> I learned more at my community college than a pretty decent public research college.
I've heard "I learned more at X than at college" multiple times, it's become a refrain. But public university courses are pretty intellectually intensive, or at least provide good opportunities to be so; I wonder if people who say these implicitly qualify it with "that I valued / that I found was useful to my (intended) career"
I think another aspect of it is that professors at research universities don't view teaching as their main vocation but as something they have to do (their "real" job is research/writing papers). I think lecturers that focus on teaching can probably be better at it, especially at undergrad level where you're anyway pretty far from the state of the art.
> professors at research universities don't view teaching as their main vocation but as something they have to do (their "real" job is research/writing papers).
Some of them view it this way, and end up being excellent lecturers. They get laid off for not publishing often enough or successfully enough. Like the one statistics professor I've had that was worth a damn.
I find universities forcing both research and teaching on the same people quite bewildering nowadays. Yes, you used to be able to get super fresh information directly from the people doing the research back in the day, but guess what, nowadays that's not what's in the curriculum anyway and your lecturer doing great research probably won't really translate into them being able to better teach the basics of their field.
I've heard "I learned more at X than at college" multiple times, it's become a refrain. But public university courses are pretty intellectually intensive, or at least provide good opportunities to be so; I wonder if people who say these implicitly qualify it with "that I valued / that I found was useful to my (intended) career"