The professors were underpaid and many of them didn't care -- some did care and were excellent teachers, but a lot of them were bitter about their career outcomes and just went through the motions. My best professors were the ones who had careers outside of the community college and taught part time, including a tenured professor at Stanford and a professional archeologist.

Honestly it's hard for me to recommend community college to people who are driven and dedicated to their educations, because so many of the other people in those institutions are not like that.

If I could go back in time I would gladly borrow an extra $20k to go to a university from the beginning. Over the time scale of a lifetime, or even just a decade, that's not a lot of money.

Similarly, there were many professors who did not care at all. However, my girlfriend is currently attending the Ohio State University as a medical student, and similarly many professors either (a) do not care about their students or whether they are effectively teaching them material, or (b) have too many students and are unable to effectively teach them all.

While I attended some classes at the community college that had 150+ students (less than her largest classes, to be fair), those professors actually were some of the best I had. Maybe I just got lucky.

FWIW, she also attended Eastern Michigan University and Washtenaw Community College (with me) prior to this. The community college was her favorite.

In any case, there are plenty of skills I'd like to learn, or learn more about (e.g. mechanical skills, art skills, etc.) and without a doubt I would choose a community college -- and research my professors! -- over a university. In either case, you should pick your professors carefully; but the price difference (even on a software engineer's salary) is simply not worth going to a university IMO.

Don't forget that money spent at the beginning of your career is worth more than money spent at the end! (Assuming you're investing well.) Compounding interest and all.

Given how little it pays to teach in a community college, I'm surprised there is any teacher who didn't care.

They genuinely liked to teach and loved it when they could get their students to care about a subject as much as they did themselves. You could tell they did it out of passion, and moreover, for the students.

Everyone has an anecdote.

The problem for me is that (like many people who didn't go to college the first time around) I didn't do particularly well in high school. And from what I've seen, the schools that won't hold my grades from 20 years ago against me are not better than the aforementioned community colleges.

Right now I'm doing a self-paced online thing... it's not better than a community college, but we will see how it turns out.

I spent way too long getting a useless degree in physics at Cal Poly SLO. They wouldn't let you switch majors (because every 17 year old knows what they want to do with their life) but it turns out changing schools is tough when your grades show you've hated your major the last 2 years.

The best thing I EVER did was sign up for classes at Santa Monica College after getting my Bachelor's. They're fantastic - this was a while back, but offering everything from Assembly to Android Dev and having great profs who actually listened to you was fantastic. I can't praise that school highly enough.

Funny enough, my wife and I both took German from _the same professor at the same time_. But I did it at SMC at night for basically free (I think $140 or so), and she paid a couple grand for the privilege at UCLA.

Community Colleges also don't destroy young lives with crushing debt that can never be discharged. We should be encouraging them and end with the cargo cult that is "everyone should go to a 4 year university"

Community college had a few great professors, but most were not good. They did not have high expectations for students, and it showed in the way that classes were taught. It was far too easy and most students were not prepared for the increased difficulty of STEM classes after they transferred.

I don't think my university treated me as a child, but they scheduled labs and exams in a way that expects you to be available at all hours. That made things difficult for the few adults students that have other obligations outside of school. I was lucky in that I could afford to quit work and focus 100% on school. Most adults can't do that, but it is the best way to learn quickly.

Professors were selfish and self-serving, but that never affected me until graduate school. The professors in the earlier engineering classes at the 100, 200, and 300 levels were outstanding and incomparable to any professor I had in community college. In general, they were unselfish and would go very far out of their way to help students succeed.

Different colleges within the university were very different. That shouldn't be a problem for a transfer student because you don't have that much interaction with colleges other than your own. I only took 3 classes outside of the College of Engineering.

I was a software developer for years before I got a degree, and I still learned a tremendous amount. I consider my time at university to be the best time of my life. I would not have my current job (at a FAANG) if not for what I learned in classes and research. In fact, I have never met anyone (at any company) in my subfield that does not have a degree.

1. Curious as to which sub-field you're currently working in 2. What was the impetus for you to make the decision to quit work full time and study again full-time? 3. When you say that you've not met anyone in your subfield that doesn't have a degree, how sure are you? I'd like to imagine that there are at least one or two that started school but didn't finish

2. Prior to going to school I was a full stack web dev. I was tired of the framework of the week treadmill and didn't think it was something I could find fulfilling for the next 20-30 years until retirement.

3. I'm very sure. Hardware is a different beast than software. In order to excel as a modern hardware designer you need all of the fundamental EE knowledge and a lot of the fundamental CS/programming knowledge.

> I don't think anyone needs a degree anymore to get to where they're going.

There are plenty of professions outside of tech where formalized education is held in the same regard as 100 years ago. The “times have changed” thing is very much a tech bubblethink. Good luck entering medicine or academia without a degree. There are outliers in these fields but that isn’t anything new.

Given that a PhD is basically a training course on how to be a professor, I think that one might actually be fair. The harshest criticism of PhDs is that they are only vocational training for professors, even.

