University Degrees are Weird

I imagine the conversation between a University and potential student going like this:

    I'd like to get qualified in a subject.

> Four years.

    Woah there, I haven't told you what I want to learn yet.

> Doesn't matter. Everything takes four years to learn.

    Really?  *Everything*? Art and medicine? Computing and Sociology?
    A basic understanding of the field takes four years of study for
    each?

    Where did you find out this amazing fact?  What amazing study
    was made, and what was the methodology?

> Fuck off.

All university courses find the idea of someone learning different things, at their own rate, anathema. Someone who learns quickly gets nothing - they don't get to finish early, they can wait about till the rest have caught up. Someone who learns slowly, but drop out, or repeat an entire year; nobody gets an extra month to brush up on Maths and otherwise continue as normal.

None of the course material demands any of the structure surrounding it. The individual units in courses often don't rely on any units which come before them, and never rely on all units which come before them. Learning about Marx doesn't require an in-depth understanding of Marxism, and knowing about set theory doesn't require calculus.

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