What is a university and what to expect from it

After reading the post of user agent0 about bad teachers who read from papers , I decided to write a comment with practical advice from a newly-born bachelor. The comment has grown a little into the article.
I ask you to read the first article before reading this post in order to better understand the essence.

I am now finishing my fourth year at one of Odessa technical universities, in parallel with this, I already have a fourth year of experience as a web developer. I worked for freelancing, doing poor joomla sites, later working as an outsourcing company grew to free operating several frameworks, to highloads and a little team leader work as the first team leader in the development of the team. Now I have my own big project and a small hardware store. Looking back at my student and work experience, I can affirm that I understand what I am talking about.

By the time of the second course I had as much indignation as the author of the above article. I have long resented about the papers in the hands of teachers, about their requirements and the quality of the information presented and the overwhelming complexity of homework. In the article I noticed several times a sensible thought that I want to help develop in current students and the author of post-anger:

I could just as well go to work and study what I need in the evening.

If you try to understand this idea a little deeper, then the essence of higher educational institutions will immediately be revealed to everyone. I want to say that no university in the world (!!!) will give you any knowledge. You can’t sit and wait for knowledge to magically penetrate your head, just because you will be inside the building with a sign. Even being in MIT, you need a lot, independently, to work on yourself. If the student himself does not shovel a lot of documentation, then he will not learn this, and today reading the documentation takes 50-60% of the programmer’s working time. Solving problems of a higher level than the level of skill - a person develops. With this approach, I managed to achieve a week from a person who had never seen a web development, very much, in my opinion, great success in mastering git and the CodeIgniter framework. Hi Acne! :) The result is an excellent catalog of products with an infinite level of investment categories. Yes, it’s not a trick, but you don’t have to wait for more from a newbie. (I forgot to say that this year I, with my companion, were already taking students from our university to my pre-diploma practice).
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We, in the first year, right on the first couple, the dean said the following words:

The fact that you have arrived here does not mean anything. Your fate and level of your qualification depends on you.

The biggest problem that no one has yet understood. And to my question to the operating system instructor: “And will we program under * nix” - I saw a very sad look and heard the phrase: “if at least 10% of students were interested in this and could try to master ...”

Let's go back to the topic of teachers.
As I said before, I was indignant for a long time about the paperwork in the hands of the teacher, about the incompetence of the add, especially since I had something to compare, outside the walls of the university, in the office, I had mentors - the guru of the design of the download system. When I thought about what was wrong, I understood. A teacher is a teacher, a person engaged in educational work with a noisy audience, taking exams, taking time to retake and defend the cursors. It is not physically possible to catch all the innovations of the new iOS SDK with such a life. Truly competent people work in the offices of large companies and if, God forbid, they all switch to the dark side of teaching, they will lose their competence in half a year.
As for the papers, I’ll say: it’s impossible for an engineer to know everything by heart, there are always reference books and literature, for example, I remember that in PHP the strpos () function is written this way, and not str_pos () only a year after the developer’s work and now, some I will not be able to recall the solutions on the go, go into the old code, or look at the snippet databases.

The problem with the requirements, I decided in the second half of the second course. I just started to perform them, I learned, getting information on arithmetic in pairs, solving differential equations at home. (Sorry I can not find an illustration, it was good, it sank into oblivion). Especially in such a rhythm that it is necessary to show something working tomorrow, and today you don’t understand it at all - you will have to live for several more years, after graduating from the university and at work there will be no concessions, because there money is spinning.

The bottom line.

The right student is a student who is able to pass an item without ever appearing in pairs.

We decided to conduct a survey among students of different institutions - for how many
they will pass the Chinese language. Approaching Physics and Technology:
- For how much Chinese will you pass?
- Well, about two months.
Come to MSU:
- For how much Chinese will you pass?
- Well, about a month.
Come to MEPI:
- For how much Chinese will you pass?
- Is there a manual?
- There is!
- Well, now I finish smoking and went to take ....

(thanks for editing from ironsnake )
As a result, you need to be able to correctly prioritize, understand what you need and receive only what you need, the rest is slag (such as “creating a mailbox on yandex.ru”, you will laugh, but we had such laboratory work in the first year) weed out or sit out.

Epilogue

I am not trying to justify the teachers - charlatans (hello, my head of the department! :) (this is not about him, this is what he calls all the teachers in our department)). With such teachers you can always fight with intelligence - this is not a problem.
I try to say that the subject of indignation of many students is based on the desire to gain knowledge in 5 years of mashing their pants, and not in 5 years of hard and painstaking work.

PS I apologize for the placement in the "programming" hubs. To add to the hub “the learning process in it” - karma does not allow, the hands do not reach the problem. Nevertheless, many problems in programming take their roots in universities.

UPD Placed a post in the hub "learning process in it"

Thanks for attention!