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
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).
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.
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.
As a university student majoring in Computer Science, I have been made to take classes such as Greek Mythology and American History... I'm paying them, if I want to learn about history, I'll tell them so. It shouldn't be the other way around.
Universities are *certifying* bodies that grant you a certificate once you have demonstrated a particular level of intellectual maturity. The whole point of a University is to expose you to ideas that you would not otherwise expose yourself to. Those ideas that you are exposed to is what your employer is paying for -- they are paying for critical thinking.
That being said, you should stop poo-pooing your American History papers and dig into the Federalist Papers. There is alot of ideas packed in there about how to run organizations and talk of the human condition. These topics are valueable. As well as the discusion techniques you learn in class and dealing with other classmates. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison are serious thinkers. You can learn alot from them.
The point is that a University is an institution of higher learning, not a job training center. Their goal is to impart knowledge and expand the scope of knowledge, not to get you a particular job. The former role is of course their historical origin, and, I think is very worthwhile, because it is that attitude that continues expansion of knowledge in many fields.
This especially applies to fields that are not terribly marketable, such as some of the humanities, arts, and pure math and science. While these may not be cash cows directly, their developement does lead eventually to innovation with commercial or political application, or enrichment of the culture as a whole. I think these are very worthwhile, even essential goals that must be maintained. Many people at Universities these days (both students and faculty) want to turn them into vocational school. While I think the school definitely has to provided guidence to resources, it is wrong to pervert an institution of higher learning into a job training center.
I think there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting an education that just trains you for a job. There are certainly places for that, places more like DeVry or Strayer, so you might look into something like that and/or interships.
Finally, I think that they don't teach all the neccessarry skills for an entry level position also as a pragmatic matter. They simply can't. The variety of requirements for different jobs are too large or it requires an amount or kind of experience (say coding a major project), that they can't provide in the limited setting of classes. I think they feel that they can't teach you the specifics, so the best solution is to teach you the things that will allow you to learn the skills you will need, and integrate them into a coherent framework.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
If you're too well rounded then you're not very sharp.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I think that you miss two important points. First, as valuable as a modern education is to somebody who learns from it, not everyone has the intelligence or personality to benefit from it. Having an alternative system so that people who don't fit in to the modern educational system are able to learn something and become productive members of society is very valuable. Second, that system still does exist and is actually quite strong still. Vocational education and even straight apprenticeship programs still exist; many union jobs, for instance, follow more that approach more or less closely. Also, much as it pains me to point it out, graduate school is much, much closer to a traditional apprenticeship program than most academics are willing to admit.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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.