Slashdot Mirror
Is A "Well-Rounded" Education a Good One?
"In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company.
In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages on Macintosh, they reply, "Why would I have to do that?" Most of them don't even think of Linux as an operating system, but more as a hacker's toy. Forget about asking them to make it Mozilla or Lynx compatible. They don't want to waste their
time. But the University will make sure it is ADA
compliant, since any institution that receives federal funding must require this...
Don't most "big picture" lessons come with experience, through person's journey from entry-level employee to a skilled IT/business professional? Wouldn't it make more sense to teach things that will help students early in their careers, like technical skills and other trade/foundation skills that are often required of entry-level, non-management employees? Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or CIO needs to make? Do companies really want me to spend more time diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first
place? (What about just documenting the code?) Knowing the big picture is good, but how do you get to that level if you don't have any skills?
My question for Slashdot readers is: Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
Schools should teach you to think for yourself. Learning any trade for a career is good, but there is always the need for additional training as the years wane by.
For example, in my chemical engineering school, we were taught to be correct to twenty percent eighty percent of the time.
Once more thing:
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
for our culture.
Consider the fact that most liberal arts grads have to get additional schooling in order to get a professional level job.
Everybody else in liberal arts is trying to pay off their hefty debt with shit jobs.
Liberal arts was designed for an independent thinker and learner; it was a training for a common culture, for a workplace where understanding the classics was important in order to gain entry into more rarefied levels of society.
Today, nobody would invest such a huge amount of money into literature or learning for its own sake. That's why liberal arts programs are suffering all over the country. It's not worth it!
College is a place where students learn to conform to the expectations of others and, most importantly, get saddled with debt.
Unattached young people are threatening to nearly every society. So, our society's solution is to force them to get college degrees in order to get a decent job, saddling them with debt to keep them engaged in the main stream of capitalist society.
The most dangerous students, the ones who went to school for learning instead of career training, tend to come out with a liberal arts degree. They are doubly crippled - they have the same debt every CS major leaves school with, but without the earning power.
This is fucked up. We need to pay for everyone's education like European countries do, in order to reclaim education's power.
Goat sex free since 2001
It seems to me that it would be better to teach skills that would help us in the first 10 years of employment.
Do you have any idea what you are going to do for your first 10 years after school? That's quite a long time. Knowing a variety of different subjects is pretty useful if your original career plan doesn't work out.
Universities could do a lot to help new graduates entering the workforce. Since jobs today are far from employment for life, those skills would prove useful a number of times.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Bah... everything I know I taught myself... I have no university education, and yet am a successful software developer... No university material I have ever seen comes close to cover the topics that I learned myself...(but to their credit, my physics skills are lacking... though I've yet to use 'physics knowledge' at my job, EVER!)
University now a days seems to be an extension of public schools... 'You don't know what you wanna be when you grow up, so here's a little from column A,B,C,etc.'... For crying out loud, your in your early 20's... Figure out what you wanna do and focus on just that one topic... I had to deal with way too many University graduates that can't code worth sh*t, but they have a degree... How bloody nice... Why didn't they teach you to code???
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
First off, the differences between a public and a private university cannot be tossed aside. When you're not just a number, but a well-embraced member of an intimate community of learning, the experience can be amazingly more valueable.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I'm from New Zealand, and in combinationn with education directions there, along with with my acceptance into honours programs at University I completed a Masters degree in Mathematics only taking 5 (small/short) courses that were not mathematics. All the other courses I took were physics courses (as I was contemplating doing physics honours at the time.
In some ways this benefitted me greatly - it enabled me to complete a Masters' degree by the time I was 21, and thoroughally cover a wide variety of subjects within mathematics. In other ways I feel that I really did miss out.
I enrolled for courses in German literature, Poetry, and philosophy, but simply had to drop them very early due to course overload (I was doing 1.6 times a full load at the time). I would have loved to have had an opportunity to properly pusue those subjects. As it is I have simply done my best to do some self directed learning - but it would have been nice to have more direction etc. in the matter.
Fortunately I had friends who did take a wide variety of courses (and I'm widely read anyway) so that helped provide some direction for my extra studies.
So, having taken an extremely directed course of study, and having studied a diverse range of subjects outside of that field, here's my advice:
Ideally a directed course of study is best, but people should be encouraged to take a few courses that are well outside their fundamental area. I don't believe in mandating what those courses are. They should be alternate areas of interest for the student. For me it was poetry and literature. For others it may be film, biology, maths, or history. It is worth doing a little bit of something else though, and it should be encouraged.
Jedidiah
--
Fortunately
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I think that too many people look to not have a well rounded education. I remember people in my CS classes, where all they wanted to do is learn how to code. The idea of learning how the compiler works they considered a waste of time. Who cares? And the hardware? They really didn't care about that. I recently had a CS from Standford tell me that the I couldn't get the 4th bit from an integer because the computer stores that in decimal.
Some of your examples are valid, but many are not. I think that you have to realize that it is total imposible to build a Gantt chart for an entire project in a semester. Just like it would be imposible to build a entire peice of useful software. There are always corners that are cut. You need to yourself, abstract what is being taught into the general principles. Those don't change with time, your first 10 years or anything else.
I think people look at college as learning the details, it is not about the details, they are unimportant. The idea is that you need to learn the principles.
At my college Clemson University, this is an ongoing debate. The University is considering making the general education requirements more flexable so you can take courses more in line with your major. This is probably going to occur, but I oppose it.
I believe in the General Education requirements. Why? Because everyone that graduates from a University should have some basic skills that can help them regardless of their profession of choice. People wanting to go into non-computer related professions should still have a vauge idea of how to use a computer. People going into computer related fields should be able to appreciate literature. Everyone in every type of profession should be able to preform some of the same basic skills.
Not only does this allow any college graduate to be able to converse intelegently about any subject, but it allows people the ability to change jobs in the future without going back to school. Because prospective employers know that any college graduate has basic skills, there is potential for starting level jobs in fields unrelated to one's degree. Without general education requirements, none of this is possible.
We all should, upon graduating from college, know the basic facts about everything. Once we know the basics, we have the foundation to learn whatever our heart desires in the future. Without general education requirements, people graduating in a given field will know more about that field from the start, but the cost is the lack of the basic knowledge of other fields, which provides for a very narrow minded person.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
I graduated from a Liberal Arts college. My degree is a Bachelors of Arts in Computer Science.
While I recieved a lot of education in areas outside of Computer Science, I spent more than half of my time studying CS and Math. I wouldn't say I know a little about everything and nothing about anything specific. Quite the opposite in fact. I know as much or more about CS than folks from more focused backgrounds.
I do believe there is a value in learning outside of your particular vocation. For instance, I know work for a large financial firm. I think that the fact that I took some accounting and economics in college helps me understand and be more effective in my current career. Not only can I develop software for them, but I can actually understand what they are talking about. CS is more than just coding, you have to be able to communicate, and you have to be able to understand the subject matter of your work. I think by experiencing a wider range of courses in college, it helps you gain undertanding of various subject matter quicker than if you hadn't had that exposure.
My 2 cents of course, and YMMV, but I am quite pleased with how well my education prepared me for a successful career.
Take care,
Brian
100% Linux Based Web Hosting, No Windows, No Code Red Worms, No Nimda worms...
Isn't the whole idea of education to teach you how to learn, and not what to know?
Granted, you will remember a good portion of the material presented when I'm being taught how to learn. But that's not really that important.
A well rounded education is going to be better anyways. People have terrible writing skills, and at least if they have to take more classes they should improve them (in theory -- but how you can get to college and not know algebra or basic writing skills is a failure of elementary/high school education).
Well-rounded education is a good direction... As long as it doesn't take away from the time that people need to specialize on the things they enjoy doing, or are good at doing (eg programming, engineering, football, etc). I also believe that companies do appreciate someone that knows a little about everything - more importantly though, someone who will say they don't know something but will know exactly how to find it out. A well-rounded education would allow this. What IS bad, is not alloying someone to specialize. If we didn't have intelligent individuals who specialized on certain thinks, I really don't think we would be posting comments on slashdot from a keyboard on the other side of the world.
As a university student majoring in Computer Science, I have been made to take classes such as Greek Mythology and American History. I'm not paying my tuition every semester so that they can waste my time (and money!) teaching me things that I'll never use in my career and that I either could've learned in high school or on my own if the need arises. I'm paying them, if I want to learn about history, I'll tell them so. It shouldn't be the other way around.
The school I'm going to (University of Rochester) is very light on specific required courses. You have to take one writing course freshman year, under the logic that no matter what you do with your life you should be able to write. Besides, that, you have your major and minor (or double major or double minor), and then you must satisfy a "cluster" (which is sort of like a mini-minor) in the area(s) that your major/minor are not in. If you major in something that is a liberal art, you must have a more technical cluster. You still get to choose which one though. It allows you to diversify and such, but not have your entire schedule dictated to you (unless you're one of those silly premeds).
There is a difference between education and training. A liberal arts school is supposed to provide a well rounded education -- to provide you with the tools you need to learn and be self-sufficient. Training should teach you how to do one thing well.
Finding a job was next to impossible, and for many years, I was only able to support myself by the typing class I had taken in high school. Only by going back to school (community college) and taking some tech courses at night, could I finally break into the IT business.
A well rounded education will help you at Jeopardy, and in cocktail party conversations, but when you get out of school, employers don't care what you know, they care about what you can do.
"curriculi", not "cirriculums"
Schools can only offer resources you can learn from; they can't teach you anything unless you actively participate. Schools have to accommodate lots of students per class, so you can't expect a personalized curriculum.
If you have the luxury of four to six years with someone else (parents, government, whatever) supporting you, AND you can spend that time at a place that has easy access to teachers, other students, libraries, labs, computers, and everything else a college has to offer, take full advantage of it. Don't expect the school to magically bestow knowledge and skills on you.
You'll find that learning to read, write, and speak as fluently as possible will take you a long way whatever you do after school.
For a view of education and learning that you probably aren't familiar with, read John Holt's two books, "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn." You don't have to be a parent or child to get a lot from those books.
The reason they're teaching you to diagram is because you'll be working with tons of other people, and getting paid for it.
They wanna know what you're doing, and they want you to do it right the first time (see also: designing before coding).
Unfortunately, this is just a reflection of the realities of the marketplace. What will happen if a site that requires ADA compliance is not compliant? The owner will probably get fined by the government. What happens if the site isn't Lynx or Netscape on Linux compatible? They risk alienating a couple of die-hard Linux users - BUT, most of us are used to just cursing out the site and booting into Windows, if we really need to access it. Why? Because a lot of sites are like that and it's not something that can easily be changed.
Supporting Linux users just doesn't make a positive impact on the bottom line for the average business.
-sting3r
Notice this author seems to be complaining more about the lesson plans not the classes with very specific reasons. So let me break down where I see his mistakes.
Finance is not designed to teach you how to run a business and pay your subordinates, for that you need Accounting and a Business Management class not a finance class.
Systems Analysis is designed to teach you how to approach a problem in an orderly fashion. Whether this takes you 3 hours or 3 minutes doesnt matter. The skills taught in this class will enable you to design the requirements for your program when you have nothing to begin with. It is not only in a school where your programming time will be less than your planning time. A good real world project may take 2 or 3 days of needs assesment and organizing it down to a basic requirements list from which you can code.
As far as the MIS class goes, it just sounds as if your teacher is suffering from a case of a lousy lesson plan. Does your teacher actually have any real world experience regarding the subject he's teaching? Or is this yet another entirely book learned teacher?
Basically what your going thru now is learning how to deal with mismanagement something you will need to get used to in the real world. If you cant learn to deal with lusers and phb types change career fields now.
The skills the original poster discusses are narrow professional skills, and if that is all you want to learn you can attend a professional school (like ITT), or learn it on your own. It is worth asking, though, why those degrees, or why a lack of a degree, leaves you at a disadvantage. Many of those who hire recognize the value that a well-rounded person brings to their institution.
Over the course of your career you will find that it is far easier to learn the next popular programming language than it is to learn basic critical thinking skills, or to grasp the greater social and political contexts for your work. You can use those narrow technogolies much more effectively when you understand their general significance.
Well, I'm glad someone said it. University at Buffalo has more "general education" requirements then I know what to do with. One could easily spend 2 years just doing that.
My current plan is to stay in school taking 1 class until they finally drop the Spanish requirement. Incidentally, business majors don't have to take a foreign language because there program is so "condensed," but Comp Sci majors still have to take it. Explain that one to me.
You seem to be saying that University should be more like a technical college for most people. You might be right. Liberal arts is intended to teach people how to think, to produce well-rounded individuals who can teach themselves whatever it is they'll need to know to suceed in a job. But more and more employers want you to already know, fresh out of college. So unless you get your liberal arts degree from, say, Yale, you're pretty screwed.
Maybe we should have a system more like the German one, where the default path isn't a "liberal arts" degree (though I would argue that few college students here do a true liberal arts program anyway), it's a technical college for whatever career you choose. So by age 21 or so you have the equivalent of a master's in whatever your field is, without wasting your time learning much else.
But then, much of our nation's economic might is based on the imagination and ambition of its workers, and cubbyholing people too early is a good way to stifle those traits. Learning how to be a CEO in college might not be the most applicable skill your first day on the job, but it reminds you that you COULD be CEO one day. And learning about ancient Greek history might not be directly useful in a CS career, but it helps your mind be able to link concepts together and make leaps of imagination you otherwise might not.
Part of the problem is what exactly is supposed to be meant by well rounded. There's a lot to be said for forcing highly focused students to take courses outside of their primary interests just so that they don't become excessively one-dimensional. I certainly feel that having been required to do so as a student was ultimately beneficial. OTOH, most of the people I know think that I'm interested in too many things already, so I'm not sure if I'm strong evidence or not.
But getting good results also depends on the requirements being reasonable and well thought out. Forcing people to take classes for which they have no preparation is pointless even if you do accept the idea of being well-rounded. You're not going to learn much if you don't have the background to get the most out of a class. But that's a potential weakness in any curriculum. I've certainly heard of a lot of tightly focused programs that tend to push students into classes for which they have inadequate grounding, so it's not unique to this kind of program. Blame it on stupidity in choosing the wrong courses within the topic, not on the general idea of requiring students to be well-rounded.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I am currently a computer science student at Virginia Tech. I too have run into problems of having to do diagrams of simple hour-long coding programs and at first I thought it was a waste. As I thought about it more, I realized that even though it was pointless for the tiny little programs we were doing, the real point was to teach students to think about the overall design of a program instead of just rushing to code it. Many of the students here have never coded anything longer than a few hundred lines. They need the design perspective.
Also, it is important to remember that the point of college is not to prepare for a future career, but to become more well rounded. If you just want to focus on your career, a trade school would be a better choice.
Go ahead and waste your life with your inhibitions, just don't ruin other people's lives with your intolerances.
What the Hell do Slashdolts know about education? Might as well be asking French people about hygiene.
Sometimes "well rounded" means "well funded," as in continued funding to a department that few take interest in. Rather than serving the student, it serves to keep a program open.
It's one thing to require everyone to take a class in geography/math/english, another to require everyone to take a class in *department unknown.*
Much like in the movie PCU, where the dean says she's debating getting rid of the Math department to support a department that would study the culture of probably 30 people worldwide (though the quote escapes me).
Seriously. What you want is a vocational education, so leave the university, because that's not what a university education is about. A university education is designed to ground you in general principles that will be of value through your lifetime, as long as you have the intelligence to adapt and apply those principles to whatever challenges you face. It is not designed to teach you specific skills so that you can immediately land a job. A reasonably intelligent person can quickly learn whatever specific skills are needed for a job while on the job.
A liberal arts educaition is often underrated and underappreciated by students. The familiar gripe of "I am never going to use this in life" is more often a display of the ignorance of the student, or a frustration with difficult subject material than a relfection of the actual (lack of) usefulness.
Learning a little about a lot is invaluable to those who aren't 100% sure what of what occupation they wish to pursue for the rest of their lives (I am included in that group). Also, education should serve to not only prepare you for the job you ultimately decide to take, but also make you a knowledgeable person, with a base of understanding of general concepts from which to formulate opinions and perceptions.
A person who has decided to work in the computer science field for the rest of their life would have no use for learning about history, correct? Absolutely not. It is my opinion that since everyone over the age of 18 has a say in our government, then any effort to educate these individuals about the mistakes of our past would improve society's lot by obtaining a larger group of more educated voters.
Also, in reference to the argument made that students should be prepared for entry level positions instead of leadership roles. I find three flaws with that theory.
First, I would venture to say that most people have aspirations of advancing themselves and their station in life. To say that they shouldnt at least recieve some preparation for a higher than entry level position would indicate that they will likely not advance past this position.
Second, giving someone insights into how decisions are made by the "higher ups" would help them to understand the motives and perspectives of those who have a large hand in their economic future.
Third, an entry level position implies that there will be someone at the company that has worked their for longer than you, is more experienced, and knows more about the job than you do. This person can train you and teach you the ins and outs of an etry level position. A CEO of a company does not have this luxury, however. The person with the most immediate experience in his job most likely is no longer employed by the company. This makes training students to become CEO's logical.
When you think of paper, hug a tree.
You should be able to do four things:
0. Have a sense of import / interest. (Know when to care)
1. Know how to find something out. (basic research skills)
2. Know how to evaluate what you find out. (thinking / analysis).
3. Know how to articulate your opinion. (writing, speaking, etc.).
My liberal education allowed me to learn on my feet (that's the way I learned to code) but to also understand all that underlying stuff around my profession (IT) and its origin.
Unfortunately, a lot of engineering schools give short shrift to the liberal arts. My current employer has made a conscious effort to stem that trend. I'd rather have a focused, yet "well-rounded" engineer than a problem-set nerd who can't talk about the implications of IT on the world stage. Those guys bore the shit out of me and usually suck as engineers anyway.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
#Begin Rant
That's why they make post-bacc degrees and courses. A 4 year degree gives you a basis, the following studies will give you a good focus. Overall, a 4 year university degree will outweigh a technical school education (ITT) or AA degree and such. With a full university degree, you are exposed to many more situations and surroundings than if you just focused on one topic. Now, I don't know about you, but for those people whom went to ITT to get that "web developer" certificate, and has now joined the ranks of the dot.gone, they either a) have to go back for a different degree in another specialized field b) or else go for the full fledged thing c) or work at Starbucks.
I did my 4 years, and another 2 years on post-bacc work in my field (Comp Sci), and right now I am working for a medical billing company taking their whole application from DOS based to a winblows based application, all through black-box exposure. I can say that all facets of my education are being put to the test, analytical, quanitative and communication in all aspects.
If all I knew was how to make the mouse hit the button, it'd take a miracle for anything to coalesce. So no, I don't think that my 4+ years were a waste, because I know that if this job disappears from me, I have the necessary background to traverse many different fields of work.
#End Rant
I had a well-rounded education. Now I know little bit about everything but not a whole hell of a lot about anything. I won't speak against being a well-adjusted person but these are skills I think should fall more squarely upon the shoulders of parents and peers rather than educators. Being forced to be well-rounded was the major feature of my high school education. There are simply people who don't care about math as there are people who hate English. And it didn't end there either. I can't tell you how many times I was getting my BA and I had to dilute my attention from my major program to attend to a general education requirement or part of a "core" cirriculum. Sure, I learned some interesting things in electives that I chose to take. But often there were required classes (such as Stats) that I just didn't care about. I've never seen an expert, specialist or genius for that matter who isn't the best in their particular field. I've never met a person with a well-rounded education who is an expert or a specialist. They may not even know they're a genius. Perhaps these things come with more education. Regardless, I'm one who wishes I had been allowed to pursue the things that interested me more and skip the things I didn't care about.
I'm a programmer who came into C.S. not from the C.S. ranks. I had a more general education before this, and indeed my degree has nothing at all to do with computers.
However, because my degree was from a discipline that favored the big picture over specialization, I am better at more things, rather than just excellect at one thing. Because of the broad-minded thought processes that my discipline encourage in me, I'm now the senior programmer that all the really difficult tasks get assigned to. In that regard, I'm like the old country doctor who's seen everything. The specialists (the C and Java programmers) know their craft very well, and are far better at their chosen path than I am.
However, they always fail to see the big picture. They rarely understand anything outside their craft, or worse underestimate significance (usually in areas of hardware, or systems communication), and it is a deliberate shortcoming of their C.S. degree, which preaches that skill at one thing easily tranfers into skill at another. A virtuoso violinist will have difficulty transferring their skills to a tuba, and a marathoner will have problems transferring their skills to the sprint. Just knowing C perfectly does not mean that you will be able to write wonderful programs in C++.
As a result of my broader education, and my broader experience (since I count nothing outside the realm of what I need to learn, and C.S. majors tend to ignore everything outside their favorite software of language), I am now paid almost twice what the other programmers earn.
There is nothing wrong with being a specialist. However, I find that my work is more varied, more fun, and I frequently get to chose what things I want to work on, and what menial tasks I get to assign to someone else.
Yes, I'm full of ego, but I am critical of all disciplines that encourage a narrow knowledge. It is my goal to learn all that is learnable. I don't have to be a know it all, nor am I, but I do have to know the boundaries of my education, my abilities, and my knowledge, and I must better myself, and my work, every day. If I do not know something, I readily admit it, and seek to provide an answer, or to direct the problem to someone who can provide an answer.
You must ask yourself if you are willing to fall into the trap of being a knowledge/skill specialist as your degree program is intending, or if you will deliberately, and from your own effort, fill the gaping voids in your education that you have already identified.
Which provides more fulfillment, and longer-term employment? The programmer-blacksmith, which turns you into a blue-collar laborer, interchangeable and discarded at a moments notice? Or a versatile idea engineer, who identifies changes before they approach, adapts with the changes, and presses eagerly and intelligently on?
The most important skills to learn in college or at university are foundational subjects. For people in Computer Science and similar, this means mathematics (there is no such thing as too much math), writing (what's the use of an idea if you can't communicate it?), and the core subjects of your chosen field. What specific programming languages you use is totally incidental; with a good grounding in programming you can pick up a new language in a couple of weeks.
This is not to say peripheral subjects is not a good idea - in moderation. Take a semester learning something non-technical just for fun. Among CS students in Lund, psychology and philosophy are both very popular (and a semester of psychology is what landed me in cognitive science...). The point is not to learn a useful work skill during that semester, it's to pig out on something just because it's fun to learn. The point is to do it in moderation; having peripheral subjects half of all your college time seems way too much.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Personally I think too much emphasis in the past years has been placed on job training. A university is not supposed to just crank out mindless zombies that no nothing more than how to program a computer, wire up a circuit, or design a bridge. I agree that if you are in a major you should be taught the important things that will help you succeed. But what shouldn't be sacrificed is courses that help to expand your mind. Courses in art, music, literature, and history give a taste of humanity, that helps to form a individual that has a broader view of existence than a computer screen.
The direct subject knowledge that you get from college is already several years out of date.
For instance, it took several years for colleges to start teaching C++ after it became an industry standard. Same with Java.
The number I most frequently hear is that the effective life of your direct subject knowledge is 7 years.
So, you have a choice...
College can teach you the latest whiz bang technology so you can immediately get a job in industry, work for about 7 years then have to find a different career.
-or-
College can teach you how to learn.
The *learning* skills that you pick up quickly studying/learning Greek Mythology and Child Psychology also apply to learning new computer languages/technologies.
I picked a college that taught me how to learn rather than any particular technology. This has allowed me to take the Object Oriented revolution and the web revolution in stride, while my more "focused" peers are out of work and have moved out of software.
My two cents worth...
My alma mater, The University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu) requires all students to go through the Common Core. An invaluable experience IMHO.
If you want to understand the communications field, and actually be able to use stuff afterwards, AND be able to crunch higher maths, why not?
If your school has a reputable EE program, it should teach you everything from the lowest level (quantum and semiconductor physics, EM waves) to the highest level (IPv6, TCP/IP, heck.. java sockets!) and everything in between (embedded programming, circuits, signal analysis).
You'll also learn practical stuff to complement it (ie C+asm programming, Xilinx boards for embedded stuff, soldering and circuit simulation, and MATLAB). Of course, you must understand the theory well enough, since the practical stuff will most likely change when you graduate.
Of course, everything you learn will be backed up with higher mathematics that are usually taught to applied mathematicians and physicists, so you can have a nice math knowledge to pursue other jobs if you get bored of EE (like the financial industry!)
Of course, you have to be hardworking, and sacrifice not getting laid much during your years suffering through pages of text. But in the end you'll be well rounded enough able to do anything in the geek industry. I guess what I mean by well rounded is the learning of both practical and theoretical stuff around a particular field, correct me if I am wrong.
this would be a good example of a 'well-rounded education'...
www.educate-yourself.org
www.dieoff.com
-=-=-
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - DraKKon to the majority of Slashdot(users).
I watched a friend (business major) take a programming course. They were teaching this person all kinds of low-level chores. What the individual took from the class: "Programming is tedious grunt work" Does he respect programmers? No. Does he have any more of a clue what goes into programming? No. Instead he thinks he knows about programming, aka "slinging code".
I think the problem is his class was too "applied" and ignored the basics. He wasn't taught anything about the history of computing, use the words "Babbage", "Turing", "Shockley", etc., and they draw a blank stare. For him, computers just emerged from thin air. He doesn't know how a transitor works. Thus, when it comes time to explain anything to him, changes in the industry, how it may impact his business, he just doesn't have the background. However, he does know how to print "Hello World" ten times. How practical.
In the other end of the spectrum, I was not encouraged to dig mightly into English and History. Both of which I've had to play "catch-up" due to years of neglect. In high school we completely ignore Contract Law, instead we focus Business class on investing and accounting. Admittedly, both of these can be useful, however my high-school business class ('87) completely left out contract law. What is business *but* contract law? I've signed many more contracts than I've had dollars to invest or accounting books to balance.
Also, they should renew the focus on civics. I recently found out that the same friend of mine didn't have a civics class. He has never read the constitution nor had a discussion of its importance beyond "US is great, we are a free country." Admittedly, I goofed off in my civics class but I do remember the day we talked about the constitution. And on Sept 11, I recalled a very long, detailed class discussion about our foreign policy. Helpful it was. History of Politics is very useful indeed.
It's impossible for a university to teach you everything you need to know to handle some particular business situation. The amount of specialization that would have to exist in a degree such as computer science would be enormous. A staggering number of similar degrees would have to exist as a result. What's more important, is the value of that specialization in states of the economy such as the one we are experiencing now.
My brother has gone the IT route. He has taken all the numerous certifications (A+, Novell, MSCE, etc) and in todays economy they are pretty much worthless. He has attended about four job fairs in the past month and has learned the harsh truth. Industry pumped out more specialized IT works then the industry can support. Every single company he talked to just threw his resume on the mountain of similar "IT professionals".
I, on the other hand, obtained a computer science degree at PSU. I also ended up with a job that doesn't use *anything* from computer science. I teach Cisco Networking at a local high school and perform IT work (maintaining parts of the computer network). The CS degree got me into the door for this job, which affords me enough free time to work on my own software development company. This is probably one of the better examples of a non-specialized degree enabling you to function in occuptions not directly related with the degree.
I can't say the same for the more specialized education my brother received. The truth is, that you obtain a degree at a university because you need to learn how to *learn*. A computer science degree, for example, adequately enables you to adapt to more situations than a specialized degree. Futhermore, you end up with a deeper understanding of how to better solve problems.
That is something that will help you throughout your entire life.
---
Michael Tanczos
Gamedev.net
http://www.gamedev.net
I don't know of any "cirriculums" period, Cliffyboy.
Today on Ask Slashdot, we ask, "What is this 'liberal-arts college' thing currently hot in tech circles? Seeing as how giant swaths of tech workers who only studied their technical fields in college are now out of work without useful skills, many wish they'd gotten a more 'well-rounded' education, but have no idea what it means. Today we'll explore the possibilities, remote as they may seem, of getting a well-rounded education. There must be a few people out in /. land who went to these so-called "liberal arts" places, what do you have to say?"
--hongpong.com
As someone who spent around 8 years in school, let me tell you: The more and longer you spend in school the better. You will never get such a great chance to explorer yourself, learn things you didn't know you cared about, and encounter strange, amazing people. Don't worry too much about the classes, you learn the most outside of them anyway!
Yes, you could say I could be further along in my 'real life' career if I had finished school earlier. I doubt I'd be as full a person.
I started school as an engineer, at Rochester Institute of Technology. After two years I accepted that was not the best path for me. It was too planned out, too narrow. I moved back home and took classes at the local state university. Since I was an in-state student, classes were very cheap. I took whatever I wanted, and worked at night to pay for it all myself. I learned how much I loved the arts and philosophy. I learned I loved to work on old cars. I transfered a second time to New York University when I felt I needed a bigger challenge and new experiences. I got a dual degree in Comparitive Literature and Philosophy, and stayed to complete my MA in Performance Studies. Yes, that's right Performance Studies.
All along I played with computers as a hobby. I never took a programming class, although I took a lot of math and logic. I think that prepared me to learn any computer language, not just whatever is popular at the time. Yes, Java is it right now, but 4 years from now? Who knows? I also took the opportunity to teach some adult education classes. That was a great experience; if you ever get the chance to teach, take it!
Now I am a senior programming at a solid company. I have no fear of losing my job, even in these questionable economic times. Often I miss the freedom I had, and the time I had for myself while I was in school. So, don't rush things along, and don't start school at the age of 18 thinking you know exactly who you are and what you want from life.
Yes, I know you're thinking if you get really rich you can retire and spent all your time on things you care about. I know two people that dropped out of college and eventually became millionaires. They're both jerks who cheat on their wives, and surround themselves with lackies and leaches, not true friends. Don't kid yourself, getting rich doesn't make you emotionally or intelectually mature. That's something that can only happen with time and experience.
Peace, or Not? Remember 9/11.
Peace, or Not?
I know that this carries the emacs/vi type of flamefest capacity, but here's my take:
Specific skills are only REALLY directly applicable for a very short span of time. By the time you get to the place where you could use the "practical" stuff, it will be deprecated. (e.g. If your school taught you VB programming, by the time you graduate and get a job, people would expect you to know WSH or C#)
In my school I had the benefit of a curriculum which tried to balance practical information (how serial ports worked) with theory (signal propagation delay.) When I graduated I was able to make cables, because I had a bit of experience doing that, but I also understood the requisite theory behind protocols.
When I learned that ARCNet was a token-passing protocol, and ethernet was csma it helped me to make the transition. I knew more than just that the ARCNet adapters needed a unique MAC and that Ethernet adapter MACs were hard-coded. I knew enough to easily make the transition to the "new" technology - the same was true when I began to work with TokenRing.
Additionaly, the object theory I learned has been greatly helpful in my understanding of components, layers, directories, code libraries, etc. If I had merely learned the practical technology application, I would have been poorly prepared for the innovative technologies that were to come.
One thing to keep in mind is that what you learn in school is foundational for what you will learn once employed. You will learn throughout your career. If you do not, you will lose your job (or wish that you'd lose your job.) University is the place to learn more about learning. Those skills will benefit you for a lifetime. You may start out at the same level as the person who went to trade school to learn programming, but your deeper understanding will allow you to move up much more quickly than that person.
Finally, and most importantly, it's people skills and not technical acumen that determine your earning potential. If you define success as title and pay, learn to interact with others and that will help you attain your goals much more rapidly than being able to code more widgets than the next guy. (Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is an excellent book that those business majors are reading right now. That's why they are the "B" part of PHB.)
Regards,
Anomaly
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you'd like to know more about this, please email me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
How about an education that teaches one how to spell "forest" ?
The university where I did my CS degree maintains that CS majors, like other students in the college of Letters & Sciences, take a majority of classes outside the major - 80 credits of the 120 needed for a baccalaureate degree must be outside the declared major. As a result, CS grads need to have a decent background in literature, history, hard sciences, and social sciences. This does a lot for critical thinking skills. The opposing view is that CS students should be "prepared for industry", which essentially boils down to teaching some vendor's tools exclusively - Oracle DBA classes, MS programming tools, Cisco certifications.
I'm firmly of the opinion that CS students should be kept in the traditional academic program. Good analytical skills are worth more in the long run than knowing how to use vendor tools right out of the box. Bear in mind that the average adult goes through seven career changes in a lifetime - a general education will still be useful to me when the paradigms of today come crashing down.
--Gus
I'm a student at a college that excels at giving a "well rounded" education. They view education as more than just trying to train students for a job, but to create thinking people who have an aptitude to learn in any circumstance. I'm a computer science major, taking artificial intelligence courses, but I also have philosophy, art/music, and cultural awareness classes. Granted at the time that I'm taking the classes, they seem pointless. But looking back at the last two years, I can see how valuable they have been in expanding my thinking beyond just computer science.
Education should not be viewed as a way to make more money or get a better job. Rather, it should be viewed as a way to broaden our horizons on every front, thus making us intelligent beings.
Everybody knows that teaching C/C++/Java (or any specific language) in a computer science course is pointless. It's the aptitude to learn new languages, the ability to quickly learn and adapt to the ever changing world, that creates a good computer science graduate. My school focuses mainly on that, and I'm very happy of that fact. Without it, what I am being taught will be extinct in 5 years!! But teaching how to learn will last a lifetime.
The most extreme example comes from a person's doctorate work - chances are you will not be continuing research into the specific subfield topic that you did your doctorate in - you'll probably never touch that again. but it tells companies that you can do 2 years of intense research into a very particular field and come out with a good thesis.
and that's a very important thing for a company to know. you might know everything there is to know about network infrastructure and you might have years of experience planning network implementation, but without that degree how will the company know if you are easy to work with? a degree will let them know that you can play well with people.
Yes, it is essential that some people learn to think for themselves - "Imagination is more important than Knowledge" rings true for some of us, perhaps most of us in this community, but Einsteins can't exist without a large number of drones to support them- we're not all gonna be the next Great Thinker, the next Innovator
If you want practical knowledge like how to start a business or pay employess, or as others mention, write a resume or networking (people-wise) skills, look to your community college.
-f
www.blackant.net
That's why they call it HIGHER learning. It's not supposed to get you hired, but to make you a better human.
Somewhere along the way, that message got lost.
School isnt really about creating experts, an expert does something in their free time and essentially becomes an expert.
School teaches you just enough about something to know if you like it or not.
Thats the purpose of school.
Want to be an expert? Buy some books and do your research
From one critique, departments and courses are much too fragmented - far too many small pictures incoherently presented. It's worth keeping in mind that knowledge wasn't approached that way until the last century - scholars of the 18th century had a much broader vantage. Making colleges into trade schools isn't bad for some students, if you can be sure that the trades they learn will still be around, and the skills taught pertinent, in five or ten years. In my own experience, I've done fine in technology after not studying it at all, because I learned how to learn at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA - which structures everything without disciplinary boundaries. People who can work across and between disciplines are often more valuable than those who can merely work within them. We've got far more specialists than people who can meaningfully and profitably coordinate them. The dot.com bust wasn't because of a lack of technical talent, but because most of what passed for 'big picture' was too thinly conceived.
On the other hand, a lot of folk from Evergreen end up going up the street to Microsoft for employment - so the untraditional structure of the curriculum may have some small reflection in the muddled structure in the code from that shop. But I'd lay more of the blame at Harvard's Gates.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Then perhaps it would have been a novel idea for you to find out what finance was before you took a class in that subject. (I suspect you will also find the novels of Charles Dickens receive a quite superficial treatment in most botany courses, and that most faculty who teach Byzantine art history spend very little time discussing the Lorentz transforms.)
FYI, here's how to start a business: Go down to city hall and fill out a DBA ("doing-business-as") form. Now start doing business under that name. Congratulations on your new business!
Also FYI, here's how to pay your employees. First, get some money and put it in a checking account. Second, write them some checks, or hire a payroll processing firm like ADP to write the checks for you. (They're in the book.)
These and many other very simple questions are addressed in books with titles like "Starting Your Own Business In East Carolina For Idiots And Dummies" which are written at a third-grade level and which are available in your local bookstore for $20 or so. Shockingly, most finance professors will spend their time discussing such trivia as the capital asset pricing model rather than covering this material. Similarly, law professors almost never tell you where the courthouses are, and medical school professors almost never tell you where all the hospitals are.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
If that shocks you, listen to this: In my chemistry lab, my TA made us spend two hours determining the pH of an unknown acid -- when in fact he knew the answer the entire time!
Of course not, Liberal Arts isnt a career.
IF you go to college for that then yuo deserve not to get a job when you get out.
While some people seem to only want to know what they need to say write a great C program and develop software I think there is something important in learning to think.
You may not think the classes your taking are worth very much to your career. You may not enjoy the subject matter. You may not even want to be in school. But if you really take the meaning of what is being taught you have learned to think that much more.
I don't really believe you will ever be prepared for a job coming out of college without some sort of serious extra cirricular activities in your chosen career field.
A college degree should prove your trainable and that you know how to learn.
