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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.
Just what sorts of universities did you people attend?
Because I can say that having to study things like calculus on the complex plane, Laplace transforms (I still shudder from thinking of the nearly 10 page long calculations for just a single problem), electromagnetic field theory or multirate filterbanks certainly didn’t feel ”very low effort” to me!
Humanities (at a fairly prestigious university in Australia). The most mathematics I did was cubic polynomials at one point (that course was also the most challenging). I can't speak for the STEM side of things but I'd estimate that the majority of students were in limp-wristed and unrigorous degrees.
There were people going through via plagiarism alone, foreign students who couldn't really speak English that well and domestic students who were quite stupid.
That sounds a bit like what they call "university of applied sciences" here which are basically souped up community colleges and have the reputation to go with that.
Well, without making doxing too easy, I can assure you it's not such an establishment. We have bad universities in Australia like Charles Sturt University or Federation University. My point is that even Group of Eight universities are getting to be like this too, they're debasing their increasingly undeserved reputations to transfer vast amounts of Chinese, student and government money to administrators.
Same thing has been happening in Canada and America. Huge grade inflation at high-end universities, while teachers bemoan the stupidity, laziness and ignorance of their students. Just the other day there was another top level post about students who struggled with fractions and quite basic maths somehow getting university admissions.
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You should have known better than to go to engineering school. Stick with CS, if you must take physics, take physics for physics majors where the problems will all have round numbers, and whatever you do, DON'T TAKE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS, and you can get by with much less effort.
(I took differential equations. It left scars)
Eh, most diffEQ classes are taught at a super introductory level, and if there is much difficulty, it's actually because they're taught at a super introductory level, in the style of, "You just need to memorize these various magic tricks," which is supremely unhelpful to building intuition. There's a more significant jump when going to something like differentiable manifolds, because that's generally only targeted at math grad students, so they often go into the other ditch in terms of rigor.
Understanding diffEQ is nearly essential for the sciences. Honestly, I don't know how one would survive physics for physics majors without it; generally it's the super introductory versions of physics that skip the differential equations and again require you to just memorize a bunch of magical formulas that seem to come from magic. It's the physics for physics majors that show how all the typical super simplified problems are just pretty easy differential equations. It even came up in some neuroscience classes I took (scared the pants off the bio majors, but was unsurprisingly the easiest part of the material for me). One can't hide even in CS, at least not today. I mean, even just the extremely rudimentary concept of gradient descent. Even manifold stuff; I still see manifold learning stuff popping up here and there. I guess if you want CS for web design, sure, but if you're thinking CS for cutting edge tech, you need a pretty large chunk of math these days.
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I thought DE was challenging but it was far from the worst class I took. By the time I was done, I could do integration by parts in my head for not-too-complex setups (very helpful in later eng classes). No danger of me doing that now. Depressing how much those skills have atrophied.
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Alas, that wouldn't have helped what with requiring more formal math and logic theory in turn. I already only passed the one required logic course by bribing my ex-gf to do the mandatory course project for me.
Ah, see... Things didn't (and still don't) work like that over here. The basic math courses and physics courses were largely the same and the difference was more complex analysis for EE vs more formal stuff for CE/CS and that isn't even getting into the horrors of discrete mathematics. So I did the only thing a reasonable person could do and passed most of the maths courses with the minimum passing grade (mostly on second try) and put it all behind me by burning the course book the next summer (Adams' Calculus, gods I hated that book). Pro tip: Make sure you have enough lighter fluid because those books are really hard to burn.
Ah, logic and discrete math didn't bother me. Stuff that requires 10 pages of for a single problem did, because it was so easy to make a mistake early on and produce 20 pages of nonsense instead. And actual advanced math I'd tend to just bounce off the notation and terminology, which there's so much of.
I'm pretty sure I have some sort of math "symbol blindness". If you wrote equations using regular letters and abbreviations, I'd say "Yeah, that's tricky but not too horrible" while using greek letters and math symbols would immediately result in "WTF is this shit I can't even...".
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It's all fun and games until you get to the physics for physicists and the are no numbers. At some point it's more abstract math than anything else, and as they say in the biz: Math ain't about numbers.
Hell, by the time I passed the last mandatory EE math course in university, the only numbers in the formulae were single digits. We were allowed to use regular non-graphical calculators but were (correctly) told that we weren't going to need them for anything in the exam.
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For physics at my university, DiffEq was required for Advanced E&M. I did not know that, and somehow took Advanced E&M first. The experience was... humbling. DiffEq itself later on was much more manageable.
Relatedly, I know at least three people who developed serious depression by taking Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning. I can still scare one of them by saying the words "rigorous proofs" in a Russian accent.
Or "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrisation of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold". (Боже мой!)
A true Lovecraftian tome.
Mankind was not meant to know some things…
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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 each 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).
Wasn’t nursing always a college track? It used to only require an associates degree(and as a legal matter, still does- nurses getting bachelors is mostly employer driven rather than regulatory) but it was never ‘trade school’.
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LVNs are vocational school nurses and are still around. A legally separate group of RNs have college degrees.
RNs typically only needed a certificate program. Requirements in many places that they get a full Bachelors are recent.
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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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