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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, and guys like you are a dime a dozen.
There's nothing more irritating than some self-righteous hot-shot programmer type touting himself as God's gift to software development -- especially when he/she has no grounding in any formal theory or concepts that are usually better taught in a good University setting.
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.
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.
Because nobody really expects business majors to know anything except the latest business jargon. Business school is for people who want to say "I went to college" but don't want to do any work.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
>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.
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."
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You can also check out the philosophy behind Oomind and a general introduction to Oomind.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein
"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
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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
"Do any of you know of cirriculums that are good examples of a true well-rounded education?"
life.
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.
For my gen ed classes, my experience was that I had classes you could never expect to have at a high school. Most high schools are either loathe to touch the subject matters (philosophy, religion, cross culture comparisons, etc), or can't dedicate the resources to the subject matters (art history, architecture, etc).
ostiguy
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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 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
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.
"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
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.
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.
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
Yeah, what the hell was your degree in? Basketweaving?
Come on, let's be serious. Is a broad range of knowledge what employers want? Not explicitly, but they do want people that can think critically and analytically.
More importantly, a liberal arts education has as its goal the development of GOOD CITIZENS. That is, citizens who will contribute to the dialoge and process that makes up a society and government.
Now, of course, you can know quite a bit about history and politics without ever taking a college class; you can also learn most of programming without taking a class (IMNSHO).
Regards,
Mark
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!
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.
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 am a physics grad student. I think you are
wrong. I think physics should be taught at grad
level from the start. It would be nice if we
didn't have intro sequence, but rather grad
level semester of mechanics, followed by two
grad level semesters of quantum, two semesters
of grad level thermo/stat. mech., two semesters
to throroughly cover Jackson's E&M, and a few
lab courses to illustrate that all this math
has a corresponding reality. In two years you
could have a physicist ready for grad school.
We do need to focus our physics curriculum, namely
we need to push graduate level courses into
undergrad domain.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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-
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.
Well, you could push graduate-level work into the freshmen year, scare off everyone who hadn't been doing college-level work in high school, and just work with the geniuses who are left, but what's the fun in that? What about the students who might have potential that _could_ have been developed, had they been brought up to speed first?
Intro sequences and survey courses do have their uses, after all. =)
Still, I'm all for advanced students being able to get on the fast track.
That is the point though... As someone who got
his high-school education not in the US, I felt
like I wasted 4 years of college. School should
be packed with math from grade 1. Don't teach
people science at all in school, just give them
solid foundation in math. By the time they get out
of high-school, kids MUST know vector calculus,
ODEs, PDEs, analytic geometry, some functional
analysis and complex number theory. Once they
get to college, tell them that all this math has
physical reality corresponding to it.
The point is that all physics has a pattern to it.
At the top is Hamiltonian dynamics, then
quantum, E&M, and relativity follow easily.
Teaching physics should be done by mapping math
already ingrained in students' minds to real
world, not via learning math as needed in parallel
with physics.
Once this basic level has been reached, it makes sense to get marketable skills.
Well tell that to my parents who I now live with because i got laid off 6 months earlier.
Since I do not have a college degree, I can't get hired for any programming job. At least here in New York. HR are the ones who decides who gets to be interviewed and they never count actual coding skills, just education and work experience. They all want 4 or 6 year degree's in any IT job in todays economy. Why? They do this because they can. With today's economy they can afford to do it. Even a telephone support help desk desk in the IT field requires a 4 year degree in CS. Don't believe me? Go look at the classifieds in your local newspaper.
The idea of a college degree not being important anymore is dead and out with the so called "new economy". Only a year ago employers were desperate and looked beyond a college degree to find someone who knows there stuff. Since alot of non technical people were trained as programers, the skills are oversaturating the whole market. I admit most trained programmers are terrible but HR people don't know this and will look at academic performance to seperate individuals from the mass herd of resumes being faxed in.
It doesn't matter if you know your stuff sadly enough. An employer can not get to you if HR doesn't hand over your resume. I know Assembler, c/c++, java, and even some perl, but I am now interviewing at a kinko's Tommorow because I have no degree. Grrr.
I can also sleep at night knowing your college graduates who can't code for sh*t as well as Hi-visa's Indians all have taken my jobs away.
Consider yourself lucky if you do not have a degree and you are sucessfull. Remember that even many programmers with 4 year degree's are unemployeed. Cnn did a study on job classified ads and the number of ads submitted were the lowest in 18 years! The world is very political and does not make sense but we must live in it.
I strongly advise people reading this to get their degree if they do not have one. Even if you all already have sucessfull IT jobs. If you get fired or laid off it will be a bitch to ever find a job as good as the one you have. Trust me, its really that bad in IT right now. The other markets excluding manufactoring are not quite there yet. I have a friend in a simular situation. He was luckier and found a helpdesk job that paid half as much as his webpage design job he had before. Poor guy. He had kids so I am happy he found something.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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 disagree. Where I work, the managers insist on HTML working on all popular browsers. I've frequently seen the GUI guy get a tongue-lashing for forgetting to test on Mac. And we need the pages to make at least half-assed sense in lynx, because this makes it easier to troubleshoot connectivity and proxy issues from machines all over the internet.
Mac users are few, but they have a voice out of proportion to their numbers. Browser specific HTML is only for very small, ignorant projects or for those who have a captive audience. If you're trying to compete in the big world, you have to support everything.
Imagine demoing your system to a prospective client or investor, and falling on your face because they use Macs and you never tested with Macs. You create a permanent perception of your product as shoddy and unfinished.
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-
Really? How about resale permits? Occupational licensing? Insurance? Negotiating a decent lease with a landlord? Negotiating revolving credit with a bank? They want a balance sheet? What's that again? What if a client refuses to pay? How do you decide a client's credit-worthiness, anyhow? How to you establish credit for your business? What rights do your employees have? What if they try to organize? How exactly did you decide that a sole proprietorship was the best form for this business?
I ran my own business for one year. If you start a business, I think you have some surprises coming.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
I've always felt that collega and university were for general education, or simply exercising the mind. I think many people over emphasize job skills.
IMO, an education is an end unto itself.