Slashdot Mirror
Reform the PhD System or Close It Down
jamie points out an opinion piece by Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor in Nature News decrying the state of PhD education in the US, calling it "broken and unsustainable." Quoting:
"The necessary changes are both curricular and institutional. One reason that many doctoral programmes do not adequately serve students is that they are overly specialized, with curricula fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia. Expertise, of course, is essential to the advancement of knowledge and to society. But in far too many cases, specialization has led to areas of research so narrow that they are of interest only to other people working in the same fields, subfields or sub-subfields. Many researchers struggle to talk to colleagues in the same department, and communication across departments and disciplines can be impossible. If doctoral education is to remain viable in the twenty-first century, universities must tear down the walls that separate fields, and establish programmes that nourish cross-disciplinary investigation and communication. They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population. Unfortunately, significant change is unlikely to come from faculty members, who all too often remain committed to traditional approaches."
Uhh... isn't the whole point of studying for a PhD because you want to remain in academia?
"Increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia"
The language of number theory seemed to be an exercise in the technical until hundreds of years later we end up with encryption systems based on their very principles. How you can claim prior knowledge of what will be useful in future, I do not know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This guy seems to forget that all the practical interdisciplinary research he is obsessed with is based on loads of theories in specialized sub-sub-sub-fields with no obvious practical use until then. It all looks like mental masturbation of the brain-heads up to the point where you need exactly that tiny piece of research to actually build the clean-water infrastructure for the third world (as an example).
The competition for tenure track positions is currently insane, since the professors from previous generations have trained too many PhDs. The funding agencies reward large labs under a single PI with large grants, with the labs mostly running on graduate students and post-docs who themselves see no way out. Now we are seeing career post-doctoral positions, especially in the biomedical sciences; see the recent suggestions about making a post-doctoral position more permanent. Not everyone can be a manager (PI), so we are stuck being graduate students or post-docs. I know industry is also a home for PhDs as I am one of those happy campers, but the fact is there are too many PhDs being trained relative to the number of positions available.
Lets have a system where the professor is rewarded for doing their own research, rather than their ability to write grants and farm out the work to their subjugated minions.
People don't pursue a PhD because they want to "provide water to a growing population." They can go to Mexico and dig wells to accomplish that (as some college friends of mine did). No one's delaying their release into the workplace to get a PhD so that they can make a better contribution to "the world," period.
People pursue a PhD so that they can stay in academia, where they are comfortable and proficient, and make as much money in academia as an academic can. Since academic institutions profit directly from the milling of PhD degrees, you'll get no argument from them on the topic.
He generalizes the situation in some subjects (e.g. philosophical sciences). The situation in natural sciences is different. Having a PhD in physics (and not being an idiot who does not look left or right) enables you to talk to a lot of people and understand a lot of people. And you usually get you degree in 3-5 years (after the master) and not 12. And yes, i agree with him, weed out the subjects in the PhD courses where people waste, badly supervised, their valuable lifetime and replace the PhD courses by more appropriate new topics and fields. My feeling however is that this is more a problem for the philosophical faculties than for the science faculties.
What's this about curricula? Aren't PhD studies research? Isn't every PhD student working on something slightly different, in order to get their own results and have something to write about in their thesis? I'm confused.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mark C. Taylor's PhD is in religion. What was that about providing clean water to a growing population?
One thing that might be helpful (at least from the point of view of Prof. Taylor) would be to eliminate the bullshit Ph.D.s in fields such as political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on. Seriously. I talk to these types several times a week a bar near the Arizona State University campus and it is amazing how obscure their research topics are. Indeed, I get the feeling that there are extra points awarded (in some sense) for the more bizarre and irrelevant your topic is. And you can just feel the inner sneer as they watch you try to process the title of their dissertation.
Some of these people understand that they are shouting in an echo chamber of one, and in their circle of nominal peers, that's freaking cool.
To get a tenure track position, you have to get your stuff published. To get your stuff published, you have to get past peer review. The only way to get past peer review is to convince the reviewers that you have done something worthwhile. The reviewers are all ultra-specialized and form a community. They won't agree that anything is worthwhile unless it meets their 'standards'.
The bottom line is that you're not getting a job if you don't join a narrow community and narrowly specialize.
I believe that the current inflation of PhD degrees is a direct consequence of the "everyone in university" attitude. I think that there is absolutely no point in giving a BA degree to pretty much anyone who enters university, because this produces an enormous mass of mediocre MS students, which then turn into way too many PhD candidates of dubious value. I include myself in this group, as I know full well that 20 years ago I would have not been admitted in a PhD program, let alone receive a degree. A PhD nowadays is an award to persistence, not excellence.
The inflation in titles is then carried on to the job market: more and more jobs are offered to candidates who hold a PhD, where a good MS would be more than enough. However, as a poster above noted, a PhD is basically taken as a certificate of being able to work independently (which, in may cases, is hardly true).
Treating PhD students as cheap labor is not doing a favor to anyone. I would find it much more honest intellectually to offer long-term internships for BA and MS students, instead of enrolling them to receive a higher degree which on the long run is devoided of all meaning.
This is the Age of the Internet. Overspecialization isn't the problem it used to be. With instant communication and email, a PhD student can be in regular contact with all the 10 people around the world who work in his particular sub-specialty if he wants to. So it doesn't matter very much if the local faculty don't know his specialty, although in practice at least the advisor ought to be qualified enough to supervise the work. Arguably, it's superior because it may lead to more inter-university collaborations.
Is he arguing that we should dump research in favor of a practical education? He clearly misses the point: Someone who needs someone to solve practical problems shouldn't be hiring a Ph.D.
What is needed are quality educational programs for applied sciences.
By far and away the biggest abuses are allowing PhDs autonomous control of their careers. And once given tenure, they simply take those bad decisions and put them in affect for life. We have faculty that do not teach, do not write grants, do not do research, or take on administrative appointments to act like they are busy. Some have not been on campus or in the same state for months or years at a time. All the while, they draw salary because they are tenured. Those that retire milk the system for a huge retirement bonus, then get rehired; only death will get them to leave and make room for another generation. They let students fail and retake classes, allow students to take up to a decade to earn their PhDs, even allow students to live in other states while earning their degree. The problem is "peer-review" management. They are their own bosses, they make their own decisions and once given tenure have absolutely no accountability to anyone but themselves. Fail.
www.itjerk.com
The goal should be to research something relevant, not to publish as many papers in as short a time as possible.
That's the core of the problem.
Very often, a reseach is actually broad enough to have some relevance... but in the race to maximize the publications, the research is cut up into tiny fragments which are then published.
Darwin wrote a single book that was relevant. Nowadays, that research would be distributed over at least 500 papers... making it nearly impossible to read. And you have to wait for someone to write a review after 5 more years to get any kind of summary.
Bullseye! Gosh, I loathe epsilon-papers.
I'm a computational chemistry PhD student. Most people have no idea what I do and would think it overly specialized. But we are getting to the point of being able to use computers for tuning molecules for specific medical properties. Some guy 30 years agi slaving over code to evaluate integrals so he could get the bond distance of water correct may seem to be wasting his time to asshats like this guy but it may help save your life someday. Before we could do what we're doing we had to start somewhere, even if it seemed irrelevant
The article assumes that a PhD in, say, data visualisation trains you for a career in data visualisation. That's not the point. If someone needs an expert in data visualisation, then it's your lucky day. Nevertheless, a PhD is a training in doing research. Don't look at the facts learned, look at the transferrable skills. A person trained in research has the skills to quickly dive into almost any other research topic and quickly get up to speed. Even if the PhD doesn't choose to continue in research, the transferrable skills learned (analysing literature, time management, presentation skills, writing...) ... will act in his favour when getting other jobs.
