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What's Wrong With the American University System
ideonexus writes "The Atlantic has an excellent interview with Andrew Hacker — co-author with Claudia Dreifus of a book titled Higher Education? — covering everything that's wrong with the American university system. The discussion ranges from entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching; to 22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position after graduating with six-figures of debt; to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate. It really lays out the farce of university culture and reminds me of everything I absolutely despised about my college life. Dreifus is active in the comments section of the article as well, lending to a fantastic discussion on the subject."
it is likely the best university system in the world. Contrast that with K-12 (lower ed) and I find it hard to complain about what is seemingly a world class higher education model.
Besides being a front for collectivist indoctrination?
Fix that first.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University. The ticket sales and merchandising are a HUGE boon for most universities, with little in the way of player salaries to cut into all that phat cash.
And, even if they didn't make money directly, popular sports programs are often a huge draw for the local donors and alumni supporters that keep most universities going. Like it or not, wealthy alumni and locals are a helluva lot more interested in how the football/basketball teams are doing than how many papers Professor Dipschitz published this year, or how much you've improved your graduation rate.
And before a bunch of you non-Americans kick in with snide "handegg" remarks, yes I'm aware that you're "football" is different from ours. But we *are* talking about American universities here.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well, for starters they're operated like for-profit corporations, instead of education institutions
As much as I hate to say it, that's one of the biggest problems. Everybody thinks they deserve to go to college. Everybody thinks that because they have a degree, they can command six figures. That's not the reality though. Somebody has to be a cart-pusher. Somebody has to work fast food.
I'm a system administrator. I didn't go to college. I'm more competent than most of my peers that did go to college.
The biggest problem with higher education in the USA is it is just a few ticks above what the high-school diploma used to be. IMHO that's because our high-school system is rather poor when it comes down to it. In the end experience is what gets you a job and diploma and degrees simply show that you aren't an absolute idiot. There a lot of jobs that require a degree when there is no need for it.
Hear, hear! Show me a university that doesn't offer advanced degrees in Objectivism or Austrian economics and I'll show you an American university.
people stop trying to find faults with the american university system. It is the elementary/high schools in america that needs to be fixed. The higher education in USA is the best in the world. People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
What is wrong with the university system is because we've screwed up our high school system to pretty much let -everyone- graduate, a diploma now means nothing. Because of this, people who usually should go to a trade school, or just have on-site training from high school is now attending university to stand out in the job market. So because of this, universities are forced to hire sub par teachers to meet the demand and because no one wants to attend a university with a 60% flunk-out rate, universities lower standards. Of course this is just a cat and mouse game, eventually employers are going to require things beyond a bachelors degree for entry-level jobs, etc.
Fix our high school system by actually -failing- kids who can't do the work. None of this "can I please have extra credit despite me doing nothing but talking in class?" crap that keeps high-profile athletes who are dumber than rocks with "passing" grades.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
For specific examples, you may see the references at the link in my signature.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I read this headline and for a moment I thought they were slamming the school I go to, which is *called* American University.
Name one profession that is _not_ filled with petty politics, sucking up to superiors, back stabbing and arguing over parking spots?
The difference is only academics write a thick book about it.
The summary started out good but:
"They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts".
"The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education."
I'm not saying get rid of liberal arts. They're great. I loved taking them when I got my BSME. I'm probably going to sneak into a few when I go back for my masters. But there is no reason every decent sized school needs to be graduating even 20 theater majors a year. Hurray, you spent 4 years and $50k to learn to do theater. Now what? Most highschools require you to have a teaching degree too. So now you're limited to off broadway and the such. Something tells me that there isn't a huge demand (at least not enough to match supply).
The most successful liberal arts major you'll ever meet was most likely one of your liberal arts professors.
We NEED to be focusing more on vocational training. The world needs ditch diggers. The world also needs mechanics, electricians, welders. We need to quit making high schools force someone who would be an excellent mechanic into going to college 'just because'. Too many parents push their kids into college thinking either "I'm successful, they have to go to be successful too." or "I want my kid to go to college because I didn't to get rich".
Personally I've liked what I read about other countries where they sort of guide you into a track early in high school. I'm sure it's not perfect and they get the track wrong, but it's a ton better than graduating 10,000 students a year from a decent sized education, 50% of which have a degree that is more or less 100% useless. WTF does an "Art Appreciation" major do?
I wish I could go back to my high school and give a swift cock punch to my guidance counselor that told me I couldn't take welding because I was college bound. There is so much stuff I'd love to make. Thankfully my dad taught me wood working and home repair and I learned to solder in an internship.
one of these "22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position"? I never have personally though they are a common complaint. No one I knew expected to even have a job upon graduating, just offers and maybes and that seemed normal.
Well thats why I enjoy the IT field so much.
Programming, Technical work, Networking, DBA, Whatever you want to do with computers, education doesn't really matter.
Don't get me wrong, it looks nice on a resume, but if you insist on attaching sample code, or insist on demonstrating your skills during an interview - it'll be more impressive than any degree you get from any university. Just because most people in IT know that a majority of it is self taught. You only ever go to school to get a piece of paper that says you can do it and show you can see something through. Some employers, that doesn't matter, as long as you can do what you claim you can. Which is where demonstration works better than a degree.
I even agree with a lot of the criticisms, but "entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing" is a downside? He seems to miss that research universities are at least as much about research as they are about teaching, and that this is a good thing. Research universities are where we get many of our scientific breakthroughs, tech ideas that are later commercialized, and general advancement of knowledge.
Now tenured professors who are doing neither research nor teaching are a real concern, though they aren't that common--- despite tenure meaning they can't be fired, universities have always had a lot of ways to make their lives miserable (bad committee assignments, move their office to somewhere lame, stop giving them even cost-of-living raises, etc.), and increasingly official ones are being added, e.g. at top research universities, you typically now have to pay somewhere around 25-40% of your own salary out of grant money, so if you stop bringing in research grants, you get a big pay cut. But still, we can think of ways to improve that.
But he seems actually worried mainly about tenured professors who are doing good research, because they aren't paying enough attention to teaching. Good teachers need to exist, but so do good researchers--- the problem with today's university is not that there are too many good senior researchers. If anything, the opposite.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"What's wrong with the American University System" is also what's wrong with any university that i've taught at, (ok, that's just the states and a random sprinkling in Europe). "entrenched tenured profs" -hah- in Germany, they don't even have to get out of bed after tenure. and what 22 year old anywhere has realistic expectations? granted, the american university athletic industry connection is an ugly situation special to america, but the rest is just stating an obvious "problem" with universities since 12th century Bologna (no... not some old lunch meat)
Some of their statements are way off. Liberal arts is not the reason you go to university, unless you want to be a writer. If you get a liberal arts (sort of) degree in a technical field you are woefully underprepared. An employer in a technical field wants you to be able to communicate, but other than that they could care less about other non-technical stuff. If you're a programmer, they want you to program and not sound like an idiot when you talk in front of people/with people.
The focus on research is a valid
"to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate"
Tuitions don't *have* to go up. Most universities have *INSANE* endowment funds. I've heard both Harvard and Michigan mentioned as schools that could offer their incoming freshman classes free education from undergrad through PhD without making so much as a dent in these funds.
I'm all for well funded endowments. But at some point you need to skim a bit off the top. I know it's a slippery slope, and the first uni that starts siphoning funds will be the first one to broke a few years later after the departments go chasing down money like kids picking up candy from a pinata. I know that the interest income on a billion dollars pays for a whole lot more than the interest on nine hundred million. But it's kinda tough to stomach hearing someone tell a broke students "Sorry, we know you're scraping by, but you're paying an extra three grand per term this year. Sorry." when (per wikipedia) at least 57 major universities have endowments over a billion dollars. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
Even better, of those 57, my wholly uncientific count says that 23 of those school are major football or basketball schools (If you want to call Indiana and Michigan 'major', sigh).
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Let's face it -- if we're going to require a college degree for every job that doesn't involve a spatula, hat, and stack of assorted meat patties, we need to consider that to be part of a public education system, paid for by the public. Instead we have ridiculous tuition rates that don't correspond at all to how much it costs to teach a class. And maybe we should consider that not all professors need to have PhDs, either.. A PhD implies that you are performing new and *valuable* research. This should be a title reserved for an elite few, not a prerequisite to teach a class.
Don't get me wrong, it looks nice on a resume, but if you insist on attaching sample code, or insist on demonstrating your skills during an interview - it'll be more impressive than any degree you get from any university.
It depends who looks at your resume though. Most of the time its a HR drone who thinks that PHP is some kind of street name for a drug. If you can get someone who knows IT to look through your resume, then yes, that would certainly help, but most companies do hiring through HR, not the department you want to work in, which is why you find the guys with a PHD in computer science who turn out buggy code.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I went to a state college - it was great, none of this harvard-like crap. My brother went to a community college, then to my state college, and said the community college was even better, with great teachers who care about teaching. Both were dirt cheap, and we both learned a lot.
My ex wife went to an expensive, prestigious university - and it was hell, she hardly learned anything and paid outrageous money for it.
It's the expensive universities that exist to sell diplomas so they can pay their researchers so they can earn prestige from them that suck. Small universities/colleges are great.
Fair enough.
But then you don't get to call yourself an engineer because you completed a 6 month course in programming, OK?
Society has been pushing a bunch of kids (and their parents) who have no business being there. A large chunk of these kids would be better off in a vocational field.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The reason education means less and less is the same reason technology does with each passing week:
Before we "globalized" our economy, our labor force was a limited size and so we had to automate and use technology and training to increase output. Now that we are competing in a marketplace where labor is orders of magnitude more plentiful, there is no reason to automate and no reason to train. We can pay 10, or even 50, what we previously paid 1, to do the same job.
The chinese government is building city after city, housing millions, over a spread of a few years. We've gutted ourselves to the point where as a "service based economy" we can't rebuild one damaged city, let alone construct any new ones.
If we want to be competitive... we need to either close our borders to trade, or we need to move away from a service based economy back to an industrial one. This is why education is worthless... and the only reason people are demanding it is because the unemployment rate is sky-high and they can write wish lists for employee qualifications and get them.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
graduating with six-figures of debt
http://ocw.mit.edu/ and other sites provide top-tier education, offering full course content on-line for free.
It's the certification that'll cost ya.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Shaun: I have to go to college.
Cindy: Why?
Shaun: Because it's what you do after high school.
Just remembered this quote
Most any college team I know of (SEC ones in my experience) MAKE the universities money by the barrel full.
Well, you have to beware of creative accounting and bad investments/contracts.
Basically it can sometimes become a 'school pride' issue, because the sports teams 'make' the college money they press for additional benefits - more pay for the coach, more money for recruiting efforts, new stadium, etc...
Of course, all this is justified as 'payoff in X years', the problem is that you never reach X...
On the creative accounting side you end up with sports expenses not being counted as part of the sports programs, things like ticket sales being counted as income even as they count stadium expenses as 'infrastructure' like actual classrooms.
I don't read AC A human right
Liberal Arts is not about Theatre, Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking. This country needs more people who can think before they do, not more doers whose educations become obsolete before the ink on their diploma is dry.
there are many good essays on exactly what Liberal Arts is, you should try reading a few of them before penning ignorant rants.
