Holy shit, how can that even happen. So if I'm reading you correctly, you could mark eighty 500 word assignments, and not get paid a cent for it? I did that once, got paid ten hours on the basis of 4,000 words an hour, and still found it a ripoff - took me much longer than ten hours once writing meaningful feedback was factored in, let me tell you.
I suppose I'm biased being part of the system, but I tend to think university is the ideal place to go if you wish to learn about something in serious depth - as long as you do the right courses at the right place. At the right university, you have institutional support, access to resources, leading experts in the field, and a community of likeminded people (mainly at postgrad) that you just can't replicate; at the wrong uni, you may as well have stayed at home and used your Internet connection to learn shit-tonnes more.
Well this is the thing - in History at the moment, we have no compulsory subjects except the third-year capstone, which is the same here as what Liam described. When I was in undergrad, that meant a considerable range of choice, and the capstone hadn't yet been introduced either so everything was an elective and you just had to do enough subjects to achieve the requisite points for a major (there was one subject that, if you did Honours, you either had to do in third year as Honours prep or during the Honours year itself, but that was the closest we came to a mandatory course). Now, with a series of budget squeezes, the range of courses has become much more limited - the Honours offerings are almost absurd right now, with all courses in theory elective but you need to do five courses and only six are offered.
I'm currently teaching in second year and that has probably the broadest offerings, so in theory all my students are there because they want to be there. It's fashionable among my colleagues to blame all the non-History students doing our subjects as breadth for dragging down the quality, but I actually find them to often be better students. They don't know History requirements, so they go out of their way to pay attention to my instructions, to read the essay guidelines, etc. Too many of the mediocre History students think they know what they're doing and hand in essays I can only describe as disappointing.
I suppose your situation is rather different to the kind of people I'm frustrated by - people from fairly wealthy, comfortable families who still live at home, who have gone on to postgrad because they have good grades but little drive or direction and are doing degrees where career options are painfully limited even for those with greatest ambition and talent (e.g. creative writing, history, sociology). Now their degrees are close to done and what are they going to do? Keep living at home off mummy and daddy? A couple of the people I'm thinking of will probably be fine because they are really talented individuals, even if they lack direction right now, and will find - or fall into - something that uses their skills. But some others, I don't even...
