Universities should be more than toll gates

If you studied university in many parts of the Middle East, try asking yourself or any of your friends what their favorite part of university was, and a lot of them will say the dorm life, late-night conversations, or the campus freedom. Very few will tell you their favorite part was what they learned in class.

A few days ago, I was lazily browsing Hacker News when I came across a provocative blog post titled “Math is Erotic.” Without going into too much detail about the contents of the post itself — which, for reference, has very little erotica — the part that really caught my attention was below:

The function universities have long played is less one of educating than of credentialing.

I studied Environmental Engineering in Jordan, and more than 10 years after graduating, the above resonates on a profound level with me. I assume a lot of people from the Arab world and South Asia would relate to this, too.

At the risk of sounding like yet another entrepreneur talking smack about university education, hear me out: the German Jordanian University, where I studied, was a conveyor belt clattering along slowly to secure jobs abroad for young Jordanians. As the name implies, engineering students were meant to spend 4 years in Jordan, and another mandatory year in Germany. It started as a joint project in 2005 between the governments of Jordan and Germany.

This university, mind you, is allegedly one of the best in Jordan. I had some of the highest grades in my class, but this came at the expense of learning very little about my actual courses. Getting good grades exclusively depended on your rote memorization skills the night before an exam. Not only do I remember nothing from what I studied¹, I detested every minute of every subject I took there. Passing subjects was significantly more important than understanding them.

A typical Jordanian engineering student needs to serve an engineering sentence of 5 years, compared to 4 years of education in the US or 3 in England. Jordanian universities follow an archaic credit-hour system where at least a semester’s worth of useless subjects are crammed into your schedule. For example, everyone I know had to study “Military Science,” a semester-long 3-credit course with very little use outside of esoteric trivia about army hierarchy.

If you’re assuming that I’m implying that the system trades your time and money for empty credit hours, then you can collect your prize at the door. 21% of Jordanians are unemployed. That’s far above the global average of 4.9%. I’m sure the Ministry of Higher Education knows exactly what they’re doing, but from where I’m standing it looks like the plan is to keep people out of the workforce for as long as possible.

This is not to say that this specific university was not worth students’ money. Many of my peers secured jobs in Germany right after graduating. These people did their time and earned their credentials. The question remains, though: is this because of what they learned at university or because of being part of the German-Jordanian labor conveyor belt?

This isn’t a complaint, it’s an obituary for the education I could’ve had. My first jolt of confusion about university lectures was in 2012, during my foreign exchange year in Germany. I was in a classroom full of Environmental Engineering students who were there because they wanted to be there. I, on the other hand, was there because my dad thought engineering would be good for me. When I saw the passion with which the professor discussed fluid mechanics, and the students peppered him with genuine questions, I realized something simple but profound: people can actually be passionate about what they study, if it’s taught well and if they truly care about the subject.

Years later, I rediscovered what I really loved: learning for its own sake. In 2024, I came across the CS50 YouTube channel, which is Harvard University’s introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science and the art of programming. Even if I had no intention to learn anything about computer science, or C programming, I couldn’t stop watching it. The thought of being entertained by learning was so alien to me and yet there I was, binge-watching lectures on algorithms, memory, and bytecode.

Last month I spent 30 hours diving into Arduinos and following tutorials with a breadboard on my desk. Before that, I spent 8 months in Godot making small games. When I found out about Cursor, I coded a Pocket clone after the original app shut down. I even built a TikTok scraping API just because I could. None of this was for money. Not one single project.

But all of this learning came with its own kind of weight. The more I dabbled, the more I realized how much there was to learn. Each new subject made me feel both excited and lost. I would forget one topic as soon as I picked up the next, and the disparity between everything I explored left me frustrated. It was a strange sadness. The deeper I went, the further behind I felt.

Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too. Then I caught myself, realizing I was being melodramatic about a decade-old grievance.

I recently started to see learning a bit differently. I don’t need to feel guilty about learning with no end goal or finish line. My learning process is suboptimal at best, and I don’t have an Obsidian or Notion “Second Brain”.

Forgetting is fine. Losing track is fine. Nobody beats themselves up because they can’t recite scripts and scenes of their favorite movie or video game, so why should I remember exactly how layers work in Godot?

What matters is that I keep finding new things to chase, new rabbit holes to fall into. The act of learning itself is such a rush, even if I find another shinier subject halfway through. I now have a new plan: acquire the financial freedom my little family needs to design my own syllabus and spend the rest of my life learning on my own terms.

1. To be fair, I only worked as an engineer for a bit more than a year between 2014 and 2016. ↩︎