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Comment by jgg | Hacker News Reader

Spot on.

I also feel like even if you were being charged the tuition of 30+ years ago, you wouldn't be getting nearly as much for your money. I looked through the introductory Russian textbook for my state university and was kind of blown away by how verbose and obnoxious it was. This same school cut operating systems and anything related to low-level programming (people complain that they just want to learn Java or .NET so they can get a job, so I guess they got their way), and rearranged basic English to make it easier to pass. 100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was standard - it seems like there's a noticeable trend towards "dumbing down", or maybe I'm viewing a time period I didn't live in with rose-colored glasses...

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100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was a large part of all there was to study. Now we have multitudes of fields and subfields regularly generating actual demonstrable progress in the capabilities of humanity, few of which require knowing anything about Thermistocles.

Knowledge has gotten so complex and siloed that one of the most useful things for the inter-disciplinary academic project I observed turned out to be a facilitator with no subject-area expertise in any of the fields, who undertook the task of building glossaries to translate jargon and storyboard concepts people in different departments were trying to explain past each other.

The chain of conceptual courses necessary to reach a level where one understands papers that have recently been published advancing a particular subfield, has grown longer and longer in STEM. At some point, your program decided to compromise on the things that weren't necessary to reach the advanced levels, so that they had room to get people there at all during their undergrad. There are fields and universities where this isn't the case, where an undergrad only qualifies you to take a master's degree. Some revision of the standard unit of 'the four-year degree' is probably a reasonable thing to examine at this point.

100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was a large part of all there was to study. Now we have multitudes of fields and subfields regularly generating actual demonstrable progress in the capabilities of humanity, few of which require knowing anything about Thermistocles.

Learning Greek and/or Latin was done as a) a mental exercise and b) a way to access an ancient body of knowledge that was basically considered something any educated person should know. Your statement that there was nothing else to learn is highly ignorant.

At some point, your program decided to compromise on the things that weren't necessary to reach the advanced levels, so that they had room to get people there at all during their undergrad.

Yeah, to reach advanced levels where the bulk of their graduates don't have to understand the English language well, and the CS grads don't know what a pointer is or how memory works.

I'm going to assume for my own mental health that you're a troll.

Well, it's possible that you're both right, in different situations:

* Let's just get all these School of Business clowns in and out, OK?

* Now, science geeks, we're gonna see some serious shit! (at least if you go to the right school)

Anyway, that's a possible interpretation :-)

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