I realized my problem with school

I have found myself with less motivation this semester to do the work in my classes than I ever have before. Up until now, I’ve written that off as being a junior, taking too many classes and having a bunch of other stuff going on that hasn’t allowed me to focus enough on my classes.

I sort of just realized that there is a more fundamental issue.

In my classes I’m being told what I need to be learning for purposes of receiving a ‘major.’ I can pursue whatever ‘major(s)’ and ‘minor(s)’ I want, and I get a decent amount of flexibility with my classes. That being said, once I enroll in a class, I have to abide by all of the requirements of the class to get a good grade. Doing the homeworks, taking the tests and writing the papers tend to be the musts. In order to do those effectively, it often means going to class (in most cases also paying attention), doing the readings, spending time studying.

What makes this process so difficult are the low odds that every piece of content I am consuming in class and each assignment that I take on are the most optimal for me. Even if 80% of what I was doing in a class was exactly what I wanted to be doing with my time, there would still be a large inefficiency gap.

You could fight back on this argument for a lot of reasons, so I will get into a few.

Credentials

When I am applying for jobs, two of the best indicators they have for my competency and fit are my major are grades. Therefore, you could argue that these classes in college are valuable as signals to employers. True believers would go on to say that the signals are legitimate indicators that I am skilled and competent in what I was studying. If I have a major in economics, then it means I have a high level of economic understanding and that my school prepared me in an effective way to understand econ.

My issue with this is two fold. One is that the signals are growing less and less important. If you know where to look and have actually done things in the past, then what you actually major in is far less significant. There are plenty of liberal arts students that end up at banks without Finance degrees and plenty of amazing engineers that never officially studied CS.

The other issue is that we are assuming that colleges are adequately teaching about each discipline. That is an unreasonable claim to make for a few reasons. First, colleges have countless departments and there are countless colleges in the country. To assume that each department at each school is teaching a subject in the best way is irrational. Second, it is really easy to shirk as a student and appear strong. I could use my friends homework assignments, cram for tests without learning the material and never go to class, while still receiving good grades.

Intellectual exploration

This is a bit more compelling of an argument.

You could say that college is the time for us to explore topics we would not have otherwise. That means I could take a class about Women, Gender and Sexuality studies (WIGS) or one about philosophy that I would not have had the opportunity to learn about otherwise.

This makes a few assumptions, though, that I struggle with. First, it assumes that we need to take classes in these topics to ever be exposed to them. From an economic perspective, if we are totally rational, then we would know what things we want to learn about and would not need classes to go learn about them. Material exists to learn about most things today without a teacher. Plus, even though I am really enjoying my WIGS class this semester, there have been readings that I have found pointless. I could have done all the ones I enjoyed and then got rid of the ones I did not and have done my own.

I suppose the point that I get the most hung up on is that if I did not take this WIGS class, I would have likely never taken the step to learn about this area. Since I am in the class, though, I have been forced to and it has honestly made a very positive impact on my life. New perspectives, ideas, etc.

That being said, from a purely economical perspective, if I took all the time I spend on school now and said “over the next four years I have to spend that much time learning,” I have no doubt that I would be able to learn more and do it in a way that best suited me.

There has to be some value to teachers and classes, though, right?

There are a few subjects that might be best taught by teachers. I’d assume it is difficult to conquer complex topics in physics, math, chemistry, bio and harder engineering disciplines without help of a teacher. I have not studied any of these at a high level, though, so I cannot make that claim indefinitely. And, I know for sure, that a lot of the foundational ideas in those fields can be learned without a teacher.

In other classes, I have found the biggest value adds to be:

1. Meaningful discussions with others who have different perspectives
2. Help filtering through which content to read
3. Being pushed to learn the material through the action of homework, writings and tests

Majority of my classes do not have meaningful discussions. The ones that have had them have been positive. That being said, most of what I am studying does not need discussion beyond just mastery of the material. There is not much of a need to have a discussion about how supply and demand curves work or how to solve certain algorithms because there is a clear cut answer. There could be ethical or philosophical conversations around those ideas, but for the purpose of learning those things, conversation does not help.

Filtering content is difficult. If I were to sit down today to explore WIGS, I would not know where to start. Having a teacher and a department to help provide content for me has been one of the best parts of that class. That being said, there are online courses and resources that exist that would enable me to find that content if I were willing to put in the time and deal a bit with the filtering myself. Plus, to be honest, that process of being able to filter through a lot of shit is probably one that everyone should become good at.

Having to write or do homework or take tests reaffirms the ideas in our head often for a short period of time. If I were genuinely interested in a topic, I do not think that spending 5 hours trying to memorize a bunch of facts for one day would really help with my understanding. Being interested would mean that I would be incentivized myself to understand the analysis and such, meaning a test would not necessarily help. And I could write about anything I want anyways.

This is very topic specific, but I can break it into a few categories.

For analytics/quantitative classes, we are taught material and how to solve problems (many of which, to be honest, do not accurately replicate how the world really works). We have homework and tests for comprehension and to practice, but all of that I have no doubt could be done by ourselves — unless we needed help actually understanding the material.

For more conversation based classes or philosophical ones, we would have to find the readings ourselves without classes and we would need a way to think about analyzing different perspectives. That could come in the form of exploring some writing which anybody could do. It could also (and often should) come in the form of having conversations. These conversations are important and college is one place to cultivate them. That being said, if you have friends interested in the same topics as you, or you are willing to put in the leg work to reach out to people in the space to converse about ideas, I think you would be able to get the same value.

This says nothing about the rest of college

These qualms I have with class say nothing about how I feel towards the rest of college. There are a lot of other things happening here that I find valuable (and things I do not like so much).

In my classes, though, I cannot help thinking “I would rather be learning about this other topic instead of what we are doing right now.” Or “I need this class because of my ‘major’ but the material I am learning is not going to be relevant to be moving forward.”

These problems are deep and difficult and I do not have the solutions. I guess I just feel that I am sometimes wasting money and time in school and it drives me crazy. Not sure.

Thanks for reading about my ramblings. Agree or disagree? Send me a note :)

noadelstein@gmail.com