> Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too. Then I caught myself, realizing I was being melodramatic about a decade-old grievance.

This is incredibly self-indulgent. You were given opportunities you refused to engage with and are now continuing that pattern by blaming everyone else for your failures.

University has no value beyond credentialism only if you don't put any in.

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thunky 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You were given opportunities you refused to engage with

That's not what I read at all. They went to a good university and got good grades. They did what they were supposed to do.

Then they later realized how little of value the actual education was.

The university missed an opportunity to educate them, not the other way around. The student is not responsible for having a bad teacher.

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Peritract 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They got good grades by panic cramming the night before exams. I've had lots of students like that (I've even been a student like that) and in every case one thing is true: they would have accomplished more with less effort if they'd focused on learning to understand rather than trying to treat everything as a memorisation task.

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wdib 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think there's a misunderstanding on your behalf. My chief complaint was about the poor educational quality of universities in my country (Jordan). Forcing students to study 5 years instead of the standard 4, or teaching you mandatory subjects irrelevant to your major are not things where I could have accomplished more with less.

Not going to university was not an option. It would have been the only way to guarantee work in my region.

	▲	Peritract 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I had some of the highest grades in my class, but this came at the expense of learning very little about my actual courses. Getting good grades exclusively depended on your rote memorization skills the night before an exam. Not only do I remember nothing from what I studied, I detested every minute of every subject I took there. Passing subjects was significantly more important than understanding them. I don't think I'm misunderstanding anything; you've been very clear. This is not a description of someone who was let down, but of someone who never had any interest in learning.

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fzwang 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think this is the lack of accountability that I find frustrating in the education system. If the student gets a bad experience, they are always blamed first and the role of the teacher/professor/university is never questioned.

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dgfitz 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> University has no value beyond credentialism

Could have stopped there.

Nothing, absolutely nothing I learned at university was because of the university. What I did learn was that the whole thing was a crock of shit when I had to buy the same book 3 times for calc 1/2/3 because each semester the author, who also taught the class and used the same book for all 3 topics, put out a new version with different problem sets each semester. Gulick or gulic was her name. Her husband also taught there. I think they were in cahoots.

I guess I did learn something: it was a crock of shit.