Long term, I would rather hire someone who proves they can learn over someone who has a narrow focus on some limited subset of technology.
We may not be programming Java in 20 years, but we will still be learning and still be progressing with technology.
Having the ability to communicate and write and express your thoughts clearly are just as important as knowing what the finalize method does in Java. Unless you plan on working alone all your life you have to communicate and work with others.
I started programming right out of highschool, while I was in highschool actually. I understand the frustration of not really understanding the technology at play right away. I was just like most college graduates only coming out of high school in that respect. Now I have a couple of years of college under my belt and the changes in the developer I am today and the developer I was four years ago are amazing.
It is just a complete perspective thing that you really can't have until you have been out there in the real world. It gives me complete 100% appreciation for every college class I ever took, even religion. Now I can stand around and know the difference in the two major muslim factions without feeling clueless.
My main point is, you learn to learn and you get perspective on life and whats out there in college. You don't really gain a ton of ultra important skills until your in the work world. I did it backwards. I worked right outta high school programming, and have filled in the gaps with college at night. To each their own, I guess.
Jeremy
Frankly as all studies show folks changing careers several times in their lifetimes to train exclusively for one type of position seems to me to be needlessly limiting. Furthermore the assumption that an advanced education is only obtained as a means of advancing one's-self in a profession is a remarkably presumptive one.
The skills that have been invaluable in my life weren't the slot-A/tab-B mechanical stuff that seems to be advocated but rather means of thought, formulating opinions, understanding situations, making decisions, and just understanding the world generally. Knowing how to learn, resources and techniques for obtaining and structuring further knowledge, as well as familiarity with the various world-views one will interact with in life (both professionally and privately) are things that are well developed in a broad education.
That these lessons are often taught in framework makes them appear directly relevant to their subject but these are broadly applicable skills even if not always approached as such. Understanding how to manage folks gives one insights into the actions and goals of your own management. Learning certain types of finances provides an entry into understanding all other related types of finance. Exposure to a broad range of subjects allows one to make informed decisions about what is interesting or amenable to one's intellect and what is less so.
By the way, I'm an IS professional who was seduced away from college by the lure of earning good money and a more interesting life then studying topics I wasn't interested in. I don't regret the course of my life and feel that I've obtained an excellent education from my own efforts but would appreciate at some later time the opportunity to once again devote myself to less-distracted learning in an environment so amenable.
I've recently begun running into barriers resulting from my not having a degree (of any sort) and have so far been able to negotiate these but they are becoming more and more bothersome. Indeed some peers in the same situation have begun obtaining cheap degrees simply in order to appease employers.
Back to the main point however, there are many folks with different needs and goals and a vast array of institutions for learning. It seems to me there's very little chance of determining a generalized answer and everyone need rather to determine what is right for their own unique needs and goals.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
You dont need to learn that stuff in university, Go read a few books geez!!
University is not for skill building, its for getting PROOF.
I know about computers, i know as much as a guy with a degree, I dont have a degree, how do i know so much? Because I taught myself.
But i still need a degree to PROVE i know what i know.
" Do any of you know of cirriculums that are good examples of a true well-rounded education? "
There is much to be said for spelling (orthography).
I've been out of school for over 20 years. My B.A. and M.S. are both in Computer Science. Along the way I took some business courses (about 1/3 of an MBA) and some non-tech courses. My experience is that except for the most fundamental technical courses, the knowledge gained from my computer science courses went stale fairly fast. When I was in school, I was taught "structured programming" on a mainframe. After school, I picked up OO programming, Unix, Linux, C, C++, X-Windows, and Java. If I have any regrets, it's that I wish I'd taken MORE non-tech courses. Business classes have been extremely useful as a foundation for post-university education. I do regret not taking a language in school. I've made several attempts since, to learn Japanese, with minimal success. Bottom line - computer science courses will be useful to your career - short term. Courses in business, the arts, world history, etc., will enrich your life. (As will travel). Of course, you've got to fulfill the technical requirements for your major, but as Mark Twain put it "Don't let school get in the way of your education".
[Insert pithy quote here]
No, I don't think this is what companies want. Companies (at least ones that stay in business long enough to pay their employees) want results, and last I checked, they don't care how you accomplish them, as long as they're delivered on time and on budget.
Isn't it amazing how the education system in this country is so screwed up?! It starts in public education and ends after your first two years of college. This whole "well-rounded" thing is there to hold you back an additional 2 years before you go into the workforce. "Know a little about a lot" and "widen your horizons" are just excuses. It's impossible to teach people everything they need beforehand. School isn't an initialization routine, yet for some reason, this is what schools try to do.
To be fair, there is the rare professor who teaches something beyond the subject matter. Most teachers basically program us with case statements, by drilling information into our heads and then testing us on it. This is nothing more than memorization. How many of you have crammed for a mid-term or final only to completely forget all the information one week later? This is because you didn't actually learn anything, and that's why the education system sucks.
What do I suggest? I mentioned the rare professor in the previous paragraph. This kind of prof teaches you how to teach yourself. Let's say I'm coding a tight loop and I need to learn some detail of switching theory or something. What do I do, cram for a test and get certification? No! I open the book on the subject, read about it, and then do what the book says. It never fails. You can learn almost anything better on your own (and by doing) than in school. Just like literature... I hated that class because they made us read some boring stuff, but nowadays, I routinely pick up a good classic and get all sorts of neat knowledge out of it, because it's something I want, not an assignment that's taking away from my Saturday night.
So how do you teach how to learn? You make the students think in directions they didn't know existed before. Why is a hammer built the way it is? What was Paul Revere's occupation (and consequently, what was he doing at midnight, before his ride?) Why does the website of Le Grand Louvre depict certain pieces of art? (Why those pieces instead of others?) Who is the source of the news we read and see and hear? (Who is that source's source? Where is the root of all sources?) These things aren't "just there"--people made decisions and took certain actions, but most folks don't think in these terms. That's because most folks were taught to think in tunnel vision mode. It's very difficult to get out of that mode once you're in it--try teaching a BASIC programmer C and you'll understand what I mean.
The problem with our education system is that we're taught to expect the teacher to know the answer, and we memorize case statements--we're essentially being programmed like computers that have web browsers built into the CPU. (Hey, it's a well-rounded operating system.) We should be taught how to actually use our brains and teach ourselves whatever we need to know on the fly. Like I said, school isn't an initialization routine.
There are, IMHO, two solid things that constitute a serious education. One is a broad comprehension of many fields. When one has this knowledge, one can generalize approaches and draw on many different patterns of thought. The holder of such can be called "educated", but perhaps "instructed" might be a better term.
The second is to know at least one subject deeply -- to the point of mastery. There are major changes in how you think when you have focused yourself enough on any one field. You know its boundaries, where it is malleable, the history of the field and what questions have been answered, and how evidence is evaluated in the field. The holder of this kind of training can be called "intelligent", and it is the practice of this that creates knowledge.
Both are required to call a person fully educated, and it is laughable to think that the average person, with average dedication, can complete this by the end of their bachelor's degree at the age of 22 or so. Currently schools try to teach the former, and only in certain fine companies will the latter be picked up by the cunning. Neither one is really useful by themselves -- the unintelligent educated man can make insights, but accomplish little; the uneducated intelligent man can achieve much that is empheral or unwanted.
In response to your final question, I should say "screw what a company really wants". What is needed is for a student to know a broad enough base to keep their mind open, and a willingness to work hard to develop focus and intelligence. You are soft iron -- you will be forged.
Thank you to all of those out there who have decided to attend trade school or "blow off" your general education requirements. It is people like you who allow those of us with an education to succeed. I hope you take great pleasure watching those "stupid college graduates" get promoted when you do not. It only makes sense after all, since they can relate to the boss, where you cannot.
Remember, there is more to your job than what is written in your job description!
During the last five or so years I've noticed that we've started getting an increasing number of undergraduates who don't know anything about things outside their own narrow field of so called expertise.
This coincides with the university's decision to "focus" the undergraduate programs. The idea was to streamline the process and to make the students better prepared for postgraduate studies.
As a result, more practical courses such as laboratory exercises involving the use of basic tools such as the oscilloscopes or multimeters were dropped in the favour of too theoretical physics and esoteric courses such as "The Philosophy of Natural Sciences", "History of Physics" and "Writing a Scientific Article".
Someone seems to have forgotten that there is only a small market for theoretical physicists. A typical argument is that "a Physicist will always be able to adapt to any job involving natural sciences". That was true for the physicists who graduated from us before the curriculum was streamlined. The people who graduate now with these courses under their belt will not able to do experimental research or get into engineering stuff unless they've.
In my opinion, creating fast-track options for university students is a recipe for disaster.
When you're 18-21 years old you DON'T know where you'll end up. It's better to study "useless" subjects and even "waste" time by taking a summer job in a completely different field. I, for instance, encourage potential postgraduate students to take a job in a hardware store or as an electricians assistant.
It's also important not to forget to hone your soft skills. All work and no fun makes an anti-social graduate who will hit trouble in work interviews and in work.
I did my undergraduate degree at Harvey Mudd College. While HMC doesn't have some of the same name recognition as CalTech or MIT, it is arguably one of the best math/science/engineering schools. Their engineering program is rather different than most. I graduated with a multidisciplinary degree in Engineering. Students don't graduate from HMC as Chemical, Electrical, etc Engineers. In addition to the broad approach to Engineering, HMC students' curriculum was divided 1/3 major, 1/3 math and sciences, and 1/3 humanities. The humanities program was structured to balance breadth and depth. Now that years have passed and I can reflect upon my education, I am very satisfied with their approach. Did my average class teach me skills that were directly transferable to the workplace? No. However, their academic strategy did give me exposure to solving a wider breadth of challenges and problems. If there is one thing that I have come to believe about working in the internet/technology industry is that the most important skill is the ability to continuously learn. I believe that if my education had been focused too strongly on the immediate issues of the day that I might not have developed some of the learning and problem solving skills that I find invaluable. That said, I do think that schools should look for programs to bridge the significant gap between the academic and commercial worlds. For example, at HMC, they pioneered an Engineering Clinic program. As a mandatory part of the engineering curriculum, Engineering majors would spend 1.5 years working on Clinic projects. Companies and government agencies would give ~$30K to the school to fund a team of students to do "real world" research or development projects. In addition to delivering something of value to the company, we were taught project management, documentation, and presentation skills that I found immensely valuable. Personally, I get very tired of overly "academic" prose and teaching styles. I believe in hands-on learning and problem solving. I would love to see more schools adopt or adapt programs similar to HMC's clinic program. Hell, maybe more Engineering schools should enter BattleBots competitions.. J -My $.03
Evolution: love it or leave it
I'm at Tufts University in Medford, MA. We have sets of core requirements, such as language, sciences, english, math, technology, and others, but only for Liberal Arts. Engineering students have a different set of requirements, focused more around technology, math, and, well, engineering ;)
That all said, I think it's notable that Engineering Students take Engineering Classes and Usually have an 'Engineering Oriented' job. On the other hand, Liberal Arts students often get a job in a field that doesn't neccessarily correspond to their major, and this, I believe is the philosophy behind a 'rounded' education.
This idea that one might go to college simply to become educated - not educated in a particular field - is more the goal behind college in a Liberal Arts education today. Although each student takes a concentration of courses to form a major, all students must diversify themselves and broaden their horizons.
Ieshan
Well, I'm probably going to be modded down to the dirt for this, but...part of your problem is that you seem to be taking an MIS curriculum at your school.
Not to get too down on those MIS folks out there, but in my experience, MIS programs are all very good at skimming lots of topics superficially, and very rarely delving deeply into any one area. In a way, it's understandable: they've tried to create programs that will teach "business" and "computers" in the same time frame as a regular CS or Business degree. You have to expect that there's going to be some topics in both areas that don't get covered well...
Now, since I can hear the flamethrowers revving up already, let me say this: I'm sure there are good MIS programs out there. In particular, I'm sure that your MIS program is the best one out there, and that you're getting a better education than everyone else. That said, I've sat through non-introductory CS classes with MIS students, and in my experience, the MIS students were far less prepared for the curriculum than the CS students.
To me, it sounds like you're dissatisfied with the content of your program, more than a "liberal arts" education. So, before you blame it on the school, why don't you try out a different major and see how things go. In particular, try out a CS major + Business minor (or even a CS/Business double, if you can), and see how you like that. I think you'll find that a lot of your complaints will go away...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
I dont attend University, I attend College. I am enrolled in a Computer Engineering Technology Course at St. Lawrence College in Kingston ON. I have many friends in CompSci at Different Universities across Ontario. The major difference between what those courses teach and what I learn has to do with 'Hand-on' experience. Currently in my third year I am in a projet group developing an application (NDA - sorry) for a company. This isnt some cheesy VB project either, we're talking QNX, XML, APache, Bluetooth, even programming an embedded webserver. Lots of fun client server stuff.
We're being trained and taught to work in software development, classes in Presentations, Technical Writing, Operating Systems, Discrete Math, Data Structures. Its not University so , I dont have to take Pysch or Sociology like my counterparts at Queens University. Our course is 3 years long (instead of 4 at university) and I am almost guaranteed a job, I already have a years experience working in a project group.
Our class size is small, way smaller compared to a university, and I actually get to know and interact with my proffessors, who are all retired from industry. At Universities, people end up being faceless in the eyes of their "not-enough-effort" proffessors.
The one important thing about an education is that its right for you, if your not enjoying it, then your in the wrong program, that simple. And the stigma that you have to go to University to get a real education is just that.. a stigma
Harder.. Better.. Faster.. Stronger
Perhaps the spelling errors in the article provide the answer to the question©
Can you find them all?
When I attended college, I was FORCED to take many classes I would have chosen not to take. I should not be forced to take a foreign language course if I am fluent in 3 languages, nor an art course if I already consider myself to be an "artist" - for the sake of being "well-rounded".
What really got me angry was my last year, when I needed an additional 3 credits in science, and so I opted to take a class that fitted my schedule (I worked while I attended college). That class was geology, however it's lab course was listed as a supplementary class. The lecture course satisfied my 3 credit requirement, so I tried to register for the course and not the lab. I couldn't do it! I spoke to the professor of the course, and he told me I HAD to take the lab. I spoke to the head of the science department, all the way up to the Vice President of the school and was told the same thing... I HAD to take a class I did not need! Since geology was the only class that fitted my schedule I had to sign up for it, and it's supplementary lab class.
Of course, I never attended the lab class and flunked it, but I didnt need the credit nor the class to graduate. In the end, I was forced out of a few hundred dollars for the cost of the lab class.
It's all about milking the students...
Of course, beyond that can be problematic. I was required to take a few writing/liberal arts-oriented courses. The problem is, while they are separate classes, they were almost exactly the same! The same goes for a couple of the history classes I took. I was also required to take a music appreciation class. I was basically required to waste 3 hours every Monday night listening to music (attendance required) in that class. Not that I'm complaining about having to hear music, but come on! I could have been spending the time on CS. I don't think potential employers are going to look at my transcript and praise me for taking a music class.
I pretty much was forced to waste lots of time and money (on books) for lots of classes I didn't need for my future life, but needed for graduation. Sure, they were all easy A classes, and some of them were interesting, but I could have spent more time filling up my cirriculum with more specific technical electives that would have been more impressive to employers looking for a good graduate.
Not only does this allow any college graduate to be able to converse intelegently about any subject, but it allows people the ability to change jobs in the future without going back to school.
Just because someone went to college, and recived a "rounded" education, doesn't mean that they are going to beable to have an intilient conversation with anyone.
As for your other point.. I don't think I want someone building my house.. that holds a "well rounded" degree in theater.
Double thanks to those who went to college "because they had to", got business degrees, and then made it so that every entry level warehouse job seems to have "must have a bachelor's degree and the ability to lift 50 pounds" on it.
Hyperbole kills.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
In the first few years after graduation, technical grads do much better, but they plateau earlier; they don't often move outside of the purely technical environment. They don't cultivate the soft skills necessary to handle people and negotiations.
Something to think about: how many people from history do we remember for their technical achievements? How many for the ability to lead others? How many for the ability to write, to create art? Why is Archimedes reduced to an anecdote while Plato and Aristotle are still studied?
I've known tons of CS people (I'm an arts grad who works in IT). Almost to a person they've maxed their earning potential by the time they're 30. I've known tons of arts grads; their careers are just getting interesting by 30.
The goal of many colleges is NOT to prepare a student for employment -- it's to give a student a fairly broad-based sampling of many disciplines while focusing on one.
I don't know what college the poster is going to, but I went to the number one ranked college in that survey (Truman) and found that much of the curriculum was designed only to prepare the students for further study and a life in academia. If that's not what you want, then you're probably in the wrong place.
It's not true only for disciplines like computer science, either. I studed journalism there, and many of the required courses were heavily tilted in favor of theory rather than practice. (A class on layout and design was only offered after the head of the communications department retired -- she blocked it as being too vocational).
Basically, many colleges are liberal arts schools, they're designed to teach academic disciplines -- not vocational ones. Choose your school wisely.
It took me three years of college, and three years of real-world work (after the first 3 yrs of college) to realize what I really wanted to study in depth. Now of course, many of my friends are already finished with their bachelor's degrees and are either working, or going back for master's degrees, but most of them still aren't EXACTLY sure about what they want to do in the real world. I'm sort of glad I kinda goofed off and waited to figure out what I wanted to do. Sure, some people may think I'm slightly 'behind the curve' for not finishing college in the first 5 years out of high school, but who cares?
Basically, I would suggest, since you're a senior, finishing school, working for a few years, and try not to worry about what you want to ultimately do for the next 10 years. I guarantee that after three years working you'll be passionate enough about something that you'll want to pursue it in depth, and not just take more general knowledge courses.
Obviously not yours.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
To answer these concerns, I think one has to broaden the historical context. When universities were first conceived of in the 14th century, most fields which we are familiar with today did not even exist in the imagination. You couldn't study information technology, any of the sciences or fields of engineering (as we know them today), or even art practice. One basically studied to become a clergyman, a lawyer, or a teacher. It wasn't until the 19th century that academia even began to consider training engineers and other practical folk within their halls using modern curricular methods, which as the poster points out, do sometimes have their drawbacks.
The point is that all of the institutional traditions of academia are set in place to create future generations of academics and professionals. We have similar discussion continuously in academia -- it has been pointed out than in steady state, a professor will train one graduate student to succeed him. Yet the average number of graduate students trained by a professor over his lifetime will often go into the dozens. Where do most of those students end up? Not in academia usually, but in industry.
My own personal opinion is that academia is not constructed for the practical "real life" experiences the poster is concerned about, nor is there any reason to expect that it would do a good job at it. That is primarily what internships and summer research experiences are intended for. Ideally, in good internship and co-op programs, not only will students bring their classwork education into industry and academic research, but students will bring back their practical knowledge into the classroom.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
I think it's good to have a well-rounded education - for three reasons. (1) You really don't know what you're going to do in later years (2) It's pretty much the only time you will get a chance to read and study all kinds of "other" stuff (3) Often times things that you have read in some other field could tangentially affect you - or even if they don't affect you, some glimmerings of what you studied might suddenly make sense (4) Finally, things keep changing in the world
Anyway, things will be very boring if you were only to study the stuff you'll do at work. And for the work stuff, there is little substitute to the real world in any case.
the ideas behind a "well rounded education" are solid.
"they" do not want us to be drones, so focused into one interest that we lose the abilities to interact with one another.
"they" want us to have multiple interests, so we can be "well rounded adults."
this does tend to cause problems, that universities are not eqipped to fix.
no matter what you go to school for, regardless of where you end up working, you will not be fully prepared. every business is different, even like businesses have different communities and different idealogies that no school could ever prepare someone for. (think office politics)
this could explain the rise in the number of technical schools. things like specific training, lifetime job placement, small class size and others are very attractive to prospective students.
is this the best way? for some.
for me? no.
but this is America, and we have a choice!
I have to agree with everyone who has said "yes" to this question. I graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in Telecommunications (was a CS major, but couldn't take the math). Unfortunately, it wasn't a technical program, and was focused around broadcasting (TV and radio) with a few small data/voice networking classes. No hands on. I now hold a job as a Network Engineer with a small telecommunications company. Mine is a decently technical position (I am in charge of the ATM backbone as well as a converged voice/data platform as well).
The only reason I hold this position is because of the "well-rounded" education that I formally received from UK as well as the miscellaneous studying (reading Slashdot and other publications and looking up the concepts listed), playing around with the computers I have, and breaking and fixing things that I was working on.
Do I wish I would have had a more specialized education? Sure. I would love to have UK offer classes on Cisco routers and the Lucent CBX 500 switches I work on every day. However, I feel I am much better off, as I will be able to eventually get myself a management position (and make a little bit more money).
Suggestion to all those who are reading this thread: Do the specialized studying in the extra time you have. Don't rely on your college classes to give you the information you need. You'll waste your time.
If you are looking for what you need to know for the next 5-10 years in IS, drop out from college, save yourself some money, and go to a technical school.
As a junior in college what I keep hearing is that college doesn't teach you what to think, it teaches you how to think. And that's why a well rounded education is absolutely important.
I plan on getting exactly that with a B.A. in CS at the George Washington Univ. It allows me to take good cs courses, like o.s. (linux kernel hacking), information warfare (last year they went out drinking with a l0pht member), algorithms, networking, database, etc -- while I still have to take courses in english, art, history, law, science, math, business, econ, statistics, etc, etc, etc.
I'm probably gonna double major in law (poly sci), now that I've been exposed to it.
The department is small, but it expects you to get involved, such as ACM programming competitions (we went to the international level last year) and student councils.
It's a great curicullum in a city that expects you to learn how to network, get resume and interviewing skills with internships, but it's also a clean and (as of 9/11) an incredibly safe city.
If you think you don't need a well rounded education, and I'm not talking about lots of different IS courses, I'm talking about english and history and art and all the other things you should check out in college -- drop out. You are wasting your money.
JC
What a sad, sad thread this is. All anyone seems to be concerned about is career, career, career and how their education will prepare them for a job. Is that all you want to do with your life - work? Don't you want to be able to enjoy good music, good literature, good cinema. Don't you want to be able to understand your place and your country's place in history and in the world? Don't you want to be able to think for yourself or will you just be another slave to the great marketing beast.
You people don't belong in universities. You belong in trade schools.
What sad and ultimately meaningless lives you will all lead.
The fundamental nature of the ordinary man is to go on out and do the best you can. -- John Prine
A number of times during the time I spent on the teaching faculty at a University, we reviewed how to adjust the curriculum. One of the more interesting things that often came up was various polls of people in technical fields (engineers, scientists) who had been out 20+ years. When asked what they thought they should have taken more of at the university, in retrospect, the majority response was for more humanities, philosophy, languages, literature and music. Few thought they needed more engineering/science courses.
Many of the technical details one learns in college are quickly outdated, and only serve the first few years of a career. After that, you must learn on your own what you need to keep ahead at work. Good, insightful courses in how our civilizations work, though, and how we live and think, are seen as highly valuable many years later.
I don't have a degree of any sort, merely lots of work experience. So far, I haven't been lacking employment opportunities.
I now face a choice: Do I enroll in college to pick up a degree (due to job market situation), or do I keep at it?
Long term, a wide exposure to many fields will almost certainly help me more than hinder. Where else am I going to be challeneged on the theory I've tried to learn on my own? Where else am I going to have a chance to really get into those subjects I love?
So yeah, go for the variety, and then later you'll have the chance to go for depth into those areas you enjoy. I'd say you'll be a better person for it.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
It is not possible that a University will teach you the exact skills you'll need on "the job". The reason for this is quite simple: the number of different jobs out there is pretty high, and the most successful workers reinvent themselves essentially every 2 years anyway. So whatever training you might get will be obsolete by the time you graduate anyway.
Therefore, the best skill to learn is the skill of learning. You must be broad before you can become deep.
If you want training in a specific skill, and have no interest in the wider world of learning, then go to a trade school.
But you can't simultaneous want a broad education (University Degree) and narrow tech training (trade school).
There's no shame in either, but pick what's appropriate to you.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Well, I hate to sound old school, but I think a liberal arts education is the best way to become well-rounded.
I have always been of the opinion that, since American high schools do very little in this area, the first four years of college should have a major focus, but a non-specific curriculum. You shouldn't spend your undergraduate years focusing on nothing but robotics, for example, never taking any other course outside of your discipline. Instead take some history courses, some humanities, some english, and maybe some classics. You can major in something like physics. Then when you get to grad school, you focus on robotics.
I know that is contrary to many current opinions, but I think too many universities are producing too many one-sided individuals. People end up learning a trade, but not learning how to think critically or analyze intelligently. Well, those are just my thoughts.
I've got a few comments on a well-rounded education.
First of all, a good education isn't obtained entirely in the classroom. Most of the practical, job-oriented stuff that I learned came out of part-time jobs and internships (which my academic background helped me get). I learned the basic theory for designing software in class, but I learned the practical skills to code parts of a complicated project by going out and doing it. It's hard to teach those things in a classroom, and I'd rather see schools help their students get real work experience (through internships and co-op programs in particular) than do a poor job of teaching this stuff in the classroom.
Besides, there's no way that a four-year education can prepare you for the first ten years of your working life unless you're planning a very dull career. In the three years I've been out of school, I've had to learn about a whole bunch of different technologies (like J2EE and wireless computing) that didn't really exist when I was in school. I can't even begin to guess what I'll be working with by the time I've been out of school for ten years. New stuff comes along pretty fast, so the best thing you can learn in school is how to learn quickly.
You said you were an Information Systems major? For most universities that means you know Visual Basic, and Cobol.
"Knowing the big picture is good, but how do
you get to that level if you don't have any skills?"
This is where general education comes in handy. Take lots of Math an Computer Science courses so you know how to break down problems you come across into bite size chunks. Take science courses so you can understand how your company's products work. Take humanities courses so you know how to relate to your customers. And take business courses to boost your GPA.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
The school I attend (Rice University) has something called distribution requirements. Basically this means you are required to take a certain amount of classes outside your major, but these are in broad categories such as science or humanities. Humanities and social sciences are usually not my cup of tea, but it is never hard to find a class that fills a distribution requirement and relates to your major (whatever it may be) at the same time (eg history of math or philosophy of cognitive science).
General Education requiremnets for graduation are a scam at my school. They have nothing to do with what I want to learn, and I take them bitterly, selling out my values just to get a good grade.
(You should take all those broad courses in high school. That's where you figure out what you want to do in life, and in college you go do it!)
The only real reason they demand these courses is to keep students like me in school for 5 years, since many colleges are run like a business, not a traditional place to learn and train for your interest.
...go to a trade school. A liberal arts education helps to develop you as a *person*. If I just wanted to learn to program, I could read a bunch of programming books and get a job doing it. But I wanted to learn Computer Science. So I learn what theory is behind it all. The math to go along with it. I am picking up a philosophy degree as well, both because it is interesting and believe it or not, it really helps with CS. You see, those "wastes of time" like learning method, or taking mythology or whatnot actually train you how to think. College is not meant to be a job training site - it is meant to develop you as an academic, and as a thinker. I'm not learning facts really, but I am learning how to apply knowledge. People are confused as to the purpose of a college education. It is to expand your mind, and refine its ability to reason. I'm a junior, and I can easily tell how much better I am at thinking and solving problems (not just CS problems) than I was before I started. Of course, in high school I assumed that there was no need for a wide educational base - I thought that I knew what I wanted to do, so why not get really involved in it, and forego the rest? Except one of the best classes I've taken so far was Russian Literature - not having to do with any of my 3 majors. Undergraduate study is a time to expand your horizons - doctoral work is when you can focus on one thing. ;-) Also, one fringe benefit of a liberal education is that it makes you a much more interesting person. I've found that generally, people with very regimented programs, like business or engineering, are barely *people* - they are so focused on their area of study that they fail to appreciate the value of anything else. Not very interesting conversationalists to say the least. In 10 years (probably less) it will catch up with them, and they will regret having not made the most of their time in college.
First let me start by saying that I am a Comp. Sci and Comp. Engineering student at a very large well respected University, I also happen to work for University Computing Services. The problem that I see with most major universities, and even smaller ones, is not in the general education requirement but is that they do not know how to teach not liberal arts majors. At my school I have to take 12 general educations class, and for the most part these classes where fun and intresting. I Enjoyed spending some time look at something other than math or code. The problem comes when you go into the actual computer science classes. The University does not seem to understand that what most students want is not the heavy theory but the more practical knowledge of what/how to do things. Some people will argue that Univesities teach you to become the true Computer Scientists that deal with number theory, if you want to learn about System Administration go to ITT Tech or some other trade school. The problem is that most employers will take the person with the degree in Comp. Sci from Univirsity X over the person with the MS degree from Trade School Y. In fact it is very scary to me how little some of these Comp. Sci. kids knows after getting the degree. As an example we recently hired someone who had just graduated from our own Univeristies Comp. Sci department. I ended up spending a couple of weeks having to show him how to do his job. At first he was useless and even now he is little more than a living breathing shell script. The big univeristies still have all the prestige but they are not teaching what the employers want, well rounded individual who have useful skill sets.
Why do we need well rounded cirriculums?
Firstly, it is important to not focus specifically in one area. By spending all of our time doing one thing, we miss basic skills such as learning to correctly spell words like "curriculum". (yes I noticed)
;-)
But most importantly, The true reason why we need to not focus so much on one area is to pick up chicks. Truthfully, who do you know that is interested in people with limited social skills? As much as porn websites would like us to belive, hot lusty babes do not go out in search of boring guys.
The moral is this: if you really wanna go out and get yourself a hot chick, don't limit your interests. Try some new stuff. Chicks don't like guys that spend all day coding in Visual Basic. Try something new like C++, Java, or Perl. Expand your horizons, Try new stuff, like compiling your own operating system, and chicks will be banging at your door. (Hopefully trying to get in and not out)
The Karma Police are out to get me
The purpose of a University education is to
develop problem solving abilities - giving the
student the theoretical bases that cannot be
aquired simply from buying a "Learn VB in 24
hours" from the local book store. Sure they
could learn Linux, compatability issues,
and all the latest trends. But that stuff
is EASY. The software industry is a complete
mess because people THINK they have all this
know-how. In all other professions, this would
not fly because there is formal acreditation:
think civil engineers who can use AutoCAD,
but don't know the basics of stress analysis.
Now a trade/technical school is different.
This is where less academically capable people
can learn something useful, knowing full well
that it may not get them to the cutting
edge of that profession. A good University
education teaches the student THE WAY HUMANITY
AQUIRES KNOWLEDGE AND ADVANCES TECHNOLOGY in
their particular field. Exactly what you learn
is unimportant, so long as you are able to
advance knowledge in a effective way afterword.
Once you can do that, you can research anything
yourself.
I don't know how this applies to the situation
explained in this article though.
>Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or CIO needs to make?
The entry-level IT person needs to understand the decisions a CEO or CIO makes.
Young people are a pain in the neck because they are not well-rounded. They come into companies thinking they have all the answers, but they don't understand what all the questions are. BTW, I'm describing myself here - I would not hire the person I was at 22.
Take the example you mention. What happens when management wants to only invest in creating content for Internet Explorer on Windows? A typical kid out of school will fight for making it work on Macintoshes, Mozilla on Linux, and possibly Lynx. The kid thinks management doesn't understand the Big Picture, but the reverse is true. It is the kid that doesn't understand all the data that management is using to make their decision. Another example is Linux within IT. There are Big Picture issues why management is afraid of using it.
Note that when I ran my own business (which eventually grew to 100 people in size), I made sure that our webpages worked on Lynx (Opera, HotJava, etc.) and I our poor little 486 running RedHat 5.2 handled huge volumes of e-mail. However, I also understand the big picture - I know why the decisions I made here do not apply to others. (The company has been bought out, we are using MS Exchange e-mail, which I find loathsome, but I don't dispute the decision, because I understand the big-picture).
>Do companies really want me to spend more time diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first place?
Yes. This is exactly the point. The company doesn't care about the code you right, they only care about whether others can fix bugs or make enhancements to your code 5 years from now. The "design" of the code is far more important than the implementation. It is actually far more complicated than that (heck, I've watched company's so afraid of actual coding that they get into design-paralysis, but that's a different issue). The point is simply that what your employer wants out of you is often different from what you want to do - that's why they pay you.
>My question for Slashdot readers is: Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
First, as an employer, I want somebody who will do what I want them to do. If that means writing content only for Internet Explorer, then so be it. Second, I want them to understand what is valuable to me. If I want Internet Explorer specific content, I don't want them to meekly submit and do it, I want them to understand why it is important to me. Fresh perspectives that youth tends to have are indeed valuable, but only when they can fit within my existing framework.
Finally, there is the general question of being "well-rounded". This is indeed the definition of a "university": its goal is not to educate you so much as prevent you from being ignorant. It depends upon your values. Some people find that ignorance is bliss. Do you want to be a raving ignorant paranoid (*cough* JonKatz *cough*) that thinks they always have the right answers? Or do you want to be somebody who knows enough of the Big Picture that never has all the answers?
You seem to be assuming that the entire meaning and purpose of a college degree is to prepare you for a job.
If that's your goal, if all you want are job-specific skills, you probably are in the wrong place. You want a trade school.
Of course, then all you get are job-specific skills. When those are out-of-date - or if you change fields - they're useless. Fortunately, what I learned both in and out of my major has proved to have more lasting relevance over the past 10 years.
Is a "well-rounded" education a good one? It's the only real kind. Anything else is a mere collection of facts and tricks to be memorized.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
We all take the course. Those of us who knew computers before the course get A's and the few who didn't get computers in high school tend to get B's. The next time we see computers will be 5 semesters later when we use the NMR or Mass Spec. Those B's have long since forgotten how computers work. If they hadn't wasted so much time on English classes to be well rounded and took a programming course they would have a much easier time using the machines.
Their lab reports do look nicely formatted though. Too bad they blead the Liquid Helium half way through the run.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Well rounded educations build enlightened people. Trade-Based educations build employees.
I cannot even believe someone would make this suggestion, the world needs people to think LESS of their business and careers and more about the important ideas around them... what a profoundly, supremely TERRIBLE idea.
Imagine a world where ONLY capitalistic function is relevant... more so than now, extended all the way to our education systems... branded, maximized, cost-structured all for building soul-less and ignorant employees.
I am really incapable of understanding why anyone would consider this... have we finally begun the wholesale-sale of all of Humanity? Would we stoop so low as to welcome only "job-function-learning"? Can you imagine a world completely without wisdom or context where everyone has been given a corporate-centered education - will we loose our ability to function in our community and devolve into endless sterile business dealings.
This kind of thinking is so glued to American Capitalism Ethos that im sure my ranting sounds crazy to those living in the Belly-of-the-Beast, but please people, there is more to life than work and money.... remember all those things that they TAUGHT YOU IN SCHOOL... remember your WELL ROUNDED and BROAD education?
Ignore liberal learning and you will be a simple tool. People with degrees are looked on as leaders, you had better learn what that means while you can. Do you really know what other people want out of life? Have you thought about what you want out of life? Money, mentioned in every one of your sentances, is not a very good answer. If you don't figure these things out now, other people will have an advatage over you. Think about how that will work with your career.
Don't think that you can lock yourself in a room and get things right. Some intersting self educated folks I can think of are Adolf Hitler (he thought like you too, hated French!), and the Unibomber (ended up hating everyone). Peer checks are important, and a good teacher's guidance is invaluable.
Find courses where you can express yourself honestly and recieve honest criticism. Propaganda classes ARE worthless. Classes that teach you how to analyze things and present them to others are valuable. Classes that force you to understand and catagorize unfamiliar ideas are useful. It will serve you and your friends later.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Looks like Cliff could have used a little general education. Cirriculums? How about spelling and Latin?
If all you want from school is to graduate immediately into a high-paying job in your field of choice, then yes, screw all those other courses, and forget being "well-rounded." But consider this: most people do not spend their entire lives in the same field of work.
... I was such a child at 5 ... it'll be different when I'm 45") you're wrong.
What were you doing when you were 5? Can you imagine doing that now, or 20 years from now? If you think you won't have the same perspective then ("But
The primary purpose of a good education is to give you tools to continue educating yourself. Quick example: every war movie ever made has the "touch-as-nails ass-kicking Sergeant who knows everything" and the "greenhorn Lieutenant who gets in the way." These are stereotypes obviously, but instructive. What's the difference between these two? It's experience vs. education.
I got a degree in English literature and philosophy and what am I doing for a living? Programming and database design. My education (and my parents) taught me how to teach myself, how to think and learn and enjoy it.
My education gave me a set of tools to apply to any problem, kind of like lock picks, or being a locksmith. No, they don't fit any lock exactly, but with a little screwing around I can get most locks open. Compared with having a specific key which smoothly and perfectly opens a given lock but is useless for anything else. The downside is that "screwing around" period, but I think my life's much more interesting for it.
