What do you learn at high end university?

[fluffy]

Recently I took the Titan Test by Ronald Hoeflin. It was made in 1997 and is no longer available to be graded. It supposes to measure IQ up to 180 Instructions say to take a month and do your best as it is self administered. Not sure my score but I spent 5 hours on it and answered 44 of the 48 questions.

Hoeflin was a librarian and published the mega test in Omni magazine in the 1980's

The reason I start with this information is that I am curious about how fast people learn when they are in school vs not in school.

My background is not in math or anything yet I feel like I at least have the ability to solve problems at a good pace. The questions on the Titan test were challenging so anyone that can do a majority of them should be able to naturally learn fast. Yet if they are not in school it could be school would accelerate ones abilities to solve problems as you practice doing them all the time instead of staring at walls all-day.

Practice can increase fluid intelligence.

So in school this may increase intelligence?

I am busy all the time trying to find new way of learning. I think books with better materials exist than I have access to. I did find how ever that these problems on the Titan test I took were not harder than what some people have to do everyday in technical fields. Such as the problem in the movie Goodwill hunting that problem took a high level professor 6 months to solve that the protagonist solved in 5 minutes. Yet he wasn't reading the advanced books, he just did it. So with the advanced books you could do allot more?

Many ways of learning exist but in school at top class places they teach you better than what most can do on their own. So I wonder what they teach the really smart people today.

 

[ZenRaiden]

You can take courses online. Many PDF format lectures, plus youtube lectures, available, plus plenty university level platforms can teach you for a fee.
I am not big fan of paying for education so I always look for sources that are for free.
Maybe in future whence I have money Ill buy some specific books. I have been eyeballing Guntrips books on psychology, but those are like 80 dollars.

Either way most important knowledge is now for free on the internet. Doubt you need university to know university level stuff sans gatekeeping and some specifics like owning license to a software or having lab access with high tech equipment, most things can be done with pencil a paper and internet.

Also libraries if good, can provide a lot of university literature.
The idea of pirating knowledge is old as I am tho and effective too, if you know how.

 

[Puffy]

I’m in favour of self-directed learning too. I studied literature/history at uni and it’s one of those degrees that’s a bit pointless doing. All you will get is writing and research skills which you don’t need a degree for. If you can get access to books and archives you have all you need to self-learn. As a Londoner I have the national archives and British library around the corner. So what do I get out of paying £9000 per year having a degree?

Where I see the benefit is in learning technical skills, either as you wouldn’t be able to learn them on your own like medicine/surgery or the learning environment and access to experienced mentors would accelerate your learning of those skills. I think you have to weigh up the best and most cost effective way of learning these skills however as university is often not mandatory. You don’t need to go to university to learn computer programming for example. I’d personally only go to university again if I had to have a degree in order to enter my chosen discipline like Chinese medicine if I decided to pursue that.

 

[dr froyd]

you learn the same things as anywhere else, but you have access to a community of highly skilled people. Being in an environment with professors, other students who are trying to learn the same thing can help a lot. It is not strictly essential for learning, but it sure is helpful

it's obviously not a about access to material, you can get that anywhere you like - internet, book shops, whatever.

let me be clear that we live in a time when the potential for being self-taught is greater than ever in history, so lack of formal education is not really an excuse for not learning things. But to balance out the popular view nowadays that academia is useless, i would note it does have certain benefits. For a guy like me, for example, who is lazy af by nature, it was helpful for learning some self-discipline

 

[birdsnestfern]

I liked learning everything and anything, but each college has very different course catalog. In California, the jr college that was free had a 400 page course catalog, and all you had to do was pay for books with a pell grant. The ones in Georgia had 30 pages of classes, and every unit was very expensive, if you didn’t have a Pell grant, it was about $1200 for three classes per semester and boring selection of classes.