- m.
That would just mean stopping science. Performing actual research is the best way to learn a scientific subject. It's the only way, in a sense.
Academic papers provide a citable unit of research that can be built upon to create more research and to write these books you're so fond of. Despite what you may think, most researchers don't work in an attempt to maximise paper output- to the contrary, they would much rather continue researching. The academic paper is something that can be quickly and easily written to summarise units of research and get it out into the public sphere so that other researchers can build upon it rather than waiting to collate a large amount of research into a tome while someone else starts researching the same field as you and produces papers along the way.
The current focus on "relevant research" and turning university labs into money-making operations is part of the problem. While it's couched in terms of universities "Making Money" and "Doing something useful" (as the TFA appears to want), in practice, it means that university researchers pair up with private industry, doing only the things that private industry deems important (=incremental and rarely disruptive). Grant programs amplify this trend ("What are the industry applications of this research?", "Was your last research project a financial success?"). So, if the universities are paying researchers to do private-industry research, private industry has less incentive to fund its own research. As a result, we're moving from a system where we had academics engaged in fundamental research, with often disruptive results, and a thriving private industry research community, to one where a smaller pool of public-private academics do the bidding of private industry.
Too many Ph.D.s? You bet. In the name of "solving practical problems", we've moved industry research into the universities, and killed off fundamental research.
Note that "Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor", pontificating on how research has become too specialized and non-understandable to the public at large, and "must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population" is himself a Professor of Religion. FTA:
"Mark C. Taylor is chair of the department of religion at Columbia University in New York and the author of Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010). e-mail:mct22@columbia.edu"
Sort of easy to predict that, in fact. Because you know what? A person doing real, cutting-edge research, developing insights that no one else ever has before in history, is almost by definition going to be non-understandable by other people -- at least until such time as their research becomes diffused and more accepted by the mainstream. The call to "nourish cross-disciplinary investigation... focus on solving practical problems" is a thinly-disguised attack on basic scientific research. It's classic short-term thinking; if you demand profit/practical solutions right now, then the basic research that develops heretofore unimaginable solutions tomorrow will not be done.
Now, there's a lot of problems with PHD employment prospects, etc. But this is pretty damned skewed by how exceptionally non-useful this guys' graduates in philosophy and religious studies are. (I say this as someone with degrees in both philosophy and STEM.) I might suggest actual solutions would include: (a) Mandatory clear information provided to prospects about career and employment prospects, so they can make their own decisions on priorities. (b) Rollback the corporate-minded administrative takeover of higher education from faculty. (c) Return most teaching positions to being full-time tenured, instead of part-time contingent faculty as we have today, etc. The "make education practical/profitable" effort has been going on for 30 years, what we have now is the result of it, and it's time to stop digging the damn hole any deeper.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Before going to the article, I quick checked Wikipedia for "Mark C. Taylor".
First sentence:
I didn't read the article.
"That traditional approach being stuffing whatever corporate-sponsored stuff into the heads of their students."
Never been in a PhD program have you. And by the way, this is somewhat the opposite of what the article was complaining about. If new PhD students were being stuffed with Business School Product ideas, then they'd be doing relevant research, wouldn't they.
Sometimes it helps to actually think before you...well...in your case...think.
Not sure if many people here know, but one day I was searching for Martin Luther King's history and found a lot more than I wanted to know. Among these were that his name wasn't officially changed to Martin Luther and neither was his father's. Next I found that many people in the PhD programs discovered that King's PhD paper was largely plagiarized and would likely have been revoked if he weren't already dead. (Some still think it should be... I'm on the fence about it... what good would it do? None for his memory, but a lot for anyone who thinks PhDs are important and should be earned. But his PhD was in religious studies ... how seriously can anyone take THAT?)
But I think it is still somewhat relevant to the discussion as being awarded a PhD in things like religious studies? Really? Anthropology I can see. Sociology I can see. But religion? Something that literally no one can agree on? Not even *what it is"? Ridiculous.
Its not surprising that he would be saying these things since he doesn't understand science. He is a professor of religion.
His article is crying out for all university research to be the same as corporate labs with top-down agendas saying for example that "clean water" is an acceptable problem to solve. This isn't the point of university research.
The main point of university research is Freedom of Thought. Do the research you believe to be important.
Actually, a lot of what he wrote also applies to other academic programs such as bachelor's programs. The thing is, getting a degree used to be pretty rare, so it definitely made anyone who got one (no matter what field it was in) stand out from the rest of the pack. Now there are loads of programs that don't lend themselves to trades, lots of folks with degrees and not enough graduates with what matters - work experience.
Only a small percentage of students want careers in academia, but that is the field for which most universities prepare their students. And an even smaller percentage can manage to make a career out of academics. I don't think major overhauls to the degrees programs are necessary, but I believe the educational system should do a better job of promoting vocational experiences as well as academic ones.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
It would be hard to argue that group theory was relevant when it was developed. Or early number theory. Maybe you'd have liked Einstein to have given several applications for his theory of relativity (hint: it was before space flight and GPS). Or how about quantum mechanics. How about modal logic, that was merely an academic curiosity before Tony Hoare and a host of others came along and made it relevant, relevant enough for Intel to care about mathematically proving facts about their chips.
Science is a web of ideas, start pruning before you even know whether something is useful is stupid and short-sighted. Here's a thought, science can chew gum and walk at the same time. It produces relevant stuff and stuff that you will not think will ever become relevant...until it does.
This is not US-specific, it's like that in all western countries.
And it's actually meant to be that way. The academic world is the only place where fundamental research can be done, since the private sector has no interest in research that do not have direct applications.
If you want to do practical research, work as a R&D engineer in the private sector.
I'd like to speak on this matter as a graduating Psychology undergraduate struggling to get into a PhD program. Professor (Doctor?) Taylor raises an excellent general point. I'm not sure I agree with his entire view, as I am admittedly too short on time at the moment to read his entire article. That aside, I just wrapped up my Honors Thesis. It was an in-depth look at the state of youth suicide treatments, preventions, and interventions. My research conclusively led to one point: academia knows insane (pardon the pun) amounts about suicide itself. It has been so focused on the quest for knowledge that the focus of the science has been lost. There are few, if any, empirically supported treatments/preventions/interventions much less supported by longitudinal data. Perhaps I'm overgeneralizing, but I feel this issue has overtaken the sciences as a whole. Academia has become a self-contained system. We dig and dig and dig, research every aspect of every subject, publish it in dusty old journals that get crammed into a library shelf, and it never actually gets USED. We don't apply what we know to anything practical. Certainly this isn't universally true, or we wouldn't have seen any innovation, but I feel that it is a growing problem within academia. I look at the researchers in my department and I see loads of statistics and data produced on a daily basis. It gets crunched and analyzed, applied to a hypothesis, printed onto a poster or in a journal....and that's the end of it. It isn't actually used. My department recently churned out a rather impressive study on tattoo stigma. Long story short? It exists. Woo. Published. The data was recycled for a couple other studies, which were in turn made into posters, won a conference award, and.....then what? The data isn't used for anything! Why are Psychologists not working with advertisers or equal rights groups to implement a program to alleviate the stigma? This is just one example in a sea of millions. Anyone else feel the same?