Finally, to this point: "Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?" A resounding "yes." When you interview for a job you'll be up against any number of people with better academic credentials. The trick is, neither of you will know nearly enough to really do your job, and you'll both need extensive training before you're productive and can repay the company's investment in you. You have to know your shit, but that's only the baseline - if you didn't have that you wouldn't have made the interview. The interview's to discover if you can learn and adapt and think, and that's the most valuable thing you can learn in school.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
What the fuck is wrong with her face? Look at http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/5926/tyra12 .jpg . She looks awful. And she's a nigger, so it's not even worth my time.
Frankly this discussion is good.
But its to no end, this generations answers (and by this generation I refer to the people responding) will not be the right answers for the next.
To me, college was more about jumping, or being tossed into the great big swimming pool and figuring out how to manage your finances and making up your mind about all of the choices that you had.
I recall there were lots of people who had no idea what they were going to do when they grew up.. there were a few rare Medicial School majors, or people headed for Law school.. but they were simply on autopilot as dictated by their parents or some other role model at home.
And you of course can recall there were those just there to party and waste time, going through the motions of getting an education.
I worked hard at my school and stuck out a major in Engineering, then wound up in a related field that generally wouldn't accept my major as an entrance fee.
It turned out, for me, the old maxium "it's not what you know, but who" that panned out and in quite an unexpected way.
I'd forget all the baloney about "taking control" and being "in charge" of your life.. and learn to get along with other people, and learn self control and tolerance.. those are the true gems of a college or university education.
And like it our not, guess which schools you'll likely run into and form friendships with people who might have similar interests and be in a position to help you find a job in the future.
You can't be a complete socialite and work from day to day, you do have to learn some tradable skills in college, but not to the exclusion of all else.. even Bill Gates worked with two or three people in the beginning.
As for dragging in the "worthless" categories like "Linux and ADA" stuff.. that's a personal bias, and shows how greedy the people who say they are worthless are.. it shows their desperation.. curiosity and tolerance are the real desirable attributes.. few people want to shout and desparage other people they want to cooperate with and ask for a job. If say RedHat stock were $395 a share and they were hiring 50,000 people by the end of the year, Linux would be all the rage and IE compatabile webpages would be periah.
The worst thing a Liberal Arts major could do is simply dellude themselves into thinking the world would change to suit their educational background, that's akin to walking around with your nose in the air.. in fact the desired effect is highly unlikely.
The degree that I will graduate with is a Bachelor Of Computing, or B.Comp., which basically consists of this:
I take about two classes from the CIS department each semester, for a total of 16.00 credits (one class is 0.5 credits)
A total of 5 math courses, including Calculus, Matrix Algebra, Numerical methods..
Finally, I must complete 4.00 credits (8 classes) in an "Area of Application".
Basically, I take computer science, and then pick a field that I am interested in to fill out my schedule. Should I chose, I can take 2.00 more credits and recieve a Minor in my area of application.
Personally, I have chosen to take Geography as my area of application because I would like to put my computer skills towards a geographical initiative of some kind.
More info about this program can be found at the University of Guelph (Ontario) Website.
Some college students would study whatever economic theories I taught, without asking why. Even worse, they just study, never learn. High school didn't provide them environment, nor encourage them to see the real world. Theories become irrelevant, not because they are irrelevant, but students were ignorant about the world.
Knowledge is only not applicable, never useless. You never know when will some knowledge is applicable. And the critical thinking behind a lot of knowledge could be applicable in some completely irrelevant situation.
We have general college education not because we don't want to provide students more in-depth knowledge in the relevant area. It is because the high schools fail to make students to learn the skills of learning. They fail to open student minds. They also fail to make students to learn what they don't know. College become the remedy.
A sig is redundant.
I am stunned. In the tens of thousands of posts I've read here over the last couple of years, I'd not have thought I'd ever have seen such resounding support for full-blown college. When I clicked on 'Read More' I expect to see an endless flame about why college sucks. Instead I see a literate discussion about roundedness and thinking! COSMIC!
I'll add my own bit here. I was totally yawned out by Introduction to Psychology. I paid attention, I got a B. I use that stuff more now mid-career than I do the engineering and science I was taught. Most problems are about people and the 'roundedness' was important in dealing with people.
What'll be next? /.ers argueing that finishing college is a good idea? I'll be dieing of a heart attack when it happens. ;-)
-- Multics
As someone who has a professional degree (I'm a physician), has helped establish 2 venture funded companies, run a small IT department, worked in the private sector in IT, security and sales just for starters, I can't say enough good things about a well rounded education. I think that any idea of specializing early in life is misguided. Sure it produces narrow thinkers who can't manuever when push comes to shove. When major economic changes come or even life changes, you need to be able bob and weave like a metaphorical boxer.
That ability can't be had by specializing. My liberal art emphasized collegiate education is at least partly to thank for my successes. Hooray small colleges. If nothing else, a broad education preps the mind for accepting new ideas, something that a narrow educational perspective just can't be credited with.
I think everyone is missing a serious point here: life is an ongoing learning process (in or out of college) and as such we need to be aware of what our environment is teaching us.
College isn't just about the things thrown at you in your major or general education courses, but about the experience, environment, and relationships you make. The one thing I've taken away from my college experience is how interact with people on all levels of life and how to learn from the environment we've created as a result. Whether it be my boss or his boss, my family, or random people I meet. It's all an environment of learning.
Why should college teach students about things they need to know for only ten years after graduation when they can focus on teaching them how to learn for the rest of their lives. There are many ways of doing this and I've seen it from all kinds of directions. Our VP of Operations has a BA and Ph.D. in Philosophy but is one of the most technically savvy people I've met in my entire life. He didn't take one technical class in college. On the other hand, I work closely with "Mr. Certification" who couldn't solve a real problem to save his life and constantly needs to be told what to do.
My point is that just giving a person 10yrs worth of technical skills to get a job after college doesn't say anything about how that person will do in life. Sure, they may be able to get a job faster and have no problem paying back any debt incurred as a result of their education, but you or I won't want to work with them because they weren't taught how to learn, interact with real people, and the "experience" they could be recieving as a result won't have any affect on their social skill and understanding how to make a system work.
It's my honest belief that all courses I took in at my University (GE and Major), haven't taught me anything but to be a well rounded person, both technically and socially. It was the environment, not necessarily the material.
i agree, and believe that thinking for yourself should be a focus as early in life as possible. public schools really should progress beyond training children for the factories of today and providing day care services.
it doesn't seem to me that the public school system has really advanced much in the past century or two, given the animosity occasionally demonstrated towards free thought as well as the strong disciplinarian atmosphere that seems to pervade schools.
in some ways, public education (i mean k-12) seems to have drastically deteriorated, as in an 8th grade final from 1895.
A lame IT "degree" doesn't cover CS theory.
Getting a BS means taking crap like French Art.
This just isn't right.
CS majors should know about Knuth, understand
the significance of those damn Turing machines,
write a bit of VB code (how that sucked!), and
know how a compiler really works.
CS theory and CS practice are both important.
It disgusts me that people can graduate without
learning how to write an OS, but hey, they know
about French art!
If you're too well rounded then you're not very sharp.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I have worked in IT and non-IT jobs over the past 10 years, and I have discovered that ALL companies want employees with two skills:
1. The ability to communicate.
2. The ability to think.
You don't get these skills in a Finance class, or a Software Design class. You get these skills in English Composition classes, Philosophy classes, Art and Music classes, and Science classes. This is what a "Well-Rounded Education" means (or at least SHOULD mean).
If you are applying for a job in a particular field (IT, for instance), they assume you have a basic set of skills in that field. However, what will set you apart from those who are competing for the same position is your ability to communicate with others (written and verbal) and to demonstrate the ability to use what you have learned as a basis for learning new things. These skills will land you your first job, and by continuing to exercise these skills in the workplace, you will get raises, promotions, and new job offers.
However, I feel it is sad that you seem to view your college education as a means to obtain a job. If all you want is to work in the IT field, you can go to a Technical School, get a certificate in Computer Programming, and go to work. However, your future potential will be limited. The reason I went to University was to improve myself, not just to get a good job. My education gives me the ability to evaluate critically any idea to which I am exposed and to decide for myself the value of those ideas. My education gives me a lens to focus my view of my experiences and to learn from them. I am a more self-reflective person because of my education. I can examine my own feelings, thoughts, and belief in a critical, rational way. I can discuss art, literature, science, history, philosophy, politics, and current events in a meaningful way with others. In short, my education helped me become a more well-rounded person.
Here's one thing you need to keep in mind when thinking about what you want to learn- there will always be skills that cannot be taught. Learning how to listen, *kindly* criticize in a subtle manner, and various other people skills will never come through textbooks. You have to go out there and learn by experience. CEO's doubtfully launch large companies right from the start- if they found a company, they only have a handful of employees to utilitze.
Colleges already teach what of much you know. You are given skills that will carry you through your specific career. It's up to you to learn how to put them together. There is no right or wrong way much of the time.
Lastly, I think learning how to design a program is more important than making it yourself. Somewhere down the line, you may run into the ultimate mother of all huge projects and will have no clue as to where to start. None of these things may be mandatory when you graduate into the big world, but they will always help in some little unseen way and give you a boost up.
you idiot, it's "sucks and blows."
Every time I run into this argument, I keep wondering what people like you are doing in a university. You're not there for what the university teaches. You're there for vocational skills - that's it. So, why are you bothering with a university? Why are you wasting their time, and your money? Why aren't you letting someone who could _get something_ out of that education in, when you obviously (a) don't get it, (b) don't give a sh*t, and (c) really just want those initials after your name.
Seriously - what you're after is what vocational schools are about. What's the point of a university? It produces research. It produces well-rounded people. It makes you learn how to learn, so you can go do it yourself.
If all you want is how to program, how to configure a Cisco box, or how to sysadmin, save everyone a lot of trouble, and go find a VocTech school.
"It doesn't exactly do students a favor by exposing them to the forrest until they have a good grasp of the concept of the "tree"
Start with the forest, then start zooming in.
Details are boring. Boredom is learning death.
As to the question "Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
Yes.
They want someone who has proven themselves capable of putting up with endless bullshit...
And not someone who could simply start their own company. Heaven forbid if the Universities were to produce competitors!
University students are initiates going through an institutionalized hazing process. It's not meant to make sense. If you really want to learn something useful, do it on your own time.
I'm a BSEE, MSEE, and MBA, and I taught a graduate level lab also. What I can tell you is this - learning to learn is essential, but not if it is not balanced with some practical skill. When I taught my class, I made sure my students knew how to write and create electronic documents. Nobody got 100% on their lab report unless I got handed an all-electronic document, because an employer won't be filing paper here in 2001. And yet, I still emphasized writing skills.
But even more importantly, I made sure my students knew how to design FPGAs (programmable chips) with tools from the major EDA tool vendors like Mentor Graphics, not the university-designed 10-year-old tools that nobody uses for mainstream design. The fact that I had used Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics tools in school made me a shoe-in for my first job in Silicon Valley and nearly everywhere else I had an offer. It's too bad that my IC test prof made her course 99% theory and 1% practice, because I only ever used 1% of the theory and 99% of what I practiced. My philosophy course didn't help out much either, by the way...
For more information about New Century College, go here:
http://www.ncc.gmu.edu/
Execute? [Y/N] _
I have a CS degree and can tell you without a doubt that having a well rounded degree is very important. Here's why:
First, you have to sign up for "fluff" classes so you have free time on Friday and Saturday nights.
Second, you need those skills learned in your communication/psychology classes to meet/pick up girls at the party/bar.
Third, you need to pay attention in Astronomy class so you can point out constellations and a little mythology behind them to that girl you picked up in step two. God, if only more people knew how easy it was...
it seems to me that my view on college is a bit skewed from others'. i've always viewed college as a learning experience, not a DeVry professional trainer.
if you want to learn a trade, go to a trade school. it's cheaper and you'll get more out of it.
but, if you want to learn, and i mean really learn, go to college.
what else is there? if all you care about is how computers work on the inside, go to a trade school. if you care about how the algorithms are built that make up the x86 arch, go to college.
if all you want is a job in the tech industry, go to a trade school. if you want to know how it all works, go to college.
it's that simple.
and the Irishman took the fly in his hands and yelled, "spit it out!"
I think education should not be about making a living; rather it should be about making a life. How can education contribute to living better? Job training is one way, but only one.
Learning to think and analyze problems is a start to a more well-rounded education, and will benefit students more fully in the long run, whether one is a geek programmer or an English teacher.
Learn to develop your opinions and beliefs, support them by learning how to construct a good argument and to write well, and be open to revising these beliefs where appropriate.
You talk of "well roundedness" then speak of it's importance in a career. What about spiritual/philosophical/etc well roundedness. What does a well educated sysadmin do when he experiences the "existential hells" we all go through when we think about life, meaning, etc.
"... skills that would help us in the first 10 years of employment"
That's what trade schools are good for.
Anonymous posts are filtered.
Im not sure that its really a failure elementary/high school. Most highschools are motivated to adjust their ciriculum so that they get good numbers. Numbers being State assessment scores, percent that go on to higher education, percent graduating. Now percent graduating and percent going on to higher education can be conflicting, but if states simply put more(financial) weight on the higher education numbers, the schools will adjust.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
I received my bachelor's degree from the US Air Force Academy in 1978. I graduated with 181.5 "hours" of courses, including 12 hours of military training (most did not count to graduation) and 24 hours of physical education. I took courses in management, philosophy, law, writing, literature, film, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, chemistry, physics and others not related to my computer science/digital engineering major. My computer science and digital engineering courses emphasized both theory and practical work. I feel that it was a good, well-rounded education. The cost was semesters when I took 21 hours of courses (including 6 hours of mathematics), having a limited, warped social life, and four years of commitment to the military. Another interesting aspect of this education was that all of the courses were graded on a bell curve, i.e. equal amounts of As and Fs. This meant that folks did fail out of school. I have always been glad of the breadth of my education, having used nearly all of it in my 23 year professional career. So, a well-rounded education is possible, but at costs which neither universities nor students would be willing to pay in the current academic environment.
4 Year Ivy League Comp Sci Degrees are FRAUD!
Why? i am talking here about the time period from 1979 to 1987...
The Personal computer had been shipping for a while (apple II) and even later in 1992, November the IBM PC and the Apple Lisa (and early Mac), and yet most huge universities still had Computer Science in the LIBERAL ARTS DEPARTMENT!
I am not kidding you! The liberal arts departments of most major universities controlled all the rules and forced computer scientists to only get to take about 8 courses in computers to graduate. The Math department typically wants power so it corrupts comp sci to include no less than FOUR courses : calculus, Discrete Math 1, Discrete Math 2, and Statistics. I had to take them and they have very little bearing on my career as a systems programmer except for the matrix math for 3d. I learned nothing from college about programmiung except that the professors and TAs are all newbie losers who only know fairy tales and myths about how a computer really works, or how a mainframe really works, or how a comercial compiler really works, or how peripherals really work.
No wonder high school aged hackers without college degrees created and staffed all of silicon valley and created the software revolution.
The best and brightest in those years usually dropped out of the major universities to go straight to work at the premiere corporations in the personal computer revolution.
Consult the old Microsoft Press book about famous legendary programmers "Programmers at Work"... a few of the oldest had collegiate training most taught themselves.
Apple's Blue Meanie crack squad of gurus was led by some genius grade dropouts. Some employees were hired at 14 and 15 and did not have time to drop out of college, they probably had to drop out of high school.
But thankfully all the ivy league crap universities learned their lessons and one by one most were overthrown and the ENGINEERING COLLEGE usurped the comp sci programs!
hurray!
now people with degrees from 1995 onward typically have useful college degrees in computer science and are not complete dolts.
Nevertheless, a PHD in Computer Science typically is not hirable because most know nothing at all about programming and Dr Dobbs journal has routinely talked about this true and semi-pstartling fact.
A likely employer of these "useless no-ambition" Comp Sci Phds asks : do you own a personal computer? What sort of things have you written that you can show us?
The answer is usually a bunch of excuses... but esentially they do not program on their own, or as a hobby, or with any passion, and many do not even care to own a useful personal computer.
I tried to change the system at a major university that was too well rounded. All I got from the dean of the college was "We are here to help people to teach themselves, to think. We are not here to create fodder for the business community. this is not a trade school". My protest ? That they did not teach C language in 1983, yet offerred a ton of other languages, including some oddball ones in the business college such as various IBM mainframe business report languages. I had other complaints about how everything was 5 years behind and drab and boring and too much emphasis on every program having to run on the mainframes.
Thankfully these days are past. But now an idiot wants to poistulate that we go back to those dark days?
3 courses of art
3 courses of sociology and anthopology
also psychology courses, a foreign language requirement, History, US Government, Classics, English courses and a lot of math. Biology, Physics, Chemistry, then a paltry few courses in computers for your Comp Sci Major requirements.
75% of the Comp Sci degree is well rounded crap from all the figting factions of the Liberal Arts college demanding to brain wash the masses. And they detest computer programmers and their rosy futures of pockets full of cash the most with their embitterred socialist viewpoints.
I am glad to hear that the revolution is almost over and that liberal arts colleges no longer dictate what a Computer Scientist should have to know.
Note that some people have difficulty with certain
courses. Hence curricula are often adjusted for
a more even distribution of graduates. Entrance
requirements are also adjusted for the same reason.
This is what is meant by "well rounded". (And BTW
this is an absolute fact.) Please don't get me
wrong, I am not complaining, just explaining.
Wouldn't it make more sense to teach things that will help students early
in their careers, like technical skills and other trade/foundation skills that
are often required of entry-level, non-management employees?
Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or
CIO needs to make? Do companies really want me to spend more time
diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first place?
(What about just documenting the code?) Knowing the big picture is
good, but how do you get to that level if you don't have any skills?
Marvelous idea. I would love to find candidates who understand that there is more than one programming language in the world and that I have already picked the language(s) to be used on this project. Or that there is more than one type of version-control software. Heck, some days, I would settle for candidates who know how to use a spell-checker. (Side rant: does anyone really expect me to hire them when they cannot take the time to run a spell-checker over their resume and cover letter?)
Realistically, I would like to find candidates who understand that, for every hour of coding, there will be at least eight hours of writing documentation (functional specifications, technical specifications, GANT charts, test plans, release notes, implementation instructions, support documentation, user instructions). I would like them to understand that their performance and that of our department will be judged on them being able to do the whole job, not just writing an hour's worth of code and walking away.
Obviously, an entry-level will not be making the "board-room" decisions. But understanding some of the rules of business will help in the understanding of why the code specs call for certain seemingly unnecessary functions. The excessive error checking; the massive fail-safe transaction rollback logic; the orderly shutdown logic; the remote monitoring processes.
I was once given a programming team for a credit card project and none of the coders had ever had a credit card. They had no idea about any part of credit card use or reconciliation. So they tried to leave out the pieces that didn't make sense to them. And most of them were dumped back out on the bricks. The rest expressed anough interest in learning that they were deemed salvageable. But teaching people how the world works while they are coding it is massively painful and not good for the blood pressure.
Bottom line, I want people whose technical skills are matched by real-world experiences. You want to write flight simulators? Go get some dual instruction in a Cessna 150. You want to write weather-forecast software? Go sign up for one of the weather bureau's spring tornado watcher classes. You want to write business software? At least take a class on double-entry bookkeeping.
Remember, programs are high-speed substitutes for human reasoning. If you don't understand the problem, how can you be a part of the solution? If all you know is how to write compilers, you are in a terribly limited job market.
Architecture School is a well rounded curriculum that encompasses philosophy, applied technology, history, design, abstract thinking, and creative problem solving. It is a good curriculum for any career which values these skills.
Work as if you might live forever, Live as if you might die tomorrow.
From the point of view of an outsider, i think american universities have an advantage. Since you guys get to pick most of your classes (or thats the idea i have about them), the student can be as specialized as he wants. There are countries (such as mine) where even in the best of best of colleges, we have six courses a semester and almost all of them are part of a given "program" which you cannot escape or change in any way. So you get to learn exactly what they want (which is allways very very bad, prehistoric garbage).
OTOH,Im all for the german idea of universities, if you dont want to be a specialized academic, take a three years technical degree that will pay as much (or even much more) than what an academic makes.
So what should universities do? give the student the freedom to choose most of their courses, let them shape their own future. Let them mix in master's degree classes if they want, and credit them for it. And those who take only the easy courses, let them go out in life and try and find a job with a BS degree in cooking burgers and american anthropology.
Alex
NO SIG
What is the purpose of education?
Some say it is vocational; i.e. the purpose of education is to prepare you for your job.
If you believe that, then there is no reason for a well rounded education. As a physics/ math double major, the political theory course for which I'm now reading the Republic is a complete waste of time; it won't help me prepare for whatever job (or grad school) I'll have after I graduate.
However, I believe that the purpose of education is to educate people in a broad range of topics. Yes, we focus on a particular field (a major), but good citizens should know much more about the world than what they need for their job.
Even if I don't remember any of the details of Plato (or whatever non-math/physics course I happen to be taking), it is important for everyone to practice thinking about ideas that have very little direct application to their jobs.
I realize that I'm being idealistic, or even haughty, but the purpose of attending college is not vocational training; it is to learn about a broad range of topics and to think in many different ways.
You are criticizing a well-rounded education, but you can't spell 'forest'. Maybe you should take a few more humanities courses (i.e. hooked on phonics)
One thing you will find when you go to work in a large corporation is that the people who get ahead generally don't know what they are doing. They are selected for advancement based on personality factors that allow them to tolerate a high degree of meaningless, bureaucratic routine and get along with others so inclined.
No university is going to teach those skills, nor should it, although many of the professors are exceptionally adept at departmental politics themselves.
I've found that for being well-rounded, nothing beats mathematics. The ability to apply mathematical concepts in analyzing a wide range of problems has been an enormous and unexpected asset. I've found my technical progress barred by the limits of my mathematical training more than any other area.
Personally, I've found that after many years, the courses that seemed most useless in college have afforded me the greatest enjoyment in later life. The literature and history courses never go out of date and form the basis of the contemplative pleaures that supply most of life's satisfaction.
Almost all the time during my studies in the unversity I was complaining about courses offered there. It seemed too me that almost all of them are either too boring or too obsolete. And although in some cases that was really true, currently i think that the cirriculum was more or less the right one.
It is almost impossible for university to prepare the graduates for the current situation on the job market. It takes years for a prefessor to prepare a good course.Much more important is to give the student foundation (e.g. courses that never get obsolete, like "theory of compilers" etc.) and teach him to learn things himself. This is the approach that will make you ready for the job market and not the one that includes the course on the latest "blah-blah-blah" technology.
At Oregon State University, we have a 'baccalaureate core' that consists of 48 credits and a writing-intensive course (WIC). 48 credits is roughly a year of teaching. What I find interesting is that the courses are typically high school level courses, in that everybody should have learned most of the stuff while in high school. And it's a state school.. Shows how much faith they have in the schools here.
On top of that, these courses, which everybody has to take to get a BA or BS are taught by the most burned out grad students ever. With classes of over 100 people, it's pathetic how little you come away with. And don't expect any help from the instructors or anything, they don't have the time or inclination to be helpful given the class population.
[steps off his soapbox]
It goes along with the prevalent attitude in U of "just teach me what I need to know to get a real good paying job (I don't care if remain a dummy)". Of course, that is immature and foolish, and any prof who tries to redirect that mindset into something more mature is doing some good.
Also, the global multinationals only want cogs who will take their place quietly in the consumerist machine.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
A few years ago I tried going to a bigger university but I couldn't keep up with the classes and the long hikes across campus.
Now I'm 6 months away from getting an associates degree in computer programming from ITT. My GPA there is 3.97 and I'm hoping to graduate at the top of my class but the classes are mostly easier than what you would find in a college.
I think I'm pretty competent with C++ and Java now, but I wonder if anybody will hire a guy like me who only has one two-year degree and hasn't worked at all for years.
What really bugs me is that most of the other students in my class are getting passing grades but really wouldn't be able to handle even a QA position and aren't really looking for programming jobs anyway. I know a lot more than they do, but what's the point when they have far better credentials and work experience than me.
If you don't learn a bit about history, literature, politics, economics, etc. then how do you expect to understand and appreciate Monty Python? Especially something like Mony Python's The Holy Grail.
My mother showed the Holy Grail to regular high school students, advanced students and to an adult education class. Each group laughed at different aspects, with the better educated students catching much more of the humor (and laughing the most.)
Learning to code to the exculsion of anything else isn't going to help you _create_ something with your skills, like, say computer games or spreadsheets. The game Civilization required a good bit of history, politics, economics and war to create, and to play. Creating a spreadsheet requires you to know that financing and accounting exist.
A well rounded education is also a common ground you can use to talk to other, non computer people. The hardest thing about programming isn't the programming. It's trying to communicate with non-computer geeks. Translating requirements spoken in Business Suit-ese into something specific enough to code is often painful. You need a little understanding of how They(tm) think. And since you don't have the specialized business knowledge that the suits have, they need _you_ to let them know what you can and can't do with computer programs (such as knowing that they can convert their hand updated spreadsheets and printed reports into a nightly job that pulls the data from a database, formats it in Crystal Reports and emails it out to the relevent parties thus saving X man-hours of labor/budget/time.)
In short, you need well-rounded education for humor, for creativity, and for communicating with groups that don't think like CS geeks so that you can actually use your uber-elite coding skills to do something useful.
doesn't mean you didn't go to college to learn.
:)
I took a lot of courses that weren't required for my major. College is what YOU make of it. You can stay in the box, and follow a prescribed path, or you can take detours. It's up to you.
I'm not what college is useful for these days. What I was trained for in college, I don't use at all. What most of my success has been based on is critical thinking skills that I had before I went to college. If it wasn't for the fact that a college degree is such a powerful credential, I would've passed on it. That is why most people in college are in college. They know it gives them an edge in reputation over those who don't have a degree. Some of that is undeserved and unwarranted.
Society doesn't have to send its unattached young to college. It can draft them into the military, and shove them in front of a meatgrinder as well. To the people who run this country, it's about the same. They really don't give a shit. Society can also make you get married at an early age, and encourage you to have kids. That also ties you down in a lot more ways than just being in hock can. If you're indebted, at least you have freedom of movement, but if you're married with children, moving becomes a lot harder to do. Governments generally like you to stay put, so they can track and control you.
But you're right about unattached people being a threat to the status quo. But every once in a while, one or two slip through the cracks. Like me, for instance
My degree is in Math (21 years ago). The school did not have a degree in CS although it's program was one of only two in the state that meet the ACM guidelines for a CS curriculum. That was my 2nd try at school, the first being a Music Ed major which I dropped out and went on the road with a band for 7 years.
Here are a few thoughts on what I've seen in schools over the years that cause this problem.
CS mechanincs (programing languages, styles, methodologies, etc) being taught seem to be the "old" stuff. My son (who is now in college) was told to take Pascal or Basic (old style non-structured basic, not even VB) as "the language" for his CS degree. It was only when I sent a note to the advisor asking why, when these are not used much, especially in the area he was studying for (Web based applications) that he was "approved" to take C. Jave at the time was out of the question as was VB. Heaven forbid the mention of Perl, Python, or Expect.
It has been a real drag over the last 22 years or so to have to spend 3 to 6 months unlearning the useless information and retraining folks so that they can become useful and productive.
Thanks to any and all of the schools that do teach the currently in use languages and even some of the ones that are starting to be used.
I have to admit, my problem has not been with the liberal arts education part. The problem has been with professors that teach only what they "have to". There is quite a difference in a course that is taught "by the book" and one that teaches the "book" and continues on to what is current today. African history was much more interesting when we learned about the Zulu's history and then went and discussed where they are today and what is happening in that same area. This made it a lot easier to talk to the folks from a company that has their home office right in that area. Who would have guessed that an African History course would have helped in understanding what was needed for the functional specifications for a programming project?
"I want to know God's thoughts...The rest are details." Albert Einstein
Do Univiersities need to add more "career development" type classes? Probably. Should this be done at the expense of a well-rounded curriculum? Absolutely not! Excuse me while I stereotype for a minute, but people who know a lot about only one thing are often narrow-minded and boring. Sure, those other people that you hang out with who are just like you - they might find you interesting, but the rest of us don't. :-P
The "well-rounded education" is not there soley for people who haven't decided on a career yet. It is there to teach you how to think about a variety of different things in a variety of different ways. It helps you out in your future life by allowing you to hold an intelligent conversation with people whose interests are divergent from yours. It allows you to better understand world events, enjoy a good book or play, or whatever it is you decide you like to do when you aren't working. If you think this is a waste of your time, then you belong at a vocational school, not a university.
Some universities decide to do this by having a core curriculum, and my friends who went to U Chicago loved theirs. My alma mater, Johns Hopkins, did it differently. Each class and major was categoriezed as history, writing, science, etc. We had to take a certain amount of classes in each of these areas. As a result, we got a well-rounded education while retaining some choice over our curriculum. Hate Post Modern Literature? Fine. Take the Anthropology of Sex instead. (I did.) Many of these classes had no direct practical application to the career path I had already chosen, but after a 6 hour organic chemistry lab, they were pretty fun. I just went to Eurpoe for the first time, and I am so glad I took Art History instead of another undergraduate science class full of information that has either become outdated in the last 4 yeats or been repeated during graduate school.
From some of the comments here, it seems like there is a demand for management and business training. I think this type of training should supplement, not replace a traditional university education. And there *are* schools that offer MBAs. Perhaps the training you seek is already there?
Just my $0.02,
-m.
--
no sig, just a website: http://www.bluehurricane.com
UC Santa Cruz (Not just for hippies anymore! no matter what they try and make you think) does a decent job of it. Regardless of your major, you're basically forced to take one class of every major type-- Including two topical "Bullshit" courses (Disney! Muppets! Wine Tasting!).
You have to take a couple "computationally intensive" classes (math, astronomy), two intro to humanity courses(history, psych, sociology, linguistics, etc), two intro to earth sciences (chem, physics, and comp sci/eng. Don't ask), intro to arts/lit (Art, digital media, film, music, lit) and, well, I'm sure I'm missing some, but that's a quick rundown... Also, they try to teach you to hate it right off the bat with a core course.
Not that I'm bitter or anything, but my core course said more or less "These three things are killing the world in general, and California in particular: Farmers, Southern California, and High tech." This went over *REAL* well with me because I was a CE major from southern california whose family farms...
Hasta luego,
Exantrius
"The generalist knows so little about so much that eventually he know nothing about everything. The specialist knows so much about so little that eventually he knows everything about nothing."
I just recieved my BSCS from the University of Texas at Austin - a really great program, but it is *very* specific - math, engineering, logic logic logic. In hindsight, I wish I had more of a humanitites education. I find myself now going back and reading "important" books and talking to my liberal arts friends about what philosophy books i should read. Maybe its the two-months of tech industry unemployment, but this sysadmin has become pretty reflective. http://www.deceptakahn.com
deceptakahn
Are we going to college for the right reasons?
Should we be in college, or a directed "tech" school/career program/trade school?
The idea of the university as a job-training ground is relatively recent. The original idea was to promote academic and scholastic learning. You went to university to learn about a subject -- and possibly contribute to the body of knowledge on the subject.
Today, the popular notion is that you can't get a decent job -- or be qualified for a decent job -- unless you go to college. This notion is popularized by both the press, businesses, and the universities themselves. But should this be true?
In four years at a typical institution, a student will take 10 or so classes in their chosen major, and an equal or greater number in a group of "core" requirements the university has selected as necessary for a college-educated individual to function in the outside world. With the relatively small number of classes necessary to graduate in a given major, and the fact that little time is spent in actual applications, is it any wonder that students feel unprepared for their jobs once they graduate?
I know a large number of people who believe that the bachelor's degree is but the first step -- real training then occurs in graduate school.
But now take a step back and look to Europe. While the following is certainly not 100% true, it's fairly accurate: if a person wants to go into an academic-based career or simply take the time to edify themselves, they go to college; otherwise, they go to a trade school. The idea then is that in the latter case, they get intensive and thorough training in the career of their choice.
Myself? I went to college at first with the idea of getting a career at the end. After a little more than a year, I shifted track and decided I wanted to learn about things I wouldn't get a chance to otherwise -- and ended up with a religion degree. Today, I have trained myself -- and been trained by my employers -- to program. My college experience and training taught me how to learn more efficiently -- but was not necessary for my career or livelihood.
What about you?
This is exactly the reason I just spent the last 12 years learning all sorts of useless bits of information. I am going to college to get my major, not to learn a bunch of unrelated nonsense I just spent the last TWELVE years learning in high school and middle school. Why should I have to learn it all over again for another 2, 4 or more years in college?
The problem with a "well rounded" education, as defined by most universities, is that in general, it doesn't serve you.
There are some exceptions. In the U.S. and other English speaking countries, I think English should be a core part of the curriculum. I was never a particularly good English student, but I have a decent command of the language, and that's important in most aspects of life. For example, I get illiterate e-mails from co-workers, and frankly, it affects my opinion of their intelligence, fair or not.
Politics, Geography, and History are all very important as well. Politics because to be an effective member of society, you must understand politics. History because, to coin a phrase, those who don't know history are destined to repeat it. And finally Geography because it is required by History and Politics.
I was not a particularly good student. I was a damn good programmer. I started when I was 10. School was "boring" for me. I never did particularly well.
This brings me to my final point. In the words of Mark Twain, "Never let your schooling interefere with your education." The point is this: I'm primarily self-educated in most of the subjects I've raised above. Though I was a poor English student in school, I've written a number of articles and a book in my field. Not that you have to be particularly well read or a particularly good writer to get published in the software field. Nevertheless, you must be able to put together a coherent sentence and be able to express yourself in writing.
I think that the education in the U.S. is abysmal in many respects. But school was never for me. You sit me down with a book and a need or an interest to learn something, and I'll learn it. I spent two years, more or less, vacationing in Mexico. In those two years, I learned more about medicine, biology and theoretical, particle, and astro-physics than I learned of any one subject in my many years of schooling.
With the Internet, education is available to anyone with a computer and a modem. Take advantage of it. Education is priceless. A degree has a price. Never confuse the two.
If you want to focus on one core area to the detriment of all other areas goto a trade school. That is what your asking for. Nothing wrong with that.
If you want to know more about the world, be creative, and have more options to success, goto and embrace college.
You can be trained skills. You can't be trained in education.
It sounds like what you want is a trade school, not a university.
You can also check out the philosophy behind Oomind and a general introduction to Oomind.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
As an undergrad I majored in Math and Philosophy and minored in Comp Sci (graduated 1991) at a small liberal arts college. It happens this college is hardly a technical powerhouse, although their Math and Science departments are quite solid. I took a lot of courses in philosophy which taught me writing and discussion skills as well as logic skills. Just under half my course load was foreign language, psychology, literature, writing, history, chemistry, fine arts. In other words: writing, speaking, logic, math, science, art -- the classical liberal arts. "Well rounded" doesn't mean a little of everything, it means the things that are fundamentally useful, the skills that other skills are founded on. After graduating I got a masters in Comp Sci at a huge state engineering school. I learned a lot about computers there, so much more than I did in college or on my own. But what I learned there is less useful in the long term I think. The liberal arts are useful in industry, they just don't show up as keywords in an HR skills database.
Finally, you might like to take a look at Richard Gabriel's Patterns of Software. Although he doesn't specifically address curriculums, he does talk about his experiences in school and in the business world, as well as how to write software. I found it quite valuable, I think you might too.
I am Jack's writable stack pointer.
The beauty of the program is learning problem solving techniques that apply to virtually every career worth pursuing.
Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein
as an undergraduate at johns hopkins university, i earned a BS in computer science. i was very unsatisfied with the idea of having just an engineering degree, so i took iot upon myself to double-major in latin american studies. this didn't require staying any extra time, just better planning. i also took advantage of the credit i could earn at another institution, and i lived and studied in santiago, chile, for a year. i ended up with a pleasingly cultural college experience, profound in both science and the humanities, all in four years.
having studied several different areas in depth, i achieve not feeling pigeonholed. i actually have more cultural skills than many of the social-science majors i know. my point is that geeks who are apprehensive about developing technical skills to the detriment of the rest should remember to develop their skills in other areas as well; most universities offer double-major programs, for example.
aaron.
"Universities seem to push being well-rounded, or knowing a little bit about everything but nothing about anything in particular. They attempt to teach courses that could help you succeed in your lifelong career, whatever it might be.
Well, preparing you to succeed in life is what a univeristy education is all about, or at least that's what it's supposed to be about.
It seems to me that it would be better to teach skills that would help us in the first 10 years of employment.
So, what are you planning to do after 10 years?
Perhaps what you're talking about is trade school. Fine. There's nothing wrong with trade school. We ramrod everyone into college when many do not need to go to college. They would benefit more from trade school. Where I live, you can't hardly get a contractor to answer the phone. Plumbers live better than programmers. If I had a son, I'd encourage him to pursue a trade. Those guys still have good career prospects when they're 50, programmers generally do not.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
...exposing them to the forrest...
