For what it's worth - the Washington Post put the article in the style section.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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chapotraphouse
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True. Just the idea "well I know calculus/Java/physics like the back of my hand so I'm clearly an Uber level intellect."
Accepting you might be good at one thing and not another is surprisingly difficult
"I paid the tuition of a 4-year liberal arts college to learn a trade, now bow to my superior intellect!"
I've studied all of the above and the "applied sciences" were by far the easiest (and least intellectual) in my experience.
Learning the humanities, on the other hand, is like studying a proof inside-and-out without a proof to actually study from. There are no toy models, components cannot be isolated, there are no authoritative references, you can't work backwards from the answer, you can't coast off of your classmates, and even the best teacher does not guarantee that an idea is going to click in any student's head. And that's just for comprehension - a productive mastery is even more intellectually challenging, with even fewer guideposts on the path.
Wrapping vocational training into higher education has caused untold harm to the world imo. Trades like engineering and software development should never have gotten mixed up with the university systems. However capitalism made it all but inevitable.
Even between the life sciences and trades. I just finished a BS in biology as a mature student and a close friend is doing his in computer science part time, and the difference in what we have to do... So much of his assessed work can be entirely unsourced because it's literally just coding. He's a clever guy and was given an award for placing in the top 100 students institution-wide last year (~40k students), but I do wonder how many of the other 99 were in similar courses!
I can definitely believe it. And no hate to your friend, or any tradespeople, or trades themselves. Some of them are just caught in a systemic scandal, which probably hurts 99% of them as much as it does everyone else.
Oh, absolutely. He sees it himself. Fortunately (a) in Australia it's partly subsidised and the loans are only indexed against inflation, and (b) he's obviously enjoying it. Plus the few units that actually belong in a university are really interesting (but not as you say enough to justify the course being at a uni).