Take me for example, I’ve been a programmer since I was 9 years old and have done countless very large projects all on my own, I’ve even had one where a whole research team of computer scientists gave me their kudos and said it took five of them a few years to get as far as I did in a single year on my own.

However, I cannot seem to be able to pass first year of computer science college. Doing it now for the second time and I have to say it’s not going too well. Whereas I could very easily do a master’s or doctorate in a heart beat (a year long heart beat but whatever)

Wouldn’t you say there’s something extremely absurd about this situation?

As for the quote and saying that’s RL experience. My RL experience is that team leads, bosses, whatever, listen to me and do as I tell them is best because they recognise my solution as superior once I elaborate.

On the other hand, what about Master’s thesises? Those basically *are* complex year-long assignments, right? I think they fit your description quite accurately. Around here, every university student gets to do a Master’s thesis, so in a way we’re doing just fine. What’s your view on this?

Just one more quote from your above post:

“when I propose a better solution than what they’re teaching me they just say I’m stupid and should do it their way, even if I later prove my way was much more efficient”

I would *definitely* call this real life experience :-)

Personally I think the perfect college programming course would be if students were given an assigment at the beginning of the year that’s complex enough to take them a few months to complete. Professors should just give advice and gentle nudges into the right way, but listen to the student and let them think (I have a big problem at school because when I propose a better solution than what they’re teaching me they just say I’m stupid and should do it their way, even if I later prove my way was much more efficient, if a little more difficult to implement and thus actually required a little effort from them as well to grade it).

Then when they’re done with the assignment, by this time they’ve learned a great deal. You change the requirements ever so slightly. This will teach them all about the importance of code maintainability.

I always cringe when seeing the umptieth blog post about how little there is to be learned in school/college/whatever formal education path there is. In short, formal education seems to be worthless, misguided, hollow and generally screwing up people’s lives.

Now, hold it there. Do people really expect to be fully prepared for the real world when graduating? I certainly did not. It’s been some years since I graduated and I’m learning new things every day. I hope to do so until the bitter end, it actually is an integral part of my education.

Stop seeing college/real life as black/white. College gives you the theory, a basis to work on, real life gives you the practice, the opportunity to see it all in action. Including the unexpected implications and side effects of what you learned, or of what you didn’t learn yet.

I believe I did learn a lot in college. In all honesty, I originally went to college to become a social worker and didn’t even know how to use a computer.

However, college did nothing to prepare me for dealing with team members, ongoing legacy code, proper patterns, architecture, or testing. All lessons were centered around something theory or simple coding constructs.

Not to sound harsh, but I am that type of father that teaches his kid by allowing him to skin his knee in a controlled environment.

College is also a controlled environment however their concentration is not focused on learning through failure, and failure is the greatest teacher of all…

Are we somehow special? Was our college education that special? Were we (as Dale and I both asserted) just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right people? I dunno. But I can tell you, not everyone has the experience you (and many commenters) describe.

I think it may have had a lot to do with the predominate culture where we went to school: way more blue-collar-strong-work-ethic than maybe upper-class-elitist-sense-of-entitlement.

Or maybe we _were_ just lucky.