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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, more and more students view higher education as a pure formality - in order to get jobs.

The disillusionment kind of kicks inn when you take on your first internship, or full-time position, and discover that there's a huge gap between what you learn and what you actually use.

It is unfortunately even worse when it comes to grad school - some people are in job positions where you're required to hold a masters degree, if you want to climb the career ladder. My own MBA was a pretty expensive diploma that only served as a door to more senior positions. Pretty much all the topics I had, I had taken before, or had been exposed to through work - maybe a whole 10% of new / fresh knowledge...and I'm the intellectually curious type.

So I'm not at all surprised that a bunch of students today will more or less offload all their schooling onto these models.

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If anything, this is just putting the huge disconnect between the ideals and the realities of higher education on display.

I studied CS because I love computers and programming and I wanted an SWE job. The idea was to earn a living doing something I enjoy / am good at, and I needed a degree for that. I didn't mind "learning how to learn", getting to know topics I probably wouldn't have chosen to learn on my own, meeting people pursuing the same goals and so on. That was nice, especially the idea of it, but it wasn't really my goal.

The reality was that during that time my primary worries were getting to lectures on time and passing exams while barely having enough money to afford anything beyond food and shelter. It wasn't me and my teachers engaging in the noble pursuit of science. I was worrying about exams while they were probably worrying about grading while taking a break from worrying about funding and authoring enough papers.

Thanks to some fluke I had a few weeks with almost nothing to do during one semester, so I decided to try and write a 3D engine. That was actually me learning just for the sake of learning: not thanks to the education system, but despite of it.

If AI brings this entire illusion down, maybe that's a good thing.

It is in some jobs. Newly educated or plain new employees are fairly useless until they have 1-3 years experience in my job area. We would routinely pay graduates or masters levels less than experienced technicians or field engineers because they took so long to create any value.

I’ve taken many courses and many stop short of giving actual usable skills. You’re supposed to do that on your own time supposedly. You don’t get start to finish an internship experience until senior year for software engineering. Electrical Engineering you may not learn soldering or how to actually build a power supply from physical parts.

You see some of this if you go through "entry-level" MOOCs at elite schools, especially in topics like computer science. As a refresher I took MIT's Intro to CS and Algorithms or whatever it was called. I would have been utterly lost had I not already known Python reasonably well.

That's probably less true in some other majors; there likely no real expectation you've taken shop classes for mechanical engineering. On the other hand, you'll maybe also graduate without knowing a lot of the ins and outs of designing and building a piping system.

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