College is, ironically, one of the worst environments I have ever been in for actually learning anything. I already completed a BS in engineering before LLMs, and now I am pursuing a master's, not because I want to learn from the college, but because the degree is necessary for better job opportunities in my field.

The funny thing is that the 6-month period of no college after I finished my bachelor's was the most productive learning period of my life. I absorbed more on my own than I ever did in a classroom. Once the master's program started, that freedom disappeared. Everything felt restrictive again, and there is always constant pressure to keep track of deadlines rather than focus on real understanding.

I have had jobs and internships where I was overworked and handling entire projects by myself, but those environments were still infinitely less stressful than college. In college, you pay them to rail you. On top of that, you are forced to hit word quotas for weekly topics and other low-effort, box-checking assignments. Some topics are interesting, but most of the "discussions" boil down to writing, "I learned how to do xyz," and then replying to a classmate with, "I like how you described exactly what I said. Amazing insight!" This happens every single week for every class. It wears you down.

It is easy for someone to mock this by reducing it to, "You can't write 700 words?" Thanks gramps, but that's not the issue, especially since I clearly have no problem writing given the length of this comment. The real issue is that college is a terrible environment for learning because it rewards grades and GPAs by any means, which usually means everything except real understanding, since it's more efficient in terms of effort to result ratio. When I was a naive freshman, thinking that doing my best based on my understanding was the way, I would always do poorly on homework assignments. From then on, I switched tactics to memorization and was rewarded with a better GPA. And I'm ok with that because I've already proved to myself that I can learn completely on my own without any help from AI or a professor.

So all of this rambling is to say that ignoring the issues and mocking students like me is about as helpful as telling an angry wife to “calm down,” instead of addressing the root cause.