Look at the utter proliferation of community colleges over the last 40 years. Academia has turned into an industry. Even though all of these starter schools are staffed w/ mostly Masters level profs with some PhDs thrown in the mix, each school fights for it's perceived share of the public funding. Moreover, these starter schools spend more time than what should be necessary simply in remedial work to qualify them for post-secondary work. Every school (community college, typical 4 yr residential college, research university) over this time has been madly competing for students because registered students=FTEs=$$. Why has tuition skyrocketed? Why are the community college faculties so up in arms in these economically lean times? Just like US manufacturing a generation ago, US higher education is undergoing a significant reshaping.
I'm sorry but group theory was invented in part out of a need to understand symmetry properties of molecules.
Caltech physicist David Goodstein has been talking about PhD overproduction for nearly twenty years, and that it actually started twenty years before that. Worth reading. http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
'Twas once said that the ideal PhD candidate was a person who increasingly knew more and more about less and less until eventually he knew everything about nothing.
To quote Heinlein: "Specialization is for insects."
Taylor is really just advocating a return to the Dark Ages, where monks could sit around at ponder philosophies at little expense to their feudal masters. While that might be OK if one's major concerns are debating just how many ferries dance on the head of a pin, this is not true for science. In science, mathematics, engineering and medicine, such specialized technical training is absolutely essential to even begin to understand the issues at the frontiers of science and knowledge. There is simply no way anyone can predetermine what odd fact or phenomenon will be at the heart of the next breakthrough nor learn enough fast enough not to specialize. Who would have thought that the properties of dielectric materials would spawn entire industries and revolutionize the way people communicate when they were first discovered in the 1840's? If you read the comment section of the article, Igor Litvinyuk's response was right on target.
What Taylor calls for is really a dismantling of funding for science under the ruse that it is hurtful to students. It is not at all surprising that Taylor points to the collapse of the research economy in the 1970's. Since this was precisely when the philosophy of Ronald Regan came into being, where "government is viewed as the problem" and the solution is for all power and wealth to be ever more concentrated into the hands of a few ultra-wealthy so that it can "trickle down" to the more deserving. Taylor's piece is little more than a call to return to the Dark Ages, where more and more money that otherwise might be spent on education and expanding the frontiers of knowledge that can be used to solve humanity's many pressing problems go instead toward yet another tax break for the wealth and an other special handout to the already well to do. They want to "reform" the PhD system because there are not enough jobs, by dismantling it. Same old sham, just repeated once again. One would think eventually people would be smart enough to recognize the consequences of such a disastrous philosophy being applied once again to yet another segment of our society.
They want reform because they fear the consequences of a lot of smart people sitting around thinking there has to be a better way. It is a threat that focuses attention on the real cause of the failure in the lack of jobs. Namely, that the ultra-wealthy, in whom we after nearly 40 years of the philosophy of Reaganism have consolidated virtually all the wealth and power, don't want to spend their money on advancing the frontiers of knowledge that might contribute to the solution of the myriad of problems plaguing society, they would rather spend it on themselves and upon maintaining their special, most fortunate status. Unfortunately, it is this system that is truly unsustainable, since the planet groans at the weight of billions all trying to achieve the same status. On such a planet, humanity will only survive if every job soon requires the skills inherent in a PhD. We need more PhD's not less. We need more education not less. To accomplish this we need less concentration of wealth to make it happen. We need more PhD's and fewer crusading monks who only seek a return to feudalism and a return to the Dark Ages. If you really want to solve the PhD job problem, not to mention most other societal, political and environmental problems work to end the consolidation of wealth in hands of a few not educated enough to recognize or just too comfortable not to want to recognize the danger inherent to humanity in the philosophy of Reaganism.
Checking Columbia's website the first Mark C Taylor I find is chair of the Dept of Religion. It also says his PhD is in religion. I suspect he might not have much first-hand experience with scientific graduate programs, to know how cross-disciplinary they are. For that matter, the general push for NIH and NSF research funding has been for cross-disciplinary collaborative research.
Not to say that our system is perfect - it most certainly is not - I'm just not sure he's the right guy to evaluate it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Universities are graded, ranked and funded by the amount of papers they publish and the amount of students that graduate. Neither of those promote good research.
The EngD programme in the UK was created for this very reason Mine was industry based with a maintenance engineering consultancy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_Doctorate
I haven't read the article. (After all, I'm on /..) I do have one question, though?
What drivel is this? The enhancement of knowledge is what doctorate level education is all about. If you don't want to pursue knowledge, jump out after your BS/BA or masters.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
In Physics at least, specialisation can lead to some very useful and broadly applicable findings. Granted, sometimes completely unexpectedly.
Indeed. In the Sciences and in Engineering, a PhD is the equivalent of a "driving license" for doing research. It does not guarantee you'll be good at it, but the odds are much better than for someone lacking the qualification. It signifies that you can plan and execute long and intellectually difficult tasks in a particular field, which may include discovery of new knowledge (experiments) as well as detailed physical and mathematical analysis. It shows that you're qualified for certain types of demanding job, which are not in particularly short supply. A PhD in physics or engineering was a prerequisite for my job and for several of my colleagues, and we're in industry, not in academia.
TFA failed to delineate the subject matter, lumping all PhDs together as if physical sciences, bioscience, and engineering suffered from the same lack of utility as the humanities or social sciences. It appears that TFA really just dealt with the humanities which tend to have limited economic applicability (PhD in Religion, or in History of art, or in Etruscan statuary). In some cases they amount to little more than an expensive hobby.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
From my personal experience, student cross-disciplinary study was encouraged by faculty who thought they could handle it. There is more self determination, self monitoring, and self management. Although at the time there was no biotechnology program at the time of my study, I was permitted to determine my own course and it was an absolute joy to embark on. Speaking with colleagues still in academia, the problem nowadays seems to stem from mundane students and the school's desire to fill seats so the room looks full.
It is the pushing of a PHD degree over that of a Masters degree.
It is the duty of the PHD candidate to push to the extremes of a specialization. It is not the candidates duty to be generic. That would be much lower in priority - well under that of proper records, accuracy, depth of study in the specialization.
It is the masters candidate that is to understand and relate many subspecializations of study. That is why even the NAME of the degree is "masters". The MS candidate must understand a broad area of study, and have mastered the information within that area.
It used to be that the graduate student would get a BS/BA, then go on to get a MS is the field of study, and FINALLY, if the candidate had the urge, and preserverence to extend the art, receive a PHD for the effort.
Nowdays, the PHD has been watered down to the point that everyone must have a PHD or not get an advanced job of any kind.
It is also why we see so much crap offered as "research" when it really isn't new, nor does it extend the art.
I will get flamed, but how many folks get a PhD because academia is the only real employment path for the specialized field they've chosen?
But I miss Lingua Franca magazine. It served the purpose of cross-discipline communication informally.
Precisely why should we emphasize cross-disciplinary research? What is the evidence that this approach is better than more narrowly focussed research? I would agree that we have too many PhDs, too few jobs for them, and or too little incentive for real innovation. I would also agree that the system needs reform. I don't agree that we should all be doing cross-disciplinary research.
Are you a virtual scientist if you work on a computer?
Please close down yourself.
Until I actually worked side-by-side with a few. Never in my life have I worked with anyone that (at least on paper) was a world authority in a very minuscule field of study, while at the same time showing close to no knowledge in pretty much everything else around them. It was depressing because I always assumed a PhD would be a really smart person that was an expert in that one particular thing, when in reality it felt like dealing with an idiot savant. Worse, all of this additional education resulted in no impact on their paychecks.
Out of the five we had on staff at one time or another, the two that I consider to be real experts in their fields couldn't be trusted to perform the most basic computing tasks, and the other three were pretty much stupid all around. I am talking "what do you mean I am not supposed to put my critical files in the recycle bin?" kind of people. How the hell can somebody under 40 in this country become a PhD in a computationally intensive biological research field without learning how to use a computer?
