If teaching is the goal, a 99% failure rate seems counterproductive.

I'd wager the "Cohorts for programs with a thousand initial students had less than 10 graduates" statement is deceptive, if not outright false.

Perhaps lifetimerubyist means "1000 students took the mandatory philosophy and ethics 101 class, but only 10 graduated as philosophy majors"

I believe certain european countries have or had free universities which instead filter students with incredibly difficult courses. Thousands might enter because both tuition and board are free and they would like a degree, but the university ensures that only a small group make it to second year. I believe the filtering is less intense in later years, since the job has already been done by that point.

Unless you're thinking of huge online courses like Udacity/Coursera, I don't think that's really a thing?

If it is, I'd be fascinated to learn more.

I mean, the logistics would be pretty wild - even a large university's largest lecture theatres might only have 500 seats. And they'd only have one or two that large. It'd be expensive as hell to build a university that could handle multiple subjects each admitting over a thousand students.

At least in Belgium it's quite common for a lot of students to fail the first year (partly due to the difficulty, partly due to partying instead of studying). But it's not like it's really free, the tuition is cheap but the accomodation is expensive. I also don't think it's particularly difficult on purpose to filter out students, it's just that it's not overly expensive and a lot of people are unsure about what to study.

According to [1] at one Belgian university 61.8% of students reached a milestone within 2 years (with 41.4% reaching it within 1 year)

That's quite a high non-completion rate - but it's nowhere near 99%.

[1] https://nieuws.kuleuven.be/en/content/2023/42-6-of-new-stude...

> And why is this a flex exactly? Almost sounds like fraud.

Do you think you're just purchasing a diploma? Or do you think you're purchasing the opportunity to gain an education and potential certification that you received said education?

It's entirely possible that the University stunk at teaching 99% of it's students (about as equally possible that 99% of the students stunk at learning), but "fraud" is absolute nonsense. You're not entitled to a diploma if you fail to learn the material well enough to earn it.

If you have a <1% pass rate from beginning to end, then that strongly suggests that your admissions criteria is intentionally low enough to admit students that are unprepared for the program so that you can take their money.

You could easily raise the bar without sacrificing quality of education (and likely you'd improve it just from the improvement in student:teacher ratio).

Exactly that. Also, I experienced a situation where a free uni (eastern Europe) had low admission criteria and then had a "cleaning" math course, which 80%-90% failed. School still got paid for the number of students admitted, not those who passed.

In another European country, schools get paid for students that passed.

I don't think one applies to university expecting they're purchasing themselves a diploma, nor that they should be magically absolved of putting in effort to learn the material. What I do think is that the place they describe sounds an awful lot like people being set up for failure though, and so that begged the question as to why that might be. I should probably clarify that I wasn't particularly serious about my fraud suggestion however (was just a bit of a jab rather), as that doesn't seem to have made it through.

If teaching was so simple that you could just tell people to go RTFM then recite it from memory, I don't know why people are bothering with pedagogy at all. It'd seem that there's more to teaching and learning than the bare minimum, and that both parties are culpable. Doesn't sound like you disagree on that either.

> you're purchasing the opportunity to

We can swap out fraud for gambling if you like :) Sounds like an even closer analogy now that you mention!

Jokes aside though, isn't it a gamble? You gamble with yourself that you can [grow to] endure and succeed or drop out / something worse. The stake is the tuition, the prize is the diploma.

Now of course, tuition is per semester (here at least, dunno elsewhere), so it's reasonable to argue that the financial investment is not quite in such jeopardy as I painted it. Not sure about the emotional investment though.

Consider the Chinese Gaokao exam, especially in its infamous historical context between the 70s and 90s. The number of available seats was way lower than the number of applications [0]. The exams grueling. What do you reckon, was it the people's fault for not winning an essentially unspoken lottery? Who do you think received the blame? According to a cursory search, the individual and their families (wasn't there, cannot know) received the blame. And no, I don't think in such a tortured scheme it is the students' fault for not making the bar.

If there are fewer seats than what there is demand for, then that's overbooking, and you the test authoring / conducting authority are biased to artificially induce test failures. It is no longer a fair assessment, nor a fair dynamic. Conversely, passing is no longer an honest signal of qualification. Or rather, not passing is no longer an honest signal of unqualification. And this doesn't have to come from a single test, it can be implemented structurally too, so that you shed people along the way. Which is what I'm actually alluding to.

