> In 2012, I studied computer science at Concordia University and dropped out after 1 semester.
> On my first day, I attended 2 lectures. I quickly realized that a 2-hour commute to listen to someone slowly recite a PowerPoint wasn’t the best use of my time.
It's so depressing that a lot of expensive higher education is this pathetic. I wish our education system worked enough like a market that it could hold lecturers, programs, and schools that to a higher standard, and destroy them if they cheated their students like this.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that most of getting a Comp. Sci. degree at Concordia University isn't actually "listen[ing] to someone slowly recite a PowerPoint". Having attended a public University in Canada myself it certainly wasn't my experience (and also not very expensive, <10K a year). Of course, as with most things in life a lot of the benefit of an activity is what you make of it, not just what is on offer to the passive consumer.
Upon completing the article my main takeaway was that the author would have been a lot better off just toughing it out at Concordia in the first place. If you are the sort of person that tries something once for a few hours and then just backs away from it entirely they way this person did.. it's really something!
As a fellow 2012 Concordia dropout, it's possible there's more to that particular story going untold, and this is the clean version of it for employers. You can look up "printemps érable 2012" for some context and Montreal Police brutality related to that. My personal experience being a student involved running from police on horseback launching teargas grenades. Finding excuses not to talk about it is easier than trying to explain it.
You don't pay for the slides, you pay for the course design, the office hours, and access to experts in the field that not only know the course material but can also guide you to further learning outside the syllabus.
...But you have to actually show up and talk to your professor.
I would say that the idea is you pay for those things. Sadly however a lot of Universities put together programs for the sole purpose of offering that program. Often times CS programs (like the ones at my University) are put together for that reason.
I've had an inordinate number of instructors who treat the lecture as the only teaching duty they have. No matter how much you would like to engage outside, the instructors have to participate as well. Many do not, and have no interest in doing so. As a consequence, the end result is often that you're just buying powerpoint slides and an optional seat in an auditorium.
Oh well that's certainly possible. Like anything else, you can still have a poor program or bad luck with a professor.
I'm just sad to see comments from students that have no idea what a university has available outside the lecture. I'm also quite surprised by it. Did these people never talk to a teacher in grade school?
Yeah, not only that. I went to a state school and we had access to a lot of computing resources I likely wouldn't have had otherwise. I attended in the 90s and unless you already had a job in the industry, you were unlikely to find a network with hundreds or thousands of computers with different OSes on them. I not only got to use macOS and Windows, but VAX, and just about every flavor of Unix at the time (AIX, HPUX, Apollo, Solaris, A/UX, etc.), and even got time on an IBM mainframe to see what that was like.
I remember, during my senior year, interviewing with a well-known company that had a grand idea for putting together a new documentation system that would allow cross-linking of documents so you could just click on a word and it would take you the definition of that word or the manual page for it. I asked, "Oh, like HTML?" to which they responded, "What's HTML?" This was around 1992-93-ish. Needless to say, I had a leg up on those already in the industry thanks to having had access to those resources at school.
It also has a lot of job opportunities. I got to be a Unix sys admin on the school network which both helped pay my expenses and gave me real-world experience. It wasn't glamorous, but it looked better on a resume than having worked flipping burgers.
The whole point of college is to figure out what you want to do, explore, network and learn how to learn.
The amount of learning that happens outside of classes, during labs with peers, is on par with lecture halls if not more. I've seen side projects, discussed random technologies, even startup MVPs on Campus.
That's where the real value lies. That and an environment where there's cutting edge research.
To be fair, this is the problem with Powerpoint. It's a well studied phenomenon.
I use it as a rule of thumb, the best thing I can do with Powerpoint is have graphics. If I start writing words, I'm misusing it. That's not entirely true, outlines and things can be helpful, but it's a reasonable ideal to shoot for to avoid just reading from the slide.
At least in US universities along with the powerpoint slide lectures there are also smaller discussion sessions, group assignments, take home programming tests, semester-long papers and projects, optional research and teaching opportunities and more. The lecture is really the least important part.
> On my first day, I attended 2 lectures. I quickly realized that a 2-hour commute to listen to someone slowly recite a PowerPoint wasn’t the best use of my time.
It's so depressing that a lot of expensive higher education is this pathetic. I wish our education system worked enough like a market that it could hold lecturers, programs, and schools that to a higher standard, and destroy them if they cheated their students like this.