The simple fact of the matter is, you won't be able to make it work. The system is a disadvantaged environment. The entities you interact with in doing so are malevolent, and there is no guaranteed job even with the education if you somehow make it through (which is almost impossible).

They lie, in the most vile of ways.

It is not a matter of commitment in nearly all cases, now this may be somewhat different in the EU than in the US, but the fundamentals remain the same. The university organization is incentivized to take your money and provide nothing in return but a promise that they never intended to honor. That promise was that if you know the material you'll pass the coursework, and you just need to persist and learn.

College/Uni in most places today have their programs designed to fail you, while you pay for the privilege (in part), but mainly they target the student assistance programs most governments in socialized countries have alongside student debt fueled revenue.

They are incentivized without any means to hold accountable, to do everything that they can towards that result, and they do so in sometimes very clever and sophisticated ways, but quite evil especially in the part where they try to make you think it is your fault, and not a structural defect they arbitrarily imposed on you.

Every program intersects with certain general classes that become weedout classes, and they require that they be passed, and those classes are skewed through structure so that the odds of you completing it are astronomical towards failure, and they do not disclose these structures upfront.

Some of the ways they do this include, setting up exams where you have two that must be taken, and the exam is structured to have the questions causally dependent upon previous questions answers. They do this quite a lot in physics based paths that are required for any engineering upper coursework.

They take advantage of undisclosed means needed to calculate rounding and get the correct answer. For example significant digits.

Any engineer worth their salt would say its simple, you don't round at each step until the end; so you don't introduce rounding error that propagates. Except doing this would cause you to fail because the actual expected method of rounding on the test is not provided, and the questions are causally dependent not independent.

To pass a course under such a structure you would need to only get 1 question wrong, and that question would have to be the last one of either test (just once, not both tests). Dominoes otherwise. You get the test back and you failed, "you just didn't study hard enough", is what they'll say. "You weren't commited enough", "You just aren't engineering material", while the real reason is because they deprived you of it arbitrarily indirectly through structure.

In these cases, and other words, you have to get a perfect, or you fail, and you are grouped with others that may have taken the course multiple times (and dragged the coursework grades down through grading on a curve). This is just a single example where they used multiple component elements together towards purpose depriving you of your future while breaking the fundamental promise.

There are other ways too that they do engage in this activity as well besides these, either through structure imposed by the software used such as Pearson's autograder where they randomize the question pool per student, innocuous but how do teachers know the question bank is bad? They get a signal when multiple students voice issues. No single pool, no signal.

Or material which is tested on but is not covered, or through a simple resource drain. There are many ways to do this.

The latter is probably the most common overall, and people overlook it all the time.

The coursework requires a certain finite amount of hours, in terms of lectures, and in the homework/project preparation. They may provide some unit numerical number for scheduling but that is not reflective of the time you must spend to pass the individual section for the course.

If you are told a 4 unit course will require 12 hours of work a week because 10-12 unites is full time (40h/week), and in reality that 4 unite course requires 60 hours, and you've signed up for multiple 4 unit courses, because you need to pass within a certain expected goal time, do you think you'll be able to make the time to actually complete the coursework while maintaining academic honesty?

Any amount of required work above 40 hours a week becomes impossible to sustain over a time period beyond a few weeks. Its the number one driver of burnout, and when you get burned out you fall prey to trauma loop/torture structures that are embedded.

Many courses are at least 16 week courses. Incidentally this is also why the refund period is setup right around the 2nd or third week just before the first exam. So they can keep your money and claim it was your decision to not move forward.

Importantly, not all University and Colleges are like this, nearly all are though with few exceptions. The exceptions are in the prestigious universities where its almost impossible to get in, and the tuition is naturally much higher.

Any community college, state funded, non-private, etc, will have these issues.

I spent my 20s and 30s trying to get a degree through sheer pigheadedness and overwork, and when you can do the work and still not pass you eventually realize the system is rigged.

Where no rational or reasonable person would disagree given objective reality; leaving only the delusional and the crazy saying to the contrary, or blinded (worse, because blindness leads evil people to evil acts) by avoiding pitfalls through sheer luck, and not skill or talent.

For engineering, if it were untrue that a person who is capable of accurately doing math and reasoning well above the coursework would pass, and yet I'm a prime example where I have passed the honors versions of Math with electives in practical applications (physics) up through Abstract Algebra including Discrete Math, Vector Calculus, Differential Equations; with honors. Yet no pass.

7+ attempts culminating in 3.5 years for that class alone with different professors in different college districts, for Mechanics of Solids (covers basic kinematics, 1st college course in the physics sequence), structured as previously mentioned shows if you cannot progress in a pipeline, you cannot ever achieve what is promised, and no amount of faux due process where everyone is in it together against the student or legal action can correct it.

They stopped the bi-annual cross-district engineering contest because I won it twice in a row, perfect labs, but fails in each class. Even had a recording of one of the professor talking with another professor about how to reduce their workload, and how it was the way all NEA members were doing it, to the detriment of the students. It was dismissed as speculation despite impeachment testimony.

The colleges don't collect the metrics needed to hold the professors and academic administrators accountable. The real pass-rate for some of those classes is 0% for any first time, and 5-12% for repeats depending on the professor, skewed heavily towards what the professor decides. I know of students that slept with the professor to get the insight into how to pass so they could go on to become professionals. Just absolutely horrible.

In business its either Economics, or Communication required GEs. In engineering its the physics sequence.

The social contract at most universities today is broken, and there is no credibility, and no means to correct. According to them, the reason you don't pass is because its your fault. Gaslighting is another more appropriate word for this.