I don't think one applies to university expecting they're purchasing themselves a diploma, nor that they should be magically absolved of putting in effort to learn the material. What I do think is that the place they describe sounds an awful lot like people being set up for failure though, and so that begged the question as to why that might be. I should probably clarify that I wasn't particularly serious about my fraud suggestion however (was just a bit of a jab rather), as that doesn't seem to have made it through.

If teaching was so simple that you could just tell people to go RTFM then recite it from memory, I don't know why people are bothering with pedagogy at all. It'd seem that there's more to teaching and learning than the bare minimum, and that both parties are culpable. Doesn't sound like you disagree on that either.

> you're purchasing the opportunity to

We can swap out fraud for gambling if you like :) Sounds like an even closer analogy now that you mention!

Jokes aside though, isn't it a gamble? You gamble with yourself that you can [grow to] endure and succeed or drop out / something worse. The stake is the tuition, the prize is the diploma.

Now of course, tuition is per semester (here at least, dunno elsewhere), so it's reasonable to argue that the financial investment is not quite in such jeopardy as I painted it. Not sure about the emotional investment though.

Consider the Chinese Gaokao exam, especially in its infamous historical context between the 70s and 90s. The number of available seats was way lower than the number of applications [0]. The exams grueling. What do you reckon, was it the people's fault for not winning an essentially unspoken lottery? Who do you think received the blame? According to a cursory search, the individual and their families (wasn't there, cannot know) received the blame. And no, I don't think in such a tortured scheme it is the students' fault for not making the bar.

If there are fewer seats than what there is demand for, then that's overbooking, and you the test authoring / conducting authority are biased to artificially induce test failures. It is no longer a fair assessment, nor a fair dynamic. Conversely, passing is no longer an honest signal of qualification. Or rather, not passing is no longer an honest signal of unqualification. And this doesn't have to come from a single test, it can be implemented structurally too, so that you shed people along the way. Which is what I'm actually alluding to.

[0] ~4.8%, so ~95% of people failed it by design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_of_1977%E2%80%931978_%28...

> If teaching was so simple that you could just tell people to go RTFM then recite it from memory, I don't know why people are bothering with pedagogy at all. It'd seem that there's more to teaching and learning than the bare minimum, and that both parties are culpable. Doesn't sound like you disagree on that either.

I do not! A situation where roughly 1% of the class is passing suggests that some part of the student group is failing, and also that there is likely a class design issue or a failure to appropriately vet incoming students for preparedness (among, probably, numerous other things I'm not smart enough to come up with).

And I did take issue with the "fraud" framing; apologies for not catching your tone! I think there is a chronic issue of students thinking they deserve good grades, or deserve a diploma simply for showing up, in social media and I probably read that into your comment where I shouldn't have.

> Jokes aside though, isn't it a gamble?

Not at all. If you learn the material, you pass and get a diploma. This is no more a gamble than your paycheck. However, I think that also presumes that the university accepts only students it believes are capable of passing it's courses. If you believe universities are over-accepting students (and I think the evidence says they frequently are not, in an effort to look like luxury brands, though I don't have a cite at hand), then I can see thinking the gambling analogy is correct.