College - Yes or No?

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It's a poll!

Teachers are mean, indeed?

Where do you kids come up with this stuff?

I mean, really!! ! Mean, us???

You've must've listen to Pink Floyd too much...

I am currently attending college.

Tim

teachers generally aren't mean in college..

Thank you, Alex.

See, we're a bunch of pussycats. Really.

I went to college for 3 years and must say in all that time only one teacher was
mean (hell he was most aspie like!) but even he I could get along with.

There were bureaucratic nightmares dealing with the adminstration. They had to have the paper they wanted but that true in all organizations.

I strongly recommend anybody who hated highschool(I did I dropped out) to give college a try.

College was a very stressful enviroment for me. Also I had a tutor who was always very rude to me.

Mines a mix, it is stressful, but not too bad.

The work is too hard so I don't go. If I wanted a degree real abd in something, I'd go and struggle.

heh i'm going to college in the fall

i'm not really sure what would be so mean about college professors, all they do is give lectures, right?

For the most part I like being at college. However, most of the time I feel that a good GPA and actually learning are mutually exclusive. My college is particularly into quantity of work over quality. I'd far rather spend a year writing an amazing 60 page paper than pulling a ton of 5 page papers out of my ass. In my opinion, if you want good grades, learn how to BS.

College is fun if you get professors who care about the class. (This is my experience, so take it how you will.) In A LOT of undergrad REQUIRED classes (like English), you either get burnt-out professors or grad students, neither of which are that interested in really helping you learn and rely on massive quanitites of busy work to prove that they "taught" somethine. Sometimes you luck out. It is in the upper division classes that college really becomes fun, and students are really interested in learning, not just passing. It is an entirely different experience.

Sometimes you get professors who think they are God's gift to the world (and their department), and can be absolute jerks. I had an experience with one of these types of professors last semester that led to me registering with the disability office to prevent further mistreatment. (The professor in question is now retired, so I don't have to worry about him any more.)

Of course, my favorite class so far has been a freshmen econ class taught by a Marxist (and I'm an Austrian) because she really cared about the class.

I agree with NeoPlatonist about the inverse relationship between GPA and learning, and the BS---luckily, I can write BS a whole lot better than I can speak BS, so it isn't a problem. That's where my upper division classes have been fun; less "work" and more "learning." It is heaven, I tell you.

College is a good idea. You don't know your teachers as well so they have less opportunity to hassle you as an individual and most teachers are ok people anyway, they do mostly lecture but they also give the occasional homework assignment. In college there is a lot more opportunity for intellectual exploration due to a bigger library, more time outside of class, and teachers who know things. As well, given the nature of the labor market, the gains from going to college are higher than they have ever been as more skilled labor is needed in our society and unskilled labor is becoming less desirable due to the increase in technology and the use of unskilled foreign labor for certain jobs.

I tend to doubt the relationship between GPA and learning being inverse as previous posters have stated but of course I have usually had a high GPA and good understanding of the material. Not only that but I probably have less focus on actually learning the material than other posters because I tend to like my major less than they do given that I chose a major based upon my expectations of future monetary gain rather than by how much I'd enjoy studying it. As well, I am an engineering major, and well, you cannot really BS your way through a bunch of math problems, you either do them, or you don't.

I'd suggest that if you think that you are capable of college work then you should attend college, if you seek a better financial future then you should recognize that many majors will pay themselves off, especially in applied science fields and business, and if you enjoy certain subjects then college will give an opportunity to express that interest, and possibly make that interest a career.

I suppose I should have qualified my statement by saying the higher you get in the program, the less busy work there tends to be, which gives you more time to spend studying what you love. I found this to be especially true in lower division history classes where you cover the entire history of some culture/country in three-hours-a-week over a period of three or four months. Coupled with this pace is a plethora of "homework" assignments that, when added to other "homework" assignments given by other classes, leaves precious little time to do anything else. (Granted, I do have to work and take Tae Kwon Do three nights a week, so I have less time than others.) I suppose, too, that the gap between GPA and knowledge/learning also depends upon other factors, such as the ability to constantly actually do busy work, the ability to exercise time management, etc. If you don't have those, then you will run into a lot of problems. Trust me.

And I agree about the math; try to BS math and you fail.

Well, of course it requires something to qualify it, there are plenty of observed aspects that contradict this understanding. I'd say that it really depends on the individual, however, I'd argue that the major tendency will be more of a positive correlation between learning and GPA with a few outliers of course as I consider caring about the class to be a major factor which will cause students who care more to try to learn more and try to appease the professor better and those with a lesser concern will do less, although, of course it really depends on all that qualifies as learning as the party animal who makes a C average could learn a lot about social skills. I will admit that I have never taken a lower division history course though, and my major class with busy work really didn't teach anyone anything and because of that the grade has no relationship to learning for that class. It is most certainly a multivariate problem as you suggest, depending on time available, time management, ability to learn, ability to do busywork, sloppiness, concern for the material, concern for the grade, etc.

After many miserable school failures, I have concluded that my troubles result from my lack of respect for the education system because I don't care about the grade. It is the last thing I worry about in a class. It drives my professors absolutely crazy, but I have been lucky to get some good ones, and they kind of "tweak" requirements to fit my autodidactic learning style. (I wouldn't go so far so to say they were giving me special favors, but after I hand in one or two of their "BS" assignments, I calmly explain to them that I would rather focus my attention on subject X and could I use that as some of the assignments instead of dropping the more complex subject X in favor of subject Y, especially since subject X has its foundations in subject Y? Usually, the professor agrees, and then also agrees to kind of mentor me and direct my reading.)

Of course, I sometimes am guilty of using the "inverse GPA/learning" argument when I am trying to rationalize my behavior. It is a scapegoat, I guess.