Universities should be more than toll gates

Well, they used to be, but the modern industrial age needed institutions that could train workers - and universities fit the bill. I don’t think it’s possible to detach the credential aspect from universities without a parallel work-focused system existing, and even then, the prestige of universities will still mean that the wealthy and privileged will prefer universities, which means that that prestige will trickle down to everyone else.

The only real solution IMO is to support institutions like St. John’s [1] and others that are explicitly not career-focused, and work on making similar institutions affordable and accessible. There’s no real reason why someone can’t start a student-operated (to keep costs down) university that focuses on the liberal arts, classics, mathematics, etc. that is affordable enough for the average person. I suspect the main problem is the lack of prestige and precariousness of the economy at large.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_College_(Annapoli...

This was exactly like my experience, although mine was in the UK maybe 15 years earlier. I went to university and studied a particular subject so that I'd be employable and didn't enjoy what I was learning. (It's debatable whether I learnt much at all, though.) Like the author, many years later I also came across computer science and found it exciting and engrossing, but I have a slightly different take on that:

    > Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too. 

Perhaps I needed to grind out a dull degree as it ultimately set me on a path to a time/place/subject that I really do enjoy. My interests now have been shaped by my journey and if you'd tried to teach me computer science at 18 I'm sure I would've hated that, too.

The annoying thing is that: when universities aren't toll gates and you actually learn something, then people don't believe you and you have "0 work experience".

So often, I've had the experience with work that it just feels like a long elaborate lab and there really is not much of a difference. Whether I make Jupyter notebooks analyzing things in a computer lab or for colleagues, I still use the same skills. Whether I present in front of classmates or colleagues, same skill.

I suspect a lot of people on HN have similar stories. College is always in conflict between rote memorization (easiest to grade, therefore cheaper) and actual understanding (best outcome, therefore increases college ranking).

This is also true for universities in Europe and America.

Well, if you actually want to learn, there is always the vast swaths of the Internet. Virtually everything here is free, and nobody will care until you do something impressive with your knowledge.

As for universities, they will likely stay as signaling mechanisms until society finds a more efficient way to signal the things that universities do. This is a worldwide pattern that has emerged, and to the extent you see deviations from it it's usually situations like e.g. getting into Tokyo University is already so incredibly difficult that some employers will just accept your letter of admission itself as a sufficient signal of your value to the firm and hire you and let you skip the whole getting a degree thing.

What does university graduation signal? Some combination of raw intelligence, conscientiousness, and ability to conform (not against the "I have beef with the standard model of physics" nonconformance, so much as the "I will not physically assault the professor for telling me I'm wrong in class" nonconformance). Admission to a selective university signals you had these traits even earlier and with greater strength than your peers.

I'm going to underline something from your own article here, which is that you went to an excellent university and got near the top of your class despite hating it. It is an incredibly rare psychological profile in the wild to be able to war-of-attrition your way through so many elite classes, while having virtually zero interest in the material themselves. Any employer would be drooling at the mouth to hire you because you sound reliable even in a pinch. Alas they cannot tell you apart from the ultranerd who gets all As because she genuinely finds all knowledge presented to her endlessly fascinating - but she's probably a good hire too, for different reasons!

But, almost by definition, you can't really signal that kind of ability if you only ever do things you want to do... And most of the things most people in the world want to do most of the time aren't very economically valuable from the doer's perspective. Everyone wants to eat, nobody wants to grow crops, etc.

All this article proves is that universities in Jordan aren't very good.

> Getting good grades exclusively depended on your rote memorization skills the night before an exam.

This is not how my American engineering university worked at all. Engineering courses had practical labs, team project work, tests involved solving a small handful of problems that could not be memorized, general education courses involved math, writing, research, and creativity. The author even demonstrated how good US universities are directly by talking up how great Harvard's C550 content is.

There is a very good reason why the university system in the USA is considered top-tier and nobody is clamoring to go to school in Jordan.

The other aspect of this article is basically "I am very smart." I wonder if the author of the article considered the idea that maybe the university program is geared toward people of more average intelligence who are actually learning a lot rather than just memorizing answers the night before like smartypants article author who already knows everything and just needs to pass the test.

> Jordanian universities follow an archaic credit-hour system where at least a semester’s worth of useless subjects are crammed into your schedule. For example, everyone I know had to study “Military Science,” a semester-long 3-credit course with very little use outside of esoteric trivia about army hierarchy.

It's highly ironic that someone talking positively about "learning for its own sake" is complaining about general education in the same article. Sure, maybe Jordan's general education courses suck, but general education in the US university system is quite literally "learning for its own sake," a system that exists to make you a more well-rounded and educated individual. Getting a university degree in the US indicates that you have a base level knowledge about a wide variety of subjects and is a major reason why employers have traditionally looked at university degrees as a general indicator of a candidate's adaptability and intelligence.

> a lot of them will say the dorm life, late-night conversations, or the campus freedom. Very few will tell you their favorite part was what they learned in class.

Just because students like the liberalization of campus life more than any other aspect doesn't mean that the coursework wasn't valuable. That's like asking someone what their favorite part of dinner was and assuming their answer of "the chocolate cake" meant that the dinner sucked.