This is one of them, http://www2.fiu.edu/~hauptli/MyViewofTheNatureofALiberalArtsEducation.html
This is a page that describes the expectations of a student that has graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts (please note that I did not say Theatre or Art Appreciation, those are part of Liberal Arts, but They are not all of Liberal Arts [if you don't understand why this is so, then you should review your logic]).
http://www.evergreen.edu/about/expectations.htm
Most of the time its a HR drone who thinks that PHP is some kind of street name for a drug
PHP is a gateway language, it's easy to start with but before you know it you're hooked on Python, C, Java, and even worse. I get the shakes now if I don't use Perl every few hours. PHP ruined my life man.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Well, there are two ways to pick a college. One is to go to a prestigious college, [...] It doesn't matter what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you. Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes
I don't think this is true. I went to Cambridge, and everything I've experienced and heard about other universities, including from exchange students at MIT is that the 'more prestigious' universities *are* harder. Certainly I didn't "get nothing" from the course. That's just silly.
The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education.
Wait, what? What happened to science?
[The professors] provide a good education because they don't expect professors to do research.
Yeah there's some truth in this, but if they aren't doing research it probably means they aren't at the cutting edge of knowledge. And they *do* teach the cutting edge to undergrads (or at least they did for me).
[Saying everyone should major in arts:] They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later—by the way, in two years rather than four.
Riiighht... I don't think I need to go on. I do think they are right about publishing though. The whole thing is a scam. Many journals even charge authors to publish!
Software design, scientific computing, algorithmic analysis, etc.
A university education is very important if you want to do much more than configure routers and hack code together.
Programming, Technical work, Networking, DBA, Whatever you want to do with computers, education doesn't really matter.
This isn't entirely true. Both outside HR and internal HR departments filter the masses of resumes they receive by education. The simple, brain-dead way to filter the vast majority of candidates, and select (on average) better ones is to require either a Masters or a PhD. I wrote quite a diatribe about the stupidity of this practice a month or so ago when this turned up on Slashdot.
So while you still can get a job without a having 4-8 years of higher education in Computer fields, you're going to have to battering-ram through stupid HR screening before you'll get noticed. The 'big' companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and such even lean towards PhD as a minimum bar for entry. That's even more stupid, and you'll find you have trouble even getting a phone interview without a PhD even if you have, say, 10+ years experience in exactly the field they want.
The root cause? Escalation. Everyone who wants to get a programming job is getting a Masters, not even a Bachelors, because employers want that because everyone in the previous generation has a Bachelors. Now employers want a PhD because, well, everyone got a Masters because employers wanted that. What happens when everyone's spent 10 years in education just to get a job? Perhaps, I dunno, people could be recruited on a basis of their quality rather than a piece of paper saying they're as good as a few million other people.
... it's certainly not the drunken debauchery.
I am really not comfortable with the state education is in these days. The problems are very deep and it is going to take some pretty drastic action to fix it.
While it is sometimes true that success is not a result of education, it remains a barrier for so many millions of people that we have fallen behind. I am a fan of Capitalism for its economic merits, but when it comes to education, it undermines some of the inherent beauties of learning.
What is is going to essentially come down to, is the marketability of a specific education will draw even more attention and scrutiny. Simply having a degree will mean nothing if it didn't come from somewhere that produces marketable graduates.
More economic adaptations are going to need to occur before the education being served is more important than the revenue of the school.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Professors that do not do any research but only teach forget what it is like to learn, and then they can no longer teach.
I agree that most professors should be doing more teaching and less research, but they should be doing research.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
At most universities, publishing is the metric on which they're assessed. You can't get tenure without getting published. University administrations give lip service to teaching, but if the quantifiable goals professors are given involve publishing, obviously that's what they're going to focus on.
I am a foreigner and since I come from different background I feel that I understand what is wrong with education system here. I have a 6 year old son in USA. He went to Kindergarten at the age of 5 and I was amazed that he is getting graded and taught to spell and recognize words cut put etc.. etc.. I felt this is so wrong to teach children at such young age. I had hoped that K will be mostly play, activities and story telling. After 2 months I withdrew him from the school because I am sure if I had continued then it would have destroyed any imaginative/creative abilities he might be having. He will rejoin K this year.
Quoting Albert Einstein - Imagination is more important than knowledge.
At age 5 the brain is not fully wired(especially boys). Kids memory part is excellent at age 5. The analytical ability develops at a later age(left and right brain have to connect). When we teach kids to memorize and learn, their brains get trained to use memory to learn and thus the analytical brain will never be challenged or used at later ages. They will excel(by reading early) in early classes, say K3 etc. but when they grow up they will not have decision making, logical analysis abilities and will most likely end up at fast food chains taking orders. The best education systems in the world start teaching kids at age 6 or 7. For example Finland.
Those aren't the companies you want to work for, fortunately.
There was trend in the 90s to bring business consultants to non-profit organization to make them operate more responsibility like businesses. The tell-tale sign was if the organization spouted a "mission statement', a signature of Kinsey methodology. Even sub-units like a professors lab was supposed to operate like a mini-business.
As with any trend, there may have been excesses. But the incorporating some business discipline may have been good.
of the collegiate educational system. First and foremost, we need to stop telling every child they need to get a 4 year degree. That is just plain madness for several reasons, the most obvious being over saturation of the job market and the second being not every child is meant for 4 years of college.
I would suggest that the accrediting associations of 4 year colleges also start working at the 2 year college level for certain industrial certifications in different areas: such as, automotive repair, aircraft repair, solar cell repair, etc. Let's start pumping out some actual industry in this country once again.
Some of you will say that we already have programs like this in our community and 2 year colleges. You are right; but there is a stigma associated with these trade schools. That could be fixed in two ways: bettering the curriculum and giving a specialized two year degree the same status of a general 4 year degree. I know some of this sound radical, but we really do have to change how things are going so that we can continue to sustain ourselves as a country.
"In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change" --Thich Nhat Hanh
I'm surprised you didn't use a Ruby on rails pun.
"That it's required for most employment these days? Fix that first."
It's a free country. Start your own business, hire only high school graduates (who presumably would settle for a lower wage), and make more money than the capitalist next door. (I won't be holding my breath.)
Every job I've gotten in IT after my first was by word of mouth and reputation. All of my interviews were just a formality. If you're good at what you do, HR will never see your resume.
Colleges spend money on football simply because they make huge profits by so doing. Football is a cash cow. There are monies directly earned as well as more indirect routes such as keeping loyal alumni who donate large sums to the school and attracting new students to a degree that higher rates can exist for admissions.
If I had a complaint it would be with some of the new age junk where people are promoted and graduated without regard to their proven learning.
As for teachers obsessed with publishing that flows from administrations pushing them to publish. Again that relates to colleges needs in fund raising which is simply a proof that society and government are not supporting education properly. It would be a far better policy to offer free schooling for all but make it difficult enough to only allow the best minds to get through the courses.
Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking.
No, Liberal Arts is about thinking the way pre-scientific people did it.
Read CP Snow's "Two Cultures", which laments the divide between the sciences and the liberal arts, and justly so.
So long as the liberal arts fail to adapt to the scientific world-view, including accepting the importance of mathematical reasoning alongside poetry etc, they have ceased to be what they once were, which is the living voice of Western culture. Instead they are just a cozy backwater for the scientifically illiterate.
The sciences, at the same time, become a cozy backwater for the poetically illiterate.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I for one believe that the society can benefit tremendously from EVERYONE having a college-level education, just like it benefited a few centuries ago from EVERYONE learning how to read. Remember they used to say that robots will take over the manual labor and humans will have to find something else to do? It's happening. Everyone should be able to get a BS equivalent by enrolling into an heavily subsidized school, and the higher education is actually already very good, so it can be left alone. The society as a whole will reap the rewards, because it is going to be a vastly more efficient, more sophisticated organism.
They conclude in the article that universities are too focused on vocational skills and not enough on Liberal Arts? WTF? People can't get jobs with Liberal Arts degrees because they don't have any job skills. This has been the rip on American universities since, well, forever (my Liberal Arts degree from 1993 included). Now these clowns say it's the opposite?
This was in the pre-web days when small town libraries werent very good and you had to leave to have access to books and clever people. The books are now on the web, but the people-part is still important. The job part is secondary; I could always get one of those if I did the education part right.
He always said that there was little difference between the education at a "good" school vs some state school. The only thing you're really paying for is the name and the only school who's name is worth it is Harvard. (Hey, he was just turning that old saw of "A student is completely responsible for his education, not the university" around.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I don't really see much of a problem really. Universities are generally considered research institutions, where the focus is on research and graduate work (again, research). Colleges generally focus on the undergraduates.
The problem is when you want to go to a university (for whatever reason: prestige, connections, great sports program, etc) and expect a college education (where teaching is often the focus for faculty).
This doesn't mean you can't have great teachers at universities, or good research coming from colleges. You don't go to your favorite supermarket and start demanding that they prepare gourmet meals for you -- you go to a 5 star restaurant if you want that. Likewise, find a good college if you want "better" teachers.
Lastly, computer science and engineering are probably the only two areas of study where you can get a decent job that pays well after graduating from an undergraduate institution. People need to realize that higher paying jobs these days require more than just an undergraduate degree.
In Argentina, almost all universities are tuition-free, and they manage to land achievements like these few: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#.22Monopoles.22_in_condensed-matter_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT [Nobel prizes from Argentina in wikipedia, too lazy to copypaste them :P]
I now work at IBM with Almaden Research Center employees, and my whole degree costed less than 2000 U.S. dollars, all along 6 years. More than 100.000 dollars of debt? THAT'S what I call a problem!
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
That sounds like an issue with employers then, not universities.
I triple majored and then got a PhD from a top school. Now with 2 years of experience, I make 5 digits, and would be making more if I hadn't wasted my time getting a PhD. Graduate STEM degrees are just not valued by anyone. They're basically a pyramid scheme.
what do college sports and the movie industry have in common? people get rich off of them but neither officially make money.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
College, Inc..
Yours In Moscow,
Kilgore Trout
Yay, another rant and rave about the evils of liberal education from slashdot! If only they would let the brilliance of our Reardon metals shine!
The rich are redistributing wealth by buying laws that favor them. I'm just suggesting we do the same back to them.
Also, see here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738326&cid=33088198
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
most employment...
...has been shipped to China.
Thanks for playing, USA.
Your decline won't end in a nice environmentally sustainable hippydom either. Alchys and neglect are your future. Detroit, writ large.
Happy Friday.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
In other words, it produces hyper-educated fools who don't know jack about running things in the real world. Less than 2 years after he was bootstrapped into office by the media and the Democrats are about to lose control of Congress. His vast experiential ignorance has Democrats in a circular firing squad!
That sounds like an issue with employers then, not universities.
If employers keep asking for ever-increasing qualifications, isn't that an indication that universities aren't providing the right education?
I agree with you that a degree arms race is stupid and counterproductive, but for the most part my experiences working/interviewing as a developer do not reflect what you're saying.
Getting past HR people who have no idea about technology is a perennial problem as a developer, but in my experience a higher degree is in most cases not the best or even a good way to surmount this hurdle.
YMMV.
Are universities really turning into their counterparts from Revenge of the Nerds, Animal House or a Rodney Dangerfield movie? You decide...
A modern liberal arts degree is a mostly worthless piece of paper. The degree is chock full of courses in dead literature and useless philosophy. All of which are a holdover form the days of royalty and privilege. The upper classes didn't have to work, so they spent their leisure time filling their heads with literature and philosophical trivia. This made them appear more intelligent than the working-class slobs whose days were filled by 16-hour shifts in the coal mines. And this in turn was used to rationalize a mythical genetic basis for the wealth and leisure of the upper class. It's time to bring colleges and universities into the 21st century. Instead of trying to recreate the old European culture of wealth and privilege, let's trash the whole university system, and create a whole new, publicly funded set of technical degree generating institutions that don't bother with dead and arcane subjects like English or Art. It would be well worth the investment of public funds to have a populace that can compete on a global scale in technical fields. Of course the useless f-tards from wealthy families can still waste their lives on "private sector" liberal arts degrees, the difference being that their lack of technical focus will label them as useless idle slugs instead of the erudite and effete members of the upper crust.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
From the article -- "Tuitions now are twice what they were 25 years ago".
