What many don't seem to understand is that it is the student's responsibility to learn. The best lecturer in the world can't teach you anything if you don't pay attention, or if you don't have the prerequisite knowledge and understanding. I could attend a lecture on advanced neuroscience and I would be left with pretty much nothing because I have no idea about any of that stuff. In order to gain from it I would need a solid base of knowledge on which the lecturer could build.
So university students fall on a spectrum. Some are really interested, they started writing code on their own before they even enrolled. They challenge themselves and do their own projects for fun and learning. Others don't care, they do as little as they can get away with.
A trick I picked up that I found very helpful was to study before each lecture. They would publish a list of all the lectures and which chapter the lecture was about, so I would study the chapter before the lecture. This allowed me to much better understand the lecture, and I felt like it really helped me gain value from the lectures and learn the material.
My point is nobody can put knowledge in your head but yourself. My experience was that the people complaining most about our studies and lecturers were the people who didn't take responsibility for their own learning. If a lecturer sucked I just skipped the lectures and read the book instead, I didn't care. I don't need a lecturer. Good lectures are just a bonus, they're not supposed to be your main source of learning. You're supposed to study on your own time, even when nobody has given you a specific task and deadline. If you do that, university is a great way to guide your learning and keep you going - and get a paper proving you have put the time in.
If I'm hiring a stranger for my company it's nice to have an esteemed institution willing to officially vouch for them having some baseline of knowledge in the field.
While there are always exceptions, the esteemed institutions in question are generally not willing to vouch for some baseline vocational knowledge in the field. In fact, that's what the entire discussion is about, with debugging being a prime example of baseline knowledge they are often not willing to vouch for. Their esteem does not stem from that sort of offer.
No doubt you keep on top of who are the exceptions, and ensure they stay that way on a continual basis, however that is going to be way more work in the end. More power to you if that's what enthrals you, but that's not work I would consider "nice". That sounds like drudgery to me...
...and most everyone else it seems. Indeed, there was those couple of years there where this notion of yours made it into the mainstream, but it disappeared as quickly as it came.
I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying a university education is useful, or at least that it was to me and I think it will be to anyone who puts effort into it.
I have actually remarked to colleagues about this exact topic, I think it's strange that debugging was a topic I had to learn on my own and teach to struggling students when I was a TA.
The flip side of that is that debugging is easy. It is definitely a skill that you can develop over time but learning the basics and getting started debugging your code is something you can do in less than an hour.
This is a minor criticism, not a justification for declaring universities useless. I learned tons of other useful stuff. I learned multiple programming languages, math, DSA, databases, networking, all kinds of things I use on a frequent basis.
Whenever I hear people say they didn't learn anything useful in university i think that says a lot more about them than it does about the university.
> I'm just saying a university education is useful
Sure. I expect there is no activity you can do in life that isn't useful. But the specific claim was that universities officially vouch for a baseline knowledge for the sake of corporate hiring interest. But the larger discussion is about how universities by and large do not vouch for such things.
And why would they? That is decidedly not the business they are in. In fact, if you found yourself hiring someone out of an esteem institution who still lacks those baseline skills and you tried suing the institution for false representation I expect you would be laughed out of the courts as there is no such promise actually made.
> It is definitely a skill that you can develop over time but learning the basics and getting started debugging your code is something you can do in less than an hour.
Sure. There is no programming-related skill that you can't start with in less than an hour. The only thing that really separates a great developer and a beginner is practice, practice, practice. Same with everything in life, really. You can learn what you need know to play baseball in less than an hour, but it is still a long road to the major leagues.
However, an expectation of baseline knowledge already being present would expect that the hours were already put in. If we accept "it is easy to get started" as good enough, then who cares about the baseline knowledge?
> Whenever I hear people say they didn't learn anything useful in university i think that says a lot more about them than it does about the university.
From my vantage point it says most about neither, but about the one who has not accurately read between the lines. But anyway...
What many don't seem to understand is that it is the student's responsibility to learn. The best lecturer in the world can't teach you anything if you don't pay attention, or if you don't have the prerequisite knowledge and understanding. I could attend a lecture on advanced neuroscience and I would be left with pretty much nothing because I have no idea about any of that stuff. In order to gain from it I would need a solid base of knowledge on which the lecturer could build.
So university students fall on a spectrum. Some are really interested, they started writing code on their own before they even enrolled. They challenge themselves and do their own projects for fun and learning. Others don't care, they do as little as they can get away with.
A trick I picked up that I found very helpful was to study before each lecture. They would publish a list of all the lectures and which chapter the lecture was about, so I would study the chapter before the lecture. This allowed me to much better understand the lecture, and I felt like it really helped me gain value from the lectures and learn the material.
My point is nobody can put knowledge in your head but yourself. My experience was that the people complaining most about our studies and lecturers were the people who didn't take responsibility for their own learning. If a lecturer sucked I just skipped the lectures and read the book instead, I didn't care. I don't need a lecturer. Good lectures are just a bonus, they're not supposed to be your main source of learning. You're supposed to study on your own time, even when nobody has given you a specific task and deadline. If you do that, university is a great way to guide your learning and keep you going - and get a paper proving you have put the time in.