Why Students Leave the Engineering Track
After reading this New York Times blog post, I wonder if the reason there aren’t more engineering graduates is because of how it’s taught. I was reading this article about Sebastian Thrun leaving Stanford to start an online university called udacity and this piece caught my eye:
Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good.
Getting a college engineering degree today seems more like a hazing ritual and seeing who makes it rather than a system that’s optimized to help students learn. Having met many folks who’ve been self-taught or learned how to build software through avenues other than an academic route leads me to believe the problem is in how it’s taught.
People have many different learning styles and I’m really excited to see many different approaches being taken to attack the problem from a variety of angles. There’s plenty of room for success, and I’m looking forward to seeing more innovation around education.