Hmm, I started at the University of Texas almost 25 years ago. Tuition has gone up by a factor of *10* since then.
(Seriously -- it was about $400 per semester back then, and now it's over $4000/semester now.)
Back then, I put myself through college. No loans. Not sure that kids could do that now ...
It really doesn't take a leading researcher to teach undergraduate classes. They should hire people who are actually good at teaching for this job.
At the largest universities, men's football, men's basketball, and men's hockey make money. At smaller universities, some or all of those 3 lose money. All other mens' sports lose money. All womens' sports, except University of Connecticut basketball (and maybe 1 or 2 others) lose money. For all sports programs that lose money, participants should pay user fees.
Another problem, though, is that these sports teams reach semi-professional levels while shafting most of the participants. They aren't paid, and they don't really get an education (everyone knows the idea of a student-athlete is largely a farce). An exceedingly small number of college athletes go on to make big money in the pros.
A good read: http://www.john-martens.com/universities/college_sports_intro.html
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Shady Dude: "Hey man, want some Lisp?"
From TFA:
One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts...
..liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later--by the way, in two years rather than four.
Disagree. Engineering classes also allow people to communicate and explore new ideas, the subject matter is simply more practical and concrete (i.e. the correct answer is more narrowly defined). Also, many quality engineering programs have liberal-education requirements for this reason. People pay a lot of money for college, and forcing them to take non-practical classes won't solve any problems, it will just further burden them with debt when they go back to "engineering school", or whatever the author is suggesting.
...you even suggest that graduates should work at Old Navy for a year and ruminate on their lives.
In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? ... There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do.
ARE YOU SERIOUS!? I quit reading the article at this point. I worked my ass off in shitty IT jobs over the last 7 years, double majored in 5 years, and this guy want me to go fold shirts or flip burgers?! I didn't expect (and don't have) a fat salary, but I do well enough to be comfortably middle-class at age 24, doing work that I somewhat enjoy. Also, there is a "rush", its called interest on my student loans.
I agree that there is a lot of stuff wrong with American Universities. Rich kids have an inherent advantage because they don't have to work during college. They socialize in Greek organizations, making connections to their future rich buddies, while lower and middle class kids like me bust our asses.
It would have to be professional climate scientists. According to all their press releases, and 50% of the slashdot commentators, they are pure as the driven snow, simply the best of the best, impeccable in ethics, morals and possessed of keen minds tempered with the most intellectually unbiased and neutral stance in all of science-dom.
Really, they say so, so it must be true.
> "It really lays out the farce of university culture and reminds me of everything
> I absolutely despised about my college life."
No pussy?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Personally I don't see anything wrong with the system. If you want an expensive certificate to get you in with the good ol' boys go to harvard or yale, if you want a good education at a good price, go to your local state college, and if you want something in-between it is there as well. Not any different than buying a cable. Its the expectation that everyone needs to go to Yale or Harvard, that's the problem.
I know Theater isn't the only Liberal arts majors, it was an example. Here is a list of LA majors from where I went to school. Yes there are some that are in there that may be useful. First off, anything "* Studies" is BS. What in the hell are you going to do with a MAJOR (not classes) but an entire major in African-American, Jewish, American, Asian, Classical, Women's Studies?
I read both essays. I really still don't get it. The first one reads like a LA major swinging a bat blindly at "ignorant rants".
"A liberal education should transform the student. As Brand Blanshard says, "to educate human mind is not merely to add something to it. It is to transform it at a vital point, the point where its secret ends reside." - Ok... so what is it transformed into? You're now able to quote Plato and write long essays that make you sound pompous, how is that going to help you when you ask if I want fries with that?
"A liberally educated individual thinks critically, writes clearly, and speaks effectively whether considering mathematical problem, a scientific theory, a political argument, or a musical composition."
Which goes back to my statement that I don't think LA should go away. Liberal arts are great for that. Engineers should be forced to take LA classes. Someone should NOT spend 4 years of their life in "Women's Studies" to enter the world in debt and no more a use to society than before.
As Bad Santa said, "Wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which fills up first." You sit around and think of enlightenment, I'll be a productive member of society. Lets see who gets hired first.
Once again.
Liberal Arts = Great for a society. Great for individuals.
Liberals Arts Majors = Not worth $50k.
Football (and athletics in general) are not causing tuition to skyrocket. As much as I wish it were so, the numbers just don't add up. For example, tuition has also skyrocketed at schools (like mine) that don't even have football teams.
I think the cause is even simpler. The problem is, no one wants to talk about it because there is no easy, feel-good solution.
Thesis: The raise in tuition rates over the last 40 years or so is largely due to the easy availability of *cheap student loans.*
I don't think this should be particularly controversial: It is a logical outcome completely consistent with classical supply/demand economics.
Let's say the government prints money and starts giving it away. Everyone is richer, right? Wrong, of course -- that money is now worth less, so prices all go up. That's inflation. This is the same scenario, except that the money can only be used for one specific purpose: education. It should logically follow that the price of that education will simply go up correspondingly.
I'm not going to propose any solutions, because I don't want to start some stupid partisan flamewar. I just want to suggest that the widely perceived *solution* to high education costs is actually the *driver* of those costs.
- AJ
EDIT: Just found this:
"The simple economics of student loan crises"
http://dmarron.com/2009/09/15/the-simple-economics-of-student-loan-crises/
No, we're talking about how you'd manage the 12 person Engineering firm you'd end up in after a few years. You get a sharp grunt to do the brutal calculations day in day out, and you get to deal with explaining to the town selectmen why they can't skimp on costs. But that requires rounding, and if you start calling them "bullshit", you win the math and lose the war.
We see that with our grads all the time. We get tons of hoop jumpers. They just want to jump through whatever hoops you like to get a degree. They are not going on with a masters because they want to do research or anything but because they think the paper will get them a better job and make up for their complete lack of problem solving skills. They are not at all interested in actual learning (as demonstrated by the fact that they never listen to what we tell them with regards to making their life easier) they just want to have a piece of paper.
HOWEVER, that perception does come from the excellence of American universities. They are not without problems, but they are still the best in the world over all.
Although i think employers look at a degree as an ability to learn rather than the ability to do X.
You could say that, but I say they are searching in the wrong places.
If I had to choose between a mechanic who has worked on cars for 8 years or a mechanic who just got out of 8 years of schooling - I am going to pick the one I know can do it.
If you exclude people based on educational institutes and not education period - you deserve what you get. You only help the political and broken system stay exactly in place.
Your criteria in a job search should be "Can they do the job" - something that universities were great at filtering before the advent of the internet. Almost any career can now be self taught - but at least with computers you already have the tools necessary to develop experience without working in the field or going to school. I mean with accounting, how are you going to get experience with handling corporate finances without working corporately? However you can take any ratty old desktop and set up a web server at home - all for relatively cheap.
Education is only important to things you don't like. If you are truly interested in a field you'll learn these things on your own; often better than can be taught. Otherwise you are just forcing an education due to it feeling required.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The problem with American universities is that these bitches just don't want to put out. Goddamn. You go to community college and flash a little knowledge and maybe have a beater compact car, you're gonna get laid. Try to get your stick wet at the University, might as well try safecracking with a blindfold and earmuffs.
Tenure is whats wrong with the American university system
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Something missing in the discussion is that universities simply don't fill the same role they once did. Universities were, at one time, much more oriented towards liberal arts.
But the purpose of a university then was not necessarily to help students get a job. It was to educate the students. Whether the education had any practical usage might be debatable.
Degrees in engineering and management would have had little place in the classical university environment. It's a problem of sorts: the level of the courses for a degree in engineering (for example) really doesn't fit in to the classical university program.
Yet the level of the courses removes them from the sort of thing one normally associates with a trade school, which the courses more closely resemble. Most of us attend university with the expectation we will be able to earn a living on the basis of our degree. I'm not sure our expectations always include huge sums of money to start, but we at least expect the ability to make a living at our chosen profession.
The classical liberal arts college really seems to have a limited role in our society. Unless we start out wealthy, we really can't afford to take four years of college before we focus on getting training that will pay the bills.
My wife is a university professor, and I once taught as an adjunct, so these are topics we've confronted first hand.
This list: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academics/programs/majors/
Quick list I pulled out with Regex:
Advertising (See Pubic Relations and Rhetorical Advocacy Communication)
African-American Studies
American Studies
Anthropology
Art History
Asian Studies
Athletic Training
Behavioral Neuroscience Concentration in Psychological Sciences
Classical Studies
Communication, General
Comparative Literature
Creative Writing
Criminal Justice (see Law and Society)
English
English Education
Film & Video Studies
Film & Video Studies (Film & Theatre Production concentration)
Fine Arts
French
French Education
German
German Education
Health & Kinesiology
Health & Safety Education
History
Human Relations Communication
Industrial (Consumer Product) Design
Interior (Space Planning) Design
Interpersonal Communication
Italian Studies
Japanese
Jewish Studies
Journalism (See Mass Communication)
Latin
Law and Society
Linguistics
Mass Communication
Medieval & Renaissance Studies
Movement and Sport Sciences
Organizational Communication
Personal Fitness Training
Philosophy
Photography
Physical Education - All Grades
Political Science
Professional Writing
Psychology
Public Health Promotion Concentration
Public Health Promotion
Public Relations & Rhetorical Advocacy Communication
Religious Studies
Russian
Sociology
Spanish
Spanish Education
Speech - Language - Hearing Science
Speech-Language-Hearing Concentration
Speech-Language-Hearing Science/Pre-Professional Option
Theatre
Theatre - Acting
Theatre - Design & Production
Visual Arts Education - All Grade
There are two kinds of universities: research universities and teaching universities. For example, in California, the UC's are research universities and the CSU's are teaching universities.
At the research universities the priorities are: first research, second production of new professors for both kinds of universities, and third undergraduate education. That's the way that it is officially supposed to be, even though most people don't know it. If you want better teachers, go to a teaching school.
A major factor you are ignoring is that jobs just require more education now. They are more complicated than in the past. Farming is a good example. Time was it was the sort of thing individuals did and had no formal education. Now you generally get a masters degree when operating a large farm, it is complex and involves a lot of science to do right. More people are achieving more education because it is needed.
Funny as you may be, there is so much truth in what you say for some recent graduates ... very sad.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Idiot Moron Liberal Democrats!!!! That IS the problem!!!
The idiot moron liberal democrat teachers are teaching our idiot moron liberal democrat children that it is OK to lie cheat and steal!!!!!
That our country should be given to the mexican drug lords!!!!!
That taxes should be higher and we should forego energy we can use for energy that is really not usable today!!!!
These idiot moron democrats need to be removed whereever they are encountered!!!
What no discussion of the wacky leftist socialist no-dissent-allowed environment that is poisoning upcoming generations?
Go buy one, they start out cheap, great fun! A boy and his welder opens up a lot of possibilities. I still medium suck at it, but I still plug away at it and learn new things all the time. Right now all I have is an old electric welder, but I'd like to get into the other forms as well. Mostly today I just do necessary repairs on our equipment, but eventually I want to build interesting stuff from scratch, like some time build a small (what they term "compact" sized) electric tractor, where heavy battery weight, using (relatively, as opposed to lithium type) cheap lead acid batts, would be a plus, not a detriment, in function. Either pure electric, or diesel electric hybrid, haven't made up my mind yet. Proly just pure electric, much cheaper to start out with.