At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the way I've been beat down to just wanting to get "the piece of paper" and be done. It's been a long three years and each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own.

The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well. Thus, don’t give up, the paper certifying it is more important than the “education” you are getting.

In my career, everyone I've worked with had at least a Bachelor's. Most had a Master's and a few had a PhD. Only one did not finish undergrad.

I can assure you, people who hold a university degree are not particularly conscientious or consistent. I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work"). And the management doesn't care either (automating boring work will not help you in your career).

I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter.

Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role.

I went to a low ranked undergrad and a top 5 grad school. My experience mirrors this person's if you substitute community college for undergrad and undergrad for grad. At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them.

There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.

As someone who's spent a few years in undergrad CS at a decently ranked Russell Group university, I'd have to agree that this appears to be the case in the UK too. For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Overcrowding is a pretty frequent issue and organisation is generally poor.

I've come to the conclusion I don't really care if the university is "research-intensive" because I've seen very little benefit from it. How much of a fundamentals course on data structures or software engineering is going to involve cutting edge research?

The TEF scores (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/what-tef-r...) over here have been pretty interesting too. A lot of the lower ranked institutions have come away with much higher results than some of the traditionally 'better' universities.

Well yes, of course. People don't go into academia because they want to teach. Academics are also not rewarded significantly for good teaching.

BTW, the low ranked university I went to was a research university. Professors got tenure/promotions based on that and not based on teaching. They still cared about teaching. It is at some level a matter of culture. If a top ranked university is worse when it comes to teaching, the reality is the university doesn't value education. Let's not use research as an excuse for poor education.

Undergraduate teaching ranks should be weighted more in overall rankings since that's supposed to be the school's primary function and all.

When student tuition fees make up the bulk of a department's income, is this reasonable and fair to students? Are they getting value for money?

Some institutions have separate teaching and research promotion tracks mapped to equivalent salary grades.

It's difficult to say, isn't it? How does one determine how much a university education "should" cost?

I don't see any easy solution. If we convert research-focused universities into teaching-focused institutions, what happens to the research? If we create new and separate teaching-focused institutions, who pays?

I don't particularly love those tasks either, but having to do them all because the alternative is to let project fail is something I don't want to go through again, ever.

There is a middle ground between the extremes :-)

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to work with people who insist on doing the same work manually that takes an hour, that could be scripted to take 2-3 minutes. And then they oppose your writing a script to do it. And I'm sure you wouldn't want to work there if your manager tells you that it would be awesome if you can automate it, but please understand our compensation policy will not allow us to reward you for increasing the team's productivity.

Except the manager, wherever I worked I had fixed salary and no special compensation for anything. Once in a while I would negotiate salary raise, but that is it. So it is kind of normal to me.

What matters is not whether they are very conscientious or consistent, but rather how conscientious or consistent relative to candidates who didn't earn the degree. Employers use this signal to perform statistical discrimination on their pool of applicants. The situation here is similar to the statistical discrimination that happens when you are shopping for car insurance: women pay lower premiums not because they are particularly safe drivers, but rather because they are safer (or less costly) than men, on average.

This kind of statistical discrimination, that is, using educational attainment to make hiring decision, is often somewhat illegal (based on straight reading of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., e.g. for most BA in History graduates it is hard to argue that their diploma is "reasonably related" to the jobs they are doing, but the employers will happily choose the graduate over someone with only high-school diploma). To my knowledge, however, nobody ever made an actual legal challenge, so employers happily keep using it.

I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work").

This may be true for people in highly-skilled jobs requiring high intelligence, which probably describes most of HN readers, but many other employers will value consistently slogging through mundane tasks over creativity and innovation.

I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter.

So do I, but, as you noted, the management doesn't value these very much.

Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role.

Precisely. This is more important, considering that less than half of college students are proficient in reading (NAAL 2003), and the rest only has intermediate level or worse. The point here is that people tend to forget most everything they learn in school, so what they learn exactly doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.

Right. My understanding is that while teaching quality in low ranked schools is lower than in high ranked ones on average, there are still plenty of low ranked schools with high teaching quality, better than most high ranked ones. One might ask themselves then, why then are they lower ranked? The truth is that the education quality doesn't matter that much, what matters is student selection.

Aren't you on holiday for a lot of those 4 years?

I went to uni for 4 years, and it was 3 terms of 8 weeks each, per year. In other words, 96 weeks.

Throw in the occasional rest week and it should really fit in two years.

I've found that every major personal change I've gone through - college, entering a career, moving cross-country, working at Google, being an entrepreneur, and even my relationship with my wife - took about 4-5 years before I was really comfortable on a gut level with my new life and could accept it as part of my identity. The actual technical material takes much less time to master - I found I was pretty competent at Javascript after 6 months, I could make major changes to Google at a year, I knew where most of the important things in the Bay Area were within a year, etc. But that's not really the point. The point is that when you go about your daily life, without thinking too much, have you internalized the value system and worldview that you're being educated into? It's the transition into unconscious competence.

