<p>thats where the dead end is. You can know as much as you want in the field, but if you don’t have connections, or the degree. Your SOL. So, even if you can learn on your own, you have to go to college to get that degree.</p>
<p>Is college a learning experience? of course it is, but not in the way you expect it to be.</p>
<p>Alright. Now that I’ve calmed down a little, I am sure this whole thing will blow over with time. </p>
<p>He made a lot of helpful and insightful comments on the mentioned projects and referred me to several other works. I’ll check those out and formulate some thoughts, and weave a reply to his question on my opinion of his classes into the email I send him.</p>
<p>I have a graduate-level class with him next semester. I will be on my best behavior and will not put ONE TOE out of line. : )</p>
<p>Or should I specifically address what I said? Thoughts?</p>
<p>I don’t think that you did anything wrong. You were honest and didn’t post anything disrespectful.</p>
<p>Since it’s obvious that the professor saw your post and also is the type of professor who takes an interest in students and thinks highly of you, I think it would be appropriate for you to stop by his office during office hours next semester and tactfully bring up your concerns about the class that you took from him.</p>
<p>I think you could approach this from the standpoint of how he knows much that the students could learn from, and you think his class could be improved if he shared more of his knowledge with students, and also raised the bar higher so the students would be inspired to learn more.</p>
<p>I also think it would be appropriate to let him know that students in general will do as little as possible, but that professor should not believe the students when they indicate that they are not capable of doing more.</p>
<p>More than likely, he is a professor who is trading being liked for teaching. His knowing that a student he respects would probably value him more if he raised the bar may give him the confidence to expect more of the students whom he teaches.</p>
<p>lol idk i feel like the degree itself is much more important then the stuff you learn. I mean basically all the stuff you can learn on your own basically by reading. I really haven’t found anything I have learned so far in college to be too useful. I mean gen ed is all joke info. Seriously I feel like college is about just going through the motions and showing your employer that you aren’t an idiot and can complete 4-5 years to complete your degree.</p>
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<p>Your degree is only valuable because someone (an employer) thinks it’s worth something. Once classes at your school start slipping and no one learns anything valuable, employers will stop valuing your degree.</p>
<p>Then your degree won’t be important at all. A demand for certification tests in all kinds of fields will start popping up, and employers will want verification that you passed certain certification tests instead of caring about a degree at all.</p>
<p>again why do you think a lot of people that graduate don’t go into the fields they graduate in. The information they gained was essentially useless.</p>
<p>MOST college degrees, aside from specialized ones, its simply just to show your committed to have a career. Do you really need to be a sociology major to adjust insurance claims? Do you really need to be a physics major to be an IT manager? no</p>
<p>most degrees at this point is just to show that you are willing to work 4 years of your life to get a valuable job.</p>
<p>my friend just graduated this year as a psychology major. He does FDIC work now and travels around the country. Other than that degree, the stuff he got out of college did not help him do the job any better.</p>
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<p>You’re partially right, but it’s not just about your willingness to work. It’s your ability to learn new skills and concepts quickly. (At least from an employer’s POV. For the student, it might be about intellectual and social growth, but I’ll cut out the supposed “bullcrap,” right?) </p>
<p>If classes are too easy and professors too lenient, then college will no longer require work or learning. That’s when college becomes worthless to all, because you don’t learn anything and you don’t demonstrate that you can learn anything. Thus, it’s useless to you and it’s useless to employers.</p>
<p>For the employer, it’s not what you learned (except for vocational majors). It’s proving that you can learn. The degree only proves this when academic standards are upheld. Thus, the degree only matters when academic standards are upheld.</p>
<p>You’re looking at it from your perspective (i.e. the degree lands me the job, nothing more) without considering why the employer gives a damn about your degree.</p>
<p>well from my thoughts, gen ed classes should be easy bc they are really not that important. I had to take a theatre class this past semester and ended up getting a B which is a joke bc i really didnt care for the class bc who the F cares about theatre in the real world??? While on the other hand I did well in a very difficult finance class (A) where the class average was in the 70’s. And finally just because a class doesn’t challenge you doesn’t mean it doesn’t challenge others. My finance class was pretty easy in my opinion but my classmates did poorly. Just reflects that they didn’t work hard enough + probably are stupid either way.</p>
<p>And even all this is a simplification, because many employers do care that their workforce is intellectual and mature–especially for the good jobs. Mature, intellectual employees have less turnover and more useful output. </p>
<p>For those type of employers, it’s especially important that employees went through a rigorous college education.</p>
<p>um, your kind of explaining my point.</p>
<p>Employers care that their workforce is intellectual and mature. What puts a college student at advantage to prove he is “more intellectual” than a guy that could sit, read the material, and learn it on its own? Degree</p>
<p>and frankly, you will realize soon enough, that any job you do will become easy after doing it for so long. This is why experience will always beat a college degree. A college degree will always just put ur foot in the door, other than that it means squat.</p>
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<p>It’s like talking to a brick. How does a degree prove this? Via grades. The more students get A’s without deserving it, the less a degree proves that a graduate sat, read, or learned anything. The more professors start handing out A’s, the more students get A’s without deserving. Thus, if you don’t give a damn that a professor is handing out A’s, your are contributing to the decline of a college degree (or, at least, your college’s degree). </p>