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Many researchers struggle to talk to colleagues in the same department, and communication across departments and disciplines can be impossible.
I understand this, and I've seen it myself. My fiance's cousin has a PhD in biochem. She had trouble explaining her thesis to just about everyone except her adviser. She couldnt explain her work as a lab assistant to anyone who didnt already know what she was doing. This seems like a problem that no amount of higher ed. learning can fix. Of course, i might be over generalizing. However, it's a problem that doesnt just plague the PhD educated under a broken system. Millions of people cannot communicate with their peers. It seems to be a fundamental issue.
It's admission decision season, and this is the second post of this flavour I've seen bashing science careers or the PhD route.
I work in a hospital, and to see Doctors come and go that only specialize in one or a just a few things is maddening. Often times a problem comes their way, and they wash their hands of it because they are a "specialist." Do you think this is how doctors acted in previous generations? Gone are the days of General Practitioners and doctors who actually know their field. This is akin to someone being a mechanic and knowing only how to work on radiators, and if the crank shaft breaks, they go "not my problem".
What's the point of a PhD? I understand it to demonstrate that a person can do primary research - i.e. generate new knowledge rather than apply existing knowledge to a job - using scientific method. It's a measure of intellectual ability, not of subject-specific knowledge (which makes the degree title a misnomer).
Under that definition, specialization is a non-problem. Specialize in your thesis topic, diversify your research afterward, the basic techniques still apply.
The world is more complex than we found it in 1900 and the body of knowledge is greater. Sure there is still great work to be done in the core of that body, but there is work to be done at the fringe of it as well. A PhD isn't about the application, it's about moving that body forward in a significant way (significant way, that does not necessarily mean an immediately useful way).
The US is too attached to its "traditional" ways of doing things to compete in today's global economy. The world needs highly-specialized PhDs like it needs more fossil fuels.
The PhD creation process is broken because it is an old boy's club as much as anything else. The process has tendency to weed out candidates with politically incorrect leanings because the keepers of the keys just don't want them as members.
There are too many PhD's in the slashdot community!
As someone who does work with private industry, I only half agree with you. It can be a problem, but I don't do work with industry that *only* achieves practical/applied goals. I won't do that. I have to get something bigger out of it, such as: A) progress in my overall research plan, B) access to proprietary data, and C) student training in specialized skills and equipment that we (students and I) wouldn't otherwise have access to, and D) money that I can apply to any research I want.
Basically I treat it as a way to not have to waste time jumping through the insane hoops necessary to get money from granting agencies, which is a big drain on time that could otherwise be spent doing research, especially if grants are not successful. It's a pretty grim commentary when it's worth more to me to spend a couple of months working on a contract doing what industry wants than it is for me to put together a grant application and hope it is successful in the grant lottery. It's guaranteed funding (fulfill the contract, get the money), and entirely flexible once I'm done. I fund my research on any basic/fundamental research I want by working for industry for part of the year. The university is fine with that as long as they get their cut ("overhead"), but it is a pretty sad commentary on how effective traditional granting agencies are at funding the "fundamental" research they say is their focus: it's more efficient for me to forgo the grant process and get research money with no strings attached. If I want to spend the money from the contract over 5 or 10 years, I can. If I want to change research direction, I can. If I want to spend it all or none of it on student salary, I can. None of this "must spend by year X of the grant", "must spend no more than Y dollars on travel/student/whatever" stuff. Finally, I can plan for the long-term if I want and allocate spending in a way that makes sense.
Well, theoretically it works that way until the industry money dries up. Then I'll be well and truly screwed. Anyway, don't assume that working with industry precludes or discourages fundamental research. Depending on how it is done it can enable it. If you mean killing off fundamental research hosted *in* industry ... yes, that may be a problem.
Yes! First let's blame the primary school teachers, then let's blame their unions, now let's blame graduate students and their professors!
Just what America needs, a further dumbing down.... *sigh*
"People don't pursue a PhD because they want to "provide water to a growing population." They can go to Mexico and dig wells to accomplish that (as some college friends of mine did)."
I'd suggest people in Mexico are capable of digging wells, not sure somebody needs to fly from another country and spend thousands to do something that would likely be better done by a local worker, and probably better for the local economy if the money went straight to said local worker. I am sure your friends did it with the best of intentions though and they put some money into the local economy, maybe other ways to support developing communities?
However, I am sure the people who need the water and are capable of locally providing labour to dig holes in the ground might welcome additional support from outside their community for more complex tasks like modelling water consumption across urban populations, designing economic models that strengthen the Mexican economy so water pipes can be put in and wells don't need to be dug, and so on. I am sure they'd welcome somebody carrying out research in that area and would be amenable to the argument that their community might not have that expert but this is where some researcher from another country might help them.
Took my PhD in community uses of technology to try and find ways that people can better help themselves with technology provision and community empowerment, working with people in low income and rural communities. Not too bothered about where I end up working (used to work in public libraries).
What was your motivation for taking a PhD?
SIgh, they might as well create a bot to generate such proposal.
Everybody knows that business just wants to dump some of their training onto the academia and make a quick buck, no matter the long term costs.
Because everybody knows long term, remedies like the ones proposed are futile, since it takes nearly a decade to bring anything to fruit in one of the stronger disciplines. (like the hard beta sciences, the ones that will really have to solve the problems, and not just talk about it), and priorities then will have changed.
The whole idea is that the ivory tower of the academia is to balance the short attention span of business. Now more than ever, with many big businesses slimming down or even closing down their central research facilities, and moving from fundamental innovation to Apple style product bling innovation
Yes, like any big problem, the big mouthed people on parties will consider it unfocussed and inefficient, but anybody who actually has something to do with it, knows it is the only way that works, and it has been so for centuries.
Aside from the academia doing fundamental research already mentioned, more importantly for this discussion they also provide a very high level scientific (people and material) infrastructure where students are actually rushed through various increasing apprentice ships. So even educationally this is crucial, not even considering the fruits of such research, merely by the process.
A) Interactions between fields should happen naturally or not at all. There *is* a great benefit to be gained there, and that should be incentive enough. There's plenty of interaction already. In my research I've collaborated with people in biology, medical science, computer science, geology, and astronomy. Trying to impose it as a required outcome is silly, and someone who chairs a religion department is the last person I'd ask for advice on whether things are "interdisciplinary enough" -- religion is not a field with a great track record for interdisciplinary collaboration or communication, either within a university environment or outside it;
B) xkcd already covered the result if you do impose interdisciplinary requirements.
You have to accept the fundamental conflict that most PhDs won't get an academic research job, yet the curriculum must be geared to those that will. That is its purpose, to promote the best science possible. Most of them will get some other job, not exactly the job they trained for, maybe as a government regulator, maybe as a lower-level educator. But many top scientists came from (relatively) humble beginnings in PhD programs at state universities, and to eliminate the bottom half of all programs or transform them into training programs for nonacademic jobs would blunt scientific inquiry. In my experience, faculty don't give students false hopes. It seems all I (and many of my colleagues) do is complain about how difficult it is to compete and survive in science, yet the students by and large still want to try to stay in research, knowing full well what the chances are. It really is remarkable. In the arts, of course, it's much worse. It's taken for granted that only a tiny fraction of aspiring actors or concert musicians will get "the jobs they trained for", but no one gripes about how dysfunctional that system is. As far as specialization, I think that is complete nonsense. At least in the biological sciences, Departments have become almost meaningless except as administrative units. Cross-department collaboration is the norm and most faculty could fit just as well into any of half-dozen departments. If anything, the fact that fields are more interconnected has made specialized work less significant. Journals are increasingly categorized not by field of study but by pecking order. Journal articles are accepted or rejected on the basis of what their perceived impact is, not whether they really fall within the realm of the journal's title. For advancing scientific knowledge, the entrepreneurial American system, where each investigator competes for grants through peer review, is unsurpassed. For solving society's problems, though, it might be that a more top-down approach, with true visionaries directing larger groups of scientists, might work better. But if so, we have been moving in the opposite direction. The National Laboratories, for example, have been basically defunded and converted into research institutes where faculty compete for outside grants just like everyone else.