By your argument U.S Universities are harder to complain about because K-12 is shite?
Students graduate with a B.S. who cannot master 8th grade math, geography or spelling, let alone logic or a second language..
"much more than configure routers" implies you cant make a really good living with a CCIE.
I have liberal arts degrees in Statistics and Computer Science. My university offers the same degrees from the College of Engineering. The difference for Stats was 4 semesters of German vs. 2 semesters of physics (ich liebe Deutsch). For Computer Science I got to freely pick my upper-level classes instead of having to be on a particular "track"; I was able to take 3 graduate-level classes instead of the 1 that College of Engineering students take. Oh yea, and I couldn't use a calculator in my math classes, so unlike the College of Engineering students, I know what eigenvalues actually are instead of simply how to compute them in MATLAB.
Funny that no one mentioned rampant cheating as a major problem at universities. While teaching at a university a few years ago, I purposely did not look. But my TA caught 6 blantant cheaters out of 100 students in my class. The senior profs and administrators made it clear to me that there was no reason for me to pursue the case because (a) it would be difficult and there was no reward for me or the department in it whatsoever, and (b) even if a letter of reprimand was placed in a student's file, it would be expunged after only 2 years.
The degree is chock full of courses in dead literature and useless philosophy.
Have you looked at the degree requirements for liberal arts schools recently? This simply is not true.
most employment...
...has been shipped to China.
Thanks for playing, USA.
Your decline won't end in a nice environmentally sustainable hippydom either.
Do you mean the factory jobs in China where people find it more beneficial to commit suicide than earn the wages? I don't think I'll miss them.
Or do you mean the jobs in China where people pull apart old motherboards and burn the pieces in the open air to extract the precious metal? I guess you need those jobs for environment.
Some of those look like important fields. An enumeration of an idea can never be complete as the idea reflects infinity. Even this enumeration, which is a list of subjects, does not contain the essential idea of what Liberal Arts is or is not. I would be hard pressed to argue against training people in the methods of Advertising, or K-12 Education. Perhaps there is a flaw in the premise that Liberal Arts is bad? Though perhaps the world would be a better place with no religion and no Lawyers.
Software design is a trade. One would be better served with a one-year program at a tech school (if any were competent) than having to study art history or whatever for a bachelors degree. You don't need (or even want) to be well rounded for a pure programming position. But education of some kind helps. College/university is just the wrong solution for the tech fields, unless you are planning on retiring to management after being a tech.
Learn to love Alaska
My daughter yesterday received her Masters Degree from the Auckland University of Technology (NZ). Guest speaker at the event was eminent New Zealand scientist Dr Ray Avery. One of those brilliant scientists who actually did some great things and provided for underprivileged around the world.
He also has a lot of experience teaching at some of the best known schools. The one thing he underlined in his speech yesterday was the fact that New Zealand students have a big advantage to the most of the places he visited in being taught by educators who not only are of the highest professional calibre but people who, almost across the board, have retained the most important attribute of any educator at any level - their humanism.
Now, if indeed there is something wrong with the high education system in the USA, I'd suggest this would be the starting point in fixing it.
You know, before I went to university, I thought the exact same thing. What's in it for me? I'm a smart guy, have a high IQ, know a lot. I'm generally smarter than many people who've graduated university. So why do employers insist on a post-secondary degree or diploma to hire for certain positions?
Then I went to university. Shortly after I got in, my world view got blown the fuck up. There are a lot of important lessons that I've learned in university.
Humility, respect, and perspective were the first to come. Most of us here were probably at the top of our graduating classes in high school in practically every subject. But once you get into a good university that requires you to take different courses (mine requires at least one full year course or equivalent in each of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Sciences), while you may excel in your own particular field of study, you'll also start to realize that people in other fields of study are equally impressive in their reasoning and knowledge. You'll also start to realize that your interests and expertise do not encompass the world, and that the world is a lot bigger than we tend to give it credit for. People are more intellectually diverse, and that diversity does not mean that they are intellectually inferior. You gain a lot of perspective.
Your social skills will also improve if you choose to engage in campus social life. Once you get past high school and into university, it seems like most people just press a social reset button. Gone are candies and nerds and other cliques, everyone's just a student. You'll quickly learn the benefits of networking, especially with those people with interests outside of your own, both as a social support mechanism as well as for professional purposes. If you're in the sciences, you'll often find yourself having to work with other people and improving your co-operation and leadership skills, two skills that are key to your professional success.
Individual work ethics and research skills will also be developed. You learn that there's a lot more to research than Wikipedia (your ass will swiftly be kicked if you try to use it as anything other than a quick overview/starting point). Your post-secondary institution will grant you unlimited access to many research portals, where you can find papers on practically any field of human knowledge. If you do well in university, your employer will know that you've had experience doing a lot of individual research and with strict deadlines approaching. Having good time management skills, self-control, and generally good work ethics are also key to being a good employee.
Then there's the actual knowledge. I can't personally speak to computer programming/science/engineering, but I do have a friend who graduated with a BSc in Software Engineering. He's told me over the years that he's really learned a lot about programming and software engineering from the school. Software engineering in particular requires you to be open minded and have different perspectives on possible solutions. He learned how to look at the problem from different angles, and different ways to attack similar problems. From my own view, there can really be no replacement for the knowledge I've gained in the past few years at this school. In fact, if I never attended this school, I wouldn't even have known that I was interested in what I'm doing right now, philosophy.
That's only a few of the many things that I can easily put into words about my experience in university. I've experienced and learned so much more, but I wouldn't have the time, nor the words in many instances, to write about them here. The catch is that you have to be willing to learn. You have to open your mind and look at university as a whole life learning experience. I know many people who just come to school in order to get that piece of paper that will get them a better chance at a job. Some of those people end up realizing the social and educational potential of the university experience at-large, but most of them learn n
I went to what was supposed to be the best IT program in the state. Unlike many students I went to college to be challenged and learn. I quickly found that the experience I got working during high school vastly exceeded many of my professors, most of whom could not find jobs in IT and had settled down to teaching. There were students in the major that despite being found guilty of cheating 3 times by the academic review board still graduated to keep the precious minority graduation rate. I found a deparment head who actually said it was not the place of a student to critque or raise concerns about a teacher.
In the end I got a piece of paper. And to be honest, the one stating I am a certified firefighter is worth more both personally and professionaly to me, even in IT.
College is for those that aren't ready for the real world. Those of us that are get stuck dealing with those that never were and became professors.
I have A Liberal Arts Degree, I make more than 50K. Perhaps the issue is based more in a lack of understanding of what Liberal Arts is. If you are blind I can explain what the color blue is until time ends, but you will never understand. In this case, I think Liberal Arts is your "Blue"
A lot of the liberal arts classes that you dismiss as snobbery and fluff are geared at enhancing context (know history so you don't repeat it) and communication (get your point across effectively). They're also often kind of fun and very different kind of work -- a fantastic change of pace and a welcome relief when you're loaded up on math and physics, say.
I'm 100% confident there's room for some of that in a college curriculum, in addition to practical, career-based stuff.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
If I had to choose between a mechanic who has worked on cars for 8 years or a mechanic who just got out of 8 years of schooling - I am going to pick the one I know can do it.
And if the choice is someone who's done it for 16 years or someone who had 8 years of advanced mechanical training and 8 years experience, then who would you pick? Or the guy doing it for 40 years vs the guy that was in school for 2 years and has 4 years experience, and you know those 2 years of school focused on the newer cars and tech they use, and the old guy probably didn't update his skills to OBD I let alone the current standard?
At some point, education to learn the basics and theory, plus some experience applying it will be better than experience alone. There are always individual people that will violate that, but as a rule, that's generally true.
Learn to love Alaska
PHDs usually require specialization in a topic for thesis. There's a world of difference between a person with a Master's and a PHD. People come in all personalities and ranges of ability. A PHD produces a smaller range. You would prefer to work in a team of people with Master's degrees, once you get the opportunity to try different compositions.
That's just misinformation. The well known tech companies contact people without PHDs more often than people with them. The bar is the catch-22 of general experience. List 10 years practical experience using the language de-jour on your resume on Monster (you also need to have a residence local to one of their offices) you can expect a call from the companies mentioned. All you have to do is actually know what you have been doing better than you needed to work at your current job.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I know this isn't Fark... but, uhm... THIS.
In the EU, you don't exit university and start your professional career effectively bankrupt. No other financing arrangement you will ever have in life simply writes you checks for an essentially intangible asset, granting pretty well anyone the same credit line with no regard to the value of the asset or the individual's ability to repay it -- and then as a matter of law make it impossible to ever discharge that debt if you fall flat on your face. This is a worse combination of adverse selection and moral hazard than the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
Everybody thinks they deserve to go to college. Everybody thinks that because they have a degree, they can command six figures.
Yes, but you have to put the reason why this is so in context.
Before WWII, only rich people could afford to send their children to college. They did this so their children would always have a leg up on the proletariat. If two people apply for a job, usually the one with the extra piece of paper will get it, right?
After WWII, congress passed the GI Bill to keep soldiers from getting restless. This bill made college affordable for many more people. The explosion of college costs can be pretty directly tied to the subsidization of college by the government.
This connection was made in a book I found at a thrift shop: The Screwing of the Average Man.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Here's the example of the number one thing wrong with the US higher education system: misunderstanding of the purpose of the "higher education system".
Universities are supposed to be places where people get a well-rounded education in a wide array of topics. That's why the undergraduate degrees tend to have liberal arts and science and social studies components to them. The result is supposed to be people who can look at the world and have some understanding of where we are and where we are going.
If you want a technical degree, go to a community college or trade school. You should not be looking to the Universities to provide well-trained mechanics.
The fact that tenure was listed as a fault is another sign of that same misunderstanding. Universities are also intended to further the arts through research. Tenure is a means of allowing faculty to relax a bit from having to deal with the daily grind and let them explore areas that aren't necessarily the most productive now -- but may become so. "Ok, you've shown you can produce papers and teach, now be inventive."
It's no different than Google's "free friday", or whatever company it was that gave employees work-time to do personal projects.
Again, rounding is available both through employee selection (hire people that aren't engineers, too) and ongoing education. Meanwhile we need the best possible bridges to be built to satisfy the criteria above.
a degree is not required for many fields yet from reading all the literature available one would come away not believing that. College is a very well marketed product. While there are fields which a degree is required many have no such need, as such we get degrees in soft areas, knowledge sets with little to apply to the business world.
What is wrong is far too many expect a degree to be a grant for a job. Some take it further and expect more than the job is worth to the employer. Having forgot their own self importance they developed while in school does not translate to the real world. We as a people tend to over value ourselves, our opinions, and undervalue those in others.
Throw in a lot of class envy and it becomes easier to sell the young on the need of a degree. It never ceases to amaze me how many twenty somethings are driving new BMWs (leased of course) and at the same grousing because they don't have enough money. Too many are of the instant gratification game and dismiss the time many of their peers and superiors put into their careers. It is not uncommon to have a new hire with a head full of new ideas and no patience to understand the system they work within. The best new hires I have seen are those who spent their summers as interns. The acclimate very quickly and their knowledge is put to better use and directed properly.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yep, PHP is 130 times worse than PCP.
The 'big' companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and such even lean towards PhD as a minimum bar for entry.
That's an overstatement, I'm currently in the middle of a Google hiring process and I don't even have Msc (finished all the courses but didn't have it in me to write the damn thesis).
Right on man, screw english and art! what good ever came from studying either of those subjects?
