his office for an hour and a half before I finally got the point (I waited so long because I at first assumed he was actually busy, and not just blowing me off). Needless to say it's hard to do well at a school in spite of isolation and depression when your professors automatically assume you're just a lazy shit who isn't trying and your advisor won't even let you into their office. I know in his head he was probably "upholding the quality of the degree for the alumni" or some shit, but it's hard to justify that when they're doing so based on snap judgments about students who depend on them and who they've never even really spoken to, and furthermore refuse to. Also, to justify that I'm not actually as much of a loser as this guy thought I was, I should say that part of the depression was due to failing to maintain a 4.0 GPA in my classes (I wanted to go to grad school for physics and felt this was required). I found out later I'd actually been one of only three students to even pass the hardest class, and somehow ended up with a B in it despite thinking I was failing the entire time.

Trust me, they do not give a fuck about you. Unless you can get their name on a paper you're publishing, you're just an ID number and a tuition payment to them.

[j2kun]

Not all schools are like that. My alma mater had no research program, and all the professors did was teach. Though the student body was largely comprised of partiers, so you may have gotten the same sort of treatment.

That being said, it sounds like you're a proponent of the "alternative routes" that the OP suggests at the end of the article.

[Scienz]

I am indeed a huge proponent of the alternative routes method. My criticisms of higher education could go on for a long time, and I'm not even going to try and list them all here. My experience has also been that professors who also do research are not nearly as good teachers as the ones who don't. The best teachers I had were in community college, despite probably not being as "qualified" or well-versed in the subjects as the ones publishing papers, a good number of them actually cared about the students and went out of their way to help you get through the class. Counterintuitively, it seems the more prestigious the school the more self-centered and hostile the professors.

[j2kun]

This is true. In research communities they actively tell graduate students not to care about teaching because it looks bad on a CV to have teaching awards, etc.

[yaddayadda]

I'm sorry to hear about your experience. While there are many professors with attitudes similar to the professor you described, certainly not all professors have the same attitude.

For my undergraduate degree, I was lucky to go to community colleges and a small, private college. By and large, the instructors at the community colleges defaulted to such an attitude, but if you had brief conversations with them and let them know what was going on in your life, they were willing to work with you. At the community college level, I've heard of exceptions, but they have been extremely rare (and I come from an academic family that has ties to community college level institutions across the U.S.). At the small, private college, professors actively worked with students and knew what was going in their lives. I only met one exception, and that professor was summarily "let go" after only a semester.

At the graduate level, I've seen exceptionally supportive and exceptionally hostile professors. And I've seen many professors who will be supportive of one or two students to the detriment of others (in the circles I come from it even has a name, the "mini-me"). I had one professor who exemplified the hostile, even when I had a series of well-documented life crises and tried to work with him. While my other professors worked with me, this individual would make no allowances - to include allowing me to miss class to have emergency surgery to prevent imminent quadriplegia. Needless to say, my health crisis took priority. When I returned, I notified my department chair and the graduate school dean. While the professor was allowed to continue to treat students with a rough hand, I was given allowances to get back on track and I subsequently learned that the graduate school changed policies to prevent situations like mine from happening to other students.

I've also had the opportunity to teach several classes. As long as the student keeps me updated and is making forward academic progress, I'll support the student; with the one exception of teamwork. By default, I try to limit teamwork to the bare minimum appropriate for academic purposes, and even then I have tried to work with students who are suffering from external stressors. In graduate school, anything less than a B is tantamount to failing. I've given two students grades less than a B. In both cases, I reached out to the student many times, and made it clear that the student was doing extremely poorly, and tried to find out what was going on and what could be done to get the student across the proverbial academic finish-line. In both cases, the students would simply tell me they had been having a hard time at home, but things had changed there, and they would be more engaged with coursework. In both cases, this happened frequently, and there was never any increased engagement. Denying there is a problem is denying others the opportunity to help you.

So, (a) please do not allow one professor to scare you away, (b) please do keep your professors up-to-date on anything that will impact your ability to meet academic goals, (c) if you don't get acceptable support from your professors, seek help from support services (e.g., the ADA office) and move up the chain-of-command (e.g., department chair), and (d) if you're passionate about physics, find a mentor that can help you navigate your program and move on to an appropriate graduate program!