I guess they don't teach you how to use spell check in your fancy college.
I find the idea of a "well-rounded" education to be a shot in the dark at something that most students won't pursue at most liberal arts colleges because they/we simply aren't motivated enough. The best "well-rounded" education is something that takes cultivation, dedication, and a bit of stubborness. For instance, here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- just like at many other universities -- the courses that challenge me to think less-egocentrically and infuse in me a desire to change my/others' [warped] perceptions of our lifestyles (recycling, hello?) by offering more efficient alternatives are the ones that contribute to a "well-rounded" education.
However, lacking specialization can be detrimental as well. I'm just as guilty as any student of believing in the infinite superiority of his particular area(s) of study -- I also realize that the capacity to learn is something that one cultivates from a young age.
Trent Gardner did a wonderful exposition on Leonardo da Vinci's life -- there is a man whose thinking is truly well-rounded.
I went to Worcester Polytech (Worcester, MA). I went through and took 6 (out of 48) Humanities (History, in my case), 2 Social Science classes, and the rest was tech. (7 math, 1 PE, 3 hard sciences [chem, physics or bio], 2 other sciences [EE fills this for CS majors], and tons of CS).
Am I well rounded? Well, I managed to avoid taking a single english class, but I took hard core classes in operating systems, compilers, networks, computer architecture, data compression, Automata, software engineering. Because I wanted to be really good, I threw in a whole mess of EE to back that CS up.
Was I "well rounded"? Probably. But not because of school. I could have been one of those RMS-like "no social skills" people, but I ended up reading like I was possessed also, and not nerd books eitehr. Sure I had my fill of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, but some Brave New World, Fountainhead, Farinheiht 451, Heinlein, James Joyce and so on.
First, as an employer, I want somebody who will do what I want them to do. If that means writing content only for Internet Explorer, then so be it. Second, I want them to understand what is valuable to me. If I want Internet Explorer specific content, I don't want them to meekly submit and do it, I want them to understand why it is important to me. Fresh perspectives that youth tends to have are indeed valuable, but only when they can fit within my existing framework.
This sounds like asking to have your cake and eat it, too. If you want to hire yes men, go right ahead. But at the same time, don't try to encourage understanding if you're coming across as inflexible. Here's our general office criteria (and maybe this is what you were getting at): Decisions or thought processes by management are adjustable to employee imput. We do occasionally encouter some resistence when we rip into an idea that we think is utter crap. But, the basis for our arguments is we are where the work is done and hence have working knowledge that perhaps doesn't occur to folks who repesent the dept in meetings six hours out of eight. Ultimately, we'll do as we're asked, but we won't hide our opinions along the way. By and large, our manager is good about listening and making adjustments where they need to be made. It's expected that no one is above discussing the reasoning behind a decision.
Secondly, we've found that management "existing frameworks" can lead to valuable ideas being ignored or dismissed when raised by "new employees." Instead, we can find ourselves behind when six to nine months later, it becomes part of someone's "existing framework"
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
My mom lived in England for a while (went to school there) and according to her, Universities only teach you what you need to know. Let's take, for example, becoming a doctor. In the US you'd have to do 4 years of HS, 4 of college, and at lest 4 of grad school. Over in England they do 5 years of HS and then 3 years of grad school (med school). They've cut out 4 years useless information, figuring what's the point of 4 years of English (in college) when you don't really need all those classes? I'm considering going to an English university to cut out those 4 years of college... I could be a doctor, lawyer, whatever when I'm in my early twenties.
No sig for you.
Go over all those responses again. Which ones
make a cogent point, which ones look like they
were written by someone without a clue?
A well rounded education (including how to express
yourself in the written form) goes a long way towards a successful career.
I should know, I took the course when I was at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. It was folded into the flat portfolio class for some reason, and went over the *basics* of how to go about doing everything you want out of a course like that. I passed it through social engineering - I made friends with the instructor, cut her under-the-table deals in the print lab and scan lab, and pushed prints for any student she sent me. And I gave a lecture to my class on printing above 72 DPI (I was the ONLY computer animation student at the time that knew how to print at 300 dpi!). So I passed.
A class is basically an expensive cliff's notes for something you're going to need in real life. There's no better way to pick it up than hands-on experience, and no - repeat- NO- class can do that for you. Let me address these proposed course points of yours from my personal experience:
Resume Writing: the ProDev class sucked for this, being incredibly basic. How did I get a decent resume? Simple- when work was slowing down at my current job, my boss told me "make up your resume and let me see it." So I did. He shot down about half of it and suggested changes. I made them. Repeat until he was happy with it- THEN he told me to run it by the assistant chair of Education, who has a Masters in English. He had a few suggestions. By the time I passed the gauntlet, my Resume rocked the casbah.
Researching Companies and Potential Employers: I've never had to do this, actually- it's been calls out of the blue, or emails from friends saying "hey, this guy's looking for...." since day one. This is a good thing- I live in Pittsburgh, and none of the local companies look like anything I'd want to work for. I'm happy where I'm at.
Interviewing Skills: This is the essence of social engineering. If you don't convince the interviewer that you're a guy who not only does the job well, but can get along with him, you should be fine. If you click, you're almost guranteed in. If you're not laid back and congenial, and don't have some social skills, forget it. I have friends that are a hell of a lot better at various aspects of what I do, but they couldn't talk a rock into sitting still.
Networking: What it ALL boils down to. No one ever got a job without knowing somebody- unless the case is 100% pure "we need somebody NOW." Case in point- my first supervisor at my job was a guy like that. I got in because he knew me. My next supervisor got in because he knew him (both of these guys left), and a future coworker is getting in by virtue of strong recommendations from myself and my last supervisor. That's three people getting jobs because they knew one guy that was in the right place at the right time.
I was barely competent when I got in- I was the only guy this person knew - and that everyone he asked knew- who could do the job. I picked up the details as I went along, and forget nascent capabilities into actual skills. Having friends in good places can only get you so far- your actual skills are going to carry you the rest of the way. So it's not enough to have a lot of friends OR be amazingly good at what you're doing- you gotta have BOTH, or you're going to be having a hell of a time of it.
That's my experience- which I'm slowly melding into a collection of essays with intent to stick on a website when I have enough of them.
If you have questions, replace AT with @ and ask away.
Age of computer programming, the modern electronics and computing revolution, all associated technologies, tools, techniques, and education: ~60 years.
Age of human thought, art, philosophy, language, history, war, politics, and civilization itself: ~6000 years.
If you think you can ignore thousands of years of accumulated human experience by saying, 'just let me stay in my room and code' you're sorely wrong. Not to mention that I could never stand to talk to you for more than five minutes before dismissing you as intellectually useless. The rest of the human race feels much the same way, and will dismiss you similarly if you persist in ignorance.
To that end, I'm of the opinion that people who get both a liberal arts degree and a technical degree have the most powerful and versatile methods of thought possible. A person like this is manager, engineer, marketing, accountant, human resources, and IT department in just one person. There's nothing anyone can say or do that they don't at least know something about, and they are able to provide humanist perspectives on highly technical problems. Tell me you wouldn't want to hire this person.
By the way, I'm looking for a job.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
All USMA grads have a BS in which they at least minored in engineering - even if they majored in something like English or History. Additionally, each cadet was required to take at least four semesters of English courses, History, sociology, philosophy, and law classes. My comments are based on my experience (92 grad, physics and nuc. engr). But the real "well-roundedness" training came in the form of leadership and physical training during the hours not spent in a classroom (afternoons, evenings, and summers). I loved the experience because common-sense problem solving was always emphasized. As a biochem grad student I now watch in amazement at many of my classmates (keeping in mind they're ~7 years younger than me) who are brilliant, but whom in my opinion will fail miserably as a principle investigator who has to actually deal with people and problem solve issues not dealing directly with their little experiments (lab budget, goals of the lab, etc). -------- Who wants an orange whip. Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips. -- John Candy
err More so the Georgia Board of Regents (remember it's usually not the specific institution that sets the cirriculum...).
Let's see 2 english composition classes...a "wellness elective" (actually i can pick one of 2 health classes, the difference between the 2 being one i run and bike in the other I don't). Oh yes, technical communications practices...hahaha, i love that one. Yes the first two years are ANY state university are filled with some useful academics - 4 semesters of calculus, 2 of physics, 1 of chmistry although i have thoughts on it's usefullness in EVERY major! The list goes on, but geez there are some requirements that could be filled with stuff more related to my field (computer engineering)! For instance I can see 1 semester of english compsition, but i think 2 is overkill...and i could go on but I guess my point is there.
Derek Greene
I have been in Jesuit instutions, both high school and university. I think they did a good job. Generally their goal was teaching critical thought. They always encouraged my expression - which was generally at odds with their articles of faith. That willingness to encourage a dialogue was impressive. I also saw them put down badly formed thought. Generally, if you simply spit out some non-sense you could be sure not to get your views aired. But any viewpoint expressed coherently was considered and given a full treatment. That's a healthy atmosphere to strive for in education. They were just there to equip us to better enter those dialogues as informed and thoughtful people.
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
Hmmm... I wonder why so many respondents concentrate on business classes and on "technical" subjects like math and computer science?
It seems to me that a college (that's what we're talking about, right?) education is always going to be incomplete if you don't equip the student to deal with life - not give him "tools" for an employer's use, or "skills" to list on a resume, but a real education, a (dare I say) moral education that teaches people to live and to live with each other. Those are the most important "skills" we can master.
My background: a political science degree from a good, not great, traditional school, master's in mass communications at a state university. That's right, I'm tooting the horn for my own education. But frankly, I've seen too many business and technical-education folks without the sense God gave a turnip trying to find their way in the world and not having a damn clue.
The first thing you teach people is how to think - that's really what high school's for, which is why they teach you Western Civ all over again in college. This means a core curriculum that's very extensive and demanding, in all disciplines. Then you need to start learning things - history, science, religion, literature, philosophy, music. Learn to appreciate. What good are you at a task if you don't understand its importance in the "scheme of things?"
Then, when you've developed into what one might call a "real person," you can focus on whatever it is you want to work at - computer science, or business, or another scientific field, or poetry, or whatever. But you've got to have a foundation - otherwise you're just a mindless drone checking off items on lists, no more human than the computer sitting on your desk.
Education is the most important thing a society passes on to its future generations. It inculcates critical, independent thinking, political orientations that give our society life and vitality, and the moral wisdom to make decent choices in a morally ambiguous world.
It's simple, and I'm sorry if you haven't yet been fortunate enough to figure out - if you haven't learned to live, well, you aren't alive. You're a useless individual doing empty, useless things. Your pleasures and pains and fears are small, inconsequential affairs, and when you are gone, truly gone, there will be no memory left behind.
The alternative? Pursue learning and usefulness to the world. Stop what you're doing, look around, and figure out what it is you need to do. And do it. That's what an education is for.
It sounds to me like you're going to U of I. But that's just owing to my own similar experience (and department names). At U of I, at least... the college of commerce is "owned" by the Big 5 accounting firms, and they want our curriculum to turn out auditors and consultants... so that's what the whole curriculum is geared towards. Everyone has to know how to pick apart financial statements, because that's what auditors do. Everyone has to know about strategic management, because that's what consultants need.
As for your classmates' and instructors' attitudes... what else would you expect? These guys (classmates) don't care about anything than impressing "the boss", who's using IE on Win 2000, with a 1280 x 1024 flatscreen LCD over the corporate intranet... and anything that looks less than perfect on his machine, and his alone isn't going to impress him enough to give out more money and promotions. So, why worry about those contract-programmer lackeys using Linux, and those enginerds using HP-UX. It had better be back-ended by a database written to play The Star Spangled Banner when your immediate supervisor goes looking at it. It's called kissing ass: the only life-skill you'll ever need.
Yes, i was being sarcastic. I'm leaving the college of commerce at the end of this semester and majoring in psychology... so, yes, since i hate it so much, i am doing something about it. :-P
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
I think... perhaps many people misunderstand what a University education is all about...
A well rounded education is important, to be sure. In a way.
University is not there to 'teach you a skill' so you can go get a job. It's there to make you think, to teach you general concepts, and a well rounded education. You can certainly take some courses to learn about certain things that interest you in your field.....
But university is not just about learning a trade.
You can do that at a trade school... a college... if you want ot be a nurse, you can do that.. if you want to be a technician, you can do that...
If you view university as 'the way to get a job'. Go to trade school, save yourself the time and money. Go to University to discover what you want to do.. to think.. to study.. to observe.
I'd happily go back to university....
I've taken the opposite approach. I went to a local Junior College and spent four years on four different majors: Physics, Philosophy, Communications (Competitive Debate mostly), and Psychology... Now I'm at four year institution where I'm adding CS to NeuroPsych as a double major... the problem is that I'm 23 and still no Bachelor's even :)
I remember that first year in physics where I looked at what would be necessary to transfer in 2 years from the Junior College. It looked like a headlong rush to cover lots of basic science without even covering the basic (school required) breadth requirements because "that would come later at the four year institution". I *like* knowing lots of science and being able to converse with "technical people", but I value my public speaking experience and the year I spent taking philosphy almost as much. In terms of my ability to think about really big pictures and distill that down to practical rhetoric in a discussion I'm having here and now; the non-technical stuff has been very useful.
With respect to the original posting, I think either my approach or Coryoth's would be better than leaping between very specialized classes in different fields, but note that in any of the situations, there are reservations from people who've done it. Either time "wasted", lack of breadth, or frustration with the un-useful breadth you do get. Mostly it probably comes down to a value judgement... What do I want out of my life? What do I want out of the first few adult years of my life?
Hi! I'm a sig virus. Copy me (slightly modified) into your sig file and help me spread!
Five years ago I was on academic senate in college (a small liberal arts school), and this was THE debate. The two sides both had good points, and the side you landed on seemed to have more to do with your view of the current state of education.
Those who wanted lower requirements had valid points: forcing students to take classes they have no interest in diminishes the "quality" of the class, professors are left to trty to develope interest in a field instead of teaching new material and really getting in depth about a subject.. Being one of the students more interested in the subjects I took, this appealed to me.
THhose in favor of requirements noted that undergraduates typically don't realize what different subjects really are, and may find that they are actually interested in different areas, having requirement eliminates the argument that advisors have with their students. The discussion becomes "ok what are you going to take" instead of "you really should take other things. Seeing how direction less my fellow students were, I could relate to this as well.
The swing is how you see our educational system, it developed originally that few went to college, only those who truly wanted more education went. Therefore it was easier to convince them to take a rounded education, as they had a thirst for learning.
The problem occurs when the number of students going to college surges becuase "you must have a college degree to get a good job" whether this is true or not. College became an extentsion of high school, and the mission became vague. People began to value the degree over the education. Being educated involves learning how to learn, a dgree is a piece of paper howing you put up with bullshit.
It is important to remember that job training happens ON THE JOB, not in college. College is and I believe should be about extenting your horizons and understanding. You have the rest of your life to learn job related skills, use college to investigate life (which means beyond classes as well.) A good friend of mine majored in history, and got a job directly out of college as a computer programer, without ever taking a CS class. How? people can be trained thinking is difficult to train.
Organicsculpture.com
It really depends on what you expect to get out of a college education. Liberal arts colleges focus on educating students - to create students who are independent thinkers and with a broad breadth of knowledge. It seems that in most other schools, college is nothing more than vocational training for entry level white collar jobs.
In regards to your statement that most liberal arts grads have to get additional schooling in order to get a professional level job, the statement is true on surface, but not for the reasons that you infer. I am a graduate of a liberal arts college, and per the most recent bulletin from the college, over 70% of the students went to graduate school for additional schooling. This is not because they couldn't get jobs, it is because they chose an undergraduate school to educate them, and then a grad school for vocational training. Instead of getting entry level white collar jobs (becoming a number in some corporate cube farm), these students went on to medical school, law school, business school or on to get their PhD's. Instead of entry level positions, they went on to get high paying positions, and in corporate environments, their first day on the job is already half way up the corporate ladder.
When I graduated a liberal arts college twelve years ago, I got a job while most of my college mates went to grad school. My starting salary was the same as most people at that time, and in the past twelve years, my salary has increased 320% - far more than most people's. And, in comparison to my college mates, if you look at earnings, I am a failure. My immediate friends because a PhD Psychologist, an MBA who is a VP in a $40M company, and an architect who is designing projects in the US, Europe and Russia.
There is a reason why Ivy league schools are so highly regarded - even though they are liberal arts schools. They produce graduates who know how to think, how to work hard, and have the skills to excel in the workplace - even if they haven't been given training specific to any one job. I think that if you compare the earnings of Ivy League schools compared to your run of the mill college who graduates warm bodies with vocational training, you will see that Ivy graduates far exceed all others.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
Schools should teach what we'll need in the first teny years of our chosen career.
As opposed to the second or third ten year period. i.e. How to start or run a small business rather than a global one.
It's sort of like teaching someone how to rewrite part of the linux kernal before learning to recompile a linux kernal, much less log in to a linux system in the first place.
The best universities don't seek to get you a good job. They don't even try to turn you into a better, more ``rounded'' person. They try to advance the sciences.
Teaching the students is a necessary evil for the universities for two reasons: to find the best graduate students to make the department the best in the world and to get funding from the government and the private sector (my professor called it prostitution).
The universities are there to leave a legacy to the future generations and civilizations other than ``Kilroy was here.''
If you don't have an interest in that objective, why should you go to a university? Well, for the employers a degree shows that you can grasp complex things and you can also finish long undertakings.
Marko
Here, here! I majored in fine arts in college, and graduated with a BFA. But, I took courses in computer science, psychology, physics, whatever, and I came out ahead of the game, in some ways. Not financially, though. The thing is, if I wanted to make more money, I could have taken engineering(the school that I went to has a terrific engineering department.) and be making 40-50K (or whatever) a year. But money isn't what it's all about. For those of you who think that it is, I really feel sorry for you, because, that kind of thinking really limits your possibilities. Later in your life, you'll probably be saying, "Gee, I wish I'd taken this or that course when I was in school". It's easy to get caught up in the money thing, but I would think that the people who use Slashdot would be more willing to learn different things, just because it is fun. While you're getting that CS degree take an art course. If you don't want to take french art history, find something else that interests you. Broaden your horizons a little bit, you'll never regret it.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
It's your money (especially if it's a student loan, because you pay that back plus a profit margin).
Your education is your choice.
The guidance is for that 94% of students who are in college because it's what teenagers do after high school and because HR departments act mechanically when sorting resume's and creating pay ladders. They don't know where they're going, so it shouldn't matter to you if they go nowhere. The school is just trying to make it look like their tuition isn't being as wasted as it is.
If you want to use your 4-10 years as training rather than renaissance-man building, that's what you pay the big bucks for. Load up on technology intelligence (math, science, engineering, writing), and take an archaeology or history class if you want to be bored in a different way for three hours a week.
Like many of you, I'm a specialist, but in a very different field. I am a composer. To write music for orchestra, etc, you need years of special training. However, you need something more. You need to know the world that you live in. So many of my colleagues who have gone through conservatories (music trade school) have had their lives and their art crippled by a system that trained their fingers, but didn't expand their minds.
I can't imagine that any kind of profession that requires brains and talent (for example, computer science) is much different. The greatest practioners are those that combine incredibly specialized focus with a broad range of interests.
I think our best schools should assume that every one of their students has the potential to be great and should educate them in as broad a manner as possible. The truly gifted and committed artist, scientist, or programmer will always find the time to learn her/his specialty. As for the mediocre, providing them with a broad education can't harm them in the slightest.
In my field, many of the top composers in the US graduated in English, in Math or studied music at a university, not a conservatory. Later, as grad students they specialized. I think that it obviously helped their creativity to have been trained to look at problems from all the different angles a liberal arts program provides.
I think the same probably holds true for all creative endeavors, including programming.
I recently graduated from Ursinus College, which is a small liberal arts school out in PA with a degree in history.
Currently trying to become a teacher (mostly didn't get certified in school due to my own laziness), but I found that Ursinus made me do a LOT of things outside the history field on the road to becoming a teach and just in order to graduate.
Classes outside the field of History and Politics:
Anthro 100
Sociology 100
Psych 100
Educational Psych
Public Speaking
Biology 100
Environmental Geology
Powerpoint
2 courses of intermed. French
Composition
Statistics
Econ/Business Admin 100
Soc 360 (Contemporary Issues)
3 Education courses with the idea of you learning and experiencing what its like to be a teacher...
and I still found time to take Golf and Basketball =)
Oh Please. How can someone from a country which was suprised to discover that much of the world hated it want to know even less about the wider world and culture?
Jeez. Americans.
People here seem very materialistic and focused on college as a way to increase their pay grade. That's not the purpose of a well-rounded education (though it *can* do that); its purpose is to make you a more intelligent and generally more well-informed person. If you know everything about TCP/IP networking inside-out, but don't even know what continent Pakistan is on, that's a bad thing, even if it isn't detrimental to your job performance. Same with knowing some basic literature, how to do math, some simply physics, and so on. You can be the best at your job and still be an idiot - the goal of higher education is to prevent that from happening.
If that's not what you look for in education, why go to a 4-year college when you could for much cheaper go to a trade school and learn just the skills you want to learn?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I am a C++ programmer in a Solaris environment. When I went to college, many years ago, if you had studied computers you would have learned to use Fortran on punch cards.
Instead of doing this, I spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek and reading ancient literary and philosophical texts. I think the course where I learned the most was a seminar when we read and analyzed Plato's Phaedo. There were only three guys in the course, so when we decided to meet five times a week instead of three, no one stoppped us.
Of course, this was long before Bjarne invented C++, when there was no fork1() around, and no pthread library to play with. However, the syntax of classical Greek is about the only thing I can think of that is actually more complicated than the syntax of C++. Well, maybe if you through in all the subtleties of STL...
Many of the guys I've worked with have similar diverse backgrounds. We did what we wanted when we were young, and then settled down to earn a living. That's the meaning of school, after all; I don't have to tell you Greeklings that 'skholia' is the word for leisure.
One of the sharpest consultants I ever met, who is very well paid and always in demand, never even touched a computer until he was in his early thirties. He majored in art, drove a taxi, ran a theatre company, went to law school, etc, etc. He told me that the best way to live is to be retired during your youth, because if you wait until you're old to retire, you won't be able to do what you want.
I'm glad I learned what I did in school, and I'm not sure I'd change anything. But I can't help thinking that I'd have plenty of time for a general education if I'd started making my present income in about 1990, invested in the booming market, and retired at age 33.
First off, you have a choice. I graduated in 97, and I recall the torture of trying to decide where to go to college. The idea is that you choose the institution which fits you best. If you don't like the curriculum, then why did you choose to go there?
Secondly, a University is designed to expand your horizons and teach you how to think. If you want to learn how to do a job, then a Technical Institute is for you. They are designed to teach you how to do a job, not how to think and learn.
So enough of my ranting, you can see that I am a firm believer in the Liberal Arts. But don't get me wrong, I think computers/technology are great and I spend lots of my life involved with my geeky pursuits. However, it can be taken to an extreme. I am attending a highly regarded Engineering school. Graduates have great job placement, are recruited actively and make lots of money, blah, blah, blah. But let me tell you, they are some of the most boring people in the world. (Not all of them, mind you, but most of them.) Many people, and geeks in particular, can get so wrapped up in an interest or project that it consumes their whole life. This is dangerous in many respects. What a liberal education will do is let you experience other areas of knowledge. One interesting tidbit: a couple of years ago my school instituted a two classes that are required for all students. They call them Technical Communications and teach students how to write memos, do presentations, and other career-oriented writing skills. These classes were implemented because employers were saying that our graduates didn't have even the most basic communication skills. They had been concentrating so hard on their Engineering studies that they hadn't learned anything else.
One of the worst effects of computers (IMHO) was the extinction of the library card catalog. I loved that as I was hunting around for the card that I needed, I would stumble upon other cards/books of interest. This is something that computers just can't equal. When I was a grade-school student I was usually bored, and to pass the time I would read the Encyclopedia. You can't image the entertainment and education that this random browsing provided. If you only study a single subject, you might become very knowledgeable in that area, but at the price of expanding your vision and your concept of the world around you. So even if you are taking a very specialized curriculum, please take some classes that are not related. Ask around and see which classes/professors are well-regarded. Psychology and Sociology are always popular. I always try to take one "fun" class a semester, and this semester it's Cultural Anthropology. Whatever it is, it should make you read and think critically. Best of luck.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
If you want career training, go to a trade school or tech school. This is NOT the same as an education. You don't go to university ONLY to learn to be some geek engineer or accountant, you go to interact and learn about other ideas, other cultures, things you may never consider in your narrow little life otherwise.
Learning a mere trade doesn't train you or encourage you to be a good citizen. Failing to learn history or the philosophies underlying our Western civilization doesn't make you competent to defend the same by word or deed. It doesn't give you the understanding of how to REALLY understand what the Constitution and Bill of Rights really means. It doesn't make you have to accept that there are valid ideas and mores DIFFERENT than you own narrow spiel.
I sure as HELL don't want some ignorant, narrow, insufficiently educated fool to become my Senator or a judge, etc. If you don't get a WELL ROUNDED education, you are merely an ignorant drone.
People, by and large, do NOT seek out interaction and intellectual exploration of ideas contrary to their narrow personal beliefs, be they religious or otherwise. On their own, they merely seek out those who are the same as them and this makes it simple to demonize those with contrary views as "sinners" or "unAmerican" when, in fact, THEY are "unAmerican".
It IS true that those who fail to study and understand history are doomed to repeat it. It is a fact that an ignorant person is a poor citizen in a democracy where the majority does NOT rule. Our society is actually based on the idea of protecting the minorities from the tyranny of the majority. A narrow education merely focused on math or business doesn't make one understand this reality. Merely studying these narrow fields doesn't give one the capacity to understand reality, like the interconnectedness of various ecologies. It leads to voters (not good citizens) with warped ideas of reality, with warped and narrow opinions. There is too much of that already, we need MORE rounding in education, not less.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Many universities are trying, apparently without much success, to help young people become well rounded so that they can function better as human beings, and perhaps learn that there is more to life than getting a 'good job' and getting paid a 'good salary'. There is a lot more to life than work. If you are lucky, you may find philosophical, aesthetic, social, and cultural rewards in life that can mean much more to you as a Human Being than simple material gains. Universities exist to provide much more than job training - if that is all you want, go to trade school or sign up for an MSCE class. If you want to create a framework for expanding your own worth as an intelligent being and as a valuable citizen of the Earth, then get a life - a real life - and try to experience more of what life has to offer.
it would be imposible to build a entire peice of useful software.
;) and it doesn't rain all the time :)
I built a quicken knock off in delphi in 3 days. I did it to learn to use delphi3. It doesn't do everything quicken does of course, and doesn't have the cash register sound stuff, etc. But I didn't need or want that. I basically wanted an electronic checkbook register that I could add comments, sorts and other info, while making it all human readable (i.e. text file stoarage as opposed to binary.
I can make edits to it on my palm pilot or in notepad. Three years worth of data recording every bank transaction in under a 100k/yr, uncompressed.
A semester is more than enough to make a useful project. Take a two week crash course/apprenticeship in carpentry and you can build a home bigger than my apt, for under $10k at home depot assuming you've got two months, a plot away from the zoning board
"Do any of you know of cirriculums that are good examples of a true well-rounded education?"
life.
UK Universities specialise strongly in one subject, but seem to want to move toward the American system. I think the UK system is superior, because subject-specific skills are relevant to many careers.
"Fun Gums"
All of the examples listed are instances of practical application. Finance, business (not economics), management, MIS, and others that teach "practical" skills that have immediate use in a particular workplace were not usually part of a university's curriculum fifty years ago.
The main purpose of undergraduate study is to prepare a student with the skills of how to think. If high school is seen as the time when a student learns how to absorb knowledge, then the university makes much more sense as a place to learn how to _use_ knowledge. How to go beyond synthesis and regurgitation. The classic humanities and sciences curriculums serve not merely to teach mathematics or history or english or chemistry, but they teach a student how to think.
Over the past fifty years, the American academic system has been under siege by pundits insisting that school teach students things that they can use immediately. This is what allowed business schools to gain legitimacy in the academic system, and what has caused much of the natural and social science curriculums to become much more geared to "the first year in the workforce".
In short, the types of majors that are increasingly taking over the American university system are disciplines that would have been found at trade schools or colleges two generations ago.
Is this a good thing? Absolutely, for the businesses who profit greatly from cheap, well-trained labor that schools churn out each year. However, having computer scientists who have no background in other areas of study does a disservice to both the individual and to the society. When Jefferson and the other radical framers of the Constitution talked about a well-educated populace, they were not talking about a group with advanced skills, but people who were well-rounded contributors to society. Their focus was not merely on the paycheck and spending power, but on the well-informed and active intellectual contribution we all should make.
Not having the skills and information to be well informed is one of the greatest dangers to democracy and the university is one of the final preservers of this institution.
Use your imagination!
One problem with a sharply directed education is that as soon as the need for people with those exact skills is less than the offer, chances are you'll be unemployed. And at the rate things change, it's not possible to predict the need for X skill 5 years from now. A well-rounded education will primarily show you how to learn by yourself things on a broad area. When the need for your particular skills is low, all you have to do is spend some time learning, something you know how to do. This way, the risk of unemployment is minimized.OTOH there's always the issue of what's the education worth for: a very directed education will teach you to be an efficient droid in some area, while a well-rounded education will teach you to be a person with skills on a broad area.
At least where I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering. My senior year, it was like high school all over. All of my classes where in the same building!! In fact, sometimes I didn't even change rooms. No, my school wasn't small being its Big-Ten with over 40,000 students.
So then I went to work for 2 years for a Fortune 50 company and realized that a B.S. in Engineering is just grunt work for several years until you become a manager. So now I'm getting my M.S. or PhD in Computer Science.
Do I wish I had a more well-rounded educations? Hell yes. And I plan to make the most out of Graduate School by taking some off-the-wall classes like Art, Economics, Political Science, and Sociology.
50 different types of beer...learned to appreciate vodka. 151 is the best cure for anything...its like drinking rubbing alcohol. tequilia will make you do things you didn't know you could...or want to. etc. etc.
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
two words: Thomas Jefferson
This is a case of too focused education. They were taught what they'll need to know to be productive over the next six monthes -- that IE over Windows is so big they can safely ignore everything else. A better-rounded education would cover Mozilla/Lynx/Linux/MacOS/... and a well-rounded compsci education would start with the W3C/IETF standards and give enough history/theory to explain why they matter. These euducations would be of value five years form now when everyone is using (please don't flame) Homesteader (succesor to konqueror) over Atheos (or something equally weird).
The general rule is that there's a trade-off between immediate applicability and longevity of knowledge. If you study DB3, you'll need to restudy it in six monthes. If you study C++ and database techniques, it may take six monthes to apply it, but it will be good for years. If you study Linear Algebra and Number Theory, it may take years, but it will remain true for ever.
What are some unpc offensive funny songs that you know? Got a list, or a pointer to a list?
I am thinking of stuff like johnny horton's "nigger hating me", but not exclusively about race as a subject.
"Secret asian man"
"a boy named sue"
Take this personaility test.
I studied Music at university. My first "real" job was as a market researcher for a software company. Eventually I was made the head of research, then a team manager. All in the space of 13 months.
Well rounded individuals are capable of doing far more in the workplace. Ever wonder why people with degrees in Accounting are never made into Vice Presidents of any real departments?
The reason is simple: Put an accountant in front of any problem they haven't seen in a text book and they shatter.
Anyway, just my two cents. Change please?
A Trade School is for people who want skills that would help students in the first 10 years.
A University is a "An institution organized and incorporated for the purpose of imparting instruction, examining students, and otherwise promoting education in the higher branches of literature, science, art, etc."
So if you want to know someting about the world you live in, you want to learn how to learn then you want to attend a university. If you just want to learn how to manage a IT network or learn how to use a program, like CAD, then a trade school is for you.
The purpose of an education is to learn. Learn about the world you live in, the world around you and the world outside of you. An education, nor a university, should never be a coporate training ground.
In Ireland we have a broad curriculum up to school leaving age (18). Everyone has to do English, Irish, and Maths. Most people do at least one foreign language, usually French. Most people do three or four more subjects.
In Irish universities a typical undegraduate degree is three or four years. The first year is often quite broad, but only within faculty limits. A physical science student might do chemistry, physics and maths. A biological science student might do several biology topics, chemistry and physics. The course gets more specialised in year 2. Year 3 (and year 4) are essentially single subject in most science courses. Arts courses often have two majors in the last year or two. Vocational degrees like medicine, law, and engineering usually have separate courses, though biological science and medicine overlap to some extent. Our idea of university education is different to yours - not better, not worse, but different.
The end result in medicine is, in my experience, similar enough. Good people are those who can think, and use common sense in applying what they know. Bad people are those who can only regurgitate what we've taught them. Good doctors are primarily those who are good with people.
-- Anthony Staines
Our degree was 1/3 cs 1/3 math and 1/3 electives.
I remember the first algebra class we had. I was taught by the associate-dean who struck me as a very intelligent man, unlike many of my other profs. This algebra class was very strange it was number theory, including useless tasks like finding the Greatest Common Denominator but some interesting ones like RCS encryption.
One day a student asked a question, "When am I ever going to use this stuff on the job?"
He responded with something like "You won't."
So why do we have to use this stuff?
He explained, you are in university not to just gain knowledge but to learn how to think and solve problems. One of the greatest tools to learn how to solve problems is with math.
I can't really word it as well as he did, but you get the idea.
Waterloo used to first teach useless "learning" languages like Pascal and Modula 3. It was only until later years would C/C++ or Java be used. The idea was that if they started with C/C++ the students would develop bad habits. They taught you how to learn. New languages pop up all the time and a university grad should be able to learn that language pretty quickly.
As an example, I was hired as a Java programmer. However, my resume only had C/C++ experience.
Unfortunatly there was a lot of pressure for Waterloo to change the Comp Sci degree with the reasoning as above. The degree now has a lot less math. Java is taught to first year students, who have no idea what a thread is but probably use them. Is the new way better? In my opinion, No.
Back in the dark ages (1984) at UC Santa Cruz, there was a lot of disagreement between the "theoreticians" and the "applicationists"(?) in the Computer Science department. Naturally, the students wanted more practical training.
Look back, some 17 years later, the decision to teach theory was correct. You can always learn the specifics of XYZ OS, or the syntax of language ABC. But learning why they work the way they do is much more important.
Scott Neugroschl
-- Founding Member of CISSA, UCSC Crown College 1984
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
First of all a well rounded education is good for society as a whole you are a more informed person and you also get to meet new people and see things thru a different light. Because of some 'stupid' ge class I took I can reconize bad arguements and break them down and take them for nothing. Others include working on my english skills something I would of not done if I just could take all my MIS stuff. It does make you a more round, educated person that is more interesting and better IMHO. If you dont want to be 'well rounded' goto a tech school and dont complain.
A co-op program where you study for part of the year at the university and then take a couple months to work at a company that relates to your major. This kind of degree is valuable for several reasons:
- most obvious, you learn the theory and principles while in school and then have a chance to put them in practice. The jobs that a lot of coop students get are not meaningless either. I've heard stories of students who have solved major problems for companies.
- next, you get money! The wages range from (in Canada, at least) around $500 - $1200 / week. After a couple months, this really adds up and can help pay for next year's tuition.
- lastly, you make create connections for employment after school. Doing a good job at a coop placement will almost certainly get you a job offer.
hgh
I think what one does in university depends a lot on what one did before in high, middle and elementary schools. For example, when I lived in Massachusetts, the elementary schools and camps there encouraged kids to do supervised experiments with chemicals, including slightly danergous ones, with proper safety procedures. In high school in Florida, my chemistry teachers were forbidden to bring any sort of chemicals into the classroom, making the class just a bunch of abstract paperwork that we totally forgot at the end of the year. Also, one private school I went to had a fantastic English teacher, very involving, comprehensive and demanding, but at the public schools in the area the English teachers were just decent.
So depending on where I've gone, I've learned nothing, a little, or a lot. I think the people who want to focus in on majors in college are those who've had good foundations in high and middle school. Those who want a broader education still need to get those foundations. Like myself.
1. They have schools that focus on specific areas of learning. They're called Vocational Tech. schools, or technical traning centers (like IKON). Both are valued more than degrees where I work. Becuase we usually have specific requirements for our jobs.
2. Universities don't REALLY teach you things to help with your chosen profession until you get into the Masters/PhD programs. What they do is show you're prospective employer that you CAN learn. You have the ability to grasp concepts quickly, use proper scientific method, and have good study habits and knowledge retention. Many companies have vague or multi-task job positions (a.k.a. middle-management) that the company is unsure of the exact type of person to hire. University grads. are perfect for these roles.