UC also offers at least one degree that is not a PhD but has a MS as a pre-rec. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/education/admissions#prof
I think Emory has a requirement that all PhD students must take at least 6 hours from a different field and that a Prof from a different department sits on the board that awards your degree.
Today: not enough jobs for PhDs.
Which is it? /. seems to be alternating between posts bemoaning technical-field PhD's from going into quant positions, and these, saying we have too many PhDs.
... that last point is critical, and points at what I'm working towards: our Ph.D. system can't work if the only jobs Ph.D.s can get in their field are in the Universities. By having universities (often with public funds) put their resources to doing private industry research, we're not only subsidizing research, we're reducing the effective number of researchers in the field (does Bell Labs still exist?). And, yeah, at the same time our National Foundations and Endowments are turning the public route into one of paperwork and resource management.
So why give out Ph.D.s when the disagree effectively disqualifies the recipient for any job but the one held by the professor, which, by the way, has all the joys of a middle-management position except the salary, vacation time and short hours? Or, to put it another way, we should be investing our resources in a manner so that industry can complement academic research, not co-opt it.
This is one of those religious bigots who think that if it ain't science, it ain't ackademick. It's a serious religion in some parts of the university. Heck, I was a member of a similar cult once, the one that goes by the name of PiDNA: "Poetry Is Drivel, Not Art." It took me some experience to learn that only the poetry I had been exposed to was drivel. But first I had to figure out what Art was. P.S: I have a BS in aerospace engineering. So I've been on both sides of the fence. I know what I'm talking about.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
*gruffle gruffle* "oohh oi we've got to, something's wrong with the p.h.d. system"
"ohhh the p.h.d. systemmmm?"
"right!"
"ohh well rather, blah blah, blah blah blah"
"i have a degree in that! blah blah blah BLAH!"
"blah BLAH blah"
"BLAHBLAH"
blah, blah, blah...
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Oh, that problem has already been solved. It's just a matter of time before the solution gets universally applied. If it matters, you might work on deployment, but I wouldn't bother to reinvent the wheel, especially since the deployment is in progress.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I was a PhD student. I finished the classroom study. I moved on to the research and promptly left the program at that point. The research was Nonsense. Not because I picked it but because my adviser was out of touch with the world. I told him and proved that his work was crap. We promptly had a huge argument and we split. I now work in industry doing research. It is where I wanted to be anyway. I never wanted to be a professor. I do like to teach. But, I like to teach what people want to learn and not what is esoteric to get a label of PhD. I don't blame my former adviser. He was just doing what he needed to do to survive in the system. The university perpetuated the problem. It is very apparent who has done the better work now but I had the better environment after leaving the program. He is stuck with the program and will never do meaningful anything there. Good luck academics.
most universities need reform at the lower levels as well.
The costs are to high.
Some of the lower level classes are too much theory based.
There are to many filler classes.
There is a big lack of real work place based class work.
In the US the system will not change because as it is, it is making the Universities money, and providing for free or cheap specialized labor to senior researchers. The arrangement is perverse, driven by greed, and not in the best interest of the students. I have lost count of how many people abandon their field after enduring graduate school for years (i.e. physics and engineering students going to work on finances), or try to fit in an underpaid position thinking they will be considered peers - they do not: funding is scarce, and research topics are overcrowded. It is about money, people, not ideals.
He has a Ph.D. in religion. The headline should read "Person with worthless Ph.D. argues that all Ph.Ds are worthless." There is plenty of room for folks with Ph.Ds that actually train them to do something.
This sounds like a manager who doesn't want to read the papers. I assure you that if you spend some effort reading papers, you can understand what's going on in other fields.
I completely agree. I spent 20 years in academia. I saw this in action. Research groups and/or laboratories become "cost centers" in the university. Now, in business-speak, a cost center is like IT, it's a place the business spends money. But int university-speak, a cost center is a place to collect money. Businesses would call this a profit center but universities are trying to foster the illusion that they are not seeking profit.
I never figured out why things went wrong. I assume it was driven mostly by the cost and complexity of modern research (i.e., the cost of equipment and the size of the teams needed). If that's true, then perhaps the change was inevitable.
BTW, one of the things lost in the process was the idea of actually teaching students. Now that professors are revenue-generating machines, the universities have forgotten that one of the primary missions of the university is teaching. New professors are told that their responsibilities are teaching, research, and service. What this really means is research, research, and research. If you have a long string of papers, nothing else matters. If you're a great teacher but don't generate publications and research funds, then you'll very soon be looking for a new job. Towards the end I began to feel very bad for the students, especially the undergraduates. They paid good money, in many cases taking out large loans, to go to school and the university did not care one whit about them (except that they stayed and kept paying their tuition). The students had to struggle to learn with a professor who, as a teacher, was uninterested, inept, and incompetent. Many of the students don't really care. They just want the diploma from the big-name school and that's what they got. However, some of the students really do care and really wanted to learn. Those students got cheated.
Actually, as a Christian and an engineer, I can agree with the muslim GF post above, and disagree with your post entirely.
The Muslim GF poster is simply observing the trend of what is seen by their writings. Or, let me try it this way: his post is like talking about some "Institute for Metaphysical Physics" as nuts who can't figure out the 2nd law of thermo.
When you have a basic understanding of how philosophy and theology need to interact in order to be rational, and how they in turn need to interact with daily life in order to be at all relevant, you can quickly recognize drivel. In religious language, "drivel" is "heresy" (an active "taking away" of some vital part of the equation, like the 2nd law of thermo.)
So when he talks about heresy, he's saying that the professor can't get some logically vital part of the religion through his skull, usually because of some other agenda he has.
Aside from that, morals and ethics *were* created by religion, purely as a leftover castaway. They are spinoff industries. Morals and ethics are what you have left of right living, when you try to take away all the basis (God's own righteousness) from which it originated. Morals simply means "reasons of action", and Ethics simply means "a consistant rule of behavior." As such "More for Me" is an Ethic, though self-destructive. But it isn't right living, and can never be, because its source is removed.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
All the low hanging fruit is gone. A hundred years ago you could be a scientist and know chemistry, physics, and biology and still make new discoveries. We have so many scientists and so much progress that in order to actually discover or invent something new you have to narrow your focus. Scientists stand on the shoulders of giants, but it's a very long climb to the top. You can spend many years just learning everything the people who have come before you have done in a field before you can even think about adding to it.
Should men who "lie together" be killed? How about unfaithful women? It's in your bible... just saying... (okay, it would be fair to mod me -1 troll for this but I just can't resist the taunting...)
Galois was significantly earlier than the study of symmetry of molecules.
If a student decides to pursue PhD studies in an obscure topic, then they should realize their opportunities for employment are bleak. A student has to excel in their field if they want to continue after PhD studies, as the competition will likely be fierce.
