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Yeah, university is a complete joke. Effort required was very low even prior to modern AI. Plenty of people would do a course and not actually read anything if they could at all avoid it. It was kind of funny seeing different teachers be at different points on the 'anger, grief, acceptance' scale, some gave up entirely and just aimed to maximize student ratings with shameless pandering and niceness.
This is what a decline in social trust looks like. People used to assume that nobody would cheat (dishonorable), students would work hard, there were rigorous standards. But that's clearly not a thing. University courses are designed to look rigorous to suckers, then accept any idiot (even if they can't do basic maths or write a vaguely decent essay) and extract their money.
Participating honestly today is being a sucker. Why would you work hard when that's not necessary to get through? I began to loathe the imbecilic, patronizing, childish box-ticking BS that lecturers inflicted. Some of them were fools too, they didn't have a clue about what they were supposed to be teaching. Better to read a book on the subject, faster and cheaper too. It's extremely demoralizing to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for this worthless, time-wasting garbage.
If I just tossed that money into crypto or shares, at least there's some possibility of returns on the investment.
The job market has little demand for skill or degrees either, it wants people with the right connections or wearing a cute dress or from a politically correct background.
It really depends on the program/major. Its pretty easy to figure out which is which by looking at how much time students spend studying every week.
Only engineering and medicine reach 40h a week, with the median for other programs being less than 10h including lessons.
Law school is somewhere in-between with people putting in some 18h a week on average, although my understanding is that top students spend in excess of 40h a week and if you just want to pass you can spend far less.
Its a bit funny when you read about some "elite" school where people apparently only spend 12h a week on school, with the implicit understanding that the students are expected to do full time internships concurrently with the education. The purpose of the education itself is just providing a really barebones foundation and act as a competence filter for internships.
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Lack of rigor barely describes how bad modern university education is.
I recently started an online master's program for computer science through the University of Colorado (Boulder). The amount of difficult work and overall rigor in the courses has been, uh, lacking to say the least. My undergraduate degree is in a humanities related discipline and all of my CS knowledge is self-taught, just to give you some context.
All assignments except for the final exam in each class have unlimited attempts, which makes the multiple choice quiz assignments a joke. But even the actual programming assignments haven't been any serious work. So far I've finished the general networking and Linux networking classes, and the assignments have been things like:
Analyze some packet dumps and find the maximum amount of TCP datagrams that are in flight at any given point in the stream.
Create ethernet devices in 4 different containers, connect them to a bridge in a 5th container, then run this premade script to ping between them and submit the packet dump.
Modify half a dozen lines in a couple of BGP config files, then turn off some ethernet interfaces, ping between two endpoints, and submit a packet dump showing that your BGP config worked correctly after turning off the interfaces.
The finals have been worth 10% of the total grade in the general networking class and 20% in the Linux networking class, and you only need a B in the first three networking classes to be admitted into the full computer science program (where, as the saying goes, C's get degrees, at least for the elective courses that make up half of the degree; you still only need B's in the required breadth courses).
And this degree doesn't have a special "online" caveat attached to it, it will appear exactly the same to employers as a Computer Science master's obtained in person at CU Boulder.
It makes more sense when you realize that many master's programs are just busywork to justify a student visa and a follow-on graduate STEM OPT work permit (two years that can be converted to a green card or H1).
They are optimizing for the user experience of someone who wants the fastest, lowest effort way to get entry into the US white collar labor market, not actual learning.
Not just that, its also grade inflation where due to the erosion of standards and enforcement, 3 year bachelor degrees are often not enough for professional graduate intakes. Also some 'blue collar' positions now require college time (eg NYPD needs 24 semester credits / 1 year of college time), or a degree where it used to be trade school (nursing in some Western nations).
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Yeah, the only reason I'm in the program is because I want to boost my resume for future employment (especially since my undergrad degree isn't in a STEM field), and because my current employer is paying for it. I have actually learned some useful things from it, but only because I applied myself more than someone just looking to pass the class would need to. And everything I did learn from it I could have learned on my own without the program, the program just provided a minimal amount of guidance and direction as to what to learn.
I did find out I can take some electives from the electrical engineering master's program and have them count for my degree, so I'll probably do that since a lot of them seem more interesting (and hopefully more rigorous).
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