<p>Even when you ignore everything else that a college education offers to society at large (we live in a democracy…you want your voters educated) and to the individual (intellectual growth), the degree still only matters because the coursework is rigorous. </p>
<p>[/leaves]</p>
<p>“What puts a college student at advantage to prove he is “more intellectual” than a guy that could sit, read the material, and learn it on its own? Degree”</p>
<p>The reason that a college degree is required for many jobs isn’t to prove how intellectual a person is but to also provide proof that a person can do the various things that one has t do in college: balance your personal life with your academic responsibilities; be organized enough to get one’s academic work in on time; be able to take orders and work on teams.</p>
<p>My older son is a very smart guy who always hated school. He dropped out of a college where he had virtually full academic scholarships after getting a gpa of below 1.0. He got such a low gpa because he didn’t bother to do assignments or even show up for tests because he liked to learn on his own.</p>
<p>At age 26, he is stuck making very little money while temping in an office job that he has worked for 4 years. He has no benefits. he is not considered for promotions or a permanent hire even though he has been a very responsible worker (who has never taken a vacation) who has taken on far more than his job requires.</p>
<p>Why is he not considered for more? Probably because of a lack of a college degree, something that he’s bright enough to get very easily if he bothered to do that. His employer doesn’t care that S is widely read (one of the things he was doing for fun last year was trying to read all of the Great Books), listens to news in French, and writes so well that a Hollywood agent was trying to sell one of son’s scripts when son was still a teen. </p>
<p>What employers care about is son’s lack of a college degree. S thinks that perspective is b.s., but S’s disdain for how the employers value college degrees isn’t helping S get a better job.</p>
<p>“well from my thoughts, gen ed classes should be easy bc they are really not that important. I had to take a theatre class this past semester and ended up getting a B which is a joke bc i really didnt care for the class bc who the F cares about theatre in the real world???”</p>
<p>Apparently, you’ve never looked at the boards of arts organizations including theatre organizations. They are filled with people who are top professionals in their fields, which tend to be highly lucrative fields.</p>
<p>In fact, given how high ticket prices are, most of the people supporting the arts are highly educated people, and many are top business executives.</p>
<p>A lawyer in my city-- one who works for a company that our mayor serves on the board of – also for fun directs an excellent theatre company. </p>
<p>Many people – including top executives – would regard as unsophisticated and not worthy of promotion to a top job – a person with the kind of perspective you have. It would make you seem unsophisticated, the type of person who wouldn’t be able to network or converse with people who are well off and in high positions. So much of getting ahead in the work world is based on who you know and what type of people one can fit in with.</p>
<p>northstar mom, that is exactly why i explained how college actually gives you a learning experience, just not the way you expect it.</p>
<p>It gives you life experiences to face the real world, you will have crappy teachers, you will have awesome teachers, you learn how to take the good in with the bad and how to work through it, you learn to interact with people outside your norm, you learn to socialize, you learn to make contacts, you learn how to manage time, you learn how to use the system to your advantage.</p>
<p>all of these is what i learned in college, and it was an invaluable experience, but i can honestly say the stuff that i was “supposed” to learn in college, i could of easily flipped open a text book and learn a lot faster.</p>
<p>justtotalk, the degrees are now are mainly useless, not because of grade inflation, is because there are many degrees that are a joke. Is it really hard to major in spanish if you are fluent in it walking in? no, is it hard to rewrite material that you read from multiple books and just summed it all up on a paper? no</p>
<p>most courses arent rigorous, you want all majors to mean something? make math all the way to linear algebra for all majors a requirement. Make all hard sciences a requirement, make business majors to create and design successful (gain a profit that outweighs man hours done) mid size businesses before allowing to graduate. Reality a lot of people would drop out of college if that were to happen, until then, college will never be rigorous, college would always be a joke that people can breeze through it depending on the major.</p>
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<p>I don’t know if specific courses are relevant–a person who took linear algebra didn’t necessary learn anything. I think what’s more relevant is making college courses more in-depth, advanced, and difficult in *all * fields. But I completely support the general idea of your statement. Why shouldn’t college be rigorous? As you say, many students can flip through a book and learn more than they learn in lectures. That’s a shame.</p>
<p>If you agree with this, then you shouldn’t be trashing people that call out professors for being too easy. These type of people are trying to make college rigorous. They won’t succeed by simply posting on ratemyprofessor, but they’re doing what they can to improve college education.</p>
<p>because what can a teacher teach that isn’t already in a book? Seriously.</p>
<p>Can a teacher explain everything in a textbook and more in a semester? nope</p>
<p>and math is beneficial wherever you go. Why shouldn’t they learn it? Its kind of pathetic when you talk to people that are “college graduates” and don’t understand the concept of how electricity works even with their highly praised degree in sociology. What can they tell me that i dont know? nothing, because its not hard to learn it.</p>
<p>and if you read WAYYYYYY in the past that i rewrote multiple times. I have told a teacher a class was too simple before, the way he did it just make him sound a pompous tool. He is just mad that he worked hard to get the same grade of the person he hoped to fail. Sucks to be him, he doesn’t know how to work the system, so he will do everything the hard way.</p>