Is A "Well-Rounded" Education a Good One?

hendridm asks: "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. It seems to me that it would be better to teach skills that would help us in the first 10 years of employment. As a senior Information Systems major in a state university in the Midwest, I can think of countless examples that support this idea." Of course, a well-rounded education can be a good one, it just depends on your definition of 'rounded'. 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", which is hedridm's main point. Do any of you know of curriculums that are good examples of a true well-rounded education?

"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?"

Comments

Re:Teach Thinking!

[jandrese]

Maybe they just don't want to give up the sweet heaven that is a good command line ftp client.

Personally, I've never found a graphical FTP client that completely suits my needs yet anyway (and not for lack of trying!), so I'm not surprised that your teacher has the same problem.

Re:Teach Thinking! start early!

[Stenpas]

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.

Re:Teach Thinking!

[binner1]

As far as I'm concerned, the best FTP client is Midnight Commander. Text based gui...integrated just like it's a local filesystem.

If you don't like mc, you might as well stick with (nc)ftp on the command line.

-Ben