When people say academia is not the real world they generally mean a few things. "Real world" might not be dictionary-correct but this is what is meant:
1. Many of the problems you're forced to solve are contrived. They're practice problems and often the knowledge required to implement the solution has been provided to you already in classroom or textbooks.
2. You are evaluated on the academic quality of your work. In the "real world" you're evaluated on whether your work meets the needs of the customer and how well you present yourself.
3. In college you are rewarded based on how you are evaluated. In the real world you are not paid based on how well you are evaluated you are paid what you're able to sell or negotiate which is dependent on what your skills are worth (not just how well you perform them).
4. Basic needs (food/shelter) are paid for by someone else or on credit. This is not always true but often is. In the real world there is pressure to provide for oneself.
I agree on the first three points. I disagree on the fourth.
The fourth point is, ironically, most true for those who manage to become highly sought-after professionals. You have to be very well-paid and sought-after these days to achieve financial independence from any one employer, allowing you to take full responsibility for yourself. At the other end, you either get basic needs supplied via the wage paid by your employer, who is on some level morally responsible because they basically own you, or your employer fails to provide for you and you become dependent on family or the state.
The broad swathe of people who will forever remain proletarians, poor or well-off, rely on someone else to supply them/us the means to their/our basic needs.
And, in fact, the financially independent (including the rich) aren't really any better. They depend on the entire market economy that has evolved to enable them to trade one highly specialized form of labor or property for otherwise-valueless tokens which they can then trade for all their basic needs and more.
Real material independence from other people - for an individual, family, village, or nation - is possible, but its desirability is very questionable. A tiny homestead, a small farming village, or a large nation-state like America or China can afford to say, "We want to achieve complete economic self-sufficiency without depending on trade with the outside world." Most units of existence in between those will start having to make trade-offs in the standard of living and level of technological sophistication they can afford if they don't admit they need the help of others to live well.
I see what you're saying and have various opinions on this topic in general (in some cases I disagree strongly), but the point still remains that college, especially the undergraduate level, still tends to be yet one or two layers more insulated than what you describe. That's really all I was saying.
Technically speaking there is nothing that is not the real world and I think that's what cat_kittles was getting at. There's always a mix of personal responsibility and dependence on others and society. My point was specifically about the relationship between college students and everyone else.
And for those like me, who were well-off and went to college on our parents' dime, fair enough. For those literally betting their future on their education in a financial transaction for which they take personal responsibility... not so much.
Which still doesn't quite hit the note I really wanted to hit. The apparent "trade-off" between personal responsibility and dependence on others doesn't exist. The real trade-off, in my opinion, is between independence and interdependence. You can live in an ultra-interdependent social-democratic economy where you depend on others both to operate both private businesses and public services that supply your need, but you still have personal responsibility. What interdependence lets us do, as any Econ 101 class explains, is specialize ourselves into our preferred niches rather than having to waste half our time farming when we really want to be computer programming.
But, in my opinion, it's downright arrogant to simply forget the interdependence. We might depend only on other people's self-interest, but that's still interdependence, and our lives would be much worse without it.
For those literally betting their future on their education in a financial transaction for which they take personal responsibility... not so much.
Most students have no way to reasonably measure the risk they are taking or or commitment they are being asked to make. A college student funding food and shelter from a financial aid package is not yet truly assuming personal responsibility for those things. Not in the way most adults do. That's the distinction I'm making. That's what people are saying when they say that college is not the real world.
For students who really do make the investment with awareness and appreciation of the risks and financial commitments involved, my statement obviously does not apply. That's a fairly small minority of students, though.
I don't really understand what you're going on about. The parent was discussing about how most people in college are either living off loans or their family but when they graduate they have to get a job because no one else is paying the rent. I don't know, it's pretty simple, right?
You're talking about some kind of "workers of the world unite" type stuff, which is not where the parent had any intention of going.
The thing is, most college students these days don't actually have someone else paying the rent. They have their future selves paying the rent via student loans. There's a level of indirection, of insulation, yes, but ultimately they are not actually being supported off someone else's charity.
Actually, given the interest rates and contract conditions on student-loans these days, I'd argue students are blatantly exploited. But that's beside the point and even more political.
No that's actually the only point of #4. The whole context of this discussion is the difference between students and graduates. One thing that happens when you graduate is that it becomes a lot harder to recruit your "future self" to pay for your basic needs of today.
1. Many of the problems you're forced to solve are contrived. They're practice problems and often the knowledge required to implement the solution has been provided to you already in classroom or textbooks.
2. You are evaluated on the academic quality of your work. In the "real world" you're evaluated on whether your work meets the needs of the customer and how well you present yourself.
3. In college you are rewarded based on how you are evaluated. In the real world you are not paid based on how well you are evaluated you are paid what you're able to sell or negotiate which is dependent on what your skills are worth (not just how well you perform them).
4. Basic needs (food/shelter) are paid for by someone else or on credit. This is not always true but often is. In the real world there is pressure to provide for oneself.