[0] ~4.8%, so ~95% of people failed it by design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_of_1977%E2%80%931978_%28...

> If teaching was so simple that you could just tell people to go RTFM then recite it from memory, I don't know why people are bothering with pedagogy at all. It'd seem that there's more to teaching and learning than the bare minimum, and that both parties are culpable. Doesn't sound like you disagree on that either.

I do not! A situation where roughly 1% of the class is passing suggests that some part of the student group is failing, and also that there is likely a class design issue or a failure to appropriately vet incoming students for preparedness (among, probably, numerous other things I'm not smart enough to come up with).

And I did take issue with the "fraud" framing; apologies for not catching your tone! I think there is a chronic issue of students thinking they deserve good grades, or deserve a diploma simply for showing up, in social media and I probably read that into your comment where I shouldn't have.

> Jokes aside though, isn't it a gamble?

Not at all. If you learn the material, you pass and get a diploma. This is no more a gamble than your paycheck. However, I think that also presumes that the university accepts only students it believes are capable of passing it's courses. If you believe universities are over-accepting students (and I think the evidence says they frequently are not, in an effort to look like luxury brands, though I don't have a cite at hand), then I can see thinking the gambling analogy is correct.

> I think there is a chronic issue of students thinking they deserve good grades, or deserve a diploma simply for showing up, in social media and I probably read that into your comment where I shouldn't have.

Yeah, that's fine, I can definitely appreciate that angle too.

As you can probably surmise, I've had quite some struggles during my college years specifically, hence my angle of concern. It used to be the other way around, I was doing very well prior to college, and would always find people's complaints to be just excuses. But then stuff happened, and I was never really the same. The rest followed.

My personal sob story aside, what I've come to find is that while yes, a lot of the things slackers say are cheap excuses or appeals to fringe edge-cases, some are surprisingly valid. For example, if this aforementioned 99% attrition rate is real, that is very very suspect. Worse still though, I'd find things that people weren't talking about, but were even more problematic. I'll have to unfortunately keep that to myself though for privacy reasons [0] [1].

Regarding grading, I find grade inflation very concerning, and I don't really see a way out. What affects me at this point though is certifications, and the same issue is kind of present there as well. I have a few colleagues who are AWS Certified xyz Engineers for example, but would stare at the AWS Management Console like a deer in the headlights, and would ask exceedingly stupid questions. The "fee extraction" practice wouldn't be too unfamiliar for the certification industry either - although that one doesn't bother me much, since I don't have to pay for these out of my own pocket, thankfully.

> If you learn the material, you pass and get a diploma. This is no more a gamble than your paycheck

I'd like to push back on this just a little bit. I'm sure it depends on where one lives, but here you either get your diploma or tough luck. There are no partial credentials. So while you can drop out (or just temporarily suspend your studies) at the end of semester, there's still stuff on the line. Not so much with a paycheck. I guess maybe a promotion is a closer analog, depending on how a given company does it (vibes vs something structured). This is further compounded by the social narrative, that if you don't get a degree then xyz, which is also not present for one's next monthly paycheck.

[0] What I guess I can mention is that I generally found the usual cycle of study season -> exam season to be very counter-productive. In general, all these "building up hype and then releasing it all at once" type situations were extremely taxing, and not for the right reasons. I think it's pretty agreeable at least that these do not result in good knowledge retention, do not inspire healthy student engagement, nor are actually necessary. Maybe this is not even a thing in better places, I don't know.

[1] I have absolutely no training in psychology or pedagogy, so take this with a mountain of salt, but I've found that people can be not just uninterested in learning, but grow downright hostile to it, often against their own self-recognized best interests. I've experienced it on myself, as well as seen it with others. It can be very difficult to snap someone out of such a state, and I have a lingering suspicion that it kind of forms a pipeline, with the lack of interest preceding it. I'm not sure that training and evaluating people in such a state results in a reasonable assessment, not for them, nor for the course they're taking.

In the modern era, you are purchasing a diploma. I witnessed dozens of students blatantly cheat without any consequence. We all got the same degree.

Colleges exist to collect tuition, especially from international students who pay more. Teaching anything at all, or punishing cheating, just isn’t that important.