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?"
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.
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 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.
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).
They make you take things not related to your major because that makes you a better person. There is nothing more pathetic than a person who only understands one subject. Look at everyone on Slashdot. If you just want to learn enough to get a job then maybe you should consider a two year technical school like DeVry.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
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.
For example -- the graduates from my college tend to be well-rounded thinkers not so much because the school trains them that way, but rather because it weeds out those who do not have the ability. (1100 inductees, 837 graduates, woohoo!) The graduates from Podunk U of South Carolina were probably hicks who were never good at thinking to begin with, so even if you sent them to Harvard or Oxford, they wouldn't somehow magically be transformed into critical thinkers with good leadership ability and an inate charisma.
Ad: One slightly used soapbox for sale, $.02, or highest bidder...
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?
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.
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.
The point is that a University is an institution of higher learning, not a job training center. Their goal is to impart knowledge and expand the scope of knowledge, not to get you a particular job. The former role is of course their historical origin, and, I think is very worthwhile, because it is that attitude that continues expansion of knowledge in many fields.
This especially applies to fields that are not terribly marketable, such as some of the humanities, arts, and pure math and science. While these may not be cash cows directly, their developement does lead eventually to innovation with commercial or political application, or enrichment of the culture as a whole. I think these are very worthwhile, even essential goals that must be maintained. Many people at Universities these days (both students and faculty) want to turn them into vocational school. While I think the school definitely has to provided guidence to resources, it is wrong to pervert an institution of higher learning into a job training center.
I think there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting an education that just trains you for a job. There are certainly places for that, places more like DeVry or Strayer, so you might look into something like that and/or interships.
Finally, I think that they don't teach all the neccessarry skills for an entry level position also as a pragmatic matter. They simply can't. The variety of requirements for different jobs are too large or it requires an amount or kind of experience (say coding a major project), that they can't provide in the limited setting of classes. I think they feel that they can't teach you the specifics, so the best solution is to teach you the things that will allow you to learn the skills you will need, and integrate them into a coherent framework.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
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!
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.
The problem is people confusing what a college is for with what elementary/high school is for.
How people here have taken a "General Education" course or a "Western Civilization" course and ended up learning the same thing you learned in High School? How many have taken Math courses that could be transplanted to 11th grade with no changes?
You should be a "Well-rounded" person when you graduate from High School. Able to talk coherently about current events, understand most of the points of the English language, hell, even be able to find the area under a curve.
The current "need" for a BS when applying for an entry level job is simply a reflection of the failure of our public schools to make a well-rounded education a requirement for graduation.
College is for learning a specific skill ie. Doctor/Lawyer/Ph.D whatever, NOT for learning (Yet again) about the vagaries of the 2 party system.
-madajb
You can take any class you want. If you want a degree you have to fill the requirements. If you just want a certification, get a certification. If you want a degree, you have to be educated, not trained. That doesn't happen on your schedule, because some things need to be standard.
As someone who is in the position to hire people, I don't look so much at certifications, and I don't even look so much at degrees. What I look for is a broad experience base, and the willingness to learn new things.
If you came to me looking for a job saying that you took all the courses for your degree except the general education classes, because they were a waste of time, there's no way I'd hire you. Says to me that you don't have patience, and aren't open minded enough to take on tasks that may require learning new skills. May be wrong, but that's tough, employers are going to call them as they see them.
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
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? /
I think that you miss two important points. First, as valuable as a modern education is to somebody who learns from it, not everyone has the intelligence or personality to benefit from it. Having an alternative system so that people who don't fit in to the modern educational system are able to learn something and become productive members of society is very valuable. Second, that system still does exist and is actually quite strong still. Vocational education and even straight apprenticeship programs still exist; many union jobs, for instance, follow more that approach more or less closely. Also, much as it pains me to point it out, graduate school is much, much closer to a traditional apprenticeship program than most academics are willing to admit.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Rote memorization isn't a sign of intellectual ability. Anybody can memorize something, given enough time. As the other reply said, med school is tough but only becuase there's a lot of memorization.
Understanding the concepts is a sign of intelligence. Being able to use applied knowledge is the same.
It kills me when people think they're really intelligent just because they got a 4.0 GPA or becuase they did really well because they "memorized the answers", not learned how to dod it....
Are you suggesting that people graduating from high school are at the peak of their ability to learn? That they have mastered /how/ to learn and should now move soley on to /what/ to learn?
If you are taking classes that could be straight out of a high school, your college is guilty of dumbing down their curriculum. As someone with friends and family working in smaller colleges, I know there is a lot of pressure by the student body (and therefore the administration who watch the purse strings and attendence numbers, especially at smaller community-college-type private schools) to dumb down the curriculum.
There is an astounding gap between the intellectual ability of a high school senior and a college senior in terms of their ability to learn. Colleges are there to further refine your learning ability as you mature.
I work with some of the most gifted kids in the country (I work at the Illinois Math and Science Academy). These are kids who are going to go to Ivy League schools and places like MIT. And they struggle with some concepts and some of the more college-based ways of approaching subjects. Does this mean that our high schools are failing them? No, it simply means that they have not developed fully intellectually.
Colleges teach things like getting information from research journals, and learning from those. How to effectively look at original documents and judge their veracity.
What you are suggesting is that the only difference between a high school senior and a college senior is *what* they know. You obviously have not been around students in a learning environment if you truly believe that.
Colleges teach *how to learn* the same as elementary and high schools. They simply teach it at a much more advanced level.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
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.
University is about getting some basic knowledge in a number of fields so you learn how to think about different types of problems. How you tackle a history essay is different from a mathematical proof is different from a studio art assignment. University is meant to make you a well-educated person, not a well-trained person. If you are concerned about your technical skills in a particular field, go to a technical/vocational institute and take a training course. University is not job-training.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.