You're just one data point, obviously. I said 'lean towards' not 'absolutely must have'. I've been involved in hiring at one of those big companies, and it absolutely is a big part of the filtering process, and I suspect the same at the others. It's NOT the only decision, but a big part of it. This is a consequence of the recession causing them to: 1) fire most of their HR departments, 2) hire far fewer engineers, and thus 3) have HR running scared trying to grab only extremely likely candidates.
I guess it's good to see a few data points showing perhaps they're rethinking that strategy.
A modern liberal arts degree is a mostly worthless piece of paper. The degree is chock full of courses in dead literature and useless philosophy.
Nothing is less impressive than a supposedly-educated person who has never heard of Chaucer or Kant. OK, so you're good at your job. Do you know enough about your society and culture to participate in them as an informed adult, or are you an idiot savant?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The path thru requirements is stultifying.
Agreed, In my view very few jobs should require University.
They way it is these days Post secondary education has established itself as the gateway to a better life.
And I went to a back woods, public high school and now a state university that is, well, still relatively back woods.
We had an excellent vocational school that worked with the local high schools, so students wanting to be a mechanic or computer technician could go to vo-tech (what we called it) and get a certificate or two by graduation. Also, if you expressed interest in a particular field, you were allowed to populate your day with it. They invented Advanced Electronics III for me so I could be in the lab two periods my senior year. A girl I knew wanted to be a fashion major, so she took two or three sewing classes a day, and the same with art, some mathematics, English and other students interested in computers. It was really nice, especially since we were only graduating about 80-90 a year, so no one had to compete for room in classes. It's kind of how they made it up to us for not having AP classes (instead we took 100 level classes at the local state university).
If the qualifications aren't ACTUALLY necessary, piling on more, no matter what level of degree it's piled into, won't help at all.
It really is more a matter that HR people can't program, so they don't know what a good programmer looks like. All they know is ticking off boxes on a form, so if they get complaints about under-qualified hires, they just sprinkle in more boxes to check because that's all they know how to do.
What they don't realize is that a PhD is NOT a Bachelor's on steroids, it is a more intensive training aimed for a different final use.
Most technical fields are "living" in the sense that they are constantly dying, so that by the end of your career your knowledge is about as worthless as a sonnet. It's true the sonnet isn't worth much either, but with the Chinese doing all our work we do have a lot of time on hands.
Exactly. This isn't the only field where thats true either. There are places where the government tries to help people buy houses in similar ways. End result: house price skyrocketing (that happened pretty badly in places that started allowing people to use their retirement money to pay cashdowns on mortages. House price goes waaaay up instantly.)
Sounds like a conclusion one with a liberal arts degree would come to.
Because so many people go to college, curricula are dumbed-down to appease the masses. Universities want to be seen as paragons of learning. However, so many kids go to college for no other reason than because they feel compelled to do so, in order to prepare them for the working world. The providers are pushing knowledge for the sake of gaining knowledge, but the consumers are looking for job training. This is a big dislocation -- the majority of students do not have any interest in the core competencies of the university system, and the university system is ill-equipped to provide what much of their market demands (how many CS or IS grads come and work in your companies and have to unlearn just about everything they've learned over the previous four years?).
The notion that white-collar training should come from college should be obsolete. Reviving and expanding vocational training would have a positive effect on higher education. Take skill set programs, such as IS (not CS though), accounting, and (especially) management, just to name a few, out of the college system, and put them into a more vocation-oriented education system. You'd end up with happier students, more appropriately-focused universities, and a workforce whose younger members are more prepared to be productive.
I somewhat disagree with this. Maybe these days, finding more information about your interest is easier because of the internet. But back when I was growing up, I really liked programming, but did not find any friends sharing the same interest nor older folks that could give me direction. School made those things accessible to me.
...erm... wouldn't we expect China to be disproportionately represented, then?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Depends entirely on the reason the employers are asking for those qualifications.
If the previous level wasn't good enough for the job, then it's the fault of the universities.
If the company uses it as an easy filtering tool to get through a million resumes, and doesn't actually care about the qualifications, it's the company's fault.
If you had 100,000 resumes to get through, and eliminating all the non-PHDs brought that down to 100, you'd do it. Not because you think they have to have a PHD, but because it's a convenient filter.
First of all, I'm legally blind.
In short, it was a waste of time. Before I attended, I was told I would get plenty of hands-on experience building and repairing PCs. This was exactly why I went. As the months went on, they cut more and more hands-on activities from the schedule. While we did have a dedicated hardware class, we had to work on PCs in groups, which means you don't get to do everything yourself. At the end of the hardware course, we were supposed to assemble a PC and have it working to pass our final. Then, on the day of the final, they canceled it. We instead just sat around and answered questions as a group. I'm not joking!
We also had to do an internship to graduate. Mine consisted of sitting in a chair and resetting passwords in AD, in spite of me asking for hands-on/hardware related activities to build my skills.
Well, I did learn one thing. People in this society only give a shit about taking your money. They will tell you whatever you want to hear and promise you the world, only to slowly remove/cancel activities along the way. Many of the students were *happy* when that final was canceled, but not I. I was, in fact, looking forward to it.
Now my family is $15,000 poorer and I can't even install a RAM module into a PC. I suppose that's the benefit of an American education. But hey, I have a degree and am a certified technician now!
Would it be that fscking hard to put me in a room with broken PCs for four or five hours a day with a mentor and allow me to fix them? How many thousands of American dollars would that cost?
Really? Slashdot readers ought to call that one like it is. I'm not quite 26 and I've been working for 3 years writing production software. Plenty of companies were ready for me and every other decent programmer that graduated with me.
Maybe in *some* fields they don't want you until you're older. But I don't believe that's the case in technical fields.
These posts of mine lead to endless links about what is wrong with the current schooling system at all levels:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
But key ideas can be found at these links:
"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by
Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20060710145531/www.universitysecrets.com/table.htm
"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
"We're NOT Off to See the Wizard: REVISITING THE IDEA OF COLLEGE"
http://unconventionalideas.wordpress.com/?s=wizard
"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
And there are many more I link to in the posts, but these are starting points.
It would take years to read through all the references I link to in the three posts (and it has. :-)
AERO is one place that catalogs most of the alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ "The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
See my other post in this thread, too:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738326&cid=33090340
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And how to fix it (by me): http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"""
Let's consider some specific tough questions about Princeton related to "quality" in the "now".
* Do, say, most people who start PU PhD programs usually get professorships?
* Does the typical person with, say, a degree in linguistics get to later do research on, say, the history of words after graduation?
* Do alumni who, say, endow professorships have long and joyful lives?
* Are donations doing unique good?
* Is there room for everyone, young and old, to give what they can to the local community and the global world?
* Are ethics integrated into science and engineering?
* Are the non-university surroundings strengthened in diversity and community by the university's presence?
* Are the students socializing Friday and Saturday nights in joyful settings promoting wellness and balance?
* Are PU assets producing the highest return in terms of people well educated globally?
Princeton is a complex institution, so there can be no definitive or easy answers to each of these questions. Still, this essay suggests that, more often than it should be, the answer to all of them is "No". So, I suggest, not only is Princeton conflicted about the "future", it even misses the "now". Which means it is time for serious change in how it sees itself.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I think he means the China that consumes more energy than the United States yet uses only half the oil.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
Just to pick one from there:
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If you have a passion for a field while in your early teens, that is GREAT. I envy you. The rest of the population that does not know what they want, until much later, need to have some base education. The school system is also meant to give a foundation that all the people have, so they can communicate with each other. They have a shared body of knowledge that makes it possible to skip a lot of the things you need to cover if you are talking to someone home schooled in China.
Liberal Arts is not about Theatre, Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking. This country needs more people who can think before they do, not more doers whose educations become obsolete before the ink on their diploma is dry.
there are many good essays on exactly what Liberal Arts is, you should try reading a few of them before penning ignorant rants.
This is one of them, http://www2.fiu.edu/~hauptli/MyViewofTheNatureofALiberalArtsEducation.html
This is a page that describes the expectations of a student that has graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts (please note that I did not say Theatre or Art Appreciation, those are part of Liberal Arts, but They are not all of Liberal Arts [if you don't understand why this is so, then you should review your logic]).
http://www.evergreen.edu/about/expectations.htm
I'll think about that whilst wiping my ass with your degree.
"Liberals Arts Majors = Not worth $50k." See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html?_r=1&
"Mr. Chetty and his colleagues -- one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 -- estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That's the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn't take into account social gains, like better health and less crime."
Is kindergarten teacher a liberal arts major?
Of course, if you just give the money directly to the families, they'll probably have even better results: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"We NEED to be focusing more on vocational training. The world needs ditch diggers. The world also needs mechanics, electricians, welders."
See this knol I put together for all the reasons that is less and less true due to automation and better design: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"My opinion on that is, professors--like everybody else in the entire world--are human" :-) http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=robotic+teacher
Except robots are being introduced into teaching:
And you can also get a good free education through online content that you discuss with other online learners (for free), like through Khan Academy:
http://www.khanacademy.org/
See my other posts in this thread for why things are changing and what to do about it.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
MOD PARENT UP What a great summary of existential issues in our society and how the effect how people feel about the system.
And for what to do about such issues in the long term, see this knol I put here:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics; Four long-term heterodox alternatives"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ok then. Lets not start that flame war.
... well everyone? Maybe we should make college free for everyone like k-12? Oh wait the Right wants that to die too.
... and have too little oversight of that money. I watch money pour down the drain where I work and wish we had an external entity give some oversight to it all. But even with that oversight we would not have enough money to do what needs to done.
But then how do you mesh the 'bootstrap & personal responsibility' mentality of the Right with the 'Anyone who wants to go to college should be able to' mentality of
I half agree with your sentiments about the increase of costs at colleges (and I work at one). But I will state that the driver of *that* is the 'bootstrap & personal responsibility' mentality of the Right.
We underfund education
How much is enough? That is a classical questoin when dealing with education funding. To me it is the same as asking how much rock do you need, I dunno, how high do you want this tower? Every answer is infinity. But again, how tall do you want that tower? The real answer is taller than anywhere else in the world.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Why was the parent marked Flamebait? It's so sarcastically true. :-) Except maybe for aspects of the "collectivist" bit, depending what is meant by that (can you have a collectivist society that alienates individuals from themselves and others?).
To understand why it is true as far as the "indoctrinaton bit", see all the links I've collected here:
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
"I'm going to make some comments on student unrest, mostly focusing on how students could make positive changes to the university without being directly obstructive. So, this mostly agrees with the first half of "Communiqué from an Absent Future" and then disagrees with the second half."
Essential links from there to other lists of links:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
And essential reading that backs up some of the parent's sarcasm:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
That book suggests studying US Armed Forces anti-brainwashing manuals for GIs captured as prisoners of war, in order to resist the indoctrination of graduate school (which could be seen as collectivist in the sense of joining an elite that is collectivist for itself in a sense, even as it preys on others).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm attending one of the top universities for Computer Engineering on the West Coast. I was so excited to get accepted. Now I'm just disappointed.
All the engineering instructors are grossly incompetent and have been out of the industry for a decade or more. Many of them regularly fail 90% of the class because they test on subject matter that is completely unrelated to the lectures or text. Their student-given ratings are the lowest possible scores imaginable. The other departments, namely Math and Physics are absolutely terrible. They only thing they do right is Chemistry, and that's because one very dedicated and hard-working woman oversees the entire program and personally ensures the quality of every course taught.
