Comment Re:College is a scam (Score 1) 331
I'm an Australian university student in one of our top 10 universities, so I thought it would be interesting to compare your experiences to mine, especially since the cost of a 4 year degree (~$32k) is similar to the average cost in the US (according to wikipedia, anyway).
Yes, there are those that just drink themselves out. But the colleges offer absolutely no help with anything at all.
All our lecturers have consultation hours, which is basically a block of time they schedule each week for anyone who wants one-on-one help, and they start each unit by telling us when they are and to make use of them if we need it.
While I haven't used them myself, whenever I have emailed a lecturer or posted a query on the discussion forums, I've usually gotten a reply in a few days.
So I'd say we do get help, but only if we ask for it.
You're paying a fortune for classes, and the schedules make little to no sense at all. I'd go to a 30min English class, then have to wait an hour and half to take a 4 or philosophy class, then wait 2hrs for my 1 hour programming class. There were thousands of students studying for the same degree I was! What's the point of having these nonsense schedules?? Can't I just get into the 8am-5pm compsci course and be done with it?
Timetabling is a fairly hard problem, computationally speaking. The more students who take a unit, the more slots there will be for its classes, but that's still subject to the availability of its lecturers. On top of that, you can't assume that everyone will take the same units at the same time - lots of courses require the same units, or require you to take them in a certain (distinct) order in order to take certain electives, and some people will need to alter their course structure if they fail a few. Having some dead time is unavoidable as a result of this.
A 30 minute class is pretty stupid though - the longer the class, the less dead time you'll have between classes. 60-90 min lectures work well in my experience.
On top of that, what's with the books scams? I'm required to buy a book my professor wrote but we never open it in class? Really? I was so broke I'd literally go without eating some days, but my professors ripping me off for $89.95?
How were you required to buy it? I'm genuinely curious, because I often hear this as a criticism (of US universities).
How it works here is the unit guide sets out a proscribed textbook, or recommended resources. Whether we buy them or not is entirely up to us, though some coursework may say "refer to ch X for background", and the library usually has copies that they don't allow to be loaned (so that they're always available).
Then the campus police... Constant unending harassment. Granted, I was a long hair... but, for example, they decided to raid the door rooms over xmas break and leave me a ticket for underage drinking for having an empty wine bottle in my room. It took me 2 months and 2 visits to court to get it cleared up that I was 23 I had enough going on, I didn't need to be dealing with them.
I don't live on campus, but I haven't heard of any problems with the campus security.