Now, you do need to be good at your job to make a decent living, so you need to do well in your specialization. Whether a "well-rounded" education is feasible and useful to you depends on many factors. Do you have the time or do you need to study a lot for your main subject? Do you even have an interested in other subjects (many people are happy engineers with only a technical hobby, and there is nothing wrong with that)? Do you expect to attend lots of cocktail parties in your life where you need to engage in erudite conversation on a variety of topics? You can think of other considerations yourself.
So, requiring "well-roundedness" is probably a mistake, but offering people the opportunity to take courses beyond their subject if it interests them is probably a good idea. Choose your college accordingly. My college had a general education requirement, which I knew would waste 25% of my academic schedule (I would have picked my own humanities subjects if I had been allowed to), but the school was good enough to make up for this otherwise pretty serious defect in their curriculum.
Open Source 101
Linux - Beginner
The History of UNIX
How To Use Open Source in the Workplace
They are a lot of ways for companies to weed people out when hiring, and not having a degree is a convienent one. Therefore, you pay your money, do the work, and get your degree so you can get a job. The reason you have to put up with the unimportant tasks of drawing E-R diagrams or--God forbid--taking a history class, is that you have to prove you can take orders and follow them. There will be plenty of times at work when instead of doing your coding, you'll be proof-reading documents for an ISO audit, or writing a peer review, or entangled with the legal dept. over a license screw up, or any other bs that goes along with modern business. Employers want someone who can flex a bit, and schools make you do that...that's why you're complaining about it! My advise would be to try to improve your perspective on the situation and appreciate the diversity of your education, rather than resist it. You're investing a fixed amount of time and money, so you might as well maximize the returns while you're there.
It's not about proof... It's about showing
prospective employers you can commit to a long
term project (school), stick it out, and suceed.
There is a far better chance, IMHO, that someone who has worked through the pain of a 4 year degree will stick it out through a long, difficult project than someone who hasn't. YMMV
having a diploma may not mean a whole lot, BUT, it does show is that a person has the dedication and the ability to learn all of the subjects that are throwed at them.
have you ever met someone that ALL they know how to do is code or the like? it's scary.
Right on! I'd give that a +5 if I was a mod.
I'm a student in Southeast High School in Lincoln, Nebraska. To be short and to the point, the school system here could be equated with being as loving and as caring as Microsoft. Heh.
Anyway, in my chemistry class, how we WERE doing things, you basically did your own work then you took a test to see if you understood it all. If you passed it, you got to move onto the next chapter. If you didn't, you could take it over and over until you passed it. There was no teacher intervention unless you went up to the teacher yourself. There was no groupwork either. You did everything for yourself, by yourself.
We did this for a few weeks, then the teacher surveyed us and asked if we liked the current layout or if we would prefer the traditional method of where the teacher teaches, and the students spit it right back out. 66% of the class liked the "do it all yourself" method, 19% wanted to go back to the tradional method, and 15% didn't care either way.
The reason the teacher did the survey was because six angry parents called and bitched to the school. As I understand it, the school asked him to come up with an answer as to why they shouldn't force him to go back to the traditional method. He gave them the survey. They made him go back to the traditional method.
I was all right with that at first, until my grade dived down like a car rolling off a mountain. It is currently rather close to failing, which is 63.9% or lower in his class. Before the layout switch, I had a 86.7%, which is almost a B+.
That's the least of the school's evil and dirty tactics. We're currently building two new schools (with really lame names. Southwest and Northstar), since the ones we have are vastly overcrowded with acedemic losers who shouldn't be in them anyways. The school went overbudget by a couple million dollars. So they went to the voters and basically said, "Increase your property taxes, or we will fire a whole bunch of staff." Keep in mind our property taxes are already in the top 5 in U.S. The amount of staff they said they would cut was rather high. It was like 104 people from my school alone. Anyway, the voters said HELL NO in January. They tried to get it passed again in April. The voters said HELL NO once again. So this year, there should be 104 or so less staff at my school, right? HELL NO. They didn't fire anybody. While that is a good thing, they lied to try to squeeze more money out of the public. That's an evil thing to do.
And I have another story. The schoolbusing here is getting cut drastically. It'll be just enough to not get in trouble with the law. This saves $1.2 million. But get this. The district budget this year is $10 million higher than it was for last year. Where the hell is that money going? Geesh.
So yes, I hate our school system. The guys in power don't really care about pursuing the best education for the students, but rather that they get their inflated check while the teachers suffer. Nationwide, our school is in the 70% percentile, but our teachers are getting paid 27k/year, which is like 43rd lowest in the nation. I'm not too sure about this next part, but I heard something about the district office hiring secretaries with only a high school education for around 35k/year. And anyway, the superintendant gets 1% of the district budget, so this year he gets $230,000.
In my opinion, a well-rounded education is not a good idea. I'm currently taking math, history, science, acting, and foreign language classes. I don't know what I want to do yet, but it's going to be something with macs. I couldn't care less about my classes. As a Brainbench Certified Power User for macintosh systems, the computer classes at school are meaningless to me. So basically, I'm just sitting in school and wasting tax dollars. I'd gladly drop out and not look back, but then my parents would kick me out of the house.
I think that a lack of mastery of advanced philosophies, skills, etc... has stunted the average american's intelligence. There is much about enlightenment that has to do with investigating things to minute details.
From my own personal experience, those who have developed mastery of specialized skills *tend* to be better balanced people, on the average, definetly more confident. And off hand, not one such person I know was advocating we kill every Arab and other such retarded nonsense after the tragedy. In fact, the only person I know personally who said something like that was a liberal arts major. Of course, this is completely anecdotal, but I wonder if anyone else has noticed this?
I have no university-level computer science classes. I studied an area so arcane, so off-topic from what I do today, that most people don't believe me. What I was taught was how to learn something quickly and apply my mind to create useful solutions. The details of the classes barely matter. I was also required to learn at least two languages or one language and math, no matter what my major. I did a great deal of my undergraduate work in languages I had *not* studied, but were similar. This has proved very useful in moving from mainframe systems to flavor of the year OSs. If you are not educated you cannot adapt. That education can be formal or experiential. Without deeper understanding of the past, the world around you, and the underlying structure of whatever you are doing, the future will take you by surprise. Unkindly. Also, learning to write coherently is a huge benefit of a "rounded" education.
Working through my second year of community college, I found this discussion very interesting. Like everyone else, I always complained/wondered why I am taking Biology, Biology Lab and History right now when I am Information Technology. I could not see a single reason why I would ever need biology or history relating to my field. Sure it may be sort of interesting but come on, lets be serious.
As I read these comments, they really made me think about the whole well-rounded idea. I've had advisors tell me that they aim to make students well-rounded and I always thought that was talking out of their butts. Now I am starting to see why being well-rounded is important.
Sure, my networking course will be directly related to something I will do in the future, but History and Biology will hopefully make me a better thinker and be able to rationalize in the future.
The best thing I read on here was about learning for "after" college. That is something I never gave a second of thought to. Why would I be thinking about after college when I have to get through it first? This can be cross-linked with "why am I taking these dumb courses when I am IT?".
I am transferring to a reputable University at the end of my second year at this community college, and that is where I hoped to really start concentrating on the courses that will benefit me in my job/career.
So now that I still dislike taking these courses (heck, I'm in the middle of a biology lab writeup right now, taking a slashdot break), I can at least understand that they *should* help or benefit me beyond just school and grades. Maybe they're right when they say that you go to school for much more than short-term learning.
> As a university student majoring in Computer
> Science, I have been made to take classes such
> as Greek Mythology and American History.
I completely agree with you and understand why you don't like this things in the university.
I think the high-school should teach the basics of many things, and the university should be highly specialized.
Perhaps that's what society says it has to be, but I feel bad paying for and attending classes I'll never use. Of course, the piece of paper I get in return I'll need to get a job, but other than that I feel like every day here is another day of missed opportunity. Think of how much money is lost by not working full time? Think of the career advancement I could accomplish in 4 years? Think of the relevant technologies I could be diving into if I could use the time I spend on school on them?
Granted, I will get a degree out of this. But it jsut seems like you could kill two birds with one stone - give me the bachelor's degree and give me something I can use at the same time.
Another question might be - why does society value a Liberal Arts education so much? If it didn't, I don't think you'd need a degree to get an entry level job.
I've always advocated mandatory critical thinking courses. I'd even go so far as to say that it should be mandatory before you're able to vote.
Just imagine a world where people who say things like "If you vote for the person you think best represents your beliefs, you're throwing your vote away.", would be instantly laughed at and reminded that voting is not about voting for the "winner" but about you choosing the person you sincerely believe will be the better person for the job.
We might even regain our freedom.
Some people want training to help them with a job they have. Some schools specialize in providing that. Some people want training to get a particular job. Some schools specialize in providing training to get someone a job. Some people want training in fundamentals that will begin to prepare them for jobs in multiple fields. Some schools specialize in providing that. Some people want training so they can have some social status. Some schools specialize in providing that.
My point is that it's perfectly ok, and even desirable that different schools provide different types of training (career developement, trade school, focused, well-rounded, liberal arts, etc.). What's important is that prospective students be educated about what they would get at each schools so they make a choice that's right for them. Therefore, it's important that schools be honest when explaining their purpose to their students.
Of course, many people don't know what they want and just do what's "easiest" for them at the time. That's a problem that seems much more difficult to get around.
The fact is that no curriculum will prepare you for the real workplace. The best thing any curriculum can do is provide you with the framework with dealing with different kinds of problems rather than direct you how to think n particular circumstances. Ultimately, this is why liberal arts majors make more money than others over time.
What does the above Latin phrase mean to YOU?
p.s.: It's "forest", not "forrest".
The submittor is in a program for a "Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems". This program is specifically designed to be a bit of everything. If you want specialization in Finance, do a Finance program. If you want specialization in programming, go for a Computer Science degree.
In an engineering program, there is plenty of opportunity for specialization. Even more so when you continue into a post grad program.
Education should not be designed to get you a job, but instead to foster your imagination.
I am 36. Here is a brief synopsis of my working life:
a waiter,
a salesman,
a cable installer,
a MS Excel macro writer (out of necessity),
help desks, support,
MS office programming for Word, Excel, Access,
to SQL Server and Oracle database programming (VB client interface)
HTML and scripts replacing the VB client
Web Front-ends, database back ends
designing these solutions for clients
Y2K analysis
structure and architecture analysis
leading a team to build these web-applications
Managing a team to build these Web-Applications
Managing a portion of a large project on the business side (non-technical)
Except for the 3 programming classes and 1 business law class my formal education is not applicable. I was always more interested in language and literature than technology. Now I use communication and people skills more than coding as my main avenue to make money. I find that business groups have the money not the IT departments. I solve business problems, usually with technology, but not always. My education in business, art, literature, golf, and communications are the keys to my sucess today.
You need a well rounded education because know one knows where they are going to end up 10 years from now, let alone 30.
When I went to college the first time I was a performing arts major. Th second time I got a liberal arts degree. Now I get paid by big corporations to solve their business problems. Do you really know where you will end up?
BTW. The retiring CEO of GE (Jack Welch) has a PHD in Chemistry.
-- Andy
It seems that people have a very convoluded idea of what a University is for. This is probably inspired by the fact that most employers require a degree of an employee -- when they really only need somebody who is has some knowledge; whether self taugh, or in the form of a degree, diploma, or certificate.
In Canada (I'm not sure what its lkike elsewhere) there are three major educational institutions.
1) Technical school -- you go here to learn how to do a task. Wire a house, fix a car, survey land, design websites/clothing. You graduate in less than two years with a certificate.
2) College -- you go here to get a job. They teach you a little more than a technical school, but keep it rounded as well. Colleges take a very practical view of education, and when you finish your diploma (usually 2 years) you are ready to get a job of some sort. {programming, sysadmin, accountant, lab assistant, dental hygenist, nurse}
3) University -- A university provides higher education in the form of a degree. It operates under teh idea that you should learn all of the theory behind what you are doing first, as the skills will come in much less time. (teach the who, what, when and why... the how is simple in comparison). You don't do many things practical, but you understand why things are done, and how to learn. A university degree is not useful for getting a job -- or rather it should not be useful for getting a job. You need skills for that. What it _does_ do, is enable you to get a _career_. Something that you can start, and follow along with for the rest of your life. You don't get that kind of education elsewhere.
- Gribflex
most modern universities still have Phys. Ed. requirements. We can't even have a simple discussion until that idiocy is gotten rid of. In the modern age, when a 98-lb-weakling (c) like myself can do anything he feels like and is just as successful in his chosen career as an overmuscled visigoth, there is no remaining reason for their viability. So don't get me started on the "well rounded" crap. They're just perpetuating the 19th century teaching methods THEY were trained in. Forward thinking, I think not.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
To me the latter option sounds much better. I wasn't as trained in efficiency or in some practical programming tricks when I graduated but if you're smart and inquisitive these are things that come along with experience of doing your programming (or other IT work) every day. The main thing you get at a liberal arts college is the ability to adapt and a grounding in the theoretical side of programming. If you think you're quite well equipped to adapt when your manager tells you to write in a different language or to restructure your program, then fine, go to a tech school or university. Liberal arts isn't for everyone but it's quite a good way to go. The costs may seem prohibitive but there's both financial aid at most schools and then, such as in my case, you can make good money once you've proven yourself to your employer. Owing 20k isn't so bad if your salary is 3 and a half times that. Beyond money, I enjoy the fact that I could easily move to a completely different type of job without any problem thanks to the breadth of my education.
Stenpas writes: "In my opinion, a well-rounded education is not a good idea. I'm currently taking math, history, science, acting, and foreign language classes."
Maybe I missed the definition of "well-rounded", but this sounds well-rounded to me. I would not drop out of this sort of education, if I were you. I would add some sort of literature and writing class, if you haven't already taken enough them, but, clearly, you write beautifully and factually already.
It really hurts to read your description of how a wonderful class was ruined. All I can suggest is to think of that as a lesson, too, not that that makes the situation any better.
Besta é tu si você não viver nesse mundo!
There is this unhealthy system or mechanism, whatever you may call it known as "education system". It's obsessed with categorizing students, teachers and schools in classes, from the worst to the best. What do you need to do that? You need grades and tests. Teacher whose students get best grades is better. Schools with best grades is higher on the ladder. *That's* the name of the game.
What's the #1 lesson, the unspoken rule in every school? Get most with the least effort - that is, highest grades with the least effort. The smarter students actually learn less than the dim ones - they are better at getting A with least knowledge.
Another important and closely related skill is forgetting the formulas 10 minutes after the test - short-spam memory.
Why is a reference book forbidden on a test? What do you see in NASA engineering rooms - do you see the supervisor shouting "What the hell is *THAT*? - and pulling out a math book from under the table paper. "Oh, I'm sorry" - says the shuttle engineer - "I just forgot one formula there." The answer is quite simple - it's easier on teachers. If reference was allowed, you'd have to create a new problem for each exam, you'd perhaps have to create exam questions that have some relation to the real world - and that's tough. You can't seriously expect that on $20k salary, can you?
The art of solving real-life problems is live above all, and education system is dead as fossils in the british museum. It's hard to trace even the subtlest relation between the two.
If you want drones, if you want robots - keep your tests and grades. If you want Da Vinci's and Einsteins, throw them out. This is not a pipe dream, there's a school in england that is free of any compulsion and it's running for decades now and it works just fine. John Gotti, a teacher of the year from NY, US has said that there's no hope for the education system as it is right now and the only way out he sees is home education. I think he is working in a some new independant school in Ohio or somewhere now (anyone have more info on this?).
Oh, there's a good word that's the root of all evil in the education system - compulsion. You cannot beat a kid with sticks into an intelligent, resourceful, capable professional. Whenever it does happen, it happens *despite* the whole system of education. It fails somewhere, and you get your Torvalds or whoever.
An ideal learning environment IMHO would be a school where a bunch of kids are free to make any sort of research or a project they want. Teachers would be there to help and guide them when help is requested. If they don't want to do anything, if they want to play nintendo, they go home and play nintendo (or don't come to school at all). Okay, so 40% or 80% won't come there at all - so school overcrowding is solved, future gas station clerks will practice their moves in tekken or watch friends reruns, and future shuttle engineers or teachers or programmers are learning in an environment that's actually, you know, is perfect for learning. Pipe dream indeed.
But that don't matter. Education is an industry, and if 80% of kids don't go through it, the industry, the machine is mortally wounded. We want kids in schools, not on the streets, even if they turn schools into a combination of a concentration camp on one hand and a street/gang place on the other. It's like Bush said "opponents say that we have 'test' mentality - but let's put that logic to the test (notice pun) - if kids are tested for arithmetics, guess what, that's what they're going to know - arithmetics". Great logic. 10s of thousands in Yale education are paying off, that is, if he wrote this himself.
What can we do? Nothing, really. If there's going to be a change, it's going to be incremental, and will take decades if not centuries. It's going to be small private schools, home education, john gottis that act from inside the concentration camps that will eventually lead to the big change.
I'm sorry if this post is incidental to the story, I think it's important enough to compensate for that.
Here's some links:
Summerhill freedom school
Sorry, I can't find the Gotti page anywhere.. I read about it on K5 but apparently they don't archive all old stories. Can anyone post link in a reply?
Also, I don't want to offend any teachers. They have to follow the rules or they'll be fired. They have to work on low wages with students who don't want to learn whatever the program says they should on that day. It's a miracle they get *anything* done at all.
At UCSC, where I was an undergrad, we had fairly numerous breadth requirements, which was excellent. The original poster seems to think that four year colleges should be more like trade schools - they should not. Four year college programs do not exist to churn out techs to work in industry - although there is certainly an effort to subvert them to do that. A graduate of such a program is _supposed_ to be an active participant in the intellectual life of society, whatever they may do for a living. So, yeah, if you have a BA in computer science you should know something about sociology, philosophy and art, not the least of how the CS industry is actually run at every level. Idea is - you need this information to make moral judgements about how to use your expertise, which is one of the things that a BA is supposed to do. If you really don't care, that's fine, I'm not criticizing you, but our educational institutions shouldn't be reduced to a rubber stamp so that people with no social conscience or inherent curiosity can get better paying jobs! Go to law school, for chrissakes.
The idea with teaching "big picture" thinking is that you will better understand the details of what you're doing if you know why you're doing them. The Poster's courses sound painfully stupid (decision theoretrics with no stat? taught by a little balding guy with pointy hair?) but that isn't a problem with breadth.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
My take comes from being on many different sides of the issue over the course of my career. I've been a university student (BS CE, honors in the comprehensive). I've been that entry-level tyke whose every idea is considered no better than "cute" by the other guys. I've been a self-employed contractor. I've been a high-level tech employee. I've been an executive.
/become/ the employee that I need.
The one thing in a new hire that helps me in my businesses is attitude. I need people who've got the basics skills down solid, but more than anything I need someone who is passionate about learning. Someone who can think clearly. I don't even need someone who can communicate clearly: there are too many good workers who speak English poorly for me to have that luxury. If I've got someone who loves to learn and can think clearly, then that person can grow into my needs.
I gave up years ago trying to find that new hire who'll fit perfectly into the position that I have open; it only happens out of blind luck. What I look for is someone who can
And those skills that I need have nothing to do with being well-rounded. In fact, being well-rounded is harmful in someone straight out of college. The basic problem is that public High Schools are miserable failures when it comes to teaching a student how to think and learn. So it falls on the universities. That means a student who has spent a great deal of time in hard sciences. Especially with a theoretical focus rather than an applied one. People with applied educations aren't capable of thinking out of the box. People with theoretical educations are slower to get started in application, but once they get over that first hurdle, they really zoom ahead.
The more time a university spends trying to "round out" a student, the less time there is for that student to develop his ability to learn and think. There's no room for thinking in the humanities: that's all just memorization and political games. Or at worst, you get stuck with a deconstructionist. And that means that the student isn't practicing the skills that I need from him.
This isn't to say that I don't like well-rounded people. I just hate well-rounded people who can't think, and that's the most common case. If someone masters thinking and learning, then I don't have any problem with them going out and making themselves well-rounded. But they should do it to themselves, not have it imposed on them by a University. If they don't have the desire to do it on their own, then it won't succeed, so there's no benefit for the University doing it. If they do have desire to do it on their own, then the University is just wasting its effort. And in any case, that desire itself is valuable to me.
-- Nolite audere delere orbiculum rigidum meum.
Was I ready for the "real world" after such non-targeted learning? Yes.
Although right out of school I had less experience and applicible knowledge than several like-aged folks at my first job, I quickly learned and had no aversion to learning more. Several of my co-workers had real fears of changing work-focuses, taking on new challenges, learning about occupation power-structures, etc. I had the confidence from my broad (and challenging) background to jump in and figure out what was important. I learned flexibility from my "well-rounded" schooling.
Lastly - It's not the well-roundedness of the education, teaching that determines the effectivness - it's the quality of the learning. It doesn't matter what school you're in - if you want to learn, you will. If you want to goof off, you will never get a great education.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
I think that there is a good argument for both sides. Where I graduated from some one had the idea that the school needed a English lab. The though was that "We have math labs,bio labs,Chem labs WE NEED a english lab. So they built it. Guess what NO BODY USED IT. So what was the answer the University came up with. Require all students to take a 3 hour class that requied english lab time. The university passes this off as a State requirement but no other university here in Florida, as far as I could find out, required it.Real great use of mine and the Tax payers money. Don't get me wrong I also feel that some of the most boring people I know are the engineers that only know engineering. But by the time you get to your upper division classes,ie you last two years, you should have all the "underwater basket weaving classes" over with.
Just my $.02 worth
My boss told me: "Forget whatever you learned in college. THIS is where your education begins".
I asked him why hire someone with an EE degree then. His reply: "Getting the degree proves that you can start and finsih something. Nothing more".
He was right....
College "prepares" you for nothing. What college DOES is teach you how to think, how to interact with others, how to FIND what you need to know....
and yes, it can help some grow up.....
My mentor (a true genius, now deceased) once told me that he believed that schooling can INTERFERE with your education. I think that he was right too...
I have seen some really good comments about how education is failing and spiraling into worthlessness (not really, but relativly to becoming skilled in a specific thing). Go and listen to Dennis Miller's rant on colledge life with audiogalaxy or whatever. "Bill Gates is the richest man in the Universe, but can you imagine how much richer he would be, if he only got his degree" -Dennis Miller.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
But it does teach them to spell forest correctly.
This is the reason a well rounded education is important. Personally, this person does not seem to be a well enlightened kid. I am not trying to bash him; I know he is in high school and all, but he must understand that cowering in a croner by ones-self is not the optimal solution to solving problems, or living one's life.
.. Well I am trying..
The first thing they did to us when I went to post-secondary, the grouped us randomly into roughly 20 people, and these people were your life line. Almost every project done was in groups, and all the classes were taken with the same people. This is the way life is when you are in the real world, so it makes sence to teach that concept in school. You don't chose the people you work with, but 99% of the time, you will be forced to work with people you: A - Hate, B - think are incompitent, or C - Can work well with.
I am telling you son, it will be a hard life for you if you can't play nice with the "idiots". Maybe you can be like me, and concider everyone the same.
Bye!
In my quest to understand where I really want to go in my life, I came across a school named St. John's in Annapolis, Maryland. Currently, I'm a baby, yes, only a Junior in High School, and I currently hold an internship at a small e-business company. We mainly work with (but not limited to) languages commonly tied in with web applications such as Java (JSP's), BASIC (ASP's), Javascript, HTML, C++, and Perl. I personally have aquired a Programmer's Java Certification over this past summer.
... lots of kids at my school want to grow up. It's what kids want to do. They want to leave their nests, stay out all night ... they want to be free and in college. I was "blessed" with an early shot at the business world--a well paying job that would look wonderful on college applications and give me a real jump-start on people going into the working world as well as college programming classes. Yes, I'm not the best programmer in the world, but I'm a little bit further than the kids in the CS classes learning VB who don't know what a switch statement is. And at first, yes, it was a blessing. I loved it. I got to go to "work" after school and talk to people who liked fast cars and video games and browse Slashdot and make fun of something that whenever you were feeling down you could rip on (Microsoft, our IBM e-commerce platform, or other people's code). It was heaven on Earth.
... something in me has changed. I don't want to be an average Joe and chill with people who only want to have LAN parties and dream of sitting in a cubical all their lives so they can have the fastest cars and feel superior to the people that once made fun of them. That's not me. I'm sorry, but it really isn't. As much as it was me one day, I'm a different person now. And I really think there's more to life than money (which, from what I've come to understand at my company, is really the only thing that concerns most people. They'd complain often about their 60-70K salaries, about how the people in Silicon Valley were making more money than them. This company's in a rural area outside of Philidelphia. Cost of living is 25% of that in Silicon. WTF?) I honestly hate working there. The only thing that makes me go on there is that High School jobs really are either the local theme park or food stores. While I'll probably continue my work there for the rest of my high school career, I look forward to the day I leave.
Anyway, back to St. John's
Slowly things change. I realize that I'm accelerating myself into a dead-end of my life. For some reason at one point I actually wanted my own cubical. Why?
Eventually, in my mail I received something from a college named St. John's. I didn't know what to expect. But it was a lot different than everything else. This was the entire curriculum. And honestly, for a long time I would have rather died than read a single item on that list. But
Most of the people here, yes, will scorn at a liberal arts school and laugh when they realize you don't get a real degree there. But you'll learn something much more important than the fastest algorithm to sort though this list or the "least ass" way of formating your Java code. You'll learn about life. You'll read about people's successes, failures, and have an additional 4 years to understand where you really want to go with your life. I wasn't born to be a code monkey, or a lemming. I want to live the best, most full life I possibly can. And if that means I'm gonna drive a Ford, live in suburbia, have kids that come before my drunk fragging on weekends, so be it. I will love every minute of it. And if this post somehow makes someone look at their live and decide to change it, it would make me completely overjoyed. And if this post gets a score of 2 and gets buried in the database--so be it.
In conclusion, everybody will go where they want to go. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we're all destined to walk around with keyboards implanted in our chests and plug into boxes all over the planet. I bet some people here would be so happy and somehow manage to wire the Quake XII output directly into their brain.
You have to know a little bit about a lot of things to fully appreciate it.
unless it's CowboyNeal's!
maybe they should teach kids to spell "forest". That might be useful someday.
That reminds me of a line I heard:
What's the definition of:
- a Bachelor of Science degree? "How does it work?"
- a Bachelor of Commerce degree? "How much will it cost?"
- a Bachelor of Arts degree? "Would you like fries with that?" *snigger*
Honestly, I really don't think that sounds like a horribly not-well-rounded curriculum the poster was taking. Only programming and busness courses were listed. A well rounded curriculum is supposed to make you a better citizen, be able to talk intelligently about a broad range of topics, and other things of that nature. Art, literature, politics and a variety of sciences. These are things that will perhaps not affect your earning potential but help society in general (by passing knowledge on to your children and by knowing enough about the world to not elect morons to public office) and might make you more than the lifeless automaton your courseload suggests you desire to become.
If you do want to become just another computer guy, perhaps you want to get some hands on training. An internship could get you what you want. You could acquire skills quite quickly this way.
Personally, I'm glad that the university system did not prep me for 10 years in a cubical. I'd much rather be "forced" to explore. If I find something I like, I will concentrate on it until I have had my fill...then I will move on. The same goes for my role in the work place. I hope to god that I never get stuck in one place for 10 year. Spare me that.
But, then again, you still need a major to graduate. I guess you have to have at least some concentration.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
"In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees.
Ask how to do it. As far as stock goes if you are even reasonably succesful chances are you will own stocks. This kind of education will be invaluable later on.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
And of course you code this in an hour with no logic or symantic mistakes, etc. Do you always want to be a programmer doing the gruntwork? I doubt that. Learning how to design and document programming tasks will get you a lot farther then just being a code monkey. Plus I rather doubt you can find a job that consists of programming tasks that all take an hour or so.
In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company.
You have to start somewhere (macro to micro verses micro to macro, most techs seem to prefer micro to macro oritnetation). Plus knowing how management manages will give you a much better understanding of why they do things. You will not be a manager for some time, and managing is also heavily dependant on people skills, something that cannot be taught, they must be practiced.
In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages on Macintosh, they reply, "Why would I have to do that?" Most of them don't even think of Linux as an operating system, but more as a hacker's toy. Forget about asking them to make it Mozilla or Lynx compatible. They don't want to waste their time. But the University will make sure it is ADA compliant, since any institution that receives federal funding must require this...
I fail to see what testing webpages on a mac has to do with client-server (maybe in a UI design course..). Did you verify your posting to make sure people could read it right to left? No. As for Linux as an OS I also fail to see what that has to do with a client-server course. Technology changes, a lot. It is much more important to understand the concepts behind it, once you do udnerstanding a specific technology will be easy.
Don't most "big picture" lessons come with experience, through person's journey from entry-level employee to a skilled IT/business professional?
Yes, but it's a lot easier to learn something by experience if you have a basic understanding of it. This is why military officers go to military academies and most professionals go to university/college/etc.
Wouldn't it make more sense to teach things that will help students early in their careers, like technical skills and other trade/foundation skills that are often required of entry-level, non-management employees?
So you do not want to advance, or be able to do something else? If you want to work on an assembly line doing the same thing forever I suggest you drop out of school now and "start getting real experience" at some low paying job.
Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or CIO needs to make?
No but it helps to understand it. If you ever have to interface with the CEO (i.e. be avice pres) you'll appreciate it.
Do companies really want me to spend more time diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first place?
Yes. I would like to make sure you are doing it correctly, or at least something resembling correctly. Plus you may not be the person programming it/maintaining it.
(What about just documenting the code?) Knowing the big picture is good, but how do you get to that level if you don't have any skills?
You will have those skills if you pay attention to your programming classes.
It is rather obvious that you are new to the game of college and the corporate environment. If I wanted to hire someone who just programs I'd get some Indian company to do it for $5 a day. If that's all you want then you can skip the education and get right to it.
My question for Slashdot readers is: Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
"In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees."
But you know how to balance a stock portfolio. And I bet you can figure out a mortgage, when that time rolls around. And you probably won't be playing the lottery.
I never took accounting/finance but we covered some basic stuff in grade school, high school and college. And because of it I'm paying my 30 year mortgage off in 15 years.
"In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!"
Would it have taken an hour if you hadn't already invested three? Besides, do you really think all real world programs take a single manhour to write?
I never thought I'd use my algorithm analysis stuff--now I wish I'd kept the books. I pull out those skills every 6 months or so for graph traversal, pattern matching, etc.
"In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company."
Don't you? Think back to how you were in high school. How successful would your startup have been back then? How successful would it be now? The difference is education.
I wish *I'd* taken some Management courses before I was promoted to Team Leader at my (former) company. It would have saved me a lot of wondering about how to get these people to do what I want. Or at least given me the resources to figure it out myself.
'In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages on Macintosh, they reply, "Why would I have to do that?"'
Education doesn't make people smarter. It gives them the tools and data they need to make themselves smarter. You peers are sitting in the middle of a fully-stocked workshop pounding on nails with their fists.
324006
I almost agree with your support of general education requirements. I got a liberal arts education-- studied philosophy, political science, chemistry, math, english, music-- lots of different stuff. My education has been enormously valuable since then.
However, I learned the most from the classes that I took voluntarily. My experience was that when I was forced to take certain classes, I was much less interested in them, so I put less effort into them, and learned much less. This was common in the required classes, which was depressing for the professors. The students disappointed the profs, and they reciprocated by investing less effort in teaching the classes.
So, I disagree with general education requirements. I think a much stronger proposition is letting students take what they want. The sharp ones take a broad array of classes, get prepared for everything, AND they don't have to endure lame classes. The clueless folks focus too early, graduate from college and are limited to a small zone of proficiency for 40 years.
Really, I see a lot of reasons to take a spectrum of classes. When I was an undergrad, I had no idea what the hell was going on. I graduated, and had 40 YEARS of working ahead of me. It would have been ridiculous for me to think "Yeah, I know exactly how to prepare myself for the next 40 years." Since then, I've gone from newspaper editor to math teacher to embedded systems engineer.
So grateful for the liberal education . . .
Brandon.
Making today worse so tomorrow seems better
This produces an individual who is a Liberal Artist in the original sense - one who is qualified to apply a disciplined reason to any subject and arrive at innovative conclusions.
On the surface, it may not seem like much use to a person who wants to be in IT - there aren't any programming courses, management fads, or courses on building robots or designing digital circuits - but the substance of the courses gives a rock solid foundation to the intellect whch the canned courses of a departmentalized university training institutes lack.
What is there is the basic sparks of every issue in contemporary life - what is life, what separates man from beast, what is number, how is information moved between minds, how did the scientific knowledge we take for granted - geometry, arithmetic, algebra, calculus, astronomy, chemistry, biology, physics, electricity, sound, and sight - come to be, and how little has changed in centuries. The ethical struggles of man are the same now as they were for those who have come before us, and they have good answers to many of them. The sciences have made remarkable strides in the last 60 years, but it is predicated on, and forshadowed by, the work of centuries . Knowing how and why things ended up as they did can give us a warning sign when we go off towards the cliff, show us the dark spots on the map that need to be explored, and remind us of fascinating subjects that had to be left unexplored because the tools were insufficient for the task. All that makes much more "well-rounded" individuals asfter four years of formal study than any program filled with HOW-TOs and formulas.
Perhaps they teach these kids to work alone so when they're in a group--and the only one doing anything--they can keep things moving. Don't teach them to play nice with the idiots; teach them to not be the idiots.
I've found that working in groups too early on promotes the "someone else will do it" mentality. I like what they're doing with this kids school and I wish mine was like that back when.
TO THE POINT: A well rounded education is a great thing. Nothing seems to help people out more than forcing them into a good logic or philosophy class; the earlier the better.
Right now my education is everything plus computer science. I can't complain.
If you have any idea what you are going to be doing in 5 years, nevermind 10 or 20, then perhaps you can count yourself as one of the lucky ones. I know very few people who know that they want to do 5 years from now, never mind know what they will be doing.
I know that universities tend to teach a well rounded education, a little of everything, but this will almost certainly pay off in your later life, especially if you plan to move around a lot and get very high paying jobs. If you want a pointed career without a lot of advancement opportunities, then you can go for a much more direct approach to education, like college. However I know that all of the people that I have heard complain about how university was a waste of their time have changed their tune after the downturn of the economy, and a lot of the college grads who were laughing suddenly are unemployed.
When the time comes that you are bored with your job / get unemployed and get an opportunity for that job that was 15% better paying than before, there's a much better chance that you would be qualified for that job because of a much more "rounded" rather than "targeted" education. Yeah, in Grade 5 I didn't want to study french, "Why the hell would I ever want to go to France?" and here I am, living in France right now. In the early years of university I kinda skimped on the math side of courses, but I learned enough and had enough BS skills to wind up getting a great job doing cryptography. (It helps that I'm a very quick learner as well). There have also been a few other opportunities that I haven't been able to take because I was of the opinion that "Bah, why would I need to know how to do that?", and similarly there have been numerous times when knowledge of physics, astronomy, calculus, algebra, psychology, and many other "side courses" that I took have come in handy.
Finally, it's 5 years out of your life. Perhaps 2 or 3 more than taking a college degree. Consider it an "investment" in your future. Not only are university degrees looked at more favorably than college degrees, but you leave a number of doors open instead of closing them. I think spending 3 years of your life to leave your opportunities open in the future is a very smart idea, but then again that's just my opinion =)
If God gave us curiosity
This post has a very idealistic view of what a CEO or CIO is capable of.
The "big picture" you describe has been, in my experience, more often a "details of the bottom line" that is the opposite of overview-level thinking. Most CEOs are not technicians, nor have they been. They tend to graduate from one of these universities that teaches business and are dumped straight into management. They have to work their way up, but they tend to be management the entire time.
Management is quite prone to fads. Not only the Dilbertesque slogans and terminology, but also to techniques ("the one thing to keep in mind is to maximize billability"--this in a company that has 90% fixed-price contracts). The CEO who assumes they understand all the issues of a breaking technology from reading articles in CIO is going to have a dot-bomb on their hands quite soon.
Yes, there are innumerable enthusiastic young things that want to sacrifice the bottom line to whatever cool idea they've come up with, but, for example, with your example of IE versus the world, you've cut yourself off from 10-15% of your marketshare. Now, unless you know your target demographic is 100% WinIE, or you absolutely need some downloadable ActiveX control to carry out the client's part of the transaction, there are very few reasons why coding to a wider set of standards than WinIE should be a bad business decision at the "big picture" level.
I agree that an employee who knows as much as is useful about the bigger picture is a more valuable employee than someone who only knows their business, but no one comes from any education instinctively knowing the "Big Picture". The "Big Picture" is made up of judgements about a wide range of information specific to each situation as well as general trends. If you're expecting someone to come in knowing what you know by psychic phenomena and don't actually say, "Yes, in an ideal world we'd code to Mac, Linux, and Netscape, but in our market that would only gain us 2% marketshare for 5% increased cost due to additional testing, and that just doesn't make business sense," then you're going to end up with blind yes-men who will not let you know that the customer is pissed, there's a new technology that would reduce your costs, or even that half your employees are planning to leave for a company that values their input.