Some classes you have to be physically there for, Archery, Art and Drawing, Clay sculpture, PE, electronic soldering, wiring. Science lab stuff with growing crystals, or looking in microscopes. I think you kind of need to get as much immersion in Math as you can, and so seeing it done on blackboard helps.

My favorite classes were in California, De Anza and Foothill colleges were free with so many choices! Geology (the field trips looking at plunging synclines were so cool), and lab experiments, and photography (the dark room was really fun. Archery and Golf also fun.


https://deanza.elumenapp.com/catalog/2024-2025/course-listings#mainContent

Courses A-Z < Foothill College

catalog.foothill.edu

Courses - Brenau University - Modern Campus Catalog™

catalog.brenau.edu

Catalog of Courses

Browse the latest courses from Harvard University

pll.harvard.edu

MIT Subject Listing & Schedule Fall 2025

just search for a college and course catalog

 

[sushi]

they are overrated, the future is online learning

 

[Hadoblado]

• It rounds you out. Some things are important to learn even if you don't find them interesting, and you don't consider them important until you've learned their importance.
• It sets you up to engage with the existing literature. It orients you to the field you're learning and gives you the tools to appraise evidence by objective (shared) standards.
• It (theoretically) guarantees you a minimum amount of competence and knowledge because you fail if you don't possess them. This is not always the case though.
• It gives you a piece of paper at the end that certifies your place in the aristocracy.

There isn't much at uni you couldn't technically learn outside of uni. However, it's a lot more reliable for teaching the general population. I know the things I learned in university much better than the things I've learned outside of it. There is a difference both in the breadth and depth of knowledge.

 

[scorpiomover]

Really depends on the university, the course and the year. Usually, to get an idea of what you'd learn, you need to look at what all of the students who did course A at university B in year C, were like and had in common when they left university, as opposed to what they were like when they began university.

I know that I'm being vague here. But really, the differences between universities and degrees is incredibly vast. Even the year you studied can make a huge difference, as sometimes the course is changed in certain years, and then the difference between those who did the old course and those who did the new course can also be vast.

I'd agree with Hado that it gives you a piece of paper that modern society accepts as meaningful.

But it doesn't grant you any place in the aristocracy, not since universities were expanded to accept lots of students, as once that happened, it turned out that so many people were going to university that there just wasn't room for them all in the top jobs, and a lot ended up having to become jobs like plumber instead.

I'd also agree that it sets you up to become familiar with the standard notations and standard theories that are accepted in that field within Western society and its extensions.

It's particularly useful in learning the jargon of the left wing, especially if you do gender studies and critical race theory, as most left-wingers tend to be university graduates.

 

[Hadoblado]

Fair.

I'd be interested to see why you think most leftists are university graduates. I know there's a correlation and I'd accept most graduates are left wing, but I just haven't seen evidence for the larger claim.

Also yes, the difference between courses etc. is enormous. Engineering and compsci are worlds apart from literary theory in which feminism and colonial oppression are primary lenses.

 

[fluffy]

As I see it you can be in some classes that teach out of date material or you can be in those classes that have materials written by the smartest people in their field.

That is, the more I Google the more I realized Google is sending me stuff I either cannot understand or stuff to simple to do anything with. I am using my cell phone not anything fancy but I expect that like some computers are obsolete some materials are superior given what you want to do with them.

Wikipedia sometimes is good but other times what the f are they talking about? Also the videos I have seen on my phone lapse into the same problem. There is no step by step intermediate process you can look up what you don't know. Like as in a technical manual you can use to get things done.

Asking for help via the Internet it too much work as no one knows? That where I am coming from. I assume you need to ask the smartest prophesor to get the best answers just like you need books that explain things in the right way. Which means not at a local university staff but higher? A book should show the work how to get to the answers. Yet most don't. Too advanced or too shallow. Meaning I can barely get anywhere.