The very best engineering projects from the senior students are just the stupidest, most Science Fair kind of things that are nothing but buzzwords and plagiarized ideas slapped together. ("A Wi-Fi Cloud Based Internet Social Networking Twitterer API Google") And don't get me started on cheating; it's a stereotype, but I thought having all Indian and Asian classmates would raise the level of professional behavior. Not so. Cheating is absolutely rampant at every level. Finals involve crowds of students in the bathrooms texting answers to their friends and looking up solutions in books and on their laptops.
Why am I doing this? Because I'll get the top pick from IBM, Intel, and just about every other big company out there. Their people regularly come to the college to scout talent and everybody knows somebody who got a job with the biggest names in the biz. So it's a sure thing. But the quality of the education is just terrible and it's a tremendous waste of money.
Sadly, I'm joining the ranks of people who say college is a bunch of bullshit where you learn nothing and spend a lot of money just to get a degree. I wonder if the other top-rated places like MIT or Caltech are any better...
Education is only important to things you don't like. If you are truly interested in a field you'll learn these things on your own; often better than can be taught.
Partially true. However, some topics are very hard to find sufficient materials to learn from on your own - and some of the more complicated things even the brightest people need someone to help explain it to them so that they fully understand it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
If employers keep asking for ever-increasing qualifications, isn't that an indication that universities aren't providing the right education?
Not true at all. Employers ask for ever-increasing qualifications because they want the best employee they can get for their buck. If you want to be the best company in X industry, you want the most qualified employees, which (typically) means people with more advanced degrees).
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching
It really doesn't take a leading researcher to teach undergraduate classes. They should hire people who are actually good at teaching for this job.
You certainly have a good point, but one of the most commonly encountered whinges about the university system is that more classes should be taught by tenured professors.
Of course, the same whinges usually complain about the mere existence of tenure. Seems to be some substantial cognitive dissonance invoved in the public attitude toward universities.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Strange, I just had an interview with Google. All I have is a BS in CS and only 3 years of experience. Not only that, I didn't even apply. They found me.
And HR looks down on tech schools that are more about the job and don't have stuff like a football team and lots of filler class that get in the way.
The very idea of commerce of goods requires laws protecting private property. Without private property, everything else in an economy is a farce.
If I write a book, and then choose to sell it, there is no partnership, because the only way you're getting the book is by paying me for it. You won't get what's in the book without providing me with something worth equally as much. If you don't have the common medium of exchange (usually gold), I might be willing to accept vegetables or meat.
By suggesting that everything is a partnership, and that you are as privy to the products of my labor as I am, you're basically saying that nothing I have is worth anything. You go first. Build a better mousetrap, and give it to everyone. Be the first to develop a means of cold fusion, and give it to the world. Liberalism is compassion and generosity with everyone else's resources.
what is this free country you speak of?
So we've got education and housing: Two major areas of life that are hugely subsidized by government, and in which prices have skyrocketed far past the rate of inflation. Now consider this:
Healthcare.
Again, not trying to provoke a flamewar. My only point is that simple laws of supply and demand cause fairly predictable effects, and those laws aren't going to go away just because we wish they would.
- AJ
...the program brought money and prestige to the university.
Money, perhaps but prestige? Really? People think that Texas A&M is a prestigious university because it has a good sports team? Call me boring but when looking at universities in the UK I was far more interested in their academics and could not care less about how well their sports teams were doing or even whether they had one. I can understand that the sport facilities i.e. the ability to participate in, not just watch, sports are important criteria for some but if you want to have a good sports team nearby why not just go to a university near a professional team? It would be a stupid criteria for selecting a university but at least the university wouldn't be encouraging it!
"If employers keep asking for ever-increasing qualifications, isn't that an indication that universities aren't providing the right education?
HR needs to filter out a hundred applicants per opening in this horrible depression/recession. It has nothing to do with quality of education or skills.
To be a manager at Payless you need a 4 year degree + 3-5 years experience for $12/hr! I have seen ads where manufacturers not only demand a masters in industrial engineering and +10 years experience, but their applicants must have chocolate experience all for an operator job at a factory. It is ridiculous.
I do have to agree that Computer Science does not teach any valuable skills applicable to working a call center or configuring routers but that is a whole other debate. These are why certifications are on the rise too. But every profession is doing this including accountants, teachers, salesmen, and even manufacturers. Employers have the ball right now in the bargaining power in terms of hiring so why not ask for more?
Managers want their cake and eat it too and people with an insane amount of experience and certifications are driven and you can bet they will give high performance. Why not require it if there is a recession?
http://saveie6.com/
The skills you gain are non transferable as HR does not actually think this is experience.
It only has to be done at work and verified by a reference to count as actual experience. Accounting on the other hand is a great example of learning a trade in school. Intense work but there is no way in hell I could learn that on my own. Even at work my knowledge would have been specialized for only accounts receivable or accounts payable while I learned.
Would you want me running your books at your company? Probably not but you can bet I would perform well doing accounts receivable and data entry for your CPA's out of school from what I have been taught.
http://saveie6.com/
I think he means the China that consumes more energy than the United States yet uses only half the oil.
And where do you think the energy comes from? Efficient use of oil, or burning shitloads of coal in a dirty fashion? As more people start to drive in China, they're going to ramp up their use of oil too.
The higher education in USA is the best in the world. People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
Lets just pause for a moment and think about that statement. Ask the people who have travelled from their home countries to the US to go to university whether they wanted to go to the US to get a quality higher education. Since the person is (a) in the US, (b) is going to university there and (c) has not left then a relatively large fraction might be inclined to answer that they did indeed want to go to the US to get an education...especially since they had to go through US immigration to get there.
I take it that you are a product of the system you are claiming is so good? If so there is excellent evidence that it teaches you how to be extremely ironic.
I know that's not the case for Apple, and I have a hard time believing Google would be that stupid. Maybe it's true for very senior positions, but for typical software development positions, no way.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I went to High School. Complete waste of time. Wish I had left. College? Same thing. Except it cost money too.
Should have just started living off a government paycheck once I turned 18. Would have spared me a lot of stress and worry.
Am I dumb? Nope. Gifted programs all through public school. Graduated 10th in my class. Am I lazy? I wouldn't say so, some might, but eh, they don't have as much validity to their argument as they think. If anything, it was the lazy people who didn't work that caused me to quit jobs.
Maybe I just got into the wrong work environments for me, but I couldn't even get any help from the so-called Career Assessment places. All they wanted to do was make me look up data on jobs, and when I said, no, that won't help me, it's not at all useful because I'm not in a position where I have any idea what I want, I want some real examination and assesment, they just said they couldn't help me. I complained about that, they just refused to do anything.
Really, you have no clue what job you want, or what you want in a job is just looking at webpages that tell you about them going to help? If you knew what you wanted, would you even be there? I know I wouldn't.
So yeah, college is a racket. So was that part of it.
Damn I'm ranting again. Oh well, at least I got this month's check. Thank you officials who would rather write somebody off with a handy psychiatric diagnosis instead of actually helping. Your laziness and failure to actively involved at least gives me documentation.
Still, it makes me cry inside. No joie de vivre for me, just existence.
Virtual +1. Even more specifically, look at the trend of healthcare costs in areas where government *isn't* heavily involved, such as cosmetic surgery and LASIK.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University.
Actually MOST college athletic programs do not make a penny. That particular fact is not exactly a secret. About 50 of the biggest athletic programs make a profit and a handsome one at that. The rest require funding. A successful athletic program does have a HUGE impact on alumni donations though which is where the justification for them sometimes comes. Seriously. It's astonishing to see the difference a good year or two on the playing field will have.
Disclosure - I was a division 1 college athlete in a non-revenue sport. (yes we exist on slashdot) I also have almost zero respect for the NCAA. Bunch of hypocrites they are...
While many tout globalization as good lets think about it?
I personally know many family members who made a good living doing construction who can't find work. They charged $30/hr for specializing tiling when houses were $125,000 for a 2,000 sq foot home 15 years ago. Fast forward today and immigrants come in for $10/hr for the same work and each house is now worth $325,000 and the price of food and gas has doubled!
This is a 1/3 paycut and with a double of the cost of living this turns into a 1/6th paycut. OUCH.
These same people are now applying for jobs that used to pay more. Accounts receivable clerk used to pay $20/hr 15 years ago now requires a college degree and pays $12. UPS package handler used to make $16/hr and now pays $8/hr. Cost of living doubles too. The reason why is because of globalization and immigration force everyone to grind and work more for less and get more education and pray for a job.
My small examples are just from what illegal immigration has done in Southern California. Now lets talk about white collar jobs. Cost of living doubles and I.T. professionals salaries are still cut in half from 2000. Globalization is forcing many to go to college because there is no work left. Work that is left here has the wages cut in half from what it once was. The wealthy are the ones who are making out like barons and causing the problem. Deflation is going to be a serious problem and even with interest rates near 0 inflation is still not kicking in.
If unemployment is high then employers simply demand a degree as many who are out of work are happy just to have a job and this is true with a degree or not. It is a very bad time to be a graduate indeed. If protectionism is put back in you can bet the wages would go back up and people would find work again very very fast. I know I may sound extremist here but its simple supply and demand. People just can't compete and live the same lifestyle.
http://saveie6.com/
Yep. Interesting article, very interesting. Unfortunately, as I can see, by making it the all-encompassing round-up, the author also somewhat disqualified. Which is very sad, since what was brought up about publication, sponsoring, fairness, are all topics that need urgent attention. The tertiary education system is broken.
But in the end, I lost the earlier interest to buy, or even read, the book. As someone who is in a similar position (teaching in a university), I can only laugh about sentences like "I say, 'I make them good.' Every student is capable of college."
Just think of the implied logic: A person who has been failed by parents, or society or school, whatever, in his/her first 20 years, and joins university at the age of around 20, barely able to do basic arithmetics, no chance to express herself in a consistent stream of thoughts, or subsequent sentences in writing. And then someone comes waltzing along, reversing all damage done in a course at a tertiary institution. Maybe in a single course, in a single semester. My only reaction could be, to doubt the second coming.
No community college or trade school will provide the top level of technical education that MIT provides, and it's important that technically oriented colleges exist. When I was there, the humanities department was mostly a (sometimes disgusting) left-wing indoctination camp. History wasn't taught, except military history (meant for the ROTC).
A "well rounded education" is something that should be complete by the end of high school. There's too much knowledge available for any but the supergenius to try to be an accomplished generalist. Universities should train towards excellence in a specialty.
About a quarter of my time at MIT was wasted fulfilling bullshit requirements for my bachelor degrees. In the time wasted, I could have achieved the learning equivalent of a masters degree or more. There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many hours in a life, and using them to pump up an English teacher's ego is a vice.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
These Universities are awash in cash spending like crazy and still charging an arm and a leg for attending. Have you seen some of the figures for how much money large Universities have stashed in various different endowment funds. Some of the figures I read from wikipedia are that most large Universities have endowments in the billions of dollars. Some of which draw huge interest yet only a very small part of them are used for scholarships each year. I smell a rat. Not sure which breed yet but a rat none the less.
Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "Can I get you a beer?" Descartes replies, "I think not!" and suddenly vanishes.
You don't come out bankrupt in the US either. There are a lot of perfectly respectable schools that are also affordable. And that is, after all, the point of the book being reviewed. I went to an inexpensive undergraduate university. In graduate school (paid for by the granting institutions funding my research) I competed with students from many good - albeit expensive - universities. They were certainly smart, but I don't think they were any better prepared than I was. After grad school I was a postdoc in labs with PhDs granted from the Ivy League. Again, smart but not better prepared.
46 & 2
Universities are supposed to be places where people get a well-rounded education in a wide array of topics.
