Comment by lr4444lr

Having gone both to a liberal arts institution and a large public university, it is not clear to me what the professors in the latter were actually doing vis a vis their teaching responsibilities that actually provided value.

Lectures that came straight from the book I could have read, recitations and problem reviews done by grad students, and tests that were little more than variations on homework problems of varying difficulty.

Maybe they were getting paid for research, but I dunno. At the liberal arts college, I actually received an education instead of bootstrapping it myself from a syllabus.