BrackenClelk wrote:Yea, university sometimes feels like a huge scam. You pay tens of thousands to do questions out of a textbook just to get a degree. I havn't seen an instance where the university made the student smarter - more knowledgeable maybe, but like Karla said, applicants that get into competitive graduate schools were most likely already solid students before they entered their undergrad program. Kinda makes you wonder if intelligence is really learned outside the classrooms.
How does one define smartness? lol not to nit pick or anything but is it the ability to think independently and differently?
We're encouraged to study quite robotically, when real enlightenment/knowledge really tends to occur when you're forced to think outside of the box.
University does tend to facilitate that a little bit (in the form of challenging projects or independent research), but at the expense that the students miss out on the purpose. Maybe we can blame ourselves for that too, because most of us approach knowledge with the "go to university, get a degree, get an awesome 100k job" mentality. Thus even if we do have the capacity to question and expand, that rarely goes very far.
Environmental Studies & Resource Management, Earth Science
University of Waterloo '11