That is preventing ignorance.
Can I get an AMEN? Good posting...
Specialization is for insects.
For example, an english lit major needs to complete a science requirement. He or she can do this by taking classes, or by an independent project - like making a website about shakespeare, or something totally non-related, like genetically modifying mealworms. It's all up to you, and whatever faculty member you choose to work with.
Granted, this is isn't the best possible system, and many people hate it, but it works very well for people, like the poster, who know exactly what they want to do and want to explore it further. I know a few people who did social science projects by researching the benefits of open-source for non-profit groups, or the "digital divide" - bringing IT to inner-city youth.
Ok, so it doesn't really help you, but it's an alternative system that has some great advantages.
-Milinar
How many of you have run across the sort of Comp Sci grad who can espouse the virtues of the Booch Method but can't write a freakin' shell script to save their life?
I don't care HOW you got your knowledge. If you spent $$$ for four years at Carnegie Mellon, fine. If you spent you evenings reading books and writing programs while you were working at McDonalds, fine.
What really matters is how well you can do the job that you are supposed to do.
College sometimes (and even often) helps, but it just helps.
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
on whether or not you intend to vote.
I suppose one could be self-taught in those matters that aren't part of the Comp Sci curriculum, but you should know that watching both Fox and PBS will not accomplish this.
But I'm not bitter.
It depends, some people do a lot of learning on their own the strict structure of the classroom actualy hinders them from learning, while others need the discipline of the classroom. An example, this guy I went to college with had to take a required speech class 3 times, he hated public speaking. But 4 years in the work force and he is now a full time public speaker, to this day he still claims that if he didn't have to take that college course he would have become a speaker much sooner. So it depends.
I know of colleges where you have to take phys. ed. to get a COMP SCI degree. This is because their core has a requirement of phys. ed.
Now, I have no problem with people who want to study phys. ed., don't get me wrong! I think it's cool that all sorts of things from S.C.U.B.A. to archery to fencing to track and field are available in college. But if someone has no interest in them, and his field of intended study/expertise is totally nonphysical (like mine), then I have never once in my life seen the point in forcing him to study phys. ed. It's a waste of his time, money, and patience.
The only people who profit, *coincidentally*, are colleges with fees for phys. ed. classes... hmmm... well, that's conspiracy # 504,327 I've unearthed today! =P
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
College (or universities, which are just many different colleges) didn't make much sense to me. I have a four year degree, and went into two different graduate programs at a different university. During that time I found out that there are some things about universities that don't make sense until you change your thinking about what universities are for.
Myth 1: Universities are taught by teachers.
Reality: In some schools, high school substitute teachers are required to take more education training than university professors. Professors are appointed to their positions because of their status in the field or because of their research and development, not because of their ability to teach. You are being taught by experts in the field, but not necessarily those that can teach or even care to do so.
Myth 2: Universities want you to be well-rounded.
Reality: Universities want you to have to take classes in departments that would otherwise dry up and die if people chose what they wanted as ciriculum. Maybe at one point being "well-rounded" was a priority. But right now, there are departments that if they relied solely on internal support, they would disappear.
I got my 4-year degree in Philosophy, and spent some graduate time in Philosophy as well. The department had 2 dozen graduate students, most on assistantship. The only way that Philosophy could keep its head above water was that two courses of theirs were essentially manditory if you did not want to take calculus. English, music, theater, and sports flocked to logic class because the alternative was derivatives and integrals. It was well known within the department that if the logic class was dropped as a manditory elective, hardly anyone would take it, and the Phil dept would disappear thru lack of funding.
Let's face it, there are some classes that you took that you would never have taken on your own that were a waste of time. There were probably others that you later enjoyed taking. But considering that adding on those electives can add 1-2 YEARS onto your course of study without them, and at $15,000 a year, that's a lot of money to spend on the possibility that some unconsidered course will be worthwhile. Why do you think that a bachelors takes four years, but a masters takes only two? Course padding.
If you doubt me, take a look at your core classes outside of your department. Chances are that those classes were in departments that don't do well on their own (don't have a large number of students). How many law classes did you have to take, or sports, or business perhaps? Those departments are well funded and don't want to be bothered with teaching core classes.
Myth 3: Well-rounded ciriculum exposes the student to different fields of study.
Reality: Often the "core" classes that are required have low standards and are not good introductions at all. Core classes are frequently taught by the adjunct faculty, grad students, or the "new" professors simply because no one else in the department wants to do it. Sometimes it is simply the professor's "turn" to teach that class. They draw the short straw, if you will. Such classes are usually very large because of its required nature. Those instructors are usually under a lot of pressure to pass students, especially sports players, so the class can become rather dumbed down. Some core classes are nothing more than student mills trying to get the most students thru as possible, so that the department can get it's funding.
That's all for now. I have to go get on another soapbox. Some of you will disagree with me, but I think if you privately asked some of your faculty what would happen if core classes were not enforced, some would says that they would lose their jobs.
At the school that I went to about 10% of each class majored in CS. However, over 50% of all undergraduates took CS 106 which at the time was a pretty fast-paced introductory C course. Later in life, which would you want to work with:
A) The English major who has written a fractal generation program, and has spent hours debugging code.
B) The English major who only used a computer to write papers.
If you picked B then I can't help you. Maybe your university is expecting too much from you.
If you picked A then use some of that logic that you've learned and apply it to yourself.
As for the comment about learning what you'll need for the next 10 years, what industry do you think you'll be working in? Should the people who graduated in 1993 not have learned Java since then? I graduated in 1998 and have spent much of the time since then working with smart cards. Should I have learned that in school? The technical aspects of your education prepare you enough that your first employer won't laugh at your resume. The theoretical aspects give you the tools you need to teach yourself new skills and that is what the computer industry is all about.
Disclaimer: I majored in CS and minored in Portuguese. I thought the different specialties were each a nice break from each other. I certainly never thought that either one hurt me.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I would like to speak more but the lawyer said "Yes or No" please.
Damn they are good.
The reason they want you 'well rounded' is so taht you end up taking classes from other departments that you would never go near in a zillion years if you didn't have to. And by doing that, they get to hire more professors in that department and hike you tuition dispite the amount of grants and endowments. i had to take one history of religion class where I did not get an A because I was not the same religion as the instructor. The instructor was the dean of that area. My dean just laughed and said my advisor should have warned me (but the advisor was on sabbaitical to Betty Ford).
Worst first post ever!!! (in voice of Comic Book Guy).
The practical courses- the ones tracking hot computer technology, e.g. 370 assembler, APL- are almost all obsolete. The lasting material are the deeper principles behind it all.
perhaps "well-rounded" education could help cliff spell "forrest"...
My Grad Contract was Information Systems and Media Production, and I had a job waiting for me at Columbia Tristar Interactive at graduation (May 2000). (CTI is now Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment.) I taught myself or learned UNIX, networking, Adobe Premiere / Photoshop, live theater, film and video techniques, etc. But... I was also "railroaded" into classes I wouldn't have taken, but I'm glad I did, like Shakespeare, Images of Women in Literature, Wine & Opera, etc.
So, I feel I got an education that prepared me for the first ten years, but left me "educated" enough to survive in "society."
Johnston is one example; there are other schools that were part of the now-defunct AHEN (Alternative Higher Education Network): AHEN's website.
geek. lawyer.
There are perfect places to be given a "well-rounded" education, they are called junior high school and high school, and there are numerous countries (including most of European nations) which implement such an education in a variety of ways, all of which arguably superior to the craptacular approach to pre-college education experienced in the US.
http://www.realuofc.org/libed/adler/wle.html The university is there to instill a discipline of self-learning. If your courses don't teach you something you need to know - go out and learn it on your own. If you're intelligent enough to see a gap, you should be intelligent enough to fill it.
GoofyScrews
I don't want to step on anyone's toes with this one but I couldn't disagree more with the proposal that universities need to teach more specifically job related skills. I pay my bills by doing freelance web design/programming so I consider myself pretty computer literate. I've also worked for dotcoms in the past, so I know what employers look for. The problem is, I don't think that's what a university education is about.
I'll let anecdotal evidence speak for my argument: I have a friend who, in May, graduated with a degree in computer science. He works for a company doing web development and programming. He told me a couple of days ago that, while he can "program a mean computer," he feels, to a great extent, that he didn't get much out of his education. He started work for this company as an intern during his sophomore year. Mostly through working there, he acquired all the skills he needs to do his job well. The CS degree was just icing. I, on the other hand, am an English major spending my time studying literature and postmodern philosophy; none too "useful" stuff. The point my friend made was that, while he had picked up skills during his four years of college, he wishes he'd spent that time doing more what we'll call "critical thinking."
To me, an education is NOT about job training. I think that's a sad outgrowth of our current system. The simple fact of the matter is that most jobs do NOT require anything one learns in college. And, for those that do, the employee would've been better off entering into that job and getting four more years of experience in it than four years of a college "education."
I firmly believe that one should get a college education because they love learning, not because they want a job. I believe there are ten times as many people enrolled in universities as there should be. If the only reason you're going to college is because of societal expectations or to acquire a piece of paper so you can get a job, then those four years seem like a waste of time to me. If, however, you want to go because you genuinely want to learn then, by all means, enter into the wonderful world of academia.
Symbolic Order? /
It's just so that they can get students to pay for classes they don't really need. That way, they can keep certain classes open, those of which nobody would take otherwise.
In retrospect, however, it does seem to help, in the long term, especially if they're concentrating primarily on attaining a degree in Computer Sciences. It's much harder for a CS major to get a job in an unrelated market during recessions such as the one we're getting close to feeling now.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
All forms of Engineering. Mechanical, structural, soil mechanics, Electric machines, control theory. It has stood me in good stead.
One survives ones childhood - and education. One does not, on the whole, choose it. My education stood me well. I support a broad education.
Only those reading newest first will see this - so what.
Cheers, Andy!
Andy Rabagliati
It seems to me that with the ever continuing changes in technology and the workplace, the importance skill is learning to learn. Face, with the exception of people skills everything you know today will be next to worthless in the workplace 5-10 years from now. Estimates are that people will have 5 careers over their working life span.
Do want a college education that will be uselss after the first career change, or do you want one that will be valuable to you over the course of a lifetime?
My plan is to major in either math or engineering, but I still need to take a full 2 YEARS (4 fucking semesters) of a foreign language. I'm terrible at that shit too, I might not even be able to pass it. It's possible that I'll just have to transfer schools because of this. Pretty sad huh?
how to learn. After a rigorous degree program in engineering, any related thing can be understood. Just get the books and start reading.
I'm not a college student yet, by the definition of the phrase. I'm still in high school, though taking classes that are commonly referred to as college level. I'm an International Baccalaureate Diploma Candidate. To define, the IB program is an acclaimed university 'preparatory' program that exists in 101 countries for high school-level students (Grades 11-12 in the US). There are several other college prep programs for high school students; the primary difference between, for example, AP classes and IB ones is simply scope. Often the AP classes teach the same things as the IB classes do, but a person can take AP American History and everything else regular level. IB students have every hour of the school day filled with critical thinking, analysis, discussion and writing. If we're interested in... say... becoming a computer scientist, we don't simply take one hard class (CompSci) and ignore the other subjects. We're given what's essentially a classical or renaissance education. All conceivable academic subjects are taught (or at least touched upon), and tied in to alternative cultural ideas.
The obvious effect is that by the time we enter college, an IB student is founded thoroughly in at least two languages, at least two branches of the sciences, the arts, the theory of wisdom and knowledge, classical philosophy, and has a mastery of Calculus-level mathematics.
The important effect, though, is that we are prepared to become members of the international community. This is a significant concept, especially today. People who are capable of doing their job and only their job are legion. What is needed are people who bind world cultures together, people who can influence the course of humanity. People who can think.
This is what a broad education is meant to provide. I must agree with what was said earlier: Universities are not technical schools or job-training academies. They exist to embrace students' minds', pull them out of the box, and, to use a cliché, expand their horizons.
I suppose one simply must ask him/herself: "Do I want to learn an occupation, or do I want an education?" If it's the former, investigate technical programs and technical schools. If it's the latter, look towards the university system.
Maybe the U.S. should learn from Germany (which, as a note, is the foreign country that I'm in my fourth year of studying) and their education system. Those who want to learn to weld metals aren't forced through philosophy and Latin classics. Instead they are identified and moved to schools to learn the jobs they want to perform. Those who want to be photographers learn the arts, physics and mathematics used therein and finish their education apprenticing with a photographer. Those who want to learn the theory of knoweldge are the ones who eventually take the Arbitur and go on to a prestegious Universität. Everybody wins.
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?
Where I live, a couple years ago the state's high-tech industry told higher educators: "You are giving us graduates who are not ready to meet the challenges of the workplace. Therefore we want to form a consortium with you, pool money, and give out grants to higher-ed institutions in the state that can create change to existing curriculum that better meet the needs of the workplace."
This summer, the consortium sent out an RFP for developing an online program that would have the same rigor as the face-to-face curriculum, yet still meet the mission of the consortium (i.e. make it relevant to the "real world"). The computer science department wanted to write a $300K proposal to put 1/2 of the computer science curriculum online. They asked me to help develop the proposal to give it the industry bent required to have a chance at success.
I rewrote their original proposal, describing 4 certificate programs that would use all of the content of the current face-to-face curriculum, but would re-chunk it according to certificate. For example, an algorithms course would be split across the 4 certificates, where algorithm content relevant to network engineers would go in that certificate, algorithm content relevant to database engineering would go in that certificate, etc. Students would learn the material through authentic, industry-relevant problems, rather than the normal decontextualized presentation you see almost without exception in current face-to-face curricula.
Anyway, after much debate, they threw it 90% of what I had produced out of the window, saying that professors (who would be responsible for the bulk of development) would have neither the time nor the inclination to do anything like that because it would be 1) very hard work, 2) would require them to be a bit more "cross-disciplinary" in order to develop these kinds of courses, 3) wouldn't contribute to tenure, and 4) would take away from publishing activities which are weighed very heavily toward tenure.
End result? A proposal describing nothing more than putting their existing courses online with little, or no change. To their credit, they left my course-development methodology section in the proposal, so at least they will utilize instructional designers to help them.
What amazed me is that their proposal was accepted! They were awarded $300K to, in essence, do nothing to make education more relevant to industry. "One of the best proposals we've seen" were among the consortium's comments. Sheesh. I'd hate to see what the bad proposals were like.
The experience has left me feeling more strongly than ever that true innovation in today's engineering curricula is going to come from outside universities and that universities will be the laggards when it comes to curriculum innovation.
I'm going to play devil's advocate for a moment. I actually got into a debate with my Political Science professor about the very meaning of college.
The discussion came to programming and he passed out an article from some respected magazine about programmers coming from different liberal arts backgrounds. He then proceeded to ask the class what do you expect out of a college education. I raised my hand and told the 130+ in the class that I expected to be trained to get a really good job and everything over that was gravy. Startled by my commentary he began to relate the virtues of getting a college education and I agreed with him except for one point.
The whole idea of college 50 years ago was to expand your horizons and try different things, maybe even as little as 25 years ago actually. Now, try to get a professional job outside of sales without a college education; it can't be done. To me it has become another requirement of a job. My grandfather never finished high school and was the manager of a number of Levins stores starting in 1955. You can't get a job managing a McDonald's without a college education anymore.
So excuse while I burst everyone's bubble about well-roundness. I think there is something for being well versed in other cultures, knowing whats going in the world, the ability to speak and write well, and knowing how to manage others. However, well-roundness is just another word for employable so don't use it to cram classes that dont contribute to that goal into my schedule (not mine specifically because I'm graduated: metaphorical my schedule =) )
I don't know about you, but my 4 yrs at college cost me approximately $120,000. So... what did I pay for?
Currently, I'm a web application developer. But I was once a professional designer. And I was also an information architect. And I was also a mobile developer.
I majored in Religious Studies and Fine Arts (I have a BA in both). So you could say that I didn't make the most of my $120k investment. But I believe I made the most of it.
I took courses that challenged me, made me think, and made me conceptualize new and unexplored ideas. That's what I feel a liberal arts degree is about (and why I went to hamilton college).
If I had arrived at college thinking I would do one thing (be a programmer), it would have been a poor choice. But, what about life after being a programmer? And what about what happens when a programmer is no longer needed?
A trade school teaches you a trade.
A college or university teaches you to think for yourself.
You should be at the one that helps you get where you want to be and believe you're going to be.
I thin kthe old adage that it is better to teach a man to be a fisherman so he can feed himself then to just give him fish applies here. The point being that teaching someone how to program using visual basic or only teaching them one particular field like computer science, will pigeon hole them in that field. Whereas giving someone a well rounded education will allow the person to not be pigeonholed. However, some universities go to far in teaching only theory and not doing hands-on real world work. I think that a healthy combination of hands-on work and theory is needed i.e. something like a theory ladened course with a internship requirement, or one theory laden course and another course putting those theories into practice on a e-commerce database application would be a nice addition. This same type of combination could be applied to a general education requirement, say your major is computer science and you are taking a religion course, at the end of the semester you could have to turn in some kind of application having to do with religion on the web etc...i.e. you are learning in other fields but also those fields are glued to yours.
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http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
At the risk or tooting my own horn, I'm gonna claim that I'm an intelligent person who's able to hold my own in conversation on nearly any topic. I became well-rounded on my own; not through any formal schooling I've ever had. And I'm pretty sure that other people have had the same experience.
So why are people being forced to "become well-rounded" if they've already done so on their own? Why are universities (public ones, at least) allowed to soak their students for money they don't have when the classes it's spent on provide little to no benefit? I for one would much rather prefer the opportunity to take classes I'm interested in, or forego them entirely if they're not required by my major. When *I* find it necessary or desirable to expand my field of knowledge, I'll do it on my own (and spend way less money doing so).
the coolest club on
Ask slashdot: nature or nurture? Which is more important?
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
I think a lot of posters here misunderstand the point of a college education. It's not all about getting a job, or learning exactly what you need for a degree, or even learning exactly what you want to learn. The idea is to learn how to learn, and to discover new things, about the world and about yourself. And, just maybe, to learn something you didn't know before and say "Wow. That's really wonderful. I'd like to learn more about that. Maybe I'd even like to do that as a career." Even if you just have a pool of interesting knowledge that lets you have stimulating conversations with other interesting people, you've won.
I can only imagine that most of the people here suggesting that one only needs to have the knowledge that they need for their current field of interest and that everything else is "a waste of time" are young, and, therefore, have not yet realized how important literature, history, philosophy, theology, and art are. My father used to say "all knowledge is useful". I think that was one of the most important things he taught me.
My advice: every semester, try to take a course, from anywhere in the catalog, just because it looks interesting. Who knows? It might even change your life.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
Of course university education should be well-rounded, it teaches you thinking and considering other perspectives, etc. If you want skills, spend your money (or your parents' money or taxpayers' money) and go to a technical college/institute.
Hey, if you want to follow the fast track to your degree and ignore all the opportunities to learn stuff you'd never touch otherwise, go ahead. You'll kick yourself later on in life when you realize that you'll learn all those pooty programming languages and API's and such in the first two weeks on the job, and all that time in school you spent on the straight and narrow has crippled your ability to think outside the box.
Any good employer hires you for your ability to learn and your ability to think independently, as well as the skills you currently posess.
---------
Get back to me when my brain starts working.
The really ironic thing is that CS people can not afford to do this in any way, shape, or form. Athletic jocks can do it to a large extent because they can be "pure" jocks and still make lots of money (hire accountants to take care of money, managers to take care of business issues, etc). However, people in the computer-related fields are tool makers. Our main purpose is to make software/hardware that enables other people in other fields to complete their jobs. It doesn't matter how many programming languages and OSes you know how to use if you can't understand the problem that you're trying to solve!
How many times have you been in a building and realized that some part of the layout is ridiculously stupid, and then realized that it's that way because it makes the overall design easier or "prettier". It's the same when programmers write software that is easy to write at the expense of error-handling, completeness, etc.
So basically, a lot of people in computer-related fields need to wake-up to the world around them. There are a lot of interesting things besides computers, and if you choose CS as a career, you'll almost definitely have to combine it with another field (business, marketing, communication, biology, physics, etc).
I've been waiting for this thread for a long time.
I wish I'd have actually gotten more of a broad based and well rounded education instead of what I did get, trained to be an engineer. I went to what is generally regarded as a good school, University of Virginia. In 4 years, I had only two classes that resembled an english class. Introductory first year english for engineers was called "Language Communication in a Technical Society". Nope, I'm not kidding.
Now approaching middle age, I find myself wishing that I had read a bit more history and a little less circuit diagrams. A bit more poetry and a few less calculus formulas. More political theory and a whole lot less C++.
College and those years presents an unequalled opportunity for personal growth. I'm afraid I wasted much of it in the lab. Those folks in the College of Arts and Sciences really are learning something valuable. I'm just sorry I missed it.
As a CS senior at Concordia University Wisconsin, I feel that a well rounded, theory based approach to computing is important. Our major's curriculum is based off of the CS-0 model from the ACM/IEEE-CS. This stresses a wide approach to CS. The reason for learning theory in CS classes is that in the four years of my studies, the computing world has changed drastically, while the theory underlying it has not. A program that teaches logical thinking and problem solving, rather than programming at first has benifits: The CS student will learn how to solve problems through the use of CS rather than how to code a program in one specific language. In addition most 4 year programs stress on the job training through internships. Another important factor is personal motivation, a student should go beyond the classroom and apply that which he/she has learned and actually use it. ACM IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula.
It has been my experience that those who cry the loudest that they don't need to be well-rounded are the ones who need it most. They can write killer code, but don't know the difference between "then" and "than," for instance.
Another is that you'll be better-prepared to participate in a democracy. Don't understimate this point! Having a broad education will make you much better at making informed good choices in life, both for yourself and your community. We need a lot of critical thinking to happen today an in the future, especially in light of September 11.
BTW, a liberal education doesn't in any way preclude you from technical jobs. I was a history major in college, then a philosophy grad student, and now a software developer. Judging from what I've seen in salary surveys, my own job satisfaction, and the qualifications of people I've interviewed, I'm doing as well as one could want. In fact, early in college I changed majors from EE to history precisely because I didn't want to be locked in such a narrow focus. I'm gald I made that decision.
john
well, i think that 'liberal arts' is highly important for tech stuff, since you really
do need to understand human nature, and
you need to be able to read thousands of
pages of writing and pull out the important
points relativeley quickly, and you need to
be able to communicate with people concisely
via writing. those 3 things are totally
history, english, etc. engineering classes generally dont cover either of those things
and alot of engineering people are really shitty
at those things and it causes alot of problems
when you try to develop something as a team.
on the other hand, you couldnt get a @#$@#$ job,
so who knows.
Judging from the original post, a well-rounded education to the slashdot community might simply be instruction in the use of a spellchecker. ;-)
Most of us live in a society where we vote our representatives. These representatives make policies. For these type of society to work, we must understand what the heck are our representatives doing, that is, understand the policies they are passing. Take fiscal policies. We all like tax cuts but how many of us know cases where tax cuts are bad for the economy? An intro course in macroeconomics gives you good idea, along with what happens when certain policies are imposed during certain economic conditions.
College should prepare us for the world. Aside from our careers, that world also includes being a knowledgeable voter and getting a well-rounded education is the only way to that.
The argument above does not apply to communism.
I'm an undergraduate Materials Engineer in a UK University and many of the students that I've met from the US can't believe just how specialized the course is, concentrating almost purely on metallurgy, with a bit of polymer science and a couple of odd-ball materials thrown in for good measure.
Ultimately, this should give a good depth of knowledge, although not a very broad knowledge base. The upshot of this is that the British education system produces few "holistic engineers" with companies needing to call in contractors/consultants to deal with a problem that one engineer with a broad skillset could handle alone.
Whilst this seems to suit big business fairly well, having experts in particular fields in-house, smaller companies may struggle to find the money to employ contractors to carry out the work that could otherwise be handled by one employee.
--
Windows XP. From the people who brought you Edlin.
I graduated 17 years ago from the University of Dallas
www.udallas.edu, where they have an extensive Core Curriculum. Literature, history, philosophy, politics, art, foreign languages--I still use all of that stuff, at least as much as the chemistry, biology and math I studied. Most importantly, they taught me how to think critically. This is what makes college more than a glorified trade school, or should anyway.
It's always been my understanding that Universities are there to teach you how to think, while still providing a core set of fundamentals. Colleges are where you go to learn Java instead of Object-oriented programming. If you want to learn a current set of skills, go to College, but if you want to learn how to learn new skills, go to University.
-Ben
Sure, you can go out and learn a career for the next 10 years. But then what. Look at the state of computer science 10 years ago and look at it now.
What you describe as a general education I don't even consider general enough. Where's the history, anthropology and psychology? Just who are you designing computer systems for anyway? I majored in anthropology with a minor in psych. I've spent 20 years moving one career to career in computers. I've started companies, I've done consulting, I've worked on big projects at big companies, and little projects on my own. Most of the CS majors I know are still stuck in one field, and suffering as the industry moves out from under them.
Use college as a way to learn how to learn. Let the rest come through experience out in the real world.
I hope for the love of god that the guy who attempts to clone a human being has done at least some classes is politics, philosophy or economics.
Gosh you like that phrase.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
If you can't spell "curriculum", your education isn't very well-rounded.
Since the ability to communicate is paramount in getting anything done in the real world, an education which teaches one to spell would be a plus. Never mind universities, tend to grammar school quality first. Then be sure the institutions of so called higher education don't do anything to screw it up.`
Assuring employment for baccalaureates is not the function of institutions of higher education. For undergrads, a liberal education is the best they can do for you, and that's not a failure. If you really need to be sure of getting a job, get an education in a suite of trades, such as bricklaying, heavy equipment operation, Microsoft system administration, etc.
I spent some time in the US Air Force, where the "Whole Person" concept was highly valued. That is, a person should know their job, and pay attention to the world outside their jobs.
As a military job is strongly affected by world events, politics, economics, and whatnot, this was a good idea.
On the other side of the coin, my education started out in Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas, in Austin.
I remember an editorial letter from a liberal arts major, who complained that we "students of the sciences" were getting way too focussed an education, without a proper rounding out of said education. Of course, we had to respond.
In prinipal, we agreed, we said. But we saw a definite lack of technical courses in the syllabi of the typical liberal arts student, and offered to take a literature course, say, if they would likewise require one of our introductory engineering courses.
We pointed out that for us, it would be a welcome vacation from the hard-core technical classes, but that liberal arts majors would likely harm their GPAs by reciprocating (grin).
Personally, I think that any education is valuable, but the best "rounding" of your formal education is obtained merely by paying attention to the rest of the world.
Someone pointed out that it would be nice to have classes on resume writing, and how to interview. I say that you simply weren't looking at student services. Most colleges have this and more. Moreover, my experience has been that this is a free service, even for part time students.
Someone else pointed out that they documented for three hours, for a program that took an hour to write. For heaven's sake, there is rarely such a thing as a throw away program. When you move on to greener pastures, someone else has to maintain that program. Speaking from experience, good documetation has saved my job time and time again, while no- or bad-documentation has made my life a living hell on more than one occasion, especially if coupled with bad programming practices.
Business, Management, and Economics courses try to give us a hint of the reason we write the software - in the corporate world, you should have a good business case (gads, I sound like Dilbert's boss) for even starting a new project, because the bottom line depends on wasting as little of a company's resources as possible.
Now, I hated having to take all the "extra classes" as much as anyone. After all, I wanted to just get on track with my career, and fill in the details as I went. It's easier if you already have some of those details when you go...
Mark Edwards
Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request
The College follows what is oft called a "Great Books Program." The basic idea is that one takes the seminal works of Western Civilization and chronologically works through them (freshmen cover the Greeks, Sophomores the Romans and Medievals, Juniors the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and Seniors the Moderns). In one sense, this means no textbooks, i.e., no "Chemistry 101." On the other hand, one does odd things like read Lavoisier's treatise establishing what we now call the table of periodic elements. The idea is to read the original sources and through conversation to analyze it and understand it. Lab classes also have a practicum section where they reenact the pertinent experiments in an attempt to see the evidence that prompted the author's conclusions. Faculty members, called tutors, take the role of facilitators. The official rhetoric of the school is that they are merely fellow learners a few steps ahead on the road to knowledge, a rhetoric that is largely lived out. In accordance with this view comes one of the odder traditions on campus: faculty members, called tutors, and all others (staff, students, etc) are addressed the same, as Mr. or Ms. So-and-so.
Registration is rather a joke. A student walks in, verifies their identity, signs the paperwork officially promising their soul and first-born child to the devil, and then picks up the schedule the Registrar has assigned them. Freshman take courses with such descriptive titles as "Freshman Language," "Freshman Mathematics," "Freshman Lab" and "Freshman Seminar." Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors all take similar classes. There are only two exceptions to this. First, Sophomores take a music tutorial (all regular course work receives this name) instead of a lab tutorial. Second, Juniors and Seniors take an 8 week break from the evening seminar to participate in "preceptorials." The only elective process of the official curriculum, upperclassman are given this opportunity to focus on a specific work or author that they would like to study in depth. Precepts are different from other classes in another way: size. Tutorials normally have 15 to 20 students and 1 Tutor, seminars have roughly 30 to 40 students and 2 Tutors, while precepts generally have anywhere from 4 to 20 students and 1 tutor. Subject matter for precepts is determined this way: Upperclassmen are allowed to suggest topics to the Dean's office. That list is then circulated around the faculty to see if anyone would care to lead such a class, after a list of which Tutor will be leading what studies, students are allowed to list a ranked 3 preferences. The Dean then assigns who goes where.
The subject of the tutorials is rather easy to determine (math, lab, music, language--classical greek and french), but seminar and precept may need more explanation. These classes are more the heart of the program. The tutorials are normal 70 minute long classes you take during the day, the seminar is different. It's a two hour long classes twice a week at night. Its expected to be a more formal event, and students often dress accordingly. Its here that one learns the skill to put forth an argument, a view, an analysis of some of the toughest stuff you've ever read and then to let it be ripped apart by your friends, enemies, and teachers, all without taking it personally. In turn you learn to do it to others. The standard at St. John's is that you can say whatever the %$*# you went, so long as you can back it up with reason. Seminar and precept are where you do it. Books covered in seminar are mostly the heavies of philosophy, religion, and "literature." Heavies like Homer, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hegel, and so on...
Grading and assessment are also different. The schools' official position is that if they could get away without giving grades, they wouldn't. But the accrediting agencies all require grades. So they give 'em. Well that's a bit generous. They assign grades. If you want to see them you have to make an apointment with the registrar and fill out a special form. Instead assessment is done chiefly through the don rag. As discussed earlier, the faculty one works with that semester gets together to discuss you, your contributions to class and the school in general, and whether or not you are fit to pass on to the next semester. You're invited to attend this meeting and listen in. At the end of the meeting, the chair of the committee finally acknowkedges your presence and you are allowed to respond in whatever manner you deem best.
The other vehicle for assessment is the annual essay. Each year one is expected to write an essay "fit for publication," and then to defend it orally before your two seminar tutors. This essay is particularly important in the sophomore year when one goes through the enabling process. In that case the entire college faculty gathers and discusses every member of the sophomore class, and their fitness to pass on to Junior year. The Senior essay is also different. Each year's essay is supposed to be both longer and weightier than that of the previous year, however, it is subject is limited to something one studied that year. In Senior year though, all bets are off. One can write on anything given the approval of the dean, and one's oral is public and conducted by a panel of three faculty members one normally isn't currently studying under. In the other three years, one can flub the essay and still move on, but if your Senior essay is rejected or you fail your oral, you don't graduate. You have to wait till the next spring to try again.
In any normal American school this would indeed end up leading to a BA with a double major and a few associated minors. However, at St. John?s you end up with a BA in liberal arts. Thats it. The idea is that the purpose of education is to be educated, not trained: well-rounded in the arts that make up our society, understanding of where those arts came from, how they got there, and how they'll probably move in the future. When one graduates, one really isn't qualified to be anything. However, a graduate is fully capable of associating with just about anyone in any field, and not thoroughly embarrassing them self or becoming absolutely clueless. In other words, high school messes you up, this college fixes you and makes you smart for life, and grad school hones you.
Hehehe - I'm being so preachy to a complete stranger who's prolly 4 years older than me. [S]he was just trying to blow off some serious frustration, and I scream uselessly at him/her. Been a while since I've posted on Slashdot...
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
from a personal perspective, i'm a CTO taking some well-earned time off, travelling, under 30, had forty people working for me by the time i was 25. i'm now working on my own projects that will never be compromised by stupid marketing or client demands. i have no CS degree
but i was quite lucky to have grown up around computers. when it came time to pick a course of study, realized i was about to be surrounded by some of the most brilliant minds in physics, philosophy, literature, history, and political science. i figured i would never be around these people again, and spending 30K a year to keep doing what came naturally to me would be a bit of a waste.
when i got out of school, i'd say my 'well roundedness' paid off. i was the engineer that always was called to meetings because i could speak convincingly and in english about what was working or not to those in charge and clients alike. i always ended up writing specs and proposals(which gets your name noticed) because i could put thoughts to words clearly, and again, in language non-engineers could understand. i was the one sent to work with the other teams because of the 'big picture' sort of thinking that's necessary at the strategic level. these things i got from the 'dead white guys' everybody is so quick to pick on, not any java or unix class.
but my advice is, choose wisely. political philosophy classes *will* help you put the smack on lawyers with stupid contracts, and embarass marketing windbags in meetings. the ability to disect somebody else's argument and destroy it piece-by-piece in a non-confrontational manner, while at the same time convincing your adversary of the correctness of your point may mean the difference between your boss going for a UNIX-based server room or having to live in NT hell. art history, on the other hand, will make you an interesting date, but not much else.
as for all those hours spent on UML diagrams and project plans... every experienced engineer knows that the best projects are the ones where somebody hands you a spec, you code, and the product is what was expected. that only happens with a *lot* of planning.
as an employer, i just want engineers who can write clean code, and think for themselves. this stuff all changes so much, that your ability to teach yourself new things is your most valuable skill. you'll get the responsibility people think you can handle, and if people see you as 'just a tech' then, that's all you'll ever be.
You left "animal husbandry" and "high-level cannabinoid theory" off your list.
There is really no substitute for a well-rounded education. What is today's technological marvel is nothing but tomorrow's surplus junkpile. In a quality educational program, abstraction and timeless principles are emphasized over concrete implementation details. How many programmers are there that can write syntactically correct C++ code, but don't know an AVI tree from an oak tree, have no idea how to do complexity analysis, think Chomskyian grammer is political criticism, and wouldn't recognize a correctness proof if it bit them on the ass. Syntax is easy, synthesis and analysis are hard.
In addition,what some people forget is that a college education has different goals than a trade school. Democratic societies require that the general populace possess sufficient education to make rational choices required to assure survival of a democratic political system, to discern the leaders from the demagogic poseurs. Economic theory, as well, from Adam Smith onwards, assumes that the consumer is making the rational and informed choices necessary for the continuation of prosperity.
If you can forgive me pushing one of my old alma maters, in my opinion one of the best, and most underrated, engineering degrees in the country is offered by Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Engineering. The Bachelor's degree in engineering is interdisciplinary, and generally requires 2-3 semesters beyond the A.B., which is a prerequisite. This program emphasizes "how to think" over "what to think", and produces an unusually high proportion of successful entrepeneurs and businessmen (Among the students, one of the local "conceits" is that Thayer graduates will start a business, and then go hire MIT graduates to work for them). The Ph.D. program is interdisciplinary as well, and has a special emphasis on the applied mathematical principles that underly all of the engineering disciplines. The latter program is the one that I have the honor of graduating from, and it has served my career well, providing me with a solid background and the flexibility required to remain competitive in rapidly evolving fields of research related to computer science and technology.
I see lots of people saying, "Well you need English" and "Colleges teach you how to learn".
My question is.. well what the hell was I doing in the 13 years of school before that? Most of the general classes I took in college were a rehash of the things I learned from 3rd grade on.
*My* well rounded (Hampshire) college curriculum taught me to take enough care in my writings to spell words correctly -- and if I don't know how to spell something, I fucking look it up.
~jeff
I've gone to both types of schools, so I think I'm in an especially good position to address this question. Before I give my opinion, let me bore you with some personal background:
:)
:)
First, straight out of high school, I got a scholarship to a pretentious liberal-arts university, and I majored in math. I burned out after three years due to life circumstances (that had nothing to do with the education I was getting) and went to work.
Once committed to the working world, I pursued skills training on an ad-hoc basis, never really searching for a degree. I got training in welding, drafting, mediation, and am now working on an MCSE. (Let's just say it's been a diverse career path.
What I've found is that the university education I had gave me a great deal of wonderful information, that was of marginal utility in the working world... at first. As time goes by, though, the seemingly scattershot diversity of my university education has continued to coalesce into a unified whole, as life gives me more context with which to tie disparate subjects together. The idea that this would happen seemed purest fantasy to me back when I was twenty.