 

[Hadoblado]

I've found AI is useful for finding resources, not because it's perfect, but because you can refine and iterate much more fluently until you narrow down to what you want. Grok has been the best so far for me but unless you have a paid subscription you get limited questions. By making an account though, you get to keep the conversation and work on it over time if it's something you're really interested in.

I primarily use it for finding research, and one of the main things it has over a normal lit search is that it will take the next step and search for what you mean, not for the exact words you say. So it may not be able to find the exact claim, but it'll often give you something useful regardless. For instructions, it often helps me to do tech stuff I'm not great at and it's generally superior in solving my problems faster than a search engine.

 

[Hadoblado]

Regarding the quality of what professors supply, realistically for many areas which move fast, they'll have a few pet areas that they're deeply invested in and up to date with. Much of any professors material will be old unless they're lucky enough to be teaching only what they're passionate about/personally research. The mechanisms for them staying up to date are imperfect.

For something like math, which is less empirical, I imagine most of what you learn is relatively timeless. On the other end of the spectrum, stuff like lit doesn't make empirical claims, so the zeitgeist might move on but ultimately interpretation shifts slowly. However, if you're in science, the chances that the lecture slide you're looking at is imbued with the most recent and relevant literature is relatively low. Does this make it pointless? No - because you are also taught how to make these appraisals yourself, you're no longer reliant on someone else's expertise. What you're shown will also be the literature that informs the research with the most recent and relevant findings.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Self learning pros - you can do whatever the fuck you set out to do and learn in anyway you want.
- you don't need to stress about grades or being pushed into stuff you don't like

cons- you have to learn to manage your time, you need to learn to validate your own effort (aint no one doing that for you), you need be your own critic. You need to be your own cheerleader and motivational engine.

School learning pros - peer pressure, external schedule that is imposed on you so you don't have to think about time, curriculum is specific and made for you and probably will be useful, external motivation like teachers, parental expectations, your own lazy ass wants to impress someone, not be dumbest guy in the class or just simply have more direct feedback from teachers and peers. Culture is about learning, you don't have to make it artificially from scratch.

cons - stress, stress, stress, guard rails and time limits, that make shit boring, you need to be the same pace as everyone else. Your particular mental handicap might not be tolerated and you will suffer for it ergo being rushed even though you want to take your sweet time with it, sometimes you cannot go deeper than lectures allow.
Lots of stressful testing and rushing through stuff. Garden hose in the mouth type of learning sometimes, where you have little time to affirm and establish concepts you just move to next chapter even though you might need more time to absorb learned material, sometimes having boring problems to solve that are brain dead obvious and boring.

 

[threeStepfourStep]

It really depends on the major. If you're taking a STEM major you're probably going to apply maths to real life situations, and also consider the social or political dimensions to those problems. If you're doing something like nursing or music, you're more applying something practical.

The humanities in general is about the history of power, I think, and the different theories on how power culminated within our society, and how that trajectory should (or could) be. This is the impression I got after taking a lot of classes in philosophy, law, and politics, and some sociology (which is I guess the most blatant of the subjects).

I took a class on political economy (which is the combination of economics with politics, but in global terms), and it made me realize that global events aren't that coordinated at all, but are under the whims of capital allocations (especially panic divestments) during particular eras. We literally learn to coordinate as political leaders on the whim, often trying to coordinate after economic disasters happen. There's an inherent fragility in the morality, politics and markets that don't readily show themselves until you piece them all together.

On a more personal level though, I think university simply tests your social boundaries and how much you can manage school work, social life and relationships with a vast array of people in general. Personal energy is a finite thing, and I think understanding how and where to allocate that resource with the capacity you have is something that helps to lead you to what you can be in life. I think the university setting is the first place for young people to come to terms with power in real life as well, so it's a good run in with real life.

I would argue that intelligence kind of crystalizes in high school, or somewhere during that developmental period. I feel like during college, I just learned how damn fragile everything was, and that society, or institutions in general are just held up by people. I think looking back, I start to realize how important it is to have good leadership.