Fine in theory, disastrous in practice. American kids study too few subjects at 14 - 6 vs. 10 in (say) the UK - and too many subjects at 16 - still 6 vs. 3 in the UK. They then screw around for 4+ years at college trying to make their minds up what they want to major in.
Even in the renaissance you only needed so many "renaissance men" - and I've never met an American grad who could be called one.
As an employer I found American first degrees worthless - except for vocational, business degrees in back office hires. Secondary degrees at least evidence some kind of focus and commitment: unfortunately they usually come with a big slice of entitlement.
Where possible I prefer H1Bs with numerate degrees who know what they want to be when they grow up. Sorry locals.
Indeed, but they are also ahead of the United States in generating alternate energy jobs and expanding its role in the power sector.
As of 2007, they were already ahead of the United States in the fraction of renewable energy in their portfolio (7.5% vs. 5.5%, about a 36% lead). Plus, it's China that has mountains of free cash to burn on research and subsidy in this regard, not America.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
I much prefer an MIT OpenCourseware class (free) on my own time than going and paying a university to sit in a class (or wasting 4 years of your life for a piece of paper for that matter). The US educational system has tried to pass off the idea that you haven't learned anything and can't make it in the professional world without anything less than a bachelors degree, negating the idea that one can learn on their own. THAT is the scam.
So I need to spend 4 years and $20k-80k on a degree to be an independent, well rounded thinker? Bullshit.
So long as the liberal arts fail to adapt to the scientific world-view, including accepting the importance of mathematical reasoning alongside poetry etc
And what liberal arts college encourages students to reject the scientific world view, might I ask?
You (and I suspect others) are confusing liberal arts majors with liberal arts colleges. The article didn't advocate going to a university and majoring in something liberal arts. They're advocating going to a liberal arts college.
Beetle B.
I am a computer science PhD at an ivy school. last year almost half of the faculty in our department were on sabbatical. and the other half, ..., no one knows what they were doing. I do not really care much about that.
Like most students, I do research on my own anyway.
It is well known that faculty don't spend time for research or for teaching after they get tenure. They become managers. Their job
description is to look busy.
From TFA - "The second way to look at it is that liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later—by the way, in two years rather than four. "
Okay, so this guy clearly doesn't understand what goes into an engineering degree in even a superficial way. Vocational? There's every bit as much theory in an engineering degree as there is in a science degree, it's just focused in different areas. I really can't stand people who are experienced in one area and then decide somewhere in their fat head that whatever they do is harder or more fundamental than another discipline. It's not any different from engineering students who rag on liberal arts majors for their light course loads. Everything at university takes work, and any degree you take will teach you to think. Trying to downplay that experience is very foolish.
And that's my two cents of engineering physics student rage.
at an Ivy League, and I love learning. When I went to take a premed track, my advisor asked me why I wanted to study Organic Chemistry; I told him I was interested in chemistry (comp sci degree). He told me point black not to take the courses as they would decrease my GPA and that he wouldn't sign the slip (reviewing/approving my courseload, which was anywhere between 16-18 credit hours per semester). I switched to another advisor who asked the same thing, I gave him the same answer, cut off his same reply, and told him I was going to take that course whether they liked it or not. He signed my slip and did so (without looking) for the remaining times that were required.
The truth is, the parents aren't at home making sure there kids are learning, society doesn't reward knowledge or creativity, it values entertainment and shallow group think, the kids themselves don't know any better, and by the time they get a clue, its too late to catch up to the kids who were reading all those years, the teachers (when they are qualified!) can't fix the problems with years of neglect (on the part of students, teachers, parents) and administrators keep dumping the good teachers and replacing them with the latest crop of young, inexperienced teachers whose only "qualifications" for teaching are a completely useless "education" degree. Did I mention the continuous decline in the actual material taught (grade inflation, dumbing down of anything controversial, removal of the basics)? I still remember when they "re-adjusted" the SAT's about 4 years after I left and inflated the average by a 100 points.
Lord, I've been fighting to get away from schooling in this country almost all my life. I would have much rather had the expense spent "educating" me given in the form of books, space, and some rudiementary supplies....
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think it's more of an aggravating factor than a cose. Actually I think the rise in tuition is due to the idea we're increasingly adopting that everybody must go to college. I remember my barber telling a story--this would have been about 10 years ago now--about his daughter interviewing for some positions and being shocked that even secretarial positions were beginning to require bachelor's degrees. (If I remember right she did have one, so the shock wasn't indignation as much as WTF?) They're even trying to convince people that being a mechanic is something you're going to need to go to a two-year school for.
Demand skyrocketed, but the supply is roughly the same -- meaning prices will also jump. But it also means capital expenditures (new dorms, new classroom buildings, new facilities, possibly land, etc) as well as hiring extra faculty and everything else that goes along with a larger student body, all of which are going to be reflected in prices as well.
Now, you're not entirely wrong. Ordinarily schools would have to weigh the supply/demand curve for their price increases. IE, does the extra money they're going to make per student offset the amount they'll lose from students who can no longer afford their school? With essentially unlimited student loans at low interest rates, combined with the societal pressure to attend, it becomes essentially a non-factor. Very few people anywhere will go "well $40,000 in debt for a four-year was okay but $50,000 -- fuck it, I'm not going to school." And there's somebody out there who will give them the money.
Combine the two and, well, why wouldn't tuition continue to skyrocket?
If I read your post correctly, I am an idiot savant because I haven't heard of Chaucer. That's great trivia but it will hardly keep somebody from participating in society as an informed adult. If you learned anything in college, it was how to come across as an elitist douche. Or, in the words of Chaucer, "The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people."
Those are classic criticisms of the American higher educational system. Yet the rest of the world is mostly worse.
Japan has the "prestigious university name" thing far worse than the US does. The University of Tokyo was the "magic key to opening the door to a powerful elite" for decades. There are now other schools approaching it in prestige, but not many. France has a very centralized educational system, with the Ecole Polytechnique at the top. Both systems are very examination-oriented. Germany has worse tenure problems than the US. Russia and China emphasized technical education after their revolutions, and they develop good engineers and scientists.
Higher education in the Islamic world is hopeless, even where there's money available. 91% of PhDs produced in Saudi Arabia are in "religious studies". The country has to import skilled labor to do almost everything that takes real-world knowledge.
What liberal arts degree doesn't include a bunch of science classes? That's why it's called liberal arts. You sound like you're talking about a degree in literature - or perhaps you don't know what you're talking about at all.
Not all liberal arts colleges are the same. I went to Harvey Mudd College which bills itself as the liberal arts college of science and engineering. I can still recite a lot of Chaucer and Shakespeare. By the same token, HMC was listed in Money Magazine as having the most financially valuable Bachelors degree in America. See: http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/22/pf/college/highest_paying_college_majors/index.htm?hpt=T2 Studying humanities as well as engineering allowed me to relate better to human events and command a knowledge of history and mathematics that I have found isn't shared with other engineers I know. Despite having only a bachelors degree, I now do research work in image processing which is on the verge of being commercially licensed. I didn't even study image processing in college: I taught myself.
It often takes an understanding of a subject before you learn to appreciate it. For example, I appreciate control systems (as a mechanical engineering undergrad), but it took two classes to understand enough of it to know that. Many engineers I talk to say they got into their field after taking a class or two on the subject and it growing on them. Saying education is only important for things you don't like is not exactly true (though I can agree self-exploration is most important once education has run its course).
My webcomic
If there was a +6, I'd have given you a +1.
Why don't you go to China or India and study there?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Yea but at least if someone at google used their "free friday" to get hammered and defecate all over their desk, they could still get fired.
Tenured professors who do an unconscionably terrible job of teaching (and there are plenty out there), can't get fired. In fact, the worst punishment a college can inflict on tenured profs would be *not* matching a salary increase offered by a rivaling school that is trying to hire a professor away. They might even slap you with social ostracism. But no matter what anyone says or does, at the end of the day, you're still making bank until you retire.
Being a tenured professor at Stanford, CAL, USC, UC Davis or Irvine = heaven on earth. Getting there...that's hell.
I stopped reading after he suggested everybody gets a liberal arts degree, then get an engineering degree 'on the job'.
He must live in some liberal arts fairy land.
No, it's an indication that corporations are lazy and incapable of evaluating prospective employees, and it's easier to come up with an arbitrary filter so you can throw 90% of the applications in the bin and spend the rest of the day in a meeting or on the golf course.
No, Liberal Arts is about thinking the way pre-scientific people did it.
It's worth noting here that mathematics, for example, is pre-scientific thinking. Pure mathematics in particular doesn't involve the scientific method in its processes. The mental processes behind economic trade, for the most part, are not scientific. That is, one makes impromptu assumptions and gambles about value and risk that aren't scientifically justified.
The point here is that there is a great deal of rational human thought outside of the realm of science. Some, particularly mathematics, are of such fundamental value that they are deeply incorporated into the processes of science. Others, such as markets, are rival truth-seeking methods that can be more effective than the scientific method for certain realms of human activity (eg, how much is gasoline today?).
IMHO the intellectual division mentioned above isn't really what Snow makes it out to be. There are similar divisions in most scientific fields (for example, between theorists and experimentalists in virtually every scientific field) and the liberal arts fields (for example, "doers" and "critics"). I believe it is a reflection of the fundamental knowledge restriction of intelligence, namely, that one cannot know everything that an intelligence of equivalent capability can know. Even if you take an intelligence which optimally uses all the resources of the universe efficiently for its perfectly rational (whatever that means) thought processes, it still doesn't know what it could know. Couple with this, humanity's difficulties of communicating knowledge (which probably isn't a natural restriction of intelligence) and you have the example of intellectual balkanization which Snow notes.
So Obama might achieve something in 30-40 years? Shit.
I find that other countries seem to understand that learning math, science, engineering, are important. Being able to produce/create something is the way to sustain one's self.
One cannot expect to make their income by feeding off of others (US lawyers) or exploiting others (US healthcare).
At least healthcare suffers from largely inelastic demand - I'm not going to put off that operation until the government comes in and helps me the same way I would for a house or school loan.
I wouldn't even say supply is all that limited in practice. There's schools all over, you can go in another country, and overall, I'm pretty sure that there's room for nearly everyone who wants to go college (and have time), or close.
Its a lot worse, and you pointed it out: Its a culture of "everyone MUST have a bachelor, or else!", which gives an health-care-like situation. People end up feeling their lives depend on it, and as you said, the loans are there, and you have to take the decision (usually) at an age where you're not mature enough to understand the ramifications of being 10+ years into debt.
This all means, regardless of supplies, schools basically can charge anything. And they do. The only factor keeping things a little now is the maximum amount of loans one can get (its not quite unlimited) and competitions (at which point people go "screw it, I'm going to state school, harvard isn't worth it, patent lawyers make money anyway")
I would say so. What this also means is the companies genuinely want people with experience. I've landed on multiple teams at Microsoft without a degree. I only make about 90k. I offer value at a reasonable price, and it's amazing how well the market sorts things out for you. Universities should learn the same lesson.
They should hire people who are actually good at teaching for this job.
...if only it were that simple. I'm a year away from finishing my Ph.D. at a major research university. My motivation has always been to teach at the college level. I just do not find high school material interesting. Give me some undergrad-level cryptography, OS, theory of computing...that's fun material. Sadly, here's what I've learned from my years in grad school:
Great research + mediocre teaching = tenure
Mediocre research + great teaching = fired
(Technically, you're not fired...just denied tenure. However, when you're hired, you're given a 7-year contract that is only extended by tenure. Otherwise, when your 7 years is up, so is your job.)