Likewise, I found that the various skills trainings I have had produced excellent benefits in the short term, but their utility rapidly diminished over time. As my career has careened along, I've found that every four years or so I need to invest in a new set of training to help me excel, as the previous training becomes irrelevant to my job. In the tech world, of course, one also has to fret about obsolescence. (Fat lot of good that MCSE will do me in two years if I roll out linux, but it's a good interim approach to my work.)
The REALLY interesting thing to me is that the broad, liberal-arts education I recieved early on has seemed to amplify the effectiveness of my skills trainings. On the job one learns What to do, in training one learns How to do it, but a broader education lets one deduce Why a thing should (or should not) be done, even when it's beyond the explicit scope of work or training.
So, to address the original question, "Yes, a well-rounded education is a good thing." In my mind, though, a truly well rounded education is one that gives a person a broad base of knowledge *and* a set of focused, up-to-date skills. In my experience, no single institution will provide this; it's best to pick and choose one's own program from academic and technical/vocational schools.
Lastly, let me give some words of advice to folks getting started out there.
First, learn to write well. Anyone who can write well by academic standards will set themselves apart from most people in the working world. I work in an office with about fifty people; about three of us can write worth a damn. Our peers who can't write well defer to us in all sorts of matters that have nothing to do with writing, just because we present our ideas well. English is not a trivial subject, no matter your primary focus... I guarantee you will use it again if you're good at it.
If you're a tech-head, take humanities courses. It may seem trivial and irrelevant now, but its utility grows with age. It's something that will not help you much in the working world, but will help with everything *else* in life, such as good citizenship.
Lastly, learn to think for yourself, to check your assumptions and recognize box canyons of thought. I absolutely guarantee that there will be times when you are wrong, and what your boss tells you to do is also wrong. You will be a hero every time can recognize this before it is too late. (How to effectively tell your boss he's wrong is left as an excercise for the reader.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Look, being truly educated means being able to use your mind. Technical skills can become obselete in very short periods of time, but a robust intellect that knows how to solve problems in the general sense and can reason fairly and cogently is always a powerful tool (weapon?). This is the kind of thing you learn from reading Einstein and Newton, Euler and Gauss, even Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
From the masters, you learn mastery of your own human capacity to understand, and we all know that knowledge is power (ABC schoolhouse ROCK!)
There is one school in the USA where you can study such things. I graduated in 1994, and can say that I learned more permanently useful skills there than I did in all of my technical training (which was extensive). It's a great school, investigate.
in hypertext that's: Thomas Aquinas College
It does more for your life than taking a fatty bong rip before class... I can tell you that much.
;)
I attend UC Santa Cruz, and in one of our on-campus dining halls we have a piece of paper kicking it on the wall containing the saying:
"A specialist is someone who learns more and more
about less and less until they know everything
about nothing."
Now I realize that nobody has enough time to not specialize at all, but the *best* thing you can put into your body is knowledge... that way the next time you are talking out of your nether orifice, you will at least sound like you know something
At least that is what I found, in my 22 years of I.T. experience. Employers want very specific skills - right down to product and version. Employers don't care about what you know about history or even math or algorithms.
Employers want: C++, Java, Oracle, HP-UX, Solaris, etc.
But if they did, they'd see my candidates for king of the well-rounded education (NOTE: US-centric; ordered by date of founding):
United States Military Academy
United States Naval Academy
United States Air Force Academy
Unlike other well-rounded universities, a student getting a B.S. in English (yes, it's a B.S. not a B.A.) will actually take *real* physics and mathematics courses. Hell, they'll even take thermodynamics. Conversely, someone getting a B.S. in mechanical engineering will take a larger number of humanities courses than they would elsewhere. Finally, since conditioning the mind is only part of the equation, they're all required to participate in, at least, 1 intra-mural or intra-scholastic athletic program.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. People spouting nonsense about post-structuralism/modernism, hermeneutics, or a "patriarchal, racist, classist society" are ignominiously buried outside the gates after proudly receiving their 9mm container award.
If this is representative of the classes you are receiving it is at least 20 years out of date. I have not used those techniques for at least 12 years and that was towards the end of their usefulness. (Note: ER is still useful for Relational Database applications only).
If you are not using UML and your instructor is not teaching it for analysis and design then you are not getting a current education.
For my credentials, I teach OOP using Java in a graduate level program. In my day job I am a software and system's architect. You ask if the time spent in A &D is appropriate I tend to think it is. The purpose of A & D is to help you think about the problem. You may be able to code it faster than you can analyze and design it but the A & D helps you think in the way you solve problems.
For OOP languages you need to study OOAD to understand how to "Think Object Oriented". If you use the structured techniques you are learning you can expect to write structured code. Even if you use an OO language. In my class I call this JavaTran (TM). It is written in Java but it sure smells like FORTRAN. If you think in 1970's structured methodology you will write 1970's structured programs, even if you use an OOP language.
Because this is slashdot, most of the people commenting seem to be CS oriented. I'd like to rant a little on the other side. I did liberal Arts at college (Auckland University, New Zealand). Going in, I had pretty much the same marks in English, Physics, and Maths. I've always been into computers, so my first instinct was CS, but when I looked at the curriculum, I got the same feeling that a lot of people here have talked about; all of this stuff was going to be useless in a few years. At the time, everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) was being moved onto java, so there was very little evidence of C++, C, linux, unix, assembler, basic comp theory, etcetcetc. A very one dimensional programme, and so I crossed the floor to do english and history. A lot of people here have been complaining about people who are too specialised in their computer degrees. Let me tell you, it's also very bad in the humanities. Most of the people I've worked with, students and lecturers, wouldn't know the first thing about maths, science or computers. And the real problem is that a lot of them seem to feel the need to discourse on these things they know nothing about. Echoes of all the things that Alan Sokal was complaining about are everywhere (physics guy who wrote a phony "postmodern" paper on quantum physics, revealed that a lot of the humanities people had no idea what they were talking about, if you don't know). My main point is that while we may complain (justly) that a lot of computer and science people don't know much about the humanities, at least (most of them) have the basic skills of writing and literacy. And in my experience there are also a lot of very well read science types around. But many people at the end of the liberal arts spectrum have absolutely no idea of even the most basic computing and science concepts. As an aside, this often extends to knowing nothing about stats, which is scary given that a lot of humanities research involves it at some point or another. And while most unread computer people wouldn't presume to rabbit on about sophocles or Milton, many liberal arts people just HAVE to say impressive, vague things about the sciences. Lack of rounding cuts both ways. Ghoraz
I had a very interesting history professor back in college*. She taught History of Science, yet she had no idea how a scientist thought. She was a perfect example of an "artsie craftsie" and was also clearly a closet socialist. Still, she was well-spoken and fun to talk to. She also seemed to like me (as a student), I guess because I actually wanted to learn the material and not just make a good grade.
I ran into this professor several years later and she asked how my engineering career was going. I explained that I had started doing environmental and energy engineering (probably the opposite of what she thought) and was now doing manufacturing engineering. "You can do that?" she asked, "you can just switch engineering fields... but weren't you a Mechanical Engineer in college." I explained that an engineering degree was NOT about learning how every different type of device works, like a humongous "car repair" degree or something. There are just way too many devices and things in the world to know how they all work, and an engineer needs to be able to imagine completely new ones. Instead, they teach you how the laws of the universe work, how to approach problems, how to do research, how to think about things and how to model them in your head or with mathematics so that whatever problem I was given I would be able to solve it. "An engineering degree is not so much about skills," I said, "It is about meta-skills... and that means that I can switch to ANY field I want, engineering or otherwise, as long as I have the time to do the background research on it." She looked at me with a stunned expression and said, "Oh MY GOD**, that is the justification for having a liberal arts degree!!! And those bastards over in the engineering school have figured out how to do it?"
I will always remember that. Unless I get amnesia.
* One of her questions on an exam was "If you lived in the time of Kepler, would you have believed his theory of how the planets revolved around the sun?" I thought "great, an opinion question... I can't get this wrong." I wrote for one and a half pages on how I could not have existed back then, but if somehow I had I would have believed Kepler because his mathematics worked better than anyone else's. Despite it being an opinion question, I got it wrong. When I went to her office to complain she explained that people in Kepler's day believed the Church or Tycho, and I would have too. I admitted that after I thought about it later I realized that I would not have believed Kepler, but not because of why she thought... I said that like the other handful of real scientists of the day, I would have been no doubt hawking my own theory to explain everything. "You see, if you assume a "gage rotation" of the universe, and first subtract that out..." She looked at me like I was from another planet.
** Despite being an atheist... she wasn't a very good one.
Young people are a pain in the neck because they are not well-rounded. They come into companies thinking they have all the answers, but they don't understand what all the questions are. BTW, I'm describing myself here - I would not hire the person I was at 22.
I could not agree more - looking back I now realize how incredibly ignorant I was coming out of college - and I thought I was pretty bright. The reality is that you can't possibly learn everything you need to know for the work-a-day world in a few years of formal college training nor is it really possible to teach such skills effectively in a school setting. Students need to accept that the fact that they will be apprentices the first few years of their careers (any career) - effectively learning and observing on the job (absorbing the good and recognizing the bad). In the long term, knowing how to think and learn is far more important than learning specific technical skills (although they may certainly help to get a first job, they also give you the illusion you know more that you actually do). Any one starting out in software field ought to have a look at the recent book Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative by Pete McBreen which suggests that software development know-how takes time to learn from experience which in turn comes from being mentored by and working with more experienced programmers - NOT from studing for and passing certification exams.
I don't know if this post will ever get moderated or read given the fact that this topic is now "old" on the list, but here it go.
There is a lot of post on this topic but it seems to me that most of them missed one key element of schooling. In my view, school AND education is all about history. When you are in school, no matter what at level, you are learning no more than about the past history. Only when you learn to see the past will you be able to see/predict the future.
So while you are at school, try to learn the past as much as you can. Once you are out of it, use your "imagination" and what you learned about the past to map the road ahead.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
If you know so much about what you need to learn and are so confident in your ability to learn it, why don't you just save youself the time and money and drop out.
PS. Let me know who you are so I can be sure never to hire you, not that your arrogance and shallowness won't be obvious.
This is indeed the definition of a "university": its goal is not to educate you so much as prevent you from being ignorant.
The purpose of education is a very old debate and the term "well-rounded" is a much watered-down version of the a principle defended by Cicero (106 - 43 B.C) that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is a defining human characteristic.
In contrast, Cato the Elder (234 - 149 BC) insisted that knowledge be judged by what it produce and held what might now be called a liberal education in contempt.
The definitive exposition of the issue is Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University. He makes a useful distinction between "servile" education ("mechanical employment, and the like, in which the mind has little or no part") as being the opposite of "liberal" education, which "is the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence."
Newman does not disparage the professions as being devoid of intellectual value. However, one can see in his distinction between the two types of education that putting one's mind purely in the service of earning a living ignores a much larger world beyond one's immediate needs.
Newman argues: "Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;--these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University."
When I compare the language errors in his post, and then yours, I find it amusing that you insinuate you're somehow more enlightened than he is.
And I wish you extraverts would stop projecting your psychological problems on the rest of us. Real World(TM) teamwork involves everyone doing their role and being able to communicate the results, not everyone taking turns looking at a culture slide and copying down the answers of the smartest person.
Many people that I knew at uni were not there in order to get a job at the end of the degree. Many were there to enjoy learning. It is unfair to design courses which do not take these people into account. They were often mature or retired, and had no use for job seeking skills.
Lots of universities (at least, in Australia) have a lot of support for students who want to learn how to do resumes, prepare for interviews, etc. See your student union/guild/support centre. We don't need to learn this stuff in class.
Ask an employer what they find more valuable. A grad with specialised knowledge that will be obsolete in 5 years, or a grad who has skills in seeking and synthesising information, regardless of the discipline. The latter is why Arts degrees are valued despite the irrelevant nature of some of the subjects.
There is a strong push by librarians worldwide to develop integrated curricula with faculty that will give students in all courses the knowledge to seek and use information effectively both during and after university. The hardest challenge is balancing the time for course content (the nitty gritty) with the holistic approach to seeking information.
1) Well rounded means you can spell and read, as well as code. ...or be creative.
2) And speak in public.
3) Remember that something like 30% of people go into jobs that they majored in.
4) The most important part in college education is to teach how to learn, not rote memorization.
5) Monkeys can memorize, people can innovate.
6)
7) "Those who don't know history are bound to repeat the mistakes of the past."
8) Learning to work in teams.
9) Learning to be flexible.
I think that is all I have to add to this discussion.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Things like:
Causality vs. Correlation
Who the F*** wrote this? Is this valid? Maybe just because its written down doesn't mean its any good... (eg. Marx, Freud, name-a-debunked-author-here)
OMG I have to manage all this coursework myself? Guess I'd better learn to manage my time...
I have 500 pages of readings to do and have to extract the meaningful 3 pages from the 497 pages of s***
-------
These are the kinds of things you learn in looniversity. I pity the poor engineer who doesn't even get a chance to wander outside their faculty and learn something else about the world around them. As opposed to my CS degree that allows me the flexibility to pursue all kinds of different things.
No, my employer probably doesn't care that I know a good deal about the Nazi policies on art, but I do...
The way AIP did ProDev for CAM students was to slap it on top of Flat Portfolio. Which meant that in addition to resumes, biz cards, interview practice, and other things, we were also responsible for passing (there was no curve- it either exceeded [a+], met [a], or failed [f]) an 18 item checklist of graphics work- life drawing, color pieces, backgrounds, storyboards, multimedia CDROM, etc. If you failed ONE of these items, you failed the entire class.
THAT was where social engineering came in. The instructor considered my photoshop work to be the strongest in the class and actually used it as an example several times. But at that point in time, my flat work (drawings) sucked ass. If I hadn't greased the rails- if the instructor had been a complete and total hardass instead of an ally- I would have failed the class on the merit of my flat drawing skills.
Which makes you wonder why they slammed two marginally related classes together and had the entire grade structure hinge on one of them, but that's something I prefer not to think about.
Why? I learned how to love knowledge. I was taught that learning is beautiful for its own sake, and thus, I learned. I learned what I was interested in. What I was interested in was computer software; I wrote a fair share in college despite never having taken one class; when I was hired as an intern I wasn't expected to have mad code skillz; what they saw in me was someone who could, and wanted to, learn anything. Generalized learning is good because it shows you how to blur the boundaries between disciplines. If you can learn C++ and Bourne shell, you can learn Java in half the time. Learn all three of those, and you'll be able to pick up Perl in a quarter of the time. The last language I acquired was Python; it took me about a week, but then, it was the eighth language I've learned in the last 5 years (not counting a few oddball niche languages).
The kind of place you want to work for will be screening for the kind of person who has two things: (1) an intermediate understanding of the work domain, in my case the set containing: C++, SQL and basic software design skills; (2) a demonstrable ability to learn across work domains, and pick up the extra skills that will be needed to be more effective. A great employee expands his skills quickly to fill the gaps wherever they may be, and an employer can't predict where they will be. Instead they hire people who they can expect to fill any gap.
Broad work experience is the best indicator of this, but I realize a large chunk of Slashdot's readership is still in college, and they won't have any yet. Here's what you want on your resume after college (if you're going to do what I'm doing):
You can load up on bullet point 1 if you want. Every code-containing CD you mail out with your resume will get you a call back. But they'll mock you cruelly if you don't have any of bullet #2. No matter what discipline you're in, people who learn quickly are more valuable than people who don't, no matter how their skill depth compares. This is the important point, and it's easy to miss, so pay attention: A broad education reduces the time it takes to learn almost anything.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I don't regret having taken any of the comp sci courses I took in college, and I took more than any or my classmates.
But here is a list of the courses that I now WISH I had taken, with the benefit of hindsight.
My university has the usual approach toward any engineering discipline. Let me outline it right quick...
1.) Make it impossible to get everything done by having the difficult projects due immediately and the simple projects vague and unspecified.
2.) Throw the research guys in to teach the difficult courses. That way, the students learn that being near brilliance makes you brilliant and grading, like life, is subjective.
3.) Discourage cooperation. I don't know if this applies to other colleges, but mine (Mississippi State) shoves the academic honesty policy down my throat every time they assign something. Then, when I ask the teacher privately he says "Maybe you could ask a friend?"
4.) Don't attempt to learn the material, since understanding concepts is useless. Memorize these few examples and regurgitate them on a test. That way, you'll have something to compare to in real life. You won't understand it then, but you kept the book the professor wrote and charged you megabucks for right?
-- I have fans? Wow.
Then you might know what a Crusade really is.
you will still have to incorporate it with the complexing complements that define your problem.
If you simply come up with a answer that say touches on one field solely, then you probably only have a crude approximation. Thus by knowing somethings about the relative fields surrounding your problem you are really just narrowing down solutions and most importantly checking your work.
That's called vocational training. You don't need to go to a university to find that.
I'm attending Westwood College of Technology in Upland, California. I've seen a lot of talk about how at a large university you're sometimes just a number, and how private intstitions are weak on the general education.
At Westwood, I have the best of both worlds. I'm taking a hefty amount of general education, but with a very specific major.
At this school you recieve an intimate relationship with other students and staff, which has really been a good experience so far.
Also, this type of school allows a student to be well-rounded in outside fields as well as education them regarding business culture, while teaching specific trades in a chosen field.
I'd recommend this type of institution to anyone, but especially Westwood.
Cheers.
I graduated from Earlham, a Liberal Arts College, with a computer science major in 1998. I've been involved in managing a website development company since then. I've found the required broad liberal arts base
very useful in the real world. I came out equipped with writing skills and the ability work well with groups of people, not just computers. I can't say I felt everything was 100% relevent, but I know CS at liberal arts schools has produced some other notable web ventures: Slashdot and PerlMonks come to mind.
I'm an electrical engineer. I design memory modules. Virtually nothing that I learned in 4 1/2 years of college applies directly to my field except for a few basic electrical principles that I didn't have to go to college to learn. On the other hand, that time in college gave me the ability to think on my own, draw accurate conclusions from limited data and to hold my own in a relatively technical conversation with my peers. The time was well spent just for that.
I suspect that if you raise your concerns with your professors, you'll find out that they won't claim that a college education, well rounded or not, will send you out into the world fully trained to do whatever it is that you want to do. But it will give you a solid foundation with which to start. And that's not so bad.
Oh, and one thing that I think everyone should be able to do is spell. "Forrest" only has one "r" in it.
-h-
Thsi may be one of the worst ask slashdot questions I've ever seen. College isn't about getting a job. Thast why there's Lincoln Tech and Computer Learning Center.
And what college does teaches you how to do lots of things, but nothing about anything in particular? Thats why you pick a MAJOR. If you major in EE, you learn lots of that. If you pick Criminal Justice, or Underwater Basket Weaving, you'll learn lots about those also. If you don't find those particularly fascinating, pick something else. if you didn;t leanr anything in particualr, its means a) you purposely picked a bogus cake major, or b) you weren't paying attention. We don't havee little data jacks in us (yet) to learng things Matrix style, so its up to you. College is what you make of it. Its a learning opportunity, not traing to be a code monkey. As much as I whine about having to take an extra liturature or diversity class, itsgood for me to take those, as it helps expand my horizons into things I wouldn't normally have taken. My knowlege of Ghandi, Islam, dance, and neauro Physics comes from those classes. Very cool stuff, that I wouldn't have approached otherwise.
Mod point free since 2001
Going back on topic:
I'm in my third year of BS computer science at a liberal arts college in the Philippines. It's not really well-known as the best CS school - a more technical school holds that honor - but I love it anyway. =) Besides, philosophy's actually _really_ interesting. Wouldn't have thought it could be that fun.
there is not one university that can "teach skills that would help us in the first 10 years of employment" The workplace changes constantly and whether a graduate succeed for 10 years after graduation soley depends on his/her own performance. When a student enters a university, the school/counselor hasn't a clue what he wants to be. Frankly, most college students don't have a clue what they want to be. Many students make bad decision regarding their major. Colleges that strive for well roundedness open doors for these students - most colleges allow students to change major w/o much fuss, albeith min req. Also, people go to college for different reasons. Teaching well roundedness is sort of a middle ground for all the different reasons. Lastly, life is a learning process. Even if you land your ideal job after graduation, you still need "more schooling" or as I like to call it, TRAINING before you can do anywork. I have a computer science degree and you would think that I can work right away. But despite my technical degree, I still need training on PBX (Private Branch Exchange) before I was of any value to my first employer. See, whether you have a technical or liberal degree, there is no avoidance of additional schooling after college.
This destroys the self-correcting nature possible in a system where information flows both ways.
Basically "what he said" but presented by a fantastically arcane, silly author that's simultaneously full of wisdom and bullcrap.
since when has the task of the university been to train people corporations want to hire? certainly, that's how universities sell themselves today. what people seem to want is a "respectable" trade school. but there's a reason it's called a university, and it's not just because it's big.
i had some more i wanted to say, about corporate influence on education, the educational system here in the us etc etc etc but the whole thing is starting to make me really sad.
You are young and think you know everything. The school is not out to get you, you are just dreaming up reasons that you are getting a d in chemistry.
Superintendents get paid a lot because they are generally selected from an elite pool. It is just a better gamble to spend more money there.
Your teachers do not make a lot of money. There are a couple of ways to spin this, but its just an unfortunate fact that teachers are underpaid.
Finally, your grade in chemistry might be dropping, but grades are not the most important aspect of school. The experience itself is the one that will effect you more than your permanent record.
Pay attention, make the most of your opportunity. You will not look back on the poor circumstance that is high school and wished that you had tried less.
Troll Like a Champion Today
If you can't see how history or biology or politics relates to computers, then you obviously won't see the point of a rounded education. Inspiration doesnt always come from the field you specialize in. Highly targeted educated people will be just as likely to be replaced by computers as bolt pluggers in factories someday anyway.
School works when it teaches you to learn.
For this, you need higher selection (harder, longer exams and studies) Takes time and hard work.
"We are all equals" and "we can all succeed" are fallacies instilled by socialists.
"Without general education requirements, people graduating in a given field will know more about that field from the start, but the cost is the lack of the basic knowledge of other fields, which provides for a very narrow minded person."
Really and how does this tie in with both the knowledge explosion, and increased specialization occuring in our society? Something has to give.
I was an Aeronautical Engineering major, who attended college early, because well... high school blows. Granted this isn't the best of reasons, and sure enough I was quickly depressed and spending FAR too much time playing quake and exploring the wonders of the Internet.
Thankfully I learned a hell of alot warezing quake and avoiding firewalls, because after I dropped out and spent my years worth of phone monkey ladder climbing I gained a sys admin job at the age of 19. Not glorious, but well paying, and stable, even these days. More importantly it gave me time and resources and experience to learn what I think will be useful, not what I think might be neat. (which is what 95% of Freshmen do, myself included).
Given how much time I wasted in courses that were of no use to me, I believe that students (who are all adults and thus legally considered to be capable of making adult decisions) should have the choice of whether or not they want to take classes outside of their major.
A university could designate two tracks for the same degree: call them 'liberal arts' and 'technical arts'. Liberal arts would include the core classes on the degree plus all the other absurd requirements that most universities foist upon their clientele, while technical arts degrees would be focused solely upon the subject the degree is in. Students would have the choice (as they should) of what degree they want, while employers would have the choice of which type of graduate they want to hire.
There's no reason there can't be two side-by-side systems for obtaining a degree. Perhaps you don't like the technical degree; well, fine, *YOU* don't have to get one. No one has the right to force you to go the technical route, nor do you have any right to force someone to go the liberal arts route.
These aren't high schools and college students aren't children. Choice should be inherent to the system.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
This question is off topic! This isn't even a topic to begin with. It's just a sucker come on.
But before you call that off-topic, let me explain that in academia, we don't tolerate misleading questions like this. So, a well rounded education includes basic academic principles that this question doesn't fullfill.
This question is like, what's the definiton of a full sex life? It's all fucking opinion. What is this, interview the slashdot community with a bullshit interview question? There's no real point to it except to get stories out of people. If you're just taking an opinion poll, put it over there on the side with all the other worthless polls and put Cowboy Neal as an option.
Yeah, at Ivy League schools, and a few select smaller colleges where bright students can be found. Smart people can and do master many different subjects. That's what separates them from the rest. I bet a typical Ivy League pre-med, comp-sci, or physics department would have more and better musicians and poets in it than a music or poetry department at a "state" school. Strike me dead for being such a snob, but that's what I've seen.
Perhaps getting a grasp on programming is plenty challenging for the average student, so they ought to just stick to that. Again, strike me dead, but...
Once this basic level has been reached, it makes sense to get marketable skills.
"In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees.
... Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or CIO needs to make? ... Knowing the big picture is good, but how do you get to that level if you don't have any skills?
:)
Thats what Entrepreneurship classes are for.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
You didn't learn the old adage that the sooner you discover problems the less money you spend, so time spent designing a better product leads to *gasp* a better product? Who would've thought that in an Analysis and Design course you'd be spending most of your time Analyzing and Designing! You should take some programming courses if you just want to code... although most of my CS classes require hardly any actual code writing, they just assume you're a good coder and work on the abstracts.
In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company.
What, no Organizational Behavior classes? Man, your school sucks!
In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages on Macintosh, they reply, "Why would I have to do that?" Most of them don't even think of Linux as an operating system, but more as a hacker's toy. Well, here you may have a point. Then again, if a school doesnt give you a decent degree, then the caliber of students it attracts can't be that high... Don't most "big picture" lessons come with experience, through person's journey from entry-level employee to a skilled IT/business professional?
I think you're missing the point of uni. Seems like you're looking for more of a vocational training... I suggest you go get your certifications. Business schools especially want to give you a much much much better start in the world of business than someone who majored in philosophy and figured out how business works on the fly. For example, in my Software Engineering class I'm at a tremendous advantage because I've taken that Systems Analysis and Design class, and can model processes... The organizational behavior class helps too, because I make sure people work together well and can fix problems before they arise... Too bad only grad students can be the project leaders in the class... Not that I'm looking for any extra work, just credit
From the posts I see everyday, slashdotters are some
of the most well rounded people around. Where else but
in nerd magazines and sites (slashdot, sciam) can you find a
topic on the bending of light by matter sit next to
articles on the effects of technology and law on our
privacy?
I think slashdotters are eminently qualified to talk about
education seeing as most are either educators or
self educated.
In other words, narrow-focused education gives you tunnel vision. You'll miss many interesting things in life if you only stare straight ahead.
>|<*:=
I believe that for optimal success, a person must learn a little about a lot. By doing this a person is better able to connect various subjects and ideas in a much more dynamic setting.
I believe for schools, specialization is necessary for preparation for the workplace, however, to be a leader, and not a follower, one must aquire knowledge from various subjects. Only then can the "whole picture" be revealed.
In high school, I made a conscience decision to learn a little about everything I could. Because of this, I have found myself with many more ideas and theories for problems I encounter.
I also believe people's response to this is also influenced by their left brain or right brain.
I believe, left brain (I hope I'm correct) is more mathematically inclined, and are more likely to require organization and definite dimentions in their work.
The right brain, is more creative and artistic, and more free than the left brain.
I believe people who are left brain dominate would prefer learning more about one topic, whereas right brain people would rather have some background in many fields. I also believe to persue this, a person must be more open minded to foriegn concepts and ideas, that don't always agree with the information they have learned from other fields.
Personally, I feel that it depends on what someone's goals are. If you are set on being a scientist you probably are better off learning all you can about science rather then learning all subjects equally.
However, other fields like communication, marketing, design, and media production, would benifit from broad influences. I would think a filmmaker who has small backgrounds in Shakespere, design, speech, and music would produce a better film than someone who only studied film.
Everything I stated here is my own opinion, and is only based on my own experiences, no scientific data.
So be sure to have some salt ready.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Consider the people you talk to about computers:
Foolish users know exactly what they need to know,
or something less. They bug you every time they
encounter something unfamiliar.
Honest workers know more than they need to know,
and they know how to find out more on their own.
True gurus know a *lot* more than they need to
know--about all kinds of things, not just
computers.
Now, which kind of person should a university aim
to produce?
The trouble is, liberal arts education is nearly dead. Marxism, deconstructionism and a thousand other fads have rotted the once-proud liberal arts curriculum till all that remains is a grinning skull. Intelligent people who perhaps were destined for liberal arts become engineers and programmers instead. The people remaining in liberal arts are mostly those who should not be in a University at all. They will party for four years, sleep in class while the professor deconstructs the imperialist tropes of Shakespear, and emerge on the job market as mental children in the guise of adults.
They'd be much better off if they just knew Latin, Greek, arithmetic and the classics. Then at least they'd equal schoolboys of 100 years ago. Four years of mental laziness at that critical age, however, permanently harms the mind.
Actually I would argue that you shouldn't teach the "tree" until the student has grasped the "forest". Having a good general picture of things so more specialised knowledge can be slotted in like pieces of a puzzle is probably the single most valuable skill at any time of life/career, including the first ten years out of uni. It's certainly more important than turning out students with a deep specialised knowledge and no understanding of the wider world!
Your incorrect assumption is that it is a university's primary task to take a "non-worthy" person as a freshman, put them through 4 years of learning about many things, and have them exit as "worthy" for the job market.
What about those who have already learned to love education before they get to college? What about those who do not attend college for financial reasons? What about those who went to college for a few years, figured out that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and left without a degree?
On the opposite side, a college degree has much in common with the much bally-hooed "paper certs". Many 4 year degrees are simply the beginning of a journey, but many of the people who get their degree are so proud of their accomplishment that they fail to realize this is not the end of their learning experience. I have attended many college ceremonies where their validictorian or president will start off a speach by saying, "Well, we finally made it guys!"
Although I do not doubt their ability to regurgitate the knowledge that they learned over the past 4-5-6-7-8 years, they over-estimate the value of their degree in the same way that many over-estimate the value of their IT cert. In fact, I applaud the graduates who are "in absentia", because they understand how unimportant their accomplishment is. Yes, its a wonderful accomplishment, but the ceremony itself is dumbed down to just a bunch of friends and relatives who want to let them know how smart they are.
So what should a university aim to produce? Simple. They should strive to have every person who graduates with a college degree DESIRE to learn even more. A university who has graduates which claim, "I'm so glad I'm done. I don't want to read another book in my entire life!", should never have passed.
This is what a university should aim to produce... the thirst for knowledge.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
First of all I must say that anyone asking a university to teach them job skills is obviously in the wrong place. In my opinion the job of a university is not to provide to any great extent courses and an education centered on the job market. This is why I'm so against studying economics and computer science as a major, because too many times this leads to a focused education.
The reason I would be wary of such a focused education is for two simple reasons:
(1) Education after high school should be trying to mature the student's thought processes. Earlier education only hinted at how to do things right, in college you should realize from scratch what's the right way to do something, either to appease yourself or to meet the requirements in some deteremined process.
(2) Education in college, though not only limited to the classroom, must have at its core some level of civic responsibility built in. We need students who are educated and aware of issues in their democratic government so that beyond the day to day job skills they will acquire, they might be able to positively contribute to the society at large and preserve democracy.
This is coming from the perspective of a student at a 'national' university where one might hope students weren't always driven by concerns of wealth and prosperity in a position at some banking firm.
There is no way 'starting a business' could be taught. This changes for each business. Networking and luck are at least as important as a good idea and hard work. You could study history to find out how other businesses were started, but there is no one formula for how to make it work.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
If the planning phase results in code that I can come along and modify in 6 months or a year, then it's well worth it. If a brand-new engineer comes on board and can understand how the whole thing works because of this documentation then it's worth it. Maintenance and adherence to the code vision for an organization is key.
Coding, and engineering in general must be thought of in a holistic sense. "How does it affect the organization?", "How does it fit into the product?", "Is this efficient relative to the rest of the product".
Too many people seem to write code in a fire and forget way that makes maintenance impossible.
In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company.
This is an interesting point. I'm thinking that people might be better employees if they had even an inkling of what their managers faced each day. (yes, I'm a techie that has become a manager, and it's not easy, at least for me).
In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages
The hardest thing for me to learn when I got out of school was that I didn't know the best route my company should take. I thought I did, and I had lots of opinions, but until you start your own company, and are faced with decisions like "do we support Macs?" or "do we support opera" or "do we use Microsoft Office or StarOffice?", you won't appreciate all that goes into such a decision.
Don't most "big picture" lessons come with experience
Rather than be down because your college tried to teach you big picture stuff, accept that no college can teach you everything. To grow to the limit of your capacity, you must keep educating yourself. Go to the library, go to professional meetings (even as a student). Ask questions, *listen* to the answers. Almost everyone can teach you something...you just gotta dig out what it is, and then pay attention.
My question for Slashdot readers is: Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
My company wants people who:
Will we find these people? I hope so, they're the kind of people I want to base my company on.
Go, Springboard, Go!
Actually I think they are frequently paying for safety. I've worked a lot in construction, and the typical construction worker has never had his "ideas" seriously challenged and picked apart. Therefore he is not a suitable contributor to the corporate decision-making process. When someone has graduated college, you can be assured that he's been exposed to debate and understands that ideas are fair game and his fists won't rescue him from faulty thinking. As a greater proportion of people get degrees, the presumption increases that the remaining folks are too dumb or too violent to do so.
I spent a few years in the Army before attending college. In college, I took a 5 year double major in Computer Engineering / Theater. Kudos to the university for ofering such a degree, but it was full of crap too. By the time someone takes on a ridiculous major such as this, they aren't in need of mandatory roundness. I wanted to take a graphics cource and another psych course. I didn't have time because I had to take crap rounding courses ... Astronomy and mechanical engineering for the spatially inept.
I think the point is a valid one, but it is focussing on the wrong problem. People expect schools to make them smart, not allow them to learn. I wish my college education would have been based more on opportunity than making sure I had some liberal arts in my engineering curriculum and som eengineering in my theater curriculum.
I was overwhelmed by the requirements. I figured I should have been understood to be well rounded by the time I got there, and afforded the opportunity to fill in what I felt were my weaknesses. The University seemed te bo more about ensuring a good minimum than allowing me to explore my potential maximum. I was disappointed. I was similarly disappointed by how the military had a similar philosophy internally, but I can understand that more in the Army than in civilian education.
Although not a 100% comparable, Danish university education offers some of what has been called for.
In my own case, which was an MSc in Biology, the course structure gave a good mix of structured teaching of basic skills as well as some time to do the courses you find interesting.
There are a couple of major differences in the way a university degree in Denmark is set up (using examples from my own degree here, i'm sure there's also local variation in Denmark). The first two years of my course was laid out before I arrived at university, with no choice of courses. Instead you were trained in the various fields in biology, having a semester in each "major" field of biology. Alongside the biology teaching, each semester also included courses in either chemistry, math or statistics (all planned out).
For the follwing two years (years 3+4) you were completely free to pick courses on your own, take semesters at other universities etc. Merits can be transferred quite easily, so i found myself doing 6 months of courses in Norway without prolonging my study time. The idea about choosing courses in year 3+4 rather than straight away is to give you some ballast in your choices. After two years of making acquaintances with all the fields, you had an idea about where you wanted to go with it.
Finally the last (fifth) year consist entirely of writing your MSc as a research project, not doing any courses, which gives you a good idea about life in research and whether continuing to a PhD is a good idea for you.
All in all, I find that the Danish university education structure does provide a very sound background and set of key skills for your chosen profession.
Although i'm certain that the education helps you obtain some key skills, once you're in a work place, you find yourself learning a lot of the same things again, simply because people there do them slightly different.
As to helping you in knowing what you want to do for the next 10 year......hmm nope still don't know!
-.sig sauer-
At my place of work, I'm often asked to interview candidates for technical positions. Thank to the dot-com crash, we have lots of resumes from people who can code up a storm in C, C++, Perl, Java, you name it - there's no lack of coding skill out there. Granted that the candidate has some level of technical accomplishment, what I look for is whether the candidate can think: that is, whether he can learn not just about computers, but about the business that the computer is assisting, and make creative improvement not just to how the computer works, but to how the business operates.
More often than not, a good candidate will be a reader, and is someone who has a passion to explore some out-of-the-way corner of knowledge. It doesn't matter if the subject is particle physics or paleography - what matters is the passion to learn. If the candidate can learn, then he or she can learn how our business works, and then apply computer skills to make the business run better.
A well-rounded university education isn't for everybody: after all, some people are dolts for whom ignorance is bliss. For them, a technical education and a cube in a Dilbertland is the perfect situation. But for someone who is curious about the world, and who wants to learn more about how to learn about it, and (most important) is not afraid to confront some truly great minds, then a classic well-rounded liberal arts education is the ticket.
As for employment - well, nothing is promised to anyone. But you'll probably find that in the long haul, knowing how to learn about the world will serve you well.
yeah,
the Internet is wellrounded,
so's life.
