James_Miller comments on College discussion thread - Less Wrong

5 Post author: benkuhn 01 April 2014 03:21AM

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Comment author: James_Miller 01 April 2014 03:57:36AM 4 points [-]

A great way to reduce the cost of college is to take summer courses at a cheap college near home and use the credits to graduate early.

Comment author: Stefie_K 02 April 2014 03:25:39PM 1 point [-]

This is true, but for classes like these in particular, you need to stay focused on getting useful things out of them. This is important for any college class, of course, but at colleges like this, the classes are likely to be geared to a student population with wildly varying abilities and knowledge. If you allow the class to be what determines how hard you work, you (if you visit a site like this) will probably learn a whole lot less in the time than you otherwise would, because the class will be focused on pushing students who need to learn more.

I say this as a community college instructor myself. I do push my best students as much as the struggling ones, but they could pass the class without getting as much out of it as they would at a more prestigious college.

Of course, if the class is just a general requirement you're taking to jump through the appropriate hoops, this may sound good to you. Still... please think carefully about what skills you might get out of the class anyway, and whether you might have a use for those skills later. Even if literature bores you, for instance, being able to write well is a useful skill... and while writing about literature isn't a very useful skill, you can still learn other, more useful writing skills even while writing about literature.