Yeah I doubt that’s true. most PhDs read extensively. I just listened to a lecture by a physicist called The Philosophy of Quantum Physics.
Very well read guy.
Not every highly skilled engineer has zero interest in the rest of the world.
You might be projecting your POV here.
I’ve never understood the US undergraduate model, to me it seems more like High School. In Australia, the UK and many other places undergraduate studies are more focused and cover the subject matter taught in US ‘graduate school’.
My second uni roommate’s dad was a tenured professor of mechanical engineering at Stony Brook in NY. My roommate - a diehard backyard mechanic and Dead fan - wanted to get away from NY and had a full ride studying physics. He ended up at another uni, teaching (you’ll never guess) mechanical engineering on a tenure track.
Quit it all to be a racing mechanic and later owned a repair shop, then a machine shop subcontracting to aircraft manufacturers. He’s pretty happy. And rich as God, I think.
Quitting when you have better things to do is great!
Maybe in those other places the state pays for education so there’s no milking of money from students going on.
I think that might be the main reason.
I spread mine out over the degree, but yeah.
Not knowing what they are there for is another reason to take all those different courses. Maybe some people didn’t know they wanted to lick rocks for the rest of their lives until they tried! As for the drop outs, I don’t think everyone needs to go to university.
Ok, bad choice. I took physics, i still sorta use the concepts, and i think a lot of the general knowledge is useful. I can’t remeber the last time I derived a proof from first principles, but still
Not everyone knows why they are there, as you said. There are also skills from things like freshman composition that engineering majors kinda need but otherwise won’t get. If you’re naturally curious, you should enjoy the opportunity. Not everyone is naturally curious, so it makes sense to require it. From the employment perspective, just part of the sorting hat mechanism: people that can’t meeet the requirements maybe aren’t suited for this or that company.
I agree that the cost of US higher education is too high, though.
No. I am there to get a degree to get a job.
I mean no offense because you’re in academia so maybe it’s not the same for you. Undergrad degrees don’t teach you that much in general. Even as i entered into the finance field with a masters degree I quickly realized I knew so little of the job until I started to do it in real life.
I do not like school. I like learning and understanding things but those do not have to be in an academic setting and it does not mean I’d enjoy the opportunity in an academic setting. I certainly do not enjoy having to pay for them.
Tbh I wish undergrad was more like grad school. I liked it so much better because in undergrad you were taught in lectures which was like pulling teeth for me with adhd. I can not learn like that. I often struggled because professors like to be assholes and test you on materials they said during their lectures. They actually think this is some sort of flex on their end to force to be there.
In grad school given the materials to learn yourself and you came some lectures to discuss what you learned and ask questions. You didn’t have to actually go if you didn’t want to. Either you understand the concept or you didn’t.
This 2nd way might make less people who shouldn’t be there not waste their time and money.
Well, then we go back to the sorting hat.
There are a lot of useless courses, useless professors. I know this very well, precisely because of my insider experience
Yeah, people learn a lot from experience. It’s kinda funny how Taiwan had entire tourism and hospitality universities, at least the US isn’t that far gone. Most of my undergrad students here have never had a job at all
I’m a terrible student, and my doctorate managed to snuff out much of my passion for the theoretical side of my expertise. People who know me also know that I really know my shit. Lots of my undergrad hands on subject area stuff is obsolete now, but the academic/theoretical foundations are the same.
The electives were fun. My music class was great, the philosophy class I use on Forumosa all the time. I took what I wad told were “easy” social sciences but they were boring and I hardly went. But I passed, got the piece of paper. Sorting hat. The people who dropped out lost some opportunities, maybe got others.
If you don’t like school, I get it. There has been a push for a credentialization model of higher education, which is an alternative I think should be on offer. Basically, just show up for the test. If you pass, great, no need to pay for all the stuff you don’t use that would have come with the 4 year residential experience
Oh, something also to be said for the 4 year residential experience, too.
My undergrad was like this. But the professors also covered the materials and guided us towards the tests. Attendance was not taken or required, but was easier than learning everything on my own
Im not sure how. Anyways, most students aren’t there to learn, they’re there to get a piece of paper to get a job
Maybe the thing most employers value most from employees who are required to have a university degree is that it gives them all a common language, a language largely acquired as an undergrad. That is where the humanities and odd seeming electives come into play, in expanding that language. University degrees aid intracompany communication with senior management, especially, and that common language saves time and money.
Yeah, if only we had your absolute lack of knowledge on every single subject while simultaneously thinking we know everything. 
I realize you don’t know much about academia (among many other things), but a PhD is supposed to be narrowly focused pretty much by definition because it’s doing something new, although there’s still quite a lot of background knowledge needed to do that.
When I went the first time. It was like a pride thing for professors to make you come. Most of them will actually fail you if you miss enough regardless of if you got 100% on everything or not.
This is why I dislike school so much. It’s full of these psychopaths power tripping all the time. I have had so many terrible experiences with academia until I got to grad school where I was for once treated like an normal human being and not their subjects.
Nomnomnom
It also means they can show up, follow instructions, and get tasks completed even when it turns out geology was a bad choice and they don’t like it. Follow through.
Insert pimple picture here
Not every university is like that, Australia had gone the total opposite direction
My colleagues, yes. I have some stories, it’s pretty awful.
Huh, for me grad school was the worst
I think you mean this one?
Yeah, I was thinking about that when I wrote the above too lol.
Still, quite irritating to be criticized en masse by someone who I’m not confident has made it outside of the second circle yet.
Yeah, I got sidetracked, thanks for getting it
In undergrad my professors were mostly academics that never left academia. Some of them were a strange bunch. Like the weirdest people I’ve ever met. We had an accounting professor that looked like a homeless cat lady for real. She came dressed the same everyday with unkept gray hair and was weird about phones. If your made even a sound, you were thrown out. One girl forgot in an exam and she showed 0 mercy and threw her out. The girl was sobbing and I still remember her begging to be let to stay.
In my grad school we had PHD students doing some lectures so they pretty much treated us as peers and most of the lecturers and professors came from real work experiences or are at least researchers working for companies as well. Some of them got paid very well for specific skills in finance outside the university. I was surprised by how normal everyone was.
And I have to say I experienced 0 political biases being forced on us as students in grad school. I could tell which way they leaned but they kept it very neutral.
