You get what you measure, and you should expect people to game your metric.
Once upon a time only the brightest (and / or richest) went to college. So a college degree becomes a proxy for clever.
Now since college graduates get the good jobs, the way to give everyone a good job is to give everyone a degree.
And since most people are only interested in the job, not the learning that underpins the degree, well, you get a bunch of students that care only for the pass mark and the certificate at the end.
When people are only there to play the game, then you can't expect them to learn.
However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow. If you are in college I recommend you take advantage of the chance to interact with the knowledge on offer. College may be offered to all, but only a lucky few see the gold on offer, and really learn.
That's the thing about the game. It's not just about the final score. There's so much more on offer.
> However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow.
Learning is not just a function of aptitude and/or effort. Interest is a huge factor as well, and even for a single person, what they find interesting changes over time.
I don't think it's really possible to have a large cohort of people pass thru a liberal arts education, with everyone learning the same stuff at the same time, and have a majority of them "suck the marrow" out of the opportunity.
I did a comp science degree, so I can't speak for the liberal arts. However I imagine the same experience could apply.
For us the curriculum was the start of the learning, not the end. We'd get a weekly assignment that could be done in an afternoon. Most of the class did the assignments, and that was enough.
There was a small group of us that lived (pretty much) in the lab. We'd take the assignment and run with it, for days, nights, spare periods, whatever. That 10 line assignment? We turned it into 1000 lines every week.
For example the class on sorting might specify a specific algorithm. We'd do all of them. Compete against each other to make the fastest one. Compare one dataset to another. Investigate data distributions. You know, suck the marrow.
(Our professors would also swing by the lab from time to time to see how things were going, drop the odd hint, or prod the bear in a direction and so on. And this is all still undergrad.
I can imagine a History major doing the same. Researching beyond the curriculum. Going down rabbit holes.
My point is though is that you're right. You need to be interested. You need to have this compulsion. You can't tell a person "go, learn". All you can do is offer the environment, sit back, and see who grabs the opportunity.
I get that you cant imagine this playing out. To those interested only in the degree, it's unimaginable. And no, as long as burning-desire is not on the entry requirements, it most certainly will not be the majority.
In truth the lab resources eoild never have coped if the majority did what we did.
> I did a comp science degree, so I can't speak for the liberal arts.
By 'liberal arts' I meant the common 4 year, non-vocational education. My major was CS too, but well over half of the time was spent on other subjects.
> I get that you cant imagine this playing out. To those interested only in the degree, it's unimaginable
I can easily imagine what you describe playing out. I just wouldn't call it 'sucking the marrow' (unless you were equally avid in all your classes, which time likely would not permit).
But as you allude to in your last point, the system isn't really designed for that. It's nice when it does effectively support the few who have developed the interest, and have extra time to devote to it, as it did for you.
I'd rather see systems that were designed for it though.
That's entirely the point. If you see the degree only as a stepping stone to the company job, then that's all you see and that's all you get.
If you accept that the degree/job relationship is the start, not end, of the reason for being there, then you see other things too.
There are opportunities around the student which are for them, not for their degree, not for their job. There are things you can learn, and never be graded. There are toys to play with you'll never see again. There are whole departments of living experts happy to answer questions.
For example, (this is pre google) I wrote a program and so needed to understand international copyright. I could have gone to the library and read about it. Instead I went to the law faculty, knocked on the door, and found their professor who specialized in intellectual property.
Since the program I wrote was in the medical space, I went to the medical campus, to the medical research library, and found tomes that listed researchers who might benefit. I basically learned about marketing.
If all you care about is the company job, then all you'll see is the degree.
right and getting a family is also just a box to check and eating food is a box to check and brushing my teeth is just a box to check and on it goes for every single thing in life. If we all just checked boxes then we'd not be human anymore.
Once upon a time only the brightest (and / or richest) went to college. So a college degree becomes a proxy for clever.
Now since college graduates get the good jobs, the way to give everyone a good job is to give everyone a degree.
And since most people are only interested in the job, not the learning that underpins the degree, well, you get a bunch of students that care only for the pass mark and the certificate at the end.
When people are only there to play the game, then you can't expect them to learn.
However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow. If you are in college I recommend you take advantage of the chance to interact with the knowledge on offer. College may be offered to all, but only a lucky few see the gold on offer, and really learn.
That's the thing about the game. It's not just about the final score. There's so much more on offer.