I took a college program this year even though I've never been a fan of school and it was so fucking bad. Most of my assignments were marked by AI and never seen by a professor. The material was all cobbled together from professors in the States. One class taught the basics of using MS Word for six weeks. By the end, I started using AI to do all of the work I remembered to do as well as through the tests and exams as all the questions were verbatim on Chegg already. One class I skipped a presentation and another answered approximately 10 out of 30 questions on the exam after only submitting maybe six pieces of graded work. On my final grades for the class, mathematically I had failed. On my grade report for academic progress, I was given a 50 and 55 respectively as a forced pass.
I did the same thing. I returned to this country for a year to see how it had changed since covid, what was new, to visit family, and to upgrade my academics.
Joined a tech related program at one of the colleges, and it was exactly this.
You can guess that the program was 90% immigrants (Indians, some Nigerians and Africans), and almost all were mature students. All the Canadians certainly were mature students, and all the immigrants were as well. There's nothing wrong with that, but if we have a checklist-
The college experience (at least at this college) is no longer for young people in their early 20s. Youre not going to make connections as a young person now that you would 20 years ago.
All the courses were entirely remote
All the courses used recycled materials, some of them wern't even up to date (imagine a tech program, where the powerpoint slides your teacher has sent you are 5 years old and not even relevant to the computer program being used, thats how lazy and how bad it is), most of the materials are used at multiple colleges that the same professor teaches at online, and most of the coursework was just "read a book, read my material, fill in these online questions and submit a report". I didn't even think my college was that bad initially going in (Spoiler, it was TMU/Ryerson) but it was
It felt very robotic.
Then you get to the cheating. Everyone cheats, noone knows what theyre doing. Practically everyone either uses AI to do their assignments, because they can and theres nothing really checking it, and on top of that- all the Indians upload every single one of their assignments to Chegg or other online 'academic assistance' sites. Want the answers to your exam? Just go there. It completely shatters any value in a diploma issued over the past half decade at least.
Was talking to my sister who is at another university/college, and its the same thing.
I'd basically say this: Most of these colleges should be shut down, diploma mill is absolutely correct, and teachers should be barred from teaching at multiple universities/colleges, because thats where I think they unironically get lazy with reusing the same tests over and over again, which just encourages cheating.
If youre going to go back to university or go to university in the first place, make sure that its
in person, and I hate to say don't choose a major with a lot of jeets, but if its something business related just don't bother, and if its tech related- its 50/50 that your program will be worth anything.