Technology

Also a software engineer... I look back on my undergrad fondly but was it really that helpful? ... nah.

I also put no stock in learning how to learn. If people want to learn something they do, if they don't, they don't. Nobody has to go to school to fish, play video games, or be a car guy, but all of those things have crazy high ceilings of knowledge and know how.

If you go into an industry you're not interested in, it doesn't matter how well you learned to learn, you're not going to learn anything more than required. For me, I'm constantly learning things from blogs, debates, and questions I find myself asking both for personal projects and professional projects.

Really all a university is, is a guided study of what's believed to be the foundational material in a field + study of a number of things that are aimed at increasing awareness across the board; that's going to be more helpful to some than others.

If you graduate and work in a bunch of Python web code ... those fundamentals aren't really that important. You're not going to write quick sort of bubble sort, very few people do, you're going to just call .sort().

You're also probably not going to care about Big-O, you're probably just going to notice organically "hey this is really bad and I can rearrange it to cache the results." A bunch of stuff like that will probably come up that you'll never even pay any mind to because the size of N is never large enough for it to matter in your application.

... personally I think our education system needs to be redone from the ground up. It creates way more stress than it justifies. The focus should be on teaching people important lessons that they can actually remember into adulthood, not cramming brains with an impossible amount of very specific information under the threat of otherwise living a "subpar" life.

Older societies I think had it right with their story form lessons, songs, etc. They made the important lessons cultural pieces and latched on to techniques that actually help people remember instead of just giving them the information with a technique to remember it and then being surprised when a huge portion of the class can't remember.

Edit: To make a software metaphor, we've in effect decided as a society to use inefficient software learn functions driven by the prefrontal cortex vs making use of much more efficient intrinsics built into the body by millions of years of evolution to facilitate learning. We're running bubble sort to power our education system.