[finder83]

I agree in principle...but in practice I think college is much less of an opportunity to make it what you want it to be than you make it out to be. Perhaps at a graduate level or at a top level school you can learn more if you apply yourself more, but at a regular state school, it was really just an extension of high school. I left with the opinion that liberal arts is just a repeat of everything you were supposed to learn during middle and high school with longer papers and more reading, but really just the same content. The only students who had trouble either 1.) Didn't actually pay attention in middle or high school or 2.) Couldn't read or work fast enough to keep up. The major classes were really pretty easy as well as a computer science major, but that's because I was already a programmer...I suppose that's not the norm. At least towards the end, I put a lot of work into it and read pretty much every page, but didn't get a lot out of it.

Many of the same problems plague colleges that plague high schools though...professors that either don't care or aren't very good at teaching, students that are just there for the degree, books that don't really challenge, and papers that just require following the formula "5 paragraphs, 3 summary sentences". Very little learning took place for me in any of that. The learning I did was from outside of college and was from learning what is considered generally graduate school work for C.S.

I really hope that most people's experiences aren't that way, and that colleges do teach young people. It just wasn't my experience through 3 different colleges. An Oxford style school with mentors and customized content probably would have served me much better than colleges that continue on the same factory system setup that is broken at the lower levels.

The workplace hasn't been difficult for me, but I definitely learn a lot more than I ever did in school. I come across actual challenges that require research and stretch me. Perhaps that's just being a software engineer though.