Wine, women, and song would arguably make for a better and more educational investment:
You are told that to make it in life, you must go to college. You work hard to get there. You or your parents drain savings or take out huge loans to pay for it all.
And you end up learning … not much.
A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.
The ironic thing is that this near-complete lack of learning doesn’t stop the average college student from believing that he’s somehow learning something by osmosis. The most cocksure and clueless critics are almost invariably college students, who aren’t learning anything substantive at their universities but haven’t been smacked in the back of the head by reality yet either.
The crazy thing is that even the Voxiversity quizzes, which cost you nothing at all and take me about 30 minutes to write, are more challenging than anything you’re likely to encounter in a history or literature class at an Ivy League university.