As I find myself temporarily without deep work or study, I sometimes romantically look back on college. There is something really special about being a student. Your full-time job is literally to learn. How incredible is that? As someone still quite young, I don’t feel the rush to work or make money people older than me might. I want to be really good at things, which takes time and study. College seems like a good place to do that.

Of course, you can learn on your own, or on the job, but it is very much not the same. When on the job, learning is secondary to doing the job. You can still learn a lot from the practical work, but there are many problems and exercises and topics that are fascinating to explore and teach you a lot, but are impractical and thus will never be valued at work. Learning on your own can also be very effective. There are endless digital resources to pore over: online textbooks, lectures, journals, and more. But it is a lonely endeavor.

At its best, college is an intellectually stimulating, fun, and communal learning environment. You are challenged just the right amount. You learn skills that are valuable and exciting. Your teachers are experts in their field, highly engaged with their students, set reasonable expectations and keep you accountable. Your peers are hardworking and inquisitive. You work together and become friends as well as classmates. I had classes like this and loved them and learned so much.

Unfortunately, college is very rarely like this. While this perfect picture sometimes happens, it is far from the average, and it exists alongside an equilibrium of truly awful experiences.

When you take off the rose-tinted glasses, most of college, to me, feels like taking dumb classes you don’t want to take, with bad professors and TAs teaching students who don’t care and assigning you useless, trivial work, while you stress about poorly specified exams which are not practical or effective methods of evaluating learning.

This is why I can hardly imagine finishing my degree. I could imagine going back to school to take a specific class on a topic I care about with a professor I know or have heard is great. But in order to finish your degree, you have to pass through so many dumb hoops that the opportunity cost of wasting your time on that becomes too high.

And this is quite unfortunate because I would love to keep learning in an environment like the best of what college can be. Recently, I have really struggled to “study” things I have wanted to learn on my own. Could it just be a willpower or interest skill issue? Sure, I guess. But since we have created highly effective (at their best) educational institutions that don’t require sheer willpower to grind through stuff, of course I would prefer to learn in that way than grind alone.

Maybe, for an analogy, consider trying to get super ripped with no equipment on a farm where you only have basic wheat to eat. I’m sure you could do it with enough effort, but it probably would be much easier and more fun to work out in a modern gym with a PhD personal trainer and have an optimized modern diet.

College is like that, except that on more than half the days you walk into the gym, the trainer loses 50 IQ points, makes you do a bunch of exercises that are really painful but contribute zero to your physique, and then doesn’t bother to tell you what to eat that day.

To me an ideal learning environment involves:

  1. A topic the student is genuinely interested in (or a genuine practically required prerequisite to something they are interested in)
  2. A highly engaged teacher who is both highly skilled in that topic and in the art of teaching
  3. A community of other students who are also learning the content at the same time
  4. A balance of direct teaching and assigned independent/group work where students must attempt to apply what they have learned. If work is incorrect, punishments are minimal and feedback is plentiful.
  5. Suitable time to answer students’ questions (even if very individual to that student) and go down “tangents”
  6. Unhackable assessments

College consistently fails at all 6 of these, often all at the same time.

Maybe there is a way with AI to essentially create your own virtual university that meets all of these criteria and teaches at the perfect level for you. But at least for now, there is a really big difference between being in a classroom with human classmates and a human professor, and being alone staring at a screen showing a simulation of those things.

I want to keep learning and I want to enjoy it at the same time.

Is that too much to ask?