I'd suggest that college, while it might look like high school with all the trappings of classes and teachers and students, is actually different from high school. It's not just High School Part 2. Up until now your education has been paid for by society because we don't want anybody to grow up illiterate, without basic understanding of math and science, and unable to socialize. Now you're paying for your own education (even if eventually, through student loans) and you need to choose where you will specialize. You have the basics down and now you're trying to make your labor worthwhile for some employer.
1: You need to show up for all your scheduled class / lecture / lab / discussion times. Some info will be in the textbook, some from lecture. In my experience you gain a lot from discussion but the parts you're tested on and expected to learn are the lecture bits that frame the discussion. Which means you still need to show up, pay attention, take notes, and participate.
2: You didn't have to buy books before because Uncle Government bought them. Now that you're in the adult world you buy your own books. The same goes for your tuition, lab and material fees, transportation, meals, housing, clothes, etc. If a student is in a position where his family will support him and let him live rent-free while he go to college, he has it a whole lot easier than most students.
3: Yes you can learn stuff online for free. What you're not getting is a formal education, meaning you need to figure out what to learn, what sources to use, how to learn it, what exercises to do to test yourself, and find someone out there to
evaluate your performance and suggest improvements. You need to learn a wide variety of these things, not just "computer science". As a programming-specific example, a self-taught programmer must go through a lot of extra work learning standard writing styles or else have more formal programmers he works with be irritated with his work and spend too much time dealing with it.
4: The college degree is definitely something you want to have on your resume. In a way, an employer sees the degree as proof that you were able to stick with your education, that you have certain basic skills, and are ready for job-specific training. It also shows that you're in the right social stratum; for example, if you walk into a boardroom with a PHD you'll be seen as a pompous and useless academic, if you walk in with a Bachelors' you'll be viewed as an underling, and anything lower than that you're carrying the coffee. You need that MBA for the other MBAs to take you seriously (partly because they're so invested in their careers and they know damn well they're a bunch of empty hats desperate to validate their own existence). PHDs are the same way regarding other PHDs. But a college degree isn't enough: you also need to get into internships and volunteering. You might not want to spend the extra time and effort on something that seems like it's not required, but if you don't you'll be screwed.
5: Not every class has a physical textbook. Talk with your professors and program chair about integrating more free materials in the courses and hopefully encourage them to transition into at least cheaper PDF textbooks and hopefully into a fully textbook-free environment. But this is difficult for the professor who must create that material or otherwise assemble it.
6: Courses are all different. Accept this. One course may be all lecture, another mostly labs, yet another will have everyone move their desks into a circle facing the center and be all discussion. Courses also change. Life is turbulent, abrupt. Adapt or perish. Let's say you get a desk job: I guarantee your boss will breeze through and change your whole week suddenly on a Tuesday and you'll need to change gears and get a big project done by end of business
that very day. If you can't learn to do, that someone else will, and their ass will fit your office chair just as well as yours did.
Look at your time in college in two ways:
A: This is a time of growth, discovery, exploration. This is the time in your life when you will have maximum freedom. You're an adult, a driver, a voter, perhaps old enough to drink. You get to choose what you will learn. You're finally learning enough about anything to have deep, deep conversations about them and learn from people around you who are learning different things. You have few responsibilities, full liberties, disposable income. You might be living away from home for the first time. Soon you will need to get a steady job, your godlike body will begin to deteriorate with age, and your options will begin to narrow. Right now you have every avenue open to you: seize those opportunities.
B: This is the opposite of retirement: a youthful time of pleasure and freedom after which you repay your childhood of vacation. The bulk of your life will involve labor, productivity. While now you're burgeoning with growth like a sapling, your adulthood will be a strengthening and toughening process. When you're no longer as useful to society you get to retire and, as an old person, enjoy a few years of relaxation. But it will not be like your time in college. Waste it complaining about textbooks at your peril.
EDIT: One more thing: an AA is the new HS diploma. You used to be able to get a decent job with a HS diploma, do some OJT, make yourself useful pretty quickly. The economy is so shitty, employers are getting tons of resumes, and they need to sort out the people who are least qualified just so they can pare down the list. If the job needs a BA, they will probably shred anyone who doesn't have a BA, and might even end up shredding all the BAs because they got a bunch of people with a Masters'. Of course they'll shred the PHDs because they're overqualified: rightfully fearful these employees will jump ship as soon as they get a better offer. With easy student loans, and with people these days getting student loans and going to a community college just for the living expenses because they can't find a job, and destruction of the typical barriers to entry (easy entry testing, high student capacity), and the availability of easy transferable degrees that just about anyone can achieve, tons of people now have Associates' degrees. This combines to mean that if your highest academic credential is a HS diploma, your resume will get shredded for any job where you're working indoors but not wearing a paper hat.
There's a movement of people who want to avoid college. Kids who see their parents half a million underwater on a subprime mortgage and now have a phobia of debt. Kids who are tired of school and just want to start their lives. Kids who think they can break into a good job despite having no academic credentials. Kids who think they can learn whatever without going to college (which is technically true, it's just harder). But the only way I can see this actually working out is if a ton of kids do this, become successful, and then carry that philosophy over to hiring their employees. Which means it's not going to happen within the next 5 years. Also note that the big computer and internet startups founded by uneducated nobodies either had significant financial backing from the parents or got real lucky - and they typically expect top-notch education and experience from their employees today.
Simply put, if nothing else changes your mind, if the personal growth and amazing opportunities don't sway you, remember that for the forseeable future a college degree is required for success and any exceptions are the equivalent of winning the lottery or cheating by starting out with old money.
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Topic: College aka High School 2: Electric Boogaloo (Read 964 times)