LogFAQs > #976253185

darkknight109 posted...

It 100% can be ball-bustingly hard; it depends entirely on your major and what classes you're taking.

I'm an engineer, and to this day I have never had to work as hard before or since as I did when I was getting my degree. The sheer volume of work thrown at you in some of the courses was nightmarish and it was difficult material to boot. And it's not like the students aren't bright; the mean high school average of students the year I went into university was 89%; we had several dozen valedictorians in the freshman batch of ~700 first year students; yet roughly a third of those students didn't make it to second year. My average in my Grade 12 year was 97% and yet I absolutely struggled at points during undergrad. I still made it through and my grades were solid, but I was definitely not a straight-A student anymore.

Will you have this experience if you take an easier degree? No, probably not. But to simply give a blanket statement that "school isn't hard, it's pointless/boring" is wrong (on both counts - I found a lot of the material extremely interesting, moreso than 95% of what we covered in high school, and it was absolutely relevant for my work).

That more goes to my point that High School is a crappy environment for learning. The 2 biggest things that you need to learn for college (and life, really) that grade school doesn't teach you is independence, and time management. I am willing to bet all of those kids with "A"s and "B"s probably had parents and teachers breathing down their neck telling them how and when to study so they can get good grades. Now take that away suddenly and add a whole bunch of other distractions. Most people aren't going to know what to do and likely drop out the 1st or 2nd year, as evidenced by the fact that 40% of people who start an undergraduate degree don't finish it.

Oddly enough, that number actually drops significantly for homeschooling. Probably because a good homeschooling environment actually teaches you those things.