A good supervisor should be encouraging a student to publish and attend conferences (which usually means acquiring outside funding). A student who has completed their entire PhD without publishing (it happens) or attending conferences should not be surprised when they can't find a job. I've heard of some schools requiring 3 publications before a student can graduate from a PhD program, which I think is a great idea. It forces a student to look down the road, and break their work up into publishable sections. Attending conferences is mandatory for networking.
I studied astrophysics as an undergrad, but quickly realized that in order to work in the field, I would have to do a full PhD, and even then most of the decent (few) jobs were in academia. So I "switched" to physics studying something more practical for my graduate studies (experimental semiconductor physics -- significantly more opportunity).
I have no comment on PhD studies in the arts and social science, other than saying I DO think they are useful and interesting, unlike many other comments on slashdot. BUT a student has to realize the lack of prospects when pursuing these studies.
(Walking into a bookstore, circa 2001)"Excuse me, where is your IT section?" "Oh, it's halfway down isle 14."
(Walking into a bookstore, circa 2011)"Excuse me, where is your IT section?" "Oh, it's isles 14, 15, 16, and 17."
Needless to say, things have become a LOT more specialized in the last 10 years, so let's not act so shocked when we find people delving deeper and deeper into particular areas of specialization. Much like in IT, one cannot learn it all anymore, the "jack of all trades, master of none" experience doesn't hold near as much value these days.
Many researchers struggle to talk to colleagues in the same department, and communication across departments and disciplines can be impossible.
Chinese is a tough language to learn.
Oh yeah, I went there!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
There is basically no coursework in my Ph.D. program, it's almost entirely personal research. (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
This guy is a professor in Religion. Of course he has a bad view of specialization in the sciences, because his doesn't get that specialized. Even if he is, for example, the foremost expert on the writings and life of Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas thoughts can be discussed with anyone with even a minimal background in philosophy and theology, and certainly anyone with a degree in either subject.
However, what would a PhD in robotics have to discuss with a PhD in semiconductor design? They are all in the ECE department, but their interests have only minimal overlap. "Oh, you guys made a new blue led chemistry using indium? Great... I'm working on a neuro-fuzzy autonomous helicopter controller based on GPS. So... talk to ya later."
This Taylor guy is an ass.
You're thinking of vocational/technical training programs, which are doing just fine and don't suffer from any of the "problems" that you just listed.
Higher education is not intended to be a curriculum of training for your career of choice, and we'd all be better off if everyone understood this before enrolling.
I never figured out why things went wrong
NIH started as a means to support fundamental biomedical research. It expanded from $4M in 1947 to 100M in 1957 and $1B in 1974 and $30B today. It became the way that biomedical research is funded, and dwarfs the NSF budget of $7B. Everybody wanted a piece of that pie, but it turns out to be tied up with political strings. Universities came to depend on research money that often exceed student tuition and state grants. But it's hard to justify basic science to congress - that's the whole reason NSF's budget is so much smaller than NIH - so NIH has been progressively steered towards clinical, applied, "translational" research. Other branches of science have been pushed in that direction, too, as they struggle to justify their existence next to curing heart disease and making the lame walk.
The argument for Government funded basic science used to be that we couldn't know what would come out of it, but that the simple process of discovery would result in unforeseen benefits. Society couldn't trust commercial enterprises to take such altruistic risks (although some of them did consider support of long-term, fundamental research part of good corporate citizenship or part of their own 20 year success program). Government now, at least in the US, has little foresight or capacity for long term planning. If the corporate attention span is one fiscal quarter, then the government attention span is one election cycle. So, we've sacrificed our long-term prospects for short term reward.
Don't eat the marshmallow yet.
Perhaps if this guy can't find a job, so is just complaining... He should go to a tech school. then he would have a vocation that will find him work.
The costs of education are definately rising faster than general inflation. Filler classes definately suck. I'm assuming (dangerous I know) that you're referring to liberal arts eduction. I say this because technical schools and job training programs focus only on 'work place based class work.' Personally, I prefer working with those with liberal arts style training. All those theory based classes (if well done) train someone to wrap their head around abstract concepts. For example, a business person with some basic understanding of scientific theory will know the difference between causation and correlation. Similarly, a tech or research person with a basic understanding of finance can understand and make a better case for using X high cost method over Y low cost method. Put another way, the cross training involved in liberal arts education gives all those involved a common language to speak. Something that someone who focuses only on their particular 'work place' will not share.
And the guy or gal writing the summary will be described perjoratively in the community as a "science popularizer" (say that with a curled lip)
That's an excellent thought experiment. Not only would building a ferry that size be difficult, just imagine the robotics involved to make it dance. Fascinating.
This is just a post by a self-serving SOAB. So, he wants all but a handful of PhD programs closed. Let me guess, but I bet that he's not advocating by example (i.e., lets close all of Columbia Univ. PhD programs first). This is particularly pathetic coming from a "department of religion" at Columbia University. I really cannot think of a most useless program (compared to biochemistry, physics, math, etc.). If he advocates for that first, then I may take him seriously. Otherwise it is the same self-serving stuff: close everyone else's programs so that my program will benefit from reduced competition. I've seen it before. STFU until you show by example first.
The government broke up Bell, thus destroying Bell Labs, one of the most amazing and productive (mostly) pure research laboratories in the world. All funded by private industry, or what you would call the ultra-wealthy.
Why the hate? It's the same thing that I hear from liberals who think that the military is some kind of peacekeeping force. You don't try to eat soup with a fork, and then blame the tool. The job of the Army is to destroy things, not build things. And the job of the government is not to create freedoms and give things, the job of the government is to restrain freedoms and taketh away. We need the government for basic services, for instance, national defense and putting the stripes on the road, but the federal government should NEVER have stirred the pot when it comes to science. It's created an unbalanced field. Grant money is the altar at which scientists worship, which is NOT RIGHT.
I can't really blame the individual scientists either, I mean, these are people with exceptional dedication to their field. They have to play the game as it exists in the real world, or be an idealist, refuse to participate in the perversion of basic scientific research, and live in a refrigerator crate.
more education does not mean more PhDs. Its not hard to read books and build off others knowledge.
PhDs are for building a legacy more than building a future. admit it.
Adnittedly, this is one of the areas that I have had a greatn deal of contention with myself.
Currently, many schools, Colleges and Universities are more concerned with teaching students WHAT to think rather than HOW to think. because of this sort of attitude, many institutions spend little time in confirming the research done by students for a Masters or PhD, thus helping to narrow and enhance specialization. What is needed today is a more diversified curriculum that would both appeal to and help develope people who are natural polymaths.
As stated, too many course plans tend to direct students into more and more specialized positions, many of which, don't exist in the job market.
On the other hand, multidisiplinarians are becoming far fewer and less comprehensive in their knowledge base, thus making the demand for their skills fall off as well.
Let's be honest about the way things have worked in the past. It is the polymaths who have usually been the true cross disiplinarian innovators. The current structure and restrictive nature of the curriculi at the various institutes of higher learning has become too restrictive and much too politically motivated, either for political reasons or as a result of tenure issues.
While a firm base of basic knowledge is a requirement, (Mathematics, English, (Writing and composition) sciences, (perhaps more geared towards the interests of the students, rather than that of the college) and at least a familiarity of American and World History. If the polymath intends to be a more science based individual, then basic familiarity of Latin would be a requirement. Any language courses, unless the polymath wishes to specialize in languages, should be geared more toward the structure and logic behind languages, rather than specific languages. (This sort of course could also be of great benifit to many programmers I know, as alot of their code becomes bloatware way too quickly). Any other sorts of courses should be more geared towards teaching students both HOW to think and learning methods, as well as memory techniques that could help the students retain the knowledge that they aquire.
