> The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job.

This is the line universities give, knowing full well that the only reason students pay exorbitant tuitions is because bachelor’s degrees are necessary for most salaried jobs in the US. Schools want to have their cake and eat it too. If education isn’t about the money they should have no problem charging lower tuition rather than paying their presidents million dollar salaries.

The reason lecture halls are packed at 7:50am on a Monday is not because students are thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial function, but because Calc 1 is a prerequisite to their engineering degree, which is a prerequisite to their job.

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WalterBright 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If one thinks doing simple derivatives is a chore, I'd suggest a career other than engineering.

I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers.

I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.

	▲	arjie 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's a trivial task and certainly does not require attending an early morning class. In fact, most engineering does not require the degree. Almost everything in the field is self-learnable in a short period. The reason the students are in the class at 0750 is not to learn how to do this, since it is trivial and almost everyone I know could do it by the 10th standard two years prior to college. It's because no matter what you know, the credential is bestowed by 4 year attendance of 0750 classes, and the credential is what the university provides.
	▲	BeetleB 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers. I have an engineering degree and did "real" engineering (electronics/semiconductors) before switching to SW. Almost all my engineering courses required calculus knowledge. None of my real engineering jobs benefited from it. And I say that as someone who tried to find any and every excuse to use calculus at work. I love calculus. My role is not an outlier. Every grad who came back to talk to students said the same.

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mistercheph 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those students should be separated from the students that want to learn, I know who I want to hire, or be sitting next to on the line and so does everyone else with a pulse: it's the person that is thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial.

Not the loser sitting in a class they hate, living out their big plan to set their life on fire doing a job that makes them sad because they love money.