Did you really never have a terrible prof?

I had a calc prof in uni that literally just read his slides in a monotone voice. I had already taken a calc course that I could have used at a college so didn't even need the credit, but wanted to understand better. At the end of the course, my understanding was way down.

I'd say arguing that people are lazy for not using their textbooks and example questions is missing the mark entirely. The complaint is that profs do nothing.. you can buy a textbook and practice questions for a lot less than $27,000.

There are plenty of exploitative “schools” out there which make big promises, cost big money, and then do shit like this.

The rub is that they cost less than real university, so that is sometimes people’s only option.

When you live in a society that actively discourages education because they don’t want citizens to realize how bad they’re getting robbed by capitalism, you don’t make it cheap or free to go to school. They want to ensure the only smart ones are already so ingrained into the system (by way of being able to afford the education) that they’d never betray it, or risk upending their comfortable lifestyle.

You know, like Lords and Ladies

Someone is still paying thousands for that PowerPoint reading, just not you directly.

Agreed. Sure there were some freshman level courses that were pretty basic and lectures that were skippable. But all of the Junior and Senior level courses were much more challenging and I really needed to understand everything for science lab work to not just be a pile of burnt crap. There were also the exams that were so hard they let us have open textbooks, just studying alone at home wouldn't have gotten through those exams.

At it's best you're paying (or better, your country is paying) to learn how to learn, with a specific discipline as a workspace. As with so much else it has enshittified due to rampant greed and power's fear of a well educated populace, still, if you go into it with that goal, some vestige can still be had.

A degree is a piece of paper that says you’re able to be trained, it comes with a side of “and you’re wildly in debt so you’ll take what you can get”

PhDs are a little different because they really vary based on your field and on your advisor. (at least in the US and in the sciences.) It's your advisor's job to make sure you learn all that you need to learn to do research. Schooling is just a distraction that you get done with on the side and as quickly as possible so you can get back to research.

In the best cases, your advisor will also introduce you to the research community if you want to be a researcher, or help you get teaching gigs / TAships if you want to be a teaching professor, or help you get internships if you want to do industry. The university is just the context in which you and your advisor work, and the degree tells your peers that you've gained a certain level of expertise.

Consequently, my primary gratitude is to my advisor, not to the university.

It is such a stupid barrier to entry.

I went a couple of years but never finished undergrad. That first job tangentially related to what I wanted to do required a personal connection because no one was going to hire a kid to hack code. But after that first job walking away with some (embellished) experience and me listing the university on the CV without mentioning a degree, I was able to break into the field.

Weirdly, you don't need a uni education to do software engineering because of how democratized the information is on computer science and how freely people share their code and techniques online for you to study. You can Good Will Hunting yourself by your own bootstraps in this area, trivially. But places really wanted to know you had that piece of paper. Even when I knew friends with that piece of paper and were incompetent at the actual craft.

Only a few times have prospective employers asked about the degree and it was a problem (some ten years past lol). It ends up being really good signal on if that place is worth it.

University Leadership: Please remember this moment when you become wealthy alumni and we come begging for donations!

US higher education is uber expensive because whenever americans put something in between the service being delivered and how it is paid, it is out of sight out of mind. The borrowing doesn't feel real because repayment is deferred. Universities love money and they figured out that they can jack up the tuition and build lots of buildings and hire lots of useless administrators because it is all borrowed money without any kind of reasonableness applied. You would think the US government would demand due diligence not just from the borrower but also from the institution not to waste that money.