All too often I have encountered incidents where I KNEW a piece of information that I had studied over the years, but had a heck of a time dredging up what that info was and where I had learned it. Courses in memroy and recall techniques would be a GREAT help. Courses in logic and philosphy should also be considered valuable, as long as political views are kept out of the mix. A course in comparitive morality probably wouldn't be a bad idea. There are many times that technologies and concepts have been developed without any concern as to whether or not they SHOULD be.
As noted, I am in favor of revising the current system of education in such a way as to allow a more cross disiplinary approach, but some courses should be requirements for a sufficent background that true polymaths can achieve the MacGuiver-esque breadth and depth of knowledge that is needed today.
Jason
Let me guess, the author's doctorate is in doctorate reform for non-medical doctorates.
Didn't want to post as ac, but can't remember my login.
And keep Indians & Chinese off the Program.
I am the anonymous coward you responded to, and I see now that I was wrong, having read the article you linked to and the history of group theory article on Wikipedia. I apologize, and thank you for correcting me.
Mathematicians are way too full of themselves. Just because encryption can be discussed in terms of number theory, doesn't mean any knowledge of number theory is required for encryption. People have been encrypting at least since Caesar, and except for basic arithmetic no mathematics knowledge is required. Modern cryptography is no exception. RSA is little more than multiplying a few numbers together and xoring the result with the message. Number theory may have been somewhat useful in designing attacks on the algorithm, but those have not yet produced anything significantly damaging.
The entire article is kind of funny when you take into account that the author, Mark Taylor, has a PhD in Religion.
I'm sure in the Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics that there are plenty of viable areas of study for PhD candidates. Exactly how many areas of PhD study are there in Religion? Probably few.
There is a big lack of real work place based class work.
That's not what universities are for. Try a technical college.
The assumption here is that higher education is for..educating. In my experience working at a University it would seem higher education is for making money, getting as many students signed up for loans as possible and getting grants. The paper they push is secondary to the goal of adding to enrollment and turning more bucks every year.
Taylor is really just advocating a return to the Dark Ages, where monks could sit around at ponder philosophies at little expense to their feudal masters. While that might be OK if one's major concerns are debating just how many ferries dance on the head of a pin, this is not true for science. In science, mathematics, engineering and medicine, such specialized technical training is absolutely essential to even begin to understand the issues at the frontiers of science and knowledge.
Copernicus was looking at the stars because he was also medical physician, and so wanted to improve his diagnostic and predictive awareness. At the time, the greatest medical minds thought that the state of a patient's planet alignment determined their health and which treatment to do.
Of course several centuries later Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, came up with what we now call the Theory of the Big Bang in 1925, but there was no empirical evidence in support of it until 1927 when Hubble published his observations on the direction that galaxies are traveling in (i.e. away from each other, which implied a common starting point).
Aquinas concluded that time had to be relative in the 1300s, but from Newton onwards it was thought to run at a constant rate. It wasn't until Einstein that we came back to it in relative terms.
For paleontology and geology, you may want to read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Steno , a Catholic bishop.
The Dark Ages are called that because people were hanging on for survival by the skin of their teeth. it wasn't a purposeful choice to live in ignorance, but simply a side effect of civilization collapsing (at least in Europe).
It should also be noted that a lot of low-hanging fruit has been plucked, and to go further you have to spend huge amounts of resources like the LHC. Cloud chambers no longer cut it.
All of higher education is in a bubble. The prices are too high. It's too easy to burden 18-22 year olds with lots of debt that will affect them for the rest of their lives. There's too many building programs. Too many faculty. Too much staff.
The bubble is going to pop and it is going to be messy.
In regards to this topic, the bubble requires as many students as possible at all levels. Universities aren't going to stop young men and women from wrecking their lives financially. What makes you think they'll say "yes, we should cut back the number of PhD students especially those doing arcane work"?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
"They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population."
Hello Luddite, it's called Basic Research. Something that might not have a practical application or solve a practical problem. But that is not the job of basic research. Solving practical problems is the job of ENGINEERS. Engineers take basic research and find practical applications for that knowledge.
There are also areas called Applied Science, which again take knowledge gained from research and apply it.
Time for you to hand in your PhD.
is that the graduate students do all the research, and write all the papers, while faculty spend most of their time applying for grants and funding. So teaching suffers with overworked grad students and professors who simply don't care, and the quality of research suffers as well.
Those medieval University Professors were certainly debating each other, and did include topics such as whether two immaterial bodies (such as those of angels) could occupy the same space. They were also training students, and explaining their work to the rest of the world. In fact, one of the roles of the medieval university was to diffuse (sure, mostly religious) knowledge to all (believers).
But professors and students were engaged in a collaborative effort to describe in a unified manner the entirety of reality. Modern science has come a long way since then, but the institutions and even the notions that shaped science come from medieval universities.
The "angels dancing on a head of a pin" jab comes from the Reformation types who never saw the point in studying something not immediately applicable.
For the rest, yes, we need more education, more Ph.D.s, and the arguments to eliminate them come straight out of Brave New World: if people are ignorant of history, they'll buy the same stupid line, again and again.
I don't think it's the case that, as a society, we have no use whatsoever for English, history, philosophy, etc, PhDs. Those subjects are interesting, and someone ought to be researching, studying, and (last but not least) teaching them. But I think the trouble is that we grind out way, way too many of them - more than could ever possibly be employed in the field. This is nothing more than ripping off the students in question, and leads to the phenomenon you describe - increasingly esoteric areas of "research". After all, these PhD candidates have to write a dissertation about SOMETHING... and practically every conceivable question has already been addressed.
I'm a hiring manager in the defense industry, and I end up needing to hire a bunch of former enlisted guys/girls to do engineering & technology work on these systems. Most of the work involves writing analyses, and most of the candidates don't have bachelor's degrees. When making hiring decisions, I need to have some level of comfort that not only does this person understand the system involved, but also can write up the findings. I can be reasonably sure that someone with an AA/AS has at least taken English 101, and therefore has turned in at least acceptable papers. So for me it's a discriminator.
Yes I would LOVE to meet someone who has a PHd who has significant expertise in some well-defined field - even if pretty narrowly defined like say Natural Language Processing. I find it interesting and refreshing beyond measure to meet someone who has mastery of a subject. Instead what I find are people with ridiculous degree designations. Like having a Masters in Computer Science after undergraduate work in Art. Now there's nothing wrong with either program but it's silly to think that someone who has never taken an Undergraduate discrete math course has much useful to contribute to the field of computer science proper (that is - the study of algorithms). There are also ridiculous masters programs that are so hard to define that it's difficult to determine who's qualified or not. In the end when you talk to these people, you reach the bottom of their knowledge in less than a minute. IMHO if that's what the alternative is to where we currently are...then change will only make things worse.
if people wanted a more general education, why not just go for several bachelors? and if people wanted a so-called practical education, why not just go to a technical school or enter into a credential program? the whole point of a PhD seems to be that you specialize. yes, if you're a biologist, you will know a particular cell VERY well and not much else. however, i fail to see why someone who has the motivation to learn other disciplines can't just pick up a book or read other online resources (there's plenty out there). i've had a lot of professors at my university who managed to cross disciplines.
now the whole bachelors system, on the other hand, is where i would revise the curriculum. i think that universities should have students take two disciplines up rather than the whole GE's, which, imo, does little overall than simply give undecided people a possible direction. i would have universities enforce a rule having people take up a technical degree and a liberal arts/humanities degree. why? the technical degree would provide some potential real world experience before the student leaves and the liberal arts/humanities degree will (hopefully) teach people to be ethical (and maybe get some of these people who can't write an email worth crap to learn how to communicate). or in general just balance a student out better.
"Never been in a PhD program have you."
In my field, I'm the ONLY authority. No PhD required and most doctorates have tried (and failed) to understand half of what my field does.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
2 x M.S. degrees get you a bigger paycheck and more interesting work then 1 x PhD if you are a engineer (esp. Comp Sci, Aero, EE, etc.)
PhD are great for traditional research sciences, not so much for the inventor/artists that are Engineers...
See "The Future of the PhD. Basically, the entire world is producing more PhDs than jobs for them.
In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more â" but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia.
Germany seems to do well on labor issues. Not just for academics, either. The country has an organized apprenticeship system turning out good technicians.
Nature isn't publishing an article about Humanities PHDs; they're talking about STEM.
I've heard these type of claims for biology and related fields: you can get so caught up on the minutia of your project that you don't learn generally applicable techniques; you only learn how to tackle your very specific problem and that makes it difficult to do anything else. I don't know if it's true, but I remember seeing several opinion pieces on it recently (although I can't find the links ATM).
That said, I agree that in a lot of the sciences the PHD is the equivalent of driver's license -- I've seen people move all over my field (condensed matter physics). However, there certainly are limits; I couldn't jump in to high energy physics. Also condensed matter is a broad field with a lot of overlap between subfields. The same may not be true for other areas of Physics. On top of all that, although it might be a license, it still could be for a field in which supply exceeds demand.
They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population.
This and other practical problems end up having solutions that are decided on by politicians and corporations.
But more importantly, how is science going to advance if we do NOT have specialization? According to Stephen Hawking, specialization and granularity in science is a good thing.
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Sig.setCleverSig(Sig.java:42)
The problem is actually a layer or three deeper.
University should be for gaining a very broad education in a wide range of subjects, NOT for vocational training. If someone wants to get advanced training after that, for a field that needs it, they get their vocational training in a PhD program.
For people who want a vocational education to enter the general workforce there are actual trade schools.
The real problem is that because our high schools are so incredibly shitty now, we are basically offloading a bunch of what should be covered there onto undergrad, leading to a ridiculous situation where we require receptionists and mailroom staff to have a bachelors.
It is absurd to me that we actually teach English composition (for a year!) as well as some pretty basic maths, at the university level. You should know how to write a basic research paper well before going to university and your classes in actual subjects should help you grow as a writer. You should know algebra well enough to handle graphing and functions etc., or you shouldn't get in the door. If you don't know these things already that's what community colleges are for - remedial work. Alas, it's too valuable for the schools to have students stick around for an extra year.
Full disclosure - I work at a university, I am a researcher, I have students working with me at graduate and undergraduate levels, and I am continually amazed at the basic, ridiculous things that our fine institution requires students to do.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
No, Joe The Dragon is thinking of software engineering, which colleges like to pretend is a solved problem. Once in a while we come up with a new and useful technique - like object-oriented programming and others before it - but the core problem of dealing with million-line source code remains a very hard one worthy of study. How many schools prepare their students to deal with this?
Ideally, the graduate of a four-year college should be well-positioned to enter industry with a solid background *or* pursue graduate school to become a scholar. If they fail at this, then they are either producing way too many students (the academe doesn't seem to be able to absorb thousands of CS graduates each year) or the curriculum leans too much to one side. I would assert that a CS graduate who doesn't understand pointers is a victim of an overly-theoretical curriculum, for example.
I partly agree, but mostly disagree.
A graduate student should get a good grounding and breath in the subject through coursework.
If they plan on going into industry, that will effect their degree plan. We should provide
more grounding for students if they wind up going into industry.
We want to teach people to learn, to be able to guide themselves through problems.
A Ph.D. is supposed to be someone who can do RESEARCH.
You don't want to teach just some very specific thing the market wants at the moment, because
that will change tomorrow. You want people who can think for themselves.
Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(often misunderstood) wrote another book, The Essential Tension.
You should read it. The following comments are partially based
on what he says.
We need to have Basic research. If you have science that can be applied
to the problems of society, by all means go ahead and apply it.
But, you won't get far on things useful to society unless there is
scientific theory to support you. Kuhn gives the example of
medicine: obviously extremely important, but over the
course of history, it did not advance much until
the scientific revolution gave theoretical grounds
to work on.
It will do no good to apply a lot of effort to
a practical problem until there is an underpinning
of basic science.
To follow Kuhn again, in basic research, the problem
to solve next, is the problem your progress has prepared you
to solve, the one that's just within your reach. That's the
way the theory advances.
When and were it will be useful is not the question to
ask at that point.
The moral is that there is going to be a lot of
"specialized" research whose benefits are not
immediately apparent. But we now by experience
that we WILL learn things that are useful in
the end.
I completely disagree with the article, but there's something to be said about the proliferation of PhDs. It seems to me (but correct me if I'm wrong) that once upon a time (say, 50 years ago?) every PhD thesis publication used to be a pretty major event. Researchers from that field would gather and discuss the new findings, analyze and verify the results, etc. Having a PhD actually meant something. Nowadays a PhD defense is just a banal event, dozens take place in a university each month and contribute little to the state of the art.
We've all noticed how nobody knows anything coming out of high school anymore (basic reading, writing and counting skills are lacking). The bachelor degree is the new high school degree, the master's is the new bachelor, and the PhD is the new master's. Since we can't go back and make these degrees more selective, we need something beyond the PhD, where the real cream of the crop would participate in significant research.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake. You have to think about it like this. Your research could lead to something amazing 100 years from now, long after you are dead. A small fragment of what you've discovered may inspire some other research that changes society. Perhaps your negative results will cause someone to pursue another alley with success.
Cooperation sounds good but you shouldn't feel pressure to produce an immediate piece of technology. That sounds like bad science to me.
For encryption to work right, number theory matters. Generate your P&Q to close, or too far apart, and the encryption is compromised. Generating the primes in the first place, in a manner that is close enough to random to not be compromised by a person who could just walk through the random seeds. Testing that the PQ are indeed prime in a timely manner (miller-rabin test from 1980). As far as "somewhat useful in designing attacks on the alogrithm (RSA)" It's the bedrock of designing the attacks, these people aren't just banging rocks together here.
Yes, the machines do the work, but the knowledge needs to be there.. the farmer sowing Genetically modified Soy doesn't need to know about the molecular biology involved in creating the seeds, he just has to treat them like regular seeds. And if it weren't for the terminator gene (Monsanto's copy protection), the farmer wouldn't need to worry about it again.
The NSA has moved away from RSA to an ECC system, they wouldn't do that If they thought RSA was secure enough, it's expensive. I'd call the NSA dropping it significantly damaging. Besides even if a person did crack RSA, they wouldn't admit it. It would be far to powerful of a tool to just throw out, and a horrible mess if someone just blurted out the algorithm to the world.
... that might be OK if one's major concerns are debating just how many ferries dance on the head of a pin...
Ferries do not dance on pinheads - they move across bodies of water. Fairies (or Faeries, if you wish) may dance on pinheads, but only if they are wearing boots with very thick soles. In general, most philosophical debates (mainly in the religious camp) are over how many "angels" may dance simultaneously on the head of a pin - unfortunately, the jury is still out on that one.
Sadly, I agree with the rest of your post.
That is all.
What you're describing is a community college. Universities are supposed to be theory based.
Many schools already have reformed. We call them trade schools.
PhD