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Comment by throwaway384034 | Hacker News Reader

It is not just financial, it is a decline in academic standards: https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/us-news/uc-berkeley-math-prof-...

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Okay so isn’t the solution then to increase standards, not to undermine the concept of college?

I really don’t get what articles like this one are proposing. Instead of having an institution like Berkeley, we ought to just give students some YouTube videos?

Like I said, it’s very often just anti-intellectualism and culture war nonsense.

There was nothing you couldn't have already learned from a book. Many professors were never even great at teaching and are employed for research.

Attending college as a student was always partly about status and once the standards of an institution drops so does the signal that comes from holding a degree. It is only natural that people will see college as less worthy of an investment.

If someone says they can replicate the college experience by reading books at home, they frankly don’t know what they are talking about.

Yes, being surrounded by smart and motivated people is a huge bonus. But if your classmate doesn't even know fractions, it looks like you won't be getting that either.

Counterpoint to your blanket statement: You do get some life experience, but for me, having a job gave me more experience than doing group projects. And as far as learning things, I often feel that I would have learned more by just goofing around on the computer on my own. In fact, I did.

To be fair, I commuted for two years and didn’t really have the full social experience. But does higher education actually deserve any credit for that aspect, or would it happen naturally with any group of young people?

I don’t think it’s merely being around other young people. There are classes on topics that you will never ever come across in a job context, yet will have a major impact on your personality, mind, etc.

Ah, that makes sense. I didn’t get too much of that in my degree because for me, college was primarily a financial thing. If I was just pursuing the love of knowledge, I would have loved to take philosophy, but it didn’t count toward my electives.

I definitely would have felt differently about college if money was not a concern. I got accepted to CMU but didn’t go because I didn’t want the debt, and at the state college I attended, I didn’t major in what I wanted to do. Looking back, I do feel some regret, but also, if I had chosen differently, I would still be paying for it today. Even if you’re looking for an amazing learning experience, the unbelievable cost forces it to be a primarily financial endeavor, at which point it makes more sense to forgo niceties like philosophy and study it on your own time, or audit classes or something.

For sure, I don’t think less of people that decide it’s not financially worth it. In many cases it’s not.

But I don’t like it when people then rationalize that decision into “it actually sucks anyway,” because IME that’s not true.

In my personal experience, I studied philosophy in college, and have continued reading books off-and-on since.

There really is no book replacement for being in a class of 5-10 philosophy students, arguing about Kant or metaphysics for 3 hours, or in having a professor rip your paper apart and highlight every flaw in an argument. It just won’t happen if you’re self-studying.

That's a decline in academic standards of pre-tertiary education, we're talking about higher education, those things aren't necessarily correlated.

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