[Scienz]

Those are good suggestions, but I'd mention that it's much easier for me now to analyze my situation in retrospect, understand what happened and the mistakes I made, and turn it into a cohesive narrative. At the time I didn't really understand why I was doing poorly or what the root causes were, so while I did seek "support" on a number of occasions, it didn't help. I simply assumed I wasn't smart enough to graduate, much less do physics. In retrospect I see this obviously wasn't true, since I'm happily reading a quantum field theory book in my spare time now and, as I said before, ended up being one of the better students in some of my classes. But if you'd asked me at the time I'd have probably just rambled a bunch of guesses and speculation. I suppose my point is that, even following those suggestions, some people will still fall through the cracks. And also that most of these institutions are just bureaucratic monoliths that aren't built to be flexible with every students particular needs and such. The bias there tends to be heavily towards the institutions, too, since students who do poorly are just deemed slackers or unfit for college, instead of considering it a systemic or structural aspect of the system that favors certain people and situations over others. Even the stereotypical "partiers" who drink their way through college could be viewed as a systemic result of a toxic social environment. I believe there was another comment here to the effect of "this is college and you're done with baby hand-holding," which is true in one sense, but it shouldn't be used as an excuse to disregard anyone doing badly in the system or a particular school as acceptable attrition for a just-good-enough educational system.

[yaddayadda]

> Those are good suggestions, but I'd mention that it's much easier for me now to analyze my situation in retrospect, understand what happened and the mistakes I made, and turn it into a cohesive narrative. At the time I didn't really understand why I was doing poorly or what the root causes were, so while I did seek "support" on a number of occasions, it didn't help.

Sadly, this is likely to have been true no matter where you were (e.g., college or workplace). In my experience, in an academic environment simply expressing that there is something wrong and seeking a little bit of help will frequently lead to help. I had several bouts of debilitating depression in the military (way suckier than in an academic environment ;-) ). During one of these, I found out some very powerful information about one leader in our unit (i.e., I learned about something that could have led to him being discharged dishonorably). Thankfully, he recognized my depression, so we made a deal. As a result I was able to get off-the-record therapy from a local, civilian counselor, but there were no concessions at work. While I was in school I dealt with several more bouts of depression. In most cases, simply telling the professor that I wasn't up my normal speed (i.e. never saying I was depressed; in several cases, I wasn't aware that it was happening again) led to delayed deadlines or other concessions. I happened to be in university during a particularly bad bout of depression and a classmate took me to the university clinic. My classmate had a conversation with the doctor before I saw the doctor (I can only imagine what was said). That was the first time I was formally diagnosed, and it was the first time I was prescribed anti-depressants. As I mentioned previously, I have a lot of academic family ties, and I hear about situations like this very frequently. I've never heard about similar support in a non-academic workplace.

> I simply assumed I wasn't smart enough to graduate, much less do physics. In retrospect I see this obviously wasn't true, since I'm happily reading a quantum field theory book in my spare time now and, as I said before, ended up being one of the better students in some of my classes. But if you'd asked me at the time I'd have probably just rambled a bunch of guesses and speculation. I suppose my point is that, even following those suggestions, some people will still fall through the cracks. And also that most of these institutions are just bureaucratic monoliths that aren't built to be flexible with every students particular needs and such.

Remember that institutions, even bureaucratic monolithic institutions, are made of people. In my experience, the people in academic institutions are particularly helpful if they know, or even just suspect, that a student needs help. The biggest single success factor I've seen is having a mentor (hence my last tip). This is not to say that you can succeed without a lot of hard work, but having a mentor helps you find the help that you need, when you need it (e.g., taking you to the doctor to be diagnosed with depression; getting an interlibrary loan ASAP; giving you career advice; letting you know where you rank in your program).

> The bias there tends to be heavily towards the institutions, too, since students who do poorly are just deemed slackers or unfit for college, instead of considering it a systemic or structural aspect of the system that favors certain people and situations over others. Even the stereotypical "partiers" who drink their way through college could be viewed as a systemic result of a toxic social environment. I believe there was another comment here to the effect of "this is college and you're done with baby hand-holding," which is true in one sense, but it shouldn't be used as an excuse to disregard anyone doing badly in the system or a particular school as acceptable attrition for a just-good-enough educational system.

This is extremely institution-specific. I have seen and heard about institutions, or departments, like this, but I've experienced and heard about many more that are vested in their students' success, both in and out of the classroom. If you can complete your bachelors degree at a small, private institution, I'd highly recommend it! (I've never heard of a small, private institution that wasn't extremely vested in their students' success in and out of class.) I wish I had known when I was an undergrad that there were "free" options (they aren't actually free, but are extremely low-cost). The only free college that I can vouch for (i.e. I know a successful alumnus who speaks highly of the experience) is http://www.deepsprings.edu/home and it only awards associate degrees. The friend I know who is an alumnus is now a professor in the sciences at a top university. He credits much of his academic success to his experiences at and friendships from Deep Springs.