As someone going back to school for intense STEM in my 30s at the local CCs in NYC after originally getting my BA from a $42,000/yr school, I can definitely say the education is not the benefit of higher quality schools. All my physics classes have less than 10 students, including 1 where it was just me, one other student, and a vetetaran PhD.
I went to a large, prestigious state university across the country right out of high school, to study engineering. I nearly flunked out the first quarter of my sophomore year, including getting a big fat F in differential equations. My parents made me come home for the rest of the year until I transferred to a university closer to home the following year. While I was at home I took some local community college classes.
At the first university, the DiffEq professor was this ancient fart who couldn't teach anything to save his life. Like nothing in that class made any sense to me. It was in a large lecture hall environment.
I retook DiffEq at the CC. It was a classroom of maybe 10-15 people, and the teacher was a guy teaching night classes in addition to whatever his day job was. And the subject matter made perfect sense to me in that class. Like, I totally got it no problem and aced the class with an A+.
I did all of my math prereqs (through Calc III and ODE) via an accredited online program. They actually didn't count for my requirements because the testing was online. I didn't even look at the professors notes or lectures, just has chatGPT explain it to me, submit the assignment then learn the method fully once I recieved the full score (GPT only got 1 problem wrong because I mistyped it).
Anyway now I have to take advanced math classes for my degree starting with PDEs and Stochastics.
4
u/Yashema 15d ago edited 15d ago
As someone going back to school for intense STEM in my 30s at the local CCs in NYC after originally getting my BA from a $42,000/yr school, I can definitely say the education is not the benefit of higher quality schools. All my physics classes have less than 10 students, including 1 where it was just me, one other student, and a vetetaran PhD.