Now, whether the university system teaches a worldview that correlates well with what you need for success in the rest of the world is another question. Just a couple months ago, the President of the U.S. was tweetstorming about academic brainwashing in universities. And depending how you squint, that may even be accurate - a worldview looks like brainwashing to people outside of that worldview. But the fact is that the vast majority of people in positions of wealth and power have been through those 4 years and have adopted that worldview, and doing so yourself will significantly reduce the friction as you interact with them.

Could you provide some more details about the community college curriculum you are talking about? To my knowledge, the local community colleges offer what is essentially the first two years of a university education, with a reduced emphasis on your actual major.

>each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own.

This means that you are not taking advantage of the resources available to you. Typically, the advice to people with energy left over after classes is that they should contact the labs at their institution and become miniature grad students. You also should try to register for graduate level courses, talking to whoever is in charge at your institution if necessary. Universities offer many avenues for gifted students that want to do more work than everybody else, and I would say that fact is the main thing that separates them from community colleges.

Except for actually holding the degree.

And yes, the 100+ person classes are the introductory classes offered in first and second year before things get whittled down to something more personal. However, they really set the tone for those first couple of years, saying "You're not in high school anymore".

I'm sure the kids really appreciate the experience four years down the line when they can look back at sophomores in a real job and think "gosh, wasn't it great my first two years of college cost me 3-4 years of my post-graduate income and gave me the wonderful value for all that money of 'waking me up' to how hard college will be when I actually start getting value from it!"

But.

I feel that this should make it easier for an adult that would like to keep their job/income while attending school.

I also agree with most of your other gripes, having seen them at the large state school that I went to, but our neighboring state university (still a high quality school) was well known as a commuter school and went out of its way to accommodate adults. In essence, I don't think that your experience necessarily has to be universal.

P.S. Working in groups with young students is terrible even if you are a young student, and the only way I ever found to alleviate that was to select courses that were infamous for their difficulty. Easy class? Worthless group. Very hard class? Useful people that can be trusted to accomplish their part on their own time without supervision/hand holding.

False, unless by "anyone" you mean people in the US. I'm from Colombia and back to college to get the degree because I can't find a job anywhere without it. In here 90% of job offers require a degree and some only count your experience after the graduation date.

Even without the long projects, the vast majority of students in my CS and math classes couldn't have handled 2x the information. The shorter summer versions of hard classes always had a much higher fail rate.

At my university you could also take up to 21 hours if you had a good GPA, and you could go during the summer. If you could handle this, you could complete most degrees in 2.5 years.

I also didn't feel like my school treated me like a child, and 90% of my professors were fantastic.

When I had a class that covered a topic I was already familiar with, I used the opportunity to get even more familiar it with by tutoring, working on harder projects, and picking the professor's brain. I also took harder theoretical classes at every opportunity.

I worked as a programmer for almost a decade before i went back for CS, and I only had 2 classes that I thought were a waste of time (both practical non-theory classes taught by the same guy).

It depends on the subject in my experience.

At my school (major state university) undergraduate business school classes were run like high school. Attendance taken, assigned seats, pop quizes, etc.

Science and Math courses were most "adult" in their treatment of students.

Elective social sciences (100-level psych, sociology, history, political science, etc.) varied somewhere in between.

I completed all my English lit and writing requirements in high school so not sure how those classes worked things.

It's probably mostly a function of how much they feel the need to treat students like kids. Even though my university had a very highly ranked business school, business in general was kind of the refuge for people who wanted to go to college but weren't sure what they wanted to do.

>I completed all my English lit and writing requirements in high school so not sure how those classes worked things.

I took 1103 instead of 1101 and 1102 because that was a thing you could do if your SAT score was high enough. It was much less high school like than the business classes. World Lit was an elective and it was nothing like high school, no attendance requirements, and no grades except for a 2 papers.

With respect to academia, this point seems to come up a lot, which is highly dependent on school, subject, etc. But in my opinion, a lot of times it boils down to a couple things.

1. Research is your main job. 2. becoming tenured is basically your get out of jail free card. without doing something /legally/ wrong or ethically wrong, your salary is basically guaranteed until retirement. at R1 institutions, your main focus is publishing work to gain tenure.

by mixing the above two points, you produce professors who “treats you like a child.”

Since leaving university, I've found many situations where neither degree nor education matter much... and some where it did.

I'd believe many community colleges are underrated, and the modern university system has a lot of flaws and ways in which it poorly serves its participants (faculty and students alike), but the value in a specific path of participation seems a lot like a YMMV kindof thing.

I wish I hadn't rushed through though. The university experience is great. I wish I had socialized more, spent more time on side projects, and did internships in undergrad.

The word "semester" literally means "six month" so you can only have two. What you might want is to have more work during these two period.

My father went to university after WW2 on the GI Bill. They ran semesters year round, because there were so many vets wanting to go. End result was he graduated in 3 years.

Wondering if you would share any details on this and/or suggestions for traditional age students working with adults?

don't forget how much cheaper it is!