If you earned that grade honestly a few ideas may stay with you for your entire life and that may change your life, even if imperceptibly. Anything you study has the potential to make you a better, more well rounded, knowledgeable and less ignorant person.
> Anything you study has the potential to make you a better, more well rounded, knowledgeable and less ignorant person.
This is a pretty meaningless sentiment. There are plenty of things one can study that will lead to more ignorance and less well-roundedness. In the extreme, this is pretty much how cults can operate.
I believe it also applies to a number of subjects in mainstream universities, but I am not going to hop into that fire pit.
It's a university.. there are a broad array of departments and courses, and I am saying that a handful of them at a multitude of universities have the potential to close minds and lead to more ignorance - this broad statement isn't too controversial - witnessed by the very vocal debate about it. I am not going to jump into the pit of the specifics of that debate though.
Exercising your ability to sit down and Just Do It instead of giving into shortcut temptations probably did change your life trajectory over the years.
Also, seems like a weird bar. I doubt any single class "changed your life trajectory." Why would it need to? I could say that about very few things in life.
The theory of higher education and a liberal arts degree, is what I'm assuming OP is talking about.
The idea of a liberal arts degree at a university is to create a well-rounded individual. The idea of taking classes outside your major is to learn about life. The idea of even going to college (which is ENTIRELY optional) is to learn. Not just to pass classes and get an A.
This is something that, traditionally, CS and Engineering students like to shit on - as an example, see the other post about Sociology being useless.
The thing is, there are boot camps and trade schools to learn job skills. People are now attending University and complaining about the 'gen ed' courses in their degree because they're not "useful for my future". This is meant to be "not job skills directly connected to what I think I want to grow up to be".
They aren't supposed to get you a job. They're not job skills programs. They're liberal arts programs. They're supposed to make you into a fully realized human. Those other general courses exist because many students enter college not knowing what their passions are, right or wrong.
Source: My career in higher education. One thing has been constant in the decades that I've worked in this field - Engineering and CS students complain about and shit on the 'gen. ed' classes more than any other major. They also don't like hearing that they can just go to trade school or a boot camp if they just want job skills training; which makes no sense to me - trade school is cheaper, and boot camps are shorter in duration.
"trade school is cheaper, and boot camps are shorter in duration."
Right now, they are quite inferior. Not because they are necessarily bad, but just, they don't last long enough to cover what a computer science education does. (Being in mind I am aware that "computer science" and "programming" aren't even really the same thing.) I think, without judging it good or bad, if something could fill in the gulf between the 4-year rounded degree and its computer programming content and the 8-week bootcamp a lot of people would be interested in it, but there's a lot of activation energy required there.
When I took computer science 20 years ago, it was only marginally related to "programming", and it has gotten much worse since then, because "programming" hasn't exactly changed but all the stuff around it has. "Deploying" used to be copying over the directory full of .ASP or .PHP files and maybe restarting the server, not committing to source control, handling a PR, running through CI, open source compliance analysis, and sundry other automated things, to be package up to something that we use devops tools to manage deploying, etc. etc. I'd love a new graduate who came to me with enough programming skills to prove they can do it, but knew source control, monitoring, basic commit hygiene, and the dozen other skills you need to have nowadays to get anything released to the public. You'll learn none of that in college.
And I'm not even saying you necessarily "should". But you definitely don't.
> The idea of a liberal arts degree at a university is to create a well-rounded individual.
That was the original idea, yes. That does not mean that actual liberal arts degrees today at actual universities actually come anywhere close to doing that. For one thing, under that original idea, science was one of the liberal arts, and anyone who expected to be considered well rounded had to study it. How many liberal arts programs include any kind of serious exposure to science?
> see the other post about Sociology being useless
To the degree that it claims to be a science, I would argue that it probably is. It has basically no predictive power.
Why should teenagers receive federally subsidized loans in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars—not dischargable even in bankruptcy—to receive such a degree? How is that a wise financial decision for a normal person rather than merely an amusing hobby for the hereditary rich?
What's the point of going to school then if not to expose you to things and make you a better, more knowledgeable, well rounded person? If only grades matter then you can buy a fake diploma and you're done with it.
You may be aware that you don't need to go to college in order to be a software developer/hacker. But if you decide to do that then what's the point in faking the grades?
Unfortunately, there truly isn't a point to many of the things we do in education, especially at the college level.
I went to college because I wanted to get a job as a high paid software engineer.
And although many of the class that I took, did indeed help me with this goal, many of them that I had to take did not.
It would have been awesome if I could have replaced some of my required classes that weren't particularly useful, with more focused ones on web development, and industry related.
They quite clearly said that it's not just grades that matter. Also, you'd show up to the exam so you don't suffer the university's consequences like academic probation and scholarship forfeiture, even if you were somehow "anti grade," whatever specious mindset you are envisioning.
Besides, I don't think anyone making their point would suggest that you shouldn't try to make good grades, which involves learning a subject well enough, including doing the boring work, to get a good mark.
I agree with them. If grades are the only thing you care about such that you'd be fine with paying an insider for a diploma without doing the work, then I'd say you wasted the entirely opportunity and only exercised your ability to cheat and be dishonest.
I've seen a lot of jobs where the basic role was to circumvent laws/regulations and otherwise get past obstacles. Using zoning regulations and court maneouvers to block competitors from developing businesses, lobbying for certain laws and exemptions, etc.