Unless you *are* a drone the only thing U.S. educatioin system teaches you is that it sucks and you need to learn things yourself.
single
This is going to be lost in a sea of /. comments.... but...
The entire idea of pushing "knowing" - and I know that's grammatically awful - is wrong. The article and the educational system thrives on the ideas of building upon what came before, and accepting past accomplishments as legit and sound.
This is almost totally unsound, as history has ALWAYS tought us. A case that all of the readers should be familiar with is the case of the computer industry - how many time has the "ceiling" been reached? Too many to count.
The only problem with universitie is the fact that the instructors, the professors, only have their own knowledge to teach, and want that knowledge to survive as long as possible. This makes many areas of studies silly, and "vocational" no matter how snobbily ivy-league it may be, because you are only learning what your professor knows and wants you to know - otherwise-- his knowledge, his LIFE, is a waste.
My point, if there is one, is that no matter what your calling, technical or artistic - listening to someone else's ideas is analogous with brain death.
No-one can hope to teach intelligence. One can only hope to inspire imagination.
Organized Ed, Organized Religion - useful sometimes, absolute: never.
I would imagine that Plato's Academy provided a good general education. It gave the students a fundamental tool-kit for critical thinking, the ability to distinguish a bogus claim from a meaningful one, and to argument in an efficent and productive manner. These things are helpful, whatever job you eventually will occupy (or indeed if you don't work at all). Then, few carpenters took classes at the Old Academy.
In my experience, which is pretty long, people with a well rounded liberal arts education to back up their technical expertise have always been able to command much higher salaries. Metaphor and analogy go a long way in life.
In general, modern problems have medieval solutions...
These are cute specs.
:).
Give schools the job to give you an "alround intellectual maturity" and how will they fill it in? With vague specs like these you can't have a good product
You need specs because a lot of arguments for learning are indirect: you learn through spinoff.
Pupils pass math exams. This proves that they learn how to think. Does it not? There are long arguments. The proof should be in the cake.
We also need tight specs because any program can be immune to (negative) critique, claiming the program was right but it got implemented wrong (or the students aren't up to it). And so they need more money.
Here is an example of good specs:
Effective thinking. Check the list. Full of things people should have learned at college, but did not.
So I wait for the rest.
An example:
When trying to solve a problem (any problem in any area), after you gather information about the situation you will either:
- Find previous situations that you either solved or saw someone solve, or heard about, that are similar and from which you can derive a solution for the problem (that's called experience kids)
- Find a previous situation which seems somewhat related and try to derive a solution from there
- Ask somebody how to solve it
- Divide your problem into component parts and try to find a solution for each part (by applying this whole process to each part)
- For each part you don't have a solution to, try the options that seem more logical
- If some part is still not solved, then insult the thing, plus it's ancestors, plus everything and everybody that relates to it (this will probably not solve it but it will make you feel slightly beter)
In all of these, you will need to use some ammount of memory (for example, when dividing the problem in component parts you will often partition it in a way similar to something you've done before).Using memory alone will usually not solve the problem - problems have small variations from one to the other, and even if you perfectly rememeber all the solutions for problems of that sort, you might not remember one that perfectly matches the problem at hand (thus you will need to be able to evaluate which is the best matching solution, and to adjust it so that it fits the current problem)
...While I agree that, if you haven't learned to operate your brain by the time you're eighteen you have problems college won't fix, I would like to plug here a college that actually TEACHES THINKING. They have no classes in computers. But they can teach you anything you need to know to _learn_ about computers...
Anyway, the place is called St. John's College. It's a private, nondenominational liberal arts school (that's right, you can ONLY get a BA from here) with two campuses, one in Annapolis, MD and one in Santa Fe, NM (I went to Santa Fe).
The program is popularly referred to as the "Great Books Program", and it's delightfully unconcerned with looking "PC". At St. John's you can spend four blissful years studying dead white guys (not exclusively, but largely), not through professors' lectures or Cliff notes, but from the actual text, in small, discussion-based classes that you'd better really know your shit to be able to pass. Not only that, but they teach corresponding subjects congruently, so the understanding you get is more that two-dimensional. For instance, every Freshman studies Attic (ancient) Greek in language, reads Plato (and all his lovely peers) in Seminar, decodes Euclidian geometry (by reading Euclid) in Math, and looks over the early Greek and Roman scientists in lab. This leads to assignments like translating some of Aristotle's Physics for lab class while debating whether he was right in view of Plato. It's not for everybody, but if you want to learn to think, not just unilaterally but across vast internal dimensions of space, time, language and culture, I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Peace and books,
S.T.
I usually read a lot of comments to see if I'm not saying things again. Now I don't...
Actually you are asking two questions:
-why am I getting this well rounded education
-what do companies want in employees after they graduate.
Both really differ, but they boil down to the same question: _what_do_you_want_with_your_life_.
I consider a university educated person to be able to think broad, universally broad. How you get the experience in _develloping_ views I don't care but it is definitely not about knowledge only. It is about develloping new knowledge too. About feeling with the real world issues together with problems that are new.
If you are not interested in training your brain in solving new situations, University is not your place. You need training in solving to be able to more effectively do it. This idea that common sense will cut it is old. When you want to do cutting edge technology you need big teams to devellop the technology, economic funding and clients to pay for it.
_The_ thing I learned in university is train myself to devellop an expert view using my qualitative, basic ideas. Being able to see how well my innovations perform on the quantative level (technically, economically, business wise etc).
Good luck...
nosig today
Heck, teach them to use spell checker. That's a useful skill.
I earned my BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Bridgewater College in Virginia. It's a small liberal arts college nestled in the Shenandoah Valley near Jamestown, VA in zip code 22812 (for those postal freaks out there).
As their degree combined CS with Math, it took a great amount of work to complete the degree. They also require many credits of non-tech disciplines, such as Philosophy and Religion.
It was the best experience of my life. Such a broad base of education (both book and social) has proven to be very valuable in adult life. Remember geeks, there is life beyond the keyboard. You need to be prepared for it.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I could not disagree with this poster more. In short: you have it entirely backwards. University should not teach any of the things you mention, and it should teach many things that you don't.
This is a topic I feel very strongly about. Univerities are schools that are strongly grounded in some very old traditions in education: scientific education, liberal education, and to some degree artistic education.
Many here will be familiar with scientific education. Artisitic education is just that: learning to paint, draw, scuplt, act, or write. Liberal education is the true heart of the university: the studies of history, literature, philosophy, classics, etc, and is by far the most important.
Technical education (writing in C++, database management, finance, etc etc) in my book have small use in a university context. Technical skills can easily be picked up by anyone with half a brain and a book; I'm a fair expert in half a dozen programming languages, all of which I picked up in my spare time.
What it is NOT possible to pick up in your spare time is an apprection for, say, the historical context of anti-American sentiment in the middle east (just to give a topical example). Or metaphysics. Good arguments regarding how government can work, or could work, or should work, and what some of the smartest people of all time thought about it. What it means (historically or philosophically) to be a citizen. How to design an experiment in a tight way, how to argue a position. How to speak, how to ask questions. How to take notes, now to takle complicated problems or compilicated issues.
In fact, the fact that you have raised this question signals to me that you haven't gotten such an education: education itself is something that has been thought about for centuries (N.B the earilest universities were born 1200 AD or thereabouts) and universities, despite constant change, have for the most part failed to adopt this narrow, supply-and-demand model you seem to be thinking in.
Scientific training gives a different set of skills, also valuable, if with a different emphasis. One gets an appreciation for the scientific traditions, the scientific context for the world around us, together with analytical skills and the ability to wield doubt and argument as weapons against the unknown.
Technical skills such as the ones you discuss are important, sure.. but I wouldn't rank them any higher than, for example, knowning how to drive a car or use a library, things that CAN be taught in universities, but should not be the main focus of such education.
Higher education is just that: higher.
I went to University in Britain for three years, studied Computer Science, along with some maths and business related courses. I completed the course, sat the exams, and failed. I left university on a Friday without any academic qualification from there, not even an attendance certificate. The following Monday, I went to work at a computer company as a programmer, and was being paid more than my tutor at University. Even though I didnt take away a piece of paper stating that I was suddenly a BSc., I still took away a fantastic education - primarily in Life, rather than Computer Science. A good, "well-rounded" education begins well before University. At college (16-18 years of age), I took only one technical course, Computer Science, along with three non-technical, humanities courses (Law, Politics and Psychology). I believe that a good education is not the sole responsibility of the educational system, but also of the educator within the system. I was fortunate, I had some excellent teachers all the way through my educational career who inspired me to learn, and to learn what was important. The point to my ramblings is that it is not so much what classes your educational system thrusts upon you, its how you receive the opportunity to learn and how you adapt it to suit your personality and appetite for knowledge. I`m now a devoted, full-time computer programmer in London, with a passion for computers and technology which has endured for 10 years, but in my spare time, I`m learning, at my own pace, about post-1945 US foreign policy and how it shaped the world we now live in. I speak passable French and German, I understand the English legal system, can talk for hours about the state of politics, and often find myself wondering what Freud would make of things ...
I believe that I have a well-rounded education, driven by desire to learn everything, not just focus on a field.
I saw a quote somewhere once, I dont recall who said it or from which film/book it comes :
"Specialisation is for insects, human beings should be able to do anything"
PS - I only ever attended state schools. None of this "paying for tutition" crap ...
The American college changed drastically after WWII, when it was flooded by men taking advantage of the G.I. Bill. These men were different from the prior students in that they were older,
:)
and that they did not come from an upper class background. They knew that this was a special opportunity, and they were intent on taking advantage of it. The idea of college was emphatically not to "expand your horizons" for these men.
From the beginning of the 20th century until this time, college was primarily a place for rich young men to play football and join fraternities until they were old enough to take the position their fathers had set up for them. There was no pretense of well-roundedness from either the faculty or students in this environment either, although many of the faculty didn't really care for their students, except for the rare few who were "grinds", that went to class and actually studied.
Before this, college was more about learning Latin and Greek than anything else, on the theory that learning hard languages improved memory.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think the origin of the "well-rounded" student was probably from the 1960's or 1970's. In any event, I'm pretty sure the 1950's image you present is wrong. If you're interested you may want to try this link.
Companies want skilled employees that are cheap. That's why they dump a ton of work on underpaid college interns. *chuckle* Really, companies want skilled people with experience more than well rounded people with high GPA's. Frankly, I think they could care less about you being well rounded. A diploma is nothing more than a personal goal you have achieved, in there eyes.
Colleges on the other hand, are a little more devious. When you get right down to it, they are a business. Not for profit, necessarily, but to keep students paying their salaries. They court you to go there, once attending they try to keep you there, and they beg you to give them donations for the rest of your life after you leave.
The first and last are obvious so I shall discuss the middle, how they keep you there. Well, they argue that you need to be well rounded. So what they do is create the "Gen. Ed." cirriculum that everyone has to take. And they put restrictions on how many of each subject you can take. And requirements for classes that are determined to be a "writing class" among other things. There are many reasons as to why it should be done (being well rounded, school respect, etc.) but the end result is that you end up taking way more classes than you are interested in taking. Add in a Major and you are lucky to get out in 8 semesters. Remember, they do not offer each class every semester. I've seen classes that only appear once every two years, if even that often. I remember them telling me "Don't worry about not having a Major picked, you have plenty of time" when they really mean "Feel free to take your time, we have no problems with taking your money". On top of that, I know all the transfer students that have lost countless semesters worth of credits because the one school did not recognise the other's classes. Do the laws of physics, math, and grammer change from school to school? No, but any excuse they can use to make you take more classes is good. Also, the Gen. Ed. curriculum keeps each of the departments with a steady flow of students scrambeling to fill the last holes in their sheets so they can graduate. "..I need a writing class on T,TH at 1-1:50......here we go, 'the impact of 20th centruy abstract art in third world nations'..." We've all been there.
That being said. I think it is a bad idea to rush through College in 4 years. With all that is listed above, the strain is too much. College should be fun, I should hope. I started out to push through in 4 years using 18 credit semesters and summer classes. Then I realized I was missing out on too much because of the work load. I lightened my classload down to 15 and used my summers and time off to get internships, which helped me get my job that I have now. Basically, I learned that companies want skilled people with experience more than well rounded people with high GPA's.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
My friend, welcome to the world of software engineering. When you graduate to the "real world" you'll soon realize that coding is about 10% of the software engineering process.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
I did not go to college to gain job-specific skills. That said, everything that I learned in college has benefited me in my work life. First, college taught me how to think, how to approach a problem and solve it. That one thing is a skill I can use in any job. Second, college gave me the opportunity to expose myself to wide range of fields and enabled me to find a career with which I am happy. I don't think that when one is seventeen years old one should expect or be expected to figure out the best career for one's life. Third, I learned my profession in professional school when I was ready. I knew what I wanted and was willing to work my butt off to be the best at it. If I had tried to do that earlier, I wouldn't have been able to, because I lacked specific goals.
Based on my own experience, then, I think that a well-rounded education is a major benefit. However, everyone is different. Some people are probably ready to go at 17, and don't need the time to figure things out like I did.
The whole point of college to do all the things that you can't do in Real Life. Going on 72 hour drinking binges, waving "save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" placards, and most of all, screwing like a rabid weasel on heat. That's what it's always been about, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't been, doesn't remember, or has a personality short circuit (and is probably wearing sandals and a knitted waistcoat).
This isn't a frivilous post, I just take a dim view of being condemned for "wasting" a college education. Let's see, I was such a wasted slacker at college that I barely passed the exams, but scamming my professors stood me in good stead for scamming my employers until I actually learned some useful skills. You can't be taught those kind of "life skills". Now, here I am ten years later, with the degree I wanted, a good job, the academia that I couldn't regurgitate on demand in an exam is actually coming back to me, and I have absolutely no regrets over missed opportunities.
You get one chance at life. Working your nuts off at college will get you a better degree and an early start on your career, but you have the rest of your life to work on your career, which is coincidentally the same amount of time you have to regret your missed opportunities. Ten years after graduating, your career will probably be the same either way, but one way you have pleasant memories of drunken orgies with hot chicks, and the other you have a lot of memories of hunching over a book.
College is about improvement. To my mind, hedonism is a goal, not something to be frowned on. We always hope that our children will have more than we had: I sincerely hope that I can provide my kids an opportunity to spend four years naked, vomiting and not giving a damn.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I started college as an architecture major. I graduated with a degree in geology. After several layoffs related to the oil bust of the 80's and a temp job installing mainframes I ended up doing admin work at a major corporation. Now I do computer work that's not taught in any classes I've found.
My well rounded education has kept food on the table for my family.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Well roundedness cannot be taught. It comes when a prepared mind meets life experiences: professional success and failure, personal triumph and grieving. You can't understand Dante or Chaucer until you've tasted human folly.
The idea that you can, as part of a degree program, be "exposed" to various courses and that this will somehow make you well rounded is absurd. You only become well rounded when you struggle to organically integrate disparate kinds of knowledge and skills. Making an attractive and functional user interface is a good example of this kind of struggle. Ideally, you understand art, psychology, programming, as well as HCI as a distinct discipline in itself. Probably, you need a team to do this well, one that brings people with different backgrounds and temperments together who somehow can manage to avoid talking past each other.
The problem with making this happen is that our idea of education is ridiculously outmoded.
Our model of education is medieval. When the University was created, lives were short and the human store of knowledge small. At twenty one, a recent graduate had lived nearly half is life expectancy, and in four or five years could reasonably have been expected to plum every store of human knowledge to some depth. Furthermore, he could be confident that while he was on his deathbed, newly matriculated students would be receiving an education exactly like the one he did. The modern student graduates with perhaps three quarters of his life ahead of him. And each decade brings more change in the state of knowledge than entire centuries did before. Imagine how the medieval model of a gentleman's education would have changed if it had to prepare it's recipients had life spans of five hundred years.
In the standard University model, education is like collecting bricks to form into a tidy little cottage that you will live the rest of your life in. The challenge for the modern student is more like being prepared to swim and turbulent, uncharted ocean with unpredictable weather and treacherous currents. Ideas that safely lived on far shores, such as Islam, now affect us in our day to day lives and demand our attention and understanding.
Economic forces are undermining the value of University education too. Some years ago I participated in a symposium on higher education sponsored by the President's Council on Sustainable Development, as part of the Rio accords. The attendees were the most forward looking academics from every field of study. One of the greatest concerns that they had was elitism. Practically any dunce can get a University education provided he has enough family support. However promising students are often derailed by personal or economic setbacks. As University prices rise, this problem will eventually engulf the entire middle class of students. Universities, unless they change both their educational financial foundations, are in danger or becoming hawkers of meaningless tokens of class status (degrees).
I believe that there is an answer that is simple in concept but difficult in execution: We should scrap practice of dividing our lives into a "learning" epoch followed by a "doing" epoch, and live our lives as a single phase of "learning-doing".
The first steps in this program would look like this:
(1) Emphasize cooperative education programs (where students work in various fields to pay for and to enrich their educations.
(2) Provide more affordable paths to the current benchmark degrees (BS/BA) for nontraditional students.
(3) Deemphasize the four year path to degrees in favor of much longer ones intermixing work and study.
(4) Introduce more specific technical credentials (e.g. networks or compilers rather than Comp Sci) that could be achieved in shorter times. Use these rather than broader BA/BS degrees for entry level credentials. Creating these credentials should not be left to people with an economic interest in mindshare (e.g. MSCE). BA/BS should be more honorary, and require actual real life contributions in the field (e.g. a novel written or a computer system developed).
(5) Change the relationship of Universities to their alumni. Universities likewise divide our lives into a "student" epoch (when we learn) and a "alumnus" epoch (when we fund). Universities should use technology and other means to change their relationship so that people who would otherwise be "alumni" will still continue to learn from them and get academic counselling for the rest of their lives. As it stands, the system is now a fraud, where a sentimental fiction of connection with the alumnus is maintained so he can be milked for cash. The relationship to the alumnus should be real, substantive and robust.
(6) Provide for educational sabbaticals in all jobs, especially professional ones. These sabbatical should be used both for liberal pursuits as well as gaining technical skills.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
would almost certainly include spelling and grammar.
For example the spelling of "forest" and the plural of "curriculum" is "curricula", just to name a couple of random examples.
-Styopa
St. John's College, with campuses in Maryland and New Mexico, offers a curriculum called "The Great Books Curriculum." It is probably the best liberal arts education money can buy. http://www.sjca.edu/
i had a professor -- dr. steinberg, poli sci theory, denison university who gave me the best piece of advice:
after getting your undergrad degree, WORK FOR TEN YEARS outside academia. then go back. the working world teaches you far more than academia ever can, and it helps to put it all in perspective.
this is why a well-rounded education is important, at least for undergrad. you need it to get out in the world, to get a job and get some real experience. then worry about focusing those areas of education that at first seem to be irrelevant.
Mindy: "Well...desserts aren't always right." Homer: "But they're so sweet!"
The appalling frequency of grammatical, sentence construction, and spelling errors in these posts appear to exemplify exactly why a purely vocational education is insufficient for living an educated life.
/. readership.
Sure, you may be able to exit school and subsequently obtain and retain a job. However, if you are unable to translate thought to effective communication, your career will stagnate, your social life will be unfulfilling, your peers will tend to ridicule and aviod your input.
I have worked as a third tier senior systems administrator at the two largest UNIX vendors in the world, and know of which I speak. I am able to hang with the upper eschelons in the UNIX world, at least at the OS integration level. Yet I have a bachelor's in English.
My experience has been that all things being equal technically, my writing and speaking skills keep me retained at work, get me the right projects, assist me in being the one chosen for international travel, and keep me on the radar of those who control the money flow. Standard written English is a benchmark of refinement to many in this world. This is why so many "foreigners" send their children to study in England and the US. Unfortunately, the US does an awful job of preparing students to manage the language, which is exemplified by the spelling skills of Taco and the
I believe education is not only for job-specific preparedness. Education allows one to connect the dots, read between the lines, and hopefully circumvent the pitfalls to which those without perspective will succumb. Adaptability, thus longevity, is impacted.
In life, balance is a key quality. To not achieve balance in basic educational reference points and situational awareness is to miss the major purpose of a university diploma.
It would be nice if those commenting (Cliff) on well-rounded educations at least knew how to spell: "forrest" and "curriculums" (should be "forest" and "curricula"). This is what you get from a generation that learned more from watching movies (like "Forrest" Gump) than from reading books!
About 1/2 the experience should be focused and about 1/2 should be rounded. When I was in school 75'- 80', the Engineers had way too many requirements to be rounded - I never felt confident that the average Engineering graduate would be able to understand the ethical/moral/social implications of what they were doing. OTOH all general knowledge while rounding in of itself, doesn't demonstrate that the pupil can dig down and understand/construct a large system from the ground up.
w
First of all, a lot of people seem to be confusing training and education. Look, if you're at an institution that requires you to take something you don't like, nobody's forcing you to stay there. If you want training, go to a place like DeVry. If you want an education, go to a college or university.
But what's disturbs me most is the fact that the question and 99% of the responses make the assumption that learning is an entirely passive process on the part of the student. Autrement dit, that it is entirely the responsibility of a parent, high school, college, university, or society to impart to people all of the information and training they will need to succeed.
What ever happened to learning as an active process? To the understanding that no training or education is perfect, that deficiencies are necessarily going to exist, and that it might, just might, be incumbent upon students to remediate them?
What I'd like to see more of is people trading tips on how to get the information and training they missed and a lot less whining about how terrible their education and/or training was...
This provides a nice counterpoint to what is learned on campus. It is more practical than theoretical and provides some of the training that a normal graduate would get from an entry-level position. It gives you a chance to apply some of the theoretical knowledge from classes in the real world.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
I did not start off as an IT Manager. I started off work as a programmer with a B.Sc. in Computer Science. My experience as a manager, with the somewhat limited data set of applicants I have seen is that University-educated programmers have a much better capacity to think and to adapt to the changing technology we need to deal with.
I think the idea behind a University degree is that it is supposed to have elements of a "Universal" education about it. When I was attending university, I chafed at the "artsy" courses I needed to take to get my degree - philosophy and English, for example. And, what Calculus had to do with being a programmer was beyond me. At the time.
I agree with the idea that a University degree isn't going to suddenly transform you into a critical thinker - that's a part of your upbringing or your willingness to be a critical thinker. Perhaps some people finally choke on all the B.S. we get fed through a wide variety of sources. There's plenty of pre-chewed food for the uncritical thinker to digest.
I'll admit, I wasn't much of a critical thinker through most of University, until one day something happened that affected me deeply and caused me to start questioning things. Gradually, over the next few years I had to reevaluate a lot of things, and then some of the other courses I had taken began to appear in a new light. Just because I took the courses, doesn't mean I was willing to apply them until the need was there. I had the tools in my toolbox, but only when I had a repair job to do did I open it up and start digging around.
One of the most valuable things I figured out from University is that I learned how to learn and adapt and study. Those are life skills that you can pick up anywhere if you have a willingness or a need to.
Learning how to think took time, and continues to take time. One truism seems to be that the more you know, the more aware you become of how little you actually know.
One bit of practical advice I can give to anyone who is still reading this is to find a copy of "How to Read a Book" by Adler and Doren, and follow the advice in it. Start reading the books they suggest should be in any great library.
I have a BS in MIS, and honestly didn't get a whole lot from it. While in school I worked as a systems technician, then moved up to a full time salary Systems Administrator. I learned more in my job, than I did in class, I had to. A lot was riding on my shoulders at work, so I busted my a$$ to learn what I was doing. After about 1.5 years of working, I came to the conclusion that a C in a class is fine with me. About 2/3 of my classmates were, and are pretty ignorant when it came to real IS related problems. For instance, someone had deleted win.com, and then windows wouldn't startup after he rebooted. He had no idea why we needed win.com, and he had a B+ average. Finally I have to say that because of my disgust with the weak MIS and CS programs at my school, I took it upon myself to learn those topics not taught in class.
All I ever wanted was a piece of paper from a widely known university, with a decent reputation. My experience and skills I've developed are what keep my bank account above $0.
Hi -
This might seem an odd reference here, but in the late 1970's "Playboy" magazine ran a great article called "Growing Poor by Degrees" I can try to roughly paraphrase the gist of it...
The basic premise was that before World War II, it was largely the children of the elite that attended college. Because their futures were already secure, there was no need to worry about whether or not what they learned had practical value in the real world.
With the huge boom in college attendance after World War II, colleges continued to emulate the traditional "well rounded" approach. But this ignored the idea that such a curriculum was originally pursued by those who would either not have to work or else already had a role secured for them in the world.
IMO, this article hit the nail on the head, and it also went into great detail about the origins of higher education, dating back to Europe.
TWR, Torrance, CA
The Specialist learns more and more about less and less until eventually they know everything about nothing.
The Generalist learns less and less about more and more until eventually they know nothing about everything.
The first problem is that you have the capacity to learn a fixed "volume" of information, over any period of time. The shape of that volume is up to you, but you cannot exceed that volume.
The second problem is that everything is context-based. And the context may or may not be inside the bounds of your knowledge. Some of that context may require a much more specialised mind. Other elements may require a broader mind.
In consequence, you need BOTH types of schooling, but any given individual may need only one or the other or both. And you have absolutely NO way of telling which.
Broad schooling follows the Reneisence line of thought, which was essentially that you needed at least a glimpse of everything, before you could really get to grips with anything. Certainly, most of the best-known names of the time (eg: Sir Isaac Newton, the famous concert pianist, Alchemist, Finance Minister, inventor, cat-lover, mathematician and part-time apple spotter), DEPENDED upon understanding a wide-range of fields.
Computing, we see the same thing. Many of the early MIT crowd were members of a student railway modelling club, according to the book "HACKERS". Then, both Von Neumann and Alan Turing were obsessed with the similarities of computational devices and "living" structures. AT went in the direction of AI, and VN branched off into Cellular Automata and self-replicating machines. (The world's first digital D.O.M.!)
Computing today is no different. You CANNOT write a decent GUI, if you don't understand some basic personal, group and cultural psychology. You cannot design a decent parallel processing architecture, without understanding systems theory, which puts you well into the realms of physics and biology, the two most basic systems you can readily observe.
Politicians with some degree of understanding of history, sociology, economics and geography would be unlikely to make the sorts of mistakes that politicians so often make.
Modern-day psychologists usually get some grounding in biology and medicine, so that they can tell whether a symptom is psychological, neurological or both, and if both, to what degree each is. (Usually, the psychologist just labels it psychological, cos they make more money that way. But it's not through ignorance of the alternatives.)
Taxi drivers need to have more than an understanding of how to stay on the road. (Although that would be a nice bonus.) They also need to understand basic geography, the psychology of the city as a whole, and ideally a smattering of at least one common second language.
Cooks at fast-food places need to understand cooking, sure, but if they want to be GOOD, they need high-level statistics, training in mnemonics, "Operational Research" (the maths of optimization), and good dexterity. There are a hell of a lot of skills you need, if you want to turn "flipping burgers" into maximal throughput with minimal wastage. (The reason your average Fast Food dumpster doesn't have throughput worth a damn is that their employees don't have the skills needed to do it well.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Don't wanna learn history, don't wanna learn math, don't wanna read books, don't wanna do anything challenging. College should just be about how to be an NT admin, everything else is total crap. And make college just six months instead of four years, so I can get in on an IPO faster and get my Boxster. What, that doesn't happen anymore? I don't understand... wahhhhhh.... mommyyy...
I know this will probably be an unpopular answer here, but I found my education at the US Naval Academy to be extremely well-rounded. I (like all midshipmen) took Calculus (3 semesters), Differential Equations, Basic Programming, History, English, Physics, Chemistry, EE, Navigation, Celestial Navigation, Law, Ethics, Leadership, Seamanship, and Naval Engineering. Even English majors took those courses. And even though I majored in CS, I had to take Operational Analysis and Management Science courses. I even got to take some Weapons Engineering courses that foucused on analog computing. Add to that the real-world application of many of those courses, from Plebe Detail to YP cruises, and I graduated not only ready to assume any role the military offers, from nuclear power to aviation to intelligence/crypto; but well prepared for the varied jobs I have held since I left active duty.
High School is for knowledge.
College is for thinking.
Graduate School or on-the-job training is for specializing.
And the number of spelling errors in the original post & replies boggles the mind.
Wow, the thread demonstrates the results, there are a lot of well educated idiots.
Success and happiness depend on making good sound choices in life, living by good solid principles and morals, honesty, hard work, committment. My "education" did not help me in those regards, my later training in life, a lot of it by life experience did. Being able to "think" is a useful ability only if one applies it in a manner that is not in their and everyone elses detriment. Most of us use it only to advance our own agenda, be it financial or otherwise. Mostly that doesn't bring success or happiness.
Study the creator, not the created, the rest will fall into place.
Perhaps if the U.S. moved to the European system of universities and technical colleges we wouldn't need this discussion at all.
Those who wanted a liberal education could go to university; those who wanted technical training could go to the Polytechnic.
This might also prevent our Liberal Arts colleges from turning into trade schools.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
Anyone in the know will agree. Among the best well-rounded educations (i.e. liberal arts) available is that of St. John's College, both in Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM. The curriculum is the Great Books program, in which original texts are read in historical order. Obviously this is not geared toward any particular job (outside of academics) but the foundation it provides for furhter higher education in pursuit of a career is invaluable.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I don't know if anyone's interested, but the school I attend (College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine)is supposed to be an example of a school teaching a well-rounded education. Students all have the same major ("ecology"), so prospective employers evaluate graduates more on the research they did than on their course work. Students can concentrate on science, art, medicine, etc. but are required to take a certain amount of courses from other areas as well. I've heard a lot of people say that being forced to take a history class made them look at science in a whole new way, or that taking computer programming gave them a new perspective on microbiology. As to whether this "works in real life", I can't say, but other graduates seem to do just fine. I just thought I'd give an example since "Cliff" asked about it in this post.
...of the lack of a well-rounded, basic education is the vacationer who flew to Australia in December, and took along a fur coat to stay warm.
Check out the co-op program at Waterloo for what you're looking for. All Engineering students and lots of other faculties are in the co-op program, it's what was a driving force behind the startup of the school. Real work experience, resume writing, more interviews than you could imagine.... You get lots of experience in potentially lots of areas (depending on your program and what you want to try out). There are six four-month terms in the typical co-op program degree, so you get lots of exposure. The real upside is that you get your 'training' and 'technical skills' through work, and leave the theory and design and the real school stuff to Universty classes. It's great, and it pays the bills. Can't say enough good about it.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
High school should be for "well-rounding" a person. College should be job specific. Too much time is wasted on useless crap (you don't need 4 years of high school AND 4 years of college just to well-round a person). That time would have been much more useful had useful things been taught. Not once in my entire operating systems class did we even LOOK at a line of kernel code, and thats just sad. Magius_AR
...and as such any attempt to answer it will boil down to pure opinionating. I'm a successful software engineer and I'll enternally be on the side of getting a "well rounded" education. Why? Adaptability. Specialized skills dry up in this profession. If you've got a range of general skills those can be aptly applied to learning newer technologies or reaching into realms you never thought you'd go.
To quote Heinlein:
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
--Lazurus Long
Linux came out long before anyone had a use for it.
And they say well-rounded is bad. :P
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
It just struck me as incongruous, a college that trains independent thinkers wouldn't trust them with making more decisions about their own curricula.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Obviously a lot of people disagree on what makes an education well rounded.
Learning how to learn, and how to think for yourself are essential.
but as well as that, there are subjects that seem really essential, to the whole, not just the job you plan to do.
So just a few keywords here, in no particular order, please add anything you think I missed.
literature, art, mathmatics, science, physical education, psychology, spirituality, language, drama, music, philosophy, nutrition, politics, economics, ethics, technology, problem solving, research techniques...
and enough life skills to look after yourself, seems kinda stupid to mention, but I've met people who can't boil an egg, don't know how to wash their own clothes or when to see a doctor etc. life training is essential, or you won't survive to use anything else.
one last thing... that the above sig reminded me of
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
I had a friend say to me recently that he has lost the ability to play with Lego. He can build, but he can no longer have the fun he had as a child, imagining scenarios etc. it bothers him, and I can see how it would, but I have no idea how to get back a lost imagination
____________________________
technodummy... waiting for Slashdot to revive so I can log in
which is why not everyone does well in the school system, it's geared towards certain methods of learning.
personally I like to ask questions, the why nots as well as why, test the status quo, push the current boundaries... which has gotten me into trouble at school in the past. I like the big picture, and I like to take the future into account in all things.
some people learn best that way, some people learn well by memorisation, and others are more hands on, or audio or visual.
but information regurgitation is no good unless you can access it quickly. I don't know about you, but when I need to check something against the alphabet, I need to go through the rhyme, not from beginning to end, but from pauses in the music. not everyone does it that way. it just depends how you learned it, how often you use it and how well you've tried to improved your information access. I don't really try to improve my skill, maybe it's a little slower than some, but I don't really use it. memorisation isn't really useful if you can only repeat it, not "search" inside your memory for what you're looking for.
people are different, they do things differently, learns things differently, retrieve things differently and react differently to environments. it's a shame school systems rarely allow for that
"graduate school is much, much closer to a traditional apprenticeship program ..." I think that's a good thing!
Personally I am very happy that my undergrad education was well rounded and even eclectic. It allowed me the perspective to see (though a bit late) that I didn't want a career in the field of my major (chemistry). If I want career-specific education, I'll go to grad school (probably for an MBA) where I will be SEEKING an apprenticeship-like experience.
-josh@alumni.N0$P@M.southern.edu
A university does not exist to teach you what you want to know. It exists to teach what you SHOULD know. If you don't want to know history, you obviously don't want a complete education. Buy a book and teach yourself, or go to DeVry.
Thinking that university, or any form of education, is a buyer/consumer system is just downright silly, not to mention in conflict with 800 years of tradition.
Really, it mainly depends on how smart you are. If you're not as smart, it will take you longer to learn and understand your core subject, so taking as long on other things can make your core work more difficult. If you're really smart, however, you'll be able to pick up your core subject matter with comparitive speed, ease and completeness. This permits you more time to pick up other information outside of your core subject - which is actually a really, really important thing to have if you're going to be an effective citizen/voter/parent/etc. Literally, the more educated you are in variant subjects, the more effective your interpretation and reactions to your experiences you will be - you'll have more to work from. Additionally, you'll have a base to work from to learn more in those variant subject areas should the need arise - essentially, you'll already know where to start and how to keep from wasting your time on crap, and that knowledge cannot be underestimated for usefulness.
And...remember, not everyone is alike. To make this a canonical discussion for one direction or another is pointless - different people not only learn the same things differently, those same bits of information influences the learners' interpretation of reality differently. Also, some people are much more oriented to learning a few things deeply while others are more oriented to learning some (to varying degrees) about a very large number of things.
So, anyways.
Given enough hydrogen, just about anything is possible.
Justifing an educational experience by polling the people you are trying to educate will not evaluate how well they are being educated, rather how well they are liked.
Finally, I looked up the non-union spun stats on your school. Let's add some accuracy to your words:
You pay $1.38 per $100 of assesed valuation in school taxes. East Winsor New Jersey pays
$2.04. But, of couse, you'll say you pay in the top 5 property taxes if it furthers your elitist goal of not educating the masses. Who needs new schools? Throw out the bums, right? That's basically what you said.
Let's evaluate your payscale claim. Your per-student costs? 63 hundred dollars. Princeton New Jersey? 15 THOUSAND dollars, more than twice as much. Where does that money come from? You - 62% property taxes, 22% state aid. Princeton? 10% state aid. That means that the average taxpayer in princeton, assuming the same child/population ratio, pays THREE TIMES AS MUCH AS YOU in property tax.
But, let's do that per teacher cost you talked about. % of your budget to Classroom Instruction, Auxiliary Instr Serv, Special Education (all of those are salaries for teachers and aids) at 69%. Total budget: 129MM. Salaries ~89MM. FTEs? 2468 . Salary per teacher? 36K. Not as shabby now, is it? That includes aids, also, because your district dosn't break out by classification.
But, hey, let's find the collective barganing aggreement your teachers union *spit* entered, so we can factor the underpaid non-union instructors (classroom aides) out. Average Salary -> $40,619, for 9 months of work. Annualize? Thats $54K a year!
So, screw you and your whiney union-defined ways. The money, you moron, is lining the teachers' (who have complete job security) pockets. As a brainbench certafied Non-Dupe, I looked up the numbers to poke a few holes in the "Pay too much for too little" theory you lied through.
If people want to go to school only to learn skills that will be useful for the first ten years of their career, they should go to a trade school, vocational program, or community college. They have no business going to a University. Universities are for learning to be critical thinkers, with an understanding of the world, and how we came to be where we are today. A well-balanced education gives us a more holistic view of how things work.
Even from an employment perspective, a well-rounded education is useful and meaningful. My current employer benefited substantially from my diverse knowledge when we were a startup with a very small staff, and unlike many companies founded around the same time, my company is still here, and is growing.