At a university, research is everything. The rule of thumb that I've been told is that the time spent preparing to teach should be the same as the time spent actually teaching. So if you teach a 3-credit hour class (2 days a week, 75 minutes each class), that means you should spend 2.5 hours per week preparing your lecture. Anything more than that, and you're taking away from your research.
The reason for so much emphasis on research is money. At a research university, you are expected to bring in money in the form of research grants. How do you get a grant? By demonstrating that you have a history of successful research (i.e., a large number of publications). So it's not only tenured professors that are obsessed with publishing, it's the entire faculty. And it's because that is the single biggest factor in keeping your job.
The emphasis on bringing in external grant funding is getting even stronger, because the amount of money that universities are receiving from the state and federal governments has been plummeting in recent years (20-30). Part of that is the "fiscal conservatives" obsession with tax cuts, rather than having an actual balanced budget. By cutting taxes and government revenues, you are cutting university operating costs. At the same time, there has been a philosophical shift in the populace. Years ago, people were more likely to support public funding for schools, because the perception was that college students would ultimately go on to benefit society. So society helped the students out by contributing to the cost of education. Now, the perception is that people go to college are doing so for the selfish benefit of a better job. As a result, people feel less inclined to help pay for others' education. I'm not passing judgment on these views, just stating them as reasons that the budget has shifted.
The decreased government support also means that universities have to pass more of the cost on to students. That's why tuition has been rising at double the cost of inflation. To make matters worse, states like CA kept their tuition artificially low for years. That's why there was a huge increase last year (something like 30%, if I remember correctly).
Given all of these money issues, you can now see why there are so many crappy teachers at research universities. In an ideal world, these universities would hire a teaching faculty and a research faculty. But that's just not feasible financially. If hiring committees have to pick, they'll always favor the candidate with the stronger research background.
Not true. The average U.S. high school graduation rate is only 69% (Source: HigherEdInfo.org). It's as low as 50% in some states. Maybe you're distinguishing between those kids that schools "let" graduate and those students that choose not to graduate. But either way, not everybody has a high school diploma.
Here's the example of the number one thing wrong with the US higher education system: misunderstanding of the purpose of the "higher education system".
Universities are supposed to be places where people get a well-rounded education in a wide array of topics. That's why the undergraduate degrees tend to have liberal arts and science and social studies components to them. The result is supposed to be people who can look at the world and have some understanding of where we are and where we are going.
"Supposed to be"? Who's writing the rules here? If I want as a student to use my university education for vocational purposes, which I might add universities can be pretty good at, then why shouldn't I? To me, there are warning signs here. When any institution (not just academia, they're just a bit more grotesque in delivery than most) can dole out its products as intangible benefits, then it becomes a lot less accountable and that in the process somehow becomes a lot less valuable. My view is that there's a growing number of "well-rounded" college graduates who aren't and who in addition have poorly marketable skills in the employment market.
In my view, a "well-rounded" education has to include a substantial vocational component. That is after all by far the most important part of the "wide array of topics" that a student will be taught in an education, liberal arts or otherwise.
The fact that tenure was listed as a fault is another sign of that same misunderstanding. Universities are also intended to further the arts through research. Tenure is a means of allowing faculty to relax a bit from having to deal with the daily grind and let them explore areas that aren't necessarily the most productive now -- but may become so. "Ok, you've shown you can produce papers and teach, now be inventive."
I see we have another "misunderstanding". Having had an opportunity to view how life-long tenure works or as is actually the case, doesn't work, I'd have to say that there isn't a misunderstanding here. Tenured for life professors naturally would disagree, but they have a blatant and huge conflict of interest. The problems don't necessarily manifest at the undergraduate level (at some universities you can see tenured professors in the classroom, but in many places, they're kept away from contact with undergrads until upper level classes where the workload is more manageable for the graders, meaning a better experience for the undergrad). However, once you get to the graduate level, especially in departments where most graduates are expected to go into academia, then you start seeing the real problems of tenure. Namely, there's a lot of people trying to get a small number of tenured positions. So we have a situation where the new professor has to work extremely hard just to get a chance at tenure (and a number of them simply don't get the opportunity, they often become the lecturers who deal with the mundane course offerings for non-major undergrads), then they can coast afterward. It's like winning the lottery rather than having a real job.
In my view, a better approach is a fixed duration tenure. That is, you have the job guaranteed for X years not forever. A period of three to seven years seems reasonable to me. If you want longer periods or sabbaticals, then save your money and fund yourself. There might be reason for a university to fund really outstanding scholars in perpetuity, but the vast portion of scholars even at top tier research universities generally don't deserve it.
This is a thought provoking article. Compliments to the authors for writing the
book and engaging in this discussion, but it must be recognized that the topics addressed here are only a small piece of a very large puzzle. There are many things that are "wrong" with higher education in this country, but they cannot be viewed in isolation from the other components that drive the dynamics of this our society. I am a professor in an engineering department at one of the Golden Dozen/Ivy League institutions that is repeatedly mentioned by name in the article. I am not a native of the United States though, and all my schooling through secondary school was in the British system, so we had 'O' and 'A' level exams and the whole bit that some folks here may be familiar with. I came to the US as an undergraduate student and stayed for graduate work before doing post-doctoral research and starting as an assistant professor in my current position. All of my education/training in the US was at institutions that again are repeatedly mentioned in this article. That said, given my background, I think I can comment somewhat objectively on the issues at hand.
LIBERAL ARTS/LIBERALISM
I believe that Hacker and Dreifus are very much on point in the value that they place on the "liberal arts" education of college students. I could perhaps rephrase that to say that the value to society and the student in the long run is in liberal education, *broadly defined*. The gap between American high school students and many of their foreign counterparts in capability in subjects such as mathematics and physics (and many others) is simply glaring. Yet, somehow, as if by magic, when one compares the products of American institutions at the MS and PhD level especially, but also too at the BS/BA, that gap has narrowed tremendously or even disappeared altogether. More importantly, in the "things that matter", in the creation of new knowledge and capabilities as a society, few places can compete with the US for its dynamism. All of this is a reflection I believe of the creativity of US students/society. I believe that US education eschews rote learning in favor of open ended learning. This was certainly more the case 50 years ago than it is today with the excessive focus on things like SATs, achievement exams in high school, No Child Left Behind etc., but certainly by comparison with many other countries, particularly "Old World" nations, it is undeniable.
GETTING THINGS DONE
While liberal/more open ended education is great, the benefit to society must be balanced against the need to just get things done. If you want a bridge built, or a circuit board designed, or accounts balanced, on the basis of existing and well established knowledge, you need vocational training to prepare 'workers', dare I use that word, to accomplish those tasks. Companies like Caterpillar and Goodyear don't go looking to MIT and Stanford for the bulk of their BS level engineers when they go hiring, and for good reason. The liberal education of a workforce or society (or military) is in general a luxury, but I would argue that it is a luxury that this country can afford, one that would serve it well on the societal level (awareness, enlightenment...they improve the human condition), and one that would also serve its interests economically, given how much of the US economy is based on 'cutting edge' activity, as opposed to simply pumping out large volumes of low value goods. In some areas, though, the rapid entry of vocationally trained individuals into the workforce is required (think nursing, for example), and there the society must act in its interest, for example, by making such training available without a liberal education prerequisite. I would argue (and many foreign educated people tend to agree) that already the US system places a very heavy emphasis on liberal education, even within the confines of a 4 year engineering degree, and to me that's perfectly fine and acceptable. I would argue, as many have and as I think the authors support, for the broa
I see no evidence that you're a teacher, nor that you have any idea what is being taught in schools. Do you have any first-hand information? I have a teaching certificate, master's degree, and I left the field recently enough that I can tell you what gets taught currently.
Acceptance of other cultures is included, mostly because we are the melting pot and we will run into other cultures, even if we don't leave our hometown. even the most closed-off cities somehow seem to have a chinese restaurant with real chinese imports working there. Fostering their fragile egos is something many teachers minimize, because they realize that the sub-population with the highest level of self-worth and self-acceptance is prison inmates. Lots of schools minimize winning, but even in that culture there are contests on a lower scale and the concept of winner or loser is not lost on these kids. It's just in an uncontrolled context rather than something the school can control and try to recognize every participant. It's actually a harsher lesson than it would be if we held contests to teach kids about losing. So they still learn real life despite administrators trying to avoid it.
I was a substitute teacher for a year, and taught at any school that wanted me, whether the kids were well-behaved or not. Many subs would cross schools off their list and never would return. So I saw a wide range of classes. You can tell a lot about the teacher from the classes, and that's coming from someone who inherited my own classes from the previous teacher. It took two months to get the 8th grade kids to do things my way, after doing things for 2 years the previous teacher's way. One day with a sub is not going to change the personality of a class much.
What I learned was there is no way to generalize. Different classes with the same teacher develop distinct personalities, and groups of students with different teachers (ones following a track for example where they all go to the first class and all move on to the next class) develop different personalities even if the individuals are the same. A bad teacher can teach a lot to a good class, a different bad teacher can accomplish nothing. A good teacher can do wonders with a good class, and can be reduced to ineffectiveness with another.
I was fortunate enough to always get into the advanced classes, except for history. I hate history because I don't remember stuff I can look up. The few history teachers who relied on connections and reasoning fought an uphill battle because I resisted it. I even dropped from an A to a C in French when we moved to the History part, that's how bad it was. I ended up in the scrub world civ class, a senior in with sophomores, taught by the football coach. It was then that I realized how many stupid people were in our school - I had never been in a class with them before. They are not taught anything, they read and memorize, and test scores are dwarfed by "were you able to retain a piece of paper I gave you and nearly filled out for you a month ago" type assignments. I was shocked. Basic information that anyone might learn by paying attention in the previous 10 grades of school, these kids had no idea. I'd blurt something out and quickly became the "Einstein" of the class. Nothing groundbreaking, just simple facts. The expectation of poorly performing students is that they are not teachable.
So there is a stratification. The good teachers get the good students, and they are the top-tier graduates, the actual "students". The mediocre teachers get the overflow good students, mediocre students, and the overflow piss-poor students. Sometimes you get lucky and crappy students get a good teacher. But mostly you fall into advanced/normal/remedial track and stay there. Lots of people have a problem with this, but it's not good to be so much smarter than everyone else in your class that you get nicknamed "einstein" (by the football coach, no less) or are so bored you do your calculus homework instead of paying attention. It
The schools within the major 6 conferences (Big East, ACC, SEC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-10) make up about 73 schools -- and a few of those in the Big East don't play football. In any case, those schools have athletic departments which break even. They make a whole bunch of money directly in football, and a little in basketball (ticket sales, licensing, TV); those two sports are also primary drivers for the alumni donations, which is the indirect money being generated. The athletic programs lose money in the rest of the sports, from baseball on down the line to women's track and field. At the end of the year, they break even -- no money ever really leaves the department. Sure, tuition, room, board, books, fees, etc come from athletics into the university to cover the costs, but the university doesn't get money transferred from the athletic program. Instead, the athletic program builds even nicer locker rooms or weight rooms or stadiums. The flip side: the athletic program doesn't get any money from the university either.
Now, the remaining schools in D1 -- their athletic programs very likely lose money, despite their football and basketball programs making a slight profit. D2 and D3 schools? Even their football and basketball teams lose money.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Education system system should ideally create employers and not employees.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Strange you should think so, since Liberal Arts education most definitely includes a number of science classes as part of the well-rounded experience.
>The sciences, at the same time, become a cozy backwater for the poetically illiterate.
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today
I guess I'll get an MBA.
the shame of being a good writer is most people are crap readers.