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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
How do you teach thinking when there are many different types of intelligent thinking?
I'm just starting med school now and we've had a couple of exams. I'm in class with some of the brightest minds of America. You would think that my class would have similar types of minds, because we all had to go through the same screening process, but we all perform differently on different types of exams.
I'm not so good at brute force memorization. It takes me much longer than my collegues to study for a biochem exam and i only do average on them. Yet I can rock the molecular bio exam with little studying because it's based on applied knowledge.
Thinking is very different for different people. It develops at an early age (thank you parents for pushing me) but takes years to develop. i didn't learn how to think for myself until i got to high school. I felt I was behind my classmates until I learned how to do applied knowledge very well. I suppose when others were memorizing, I was using connecting schematics.
To answer my first question, I would probably go about it through a "well-rounded" education. If I hadn't majored in philosophy as an undergraduate, I'm sure I wouldn't have been good at applied knowledge skills. If I had taken more classes where memorization plays a big role, then maybe I would have been better at that. As of right now, I'm the only one in my class that cannot remember more than 20% of the names of our classmates.
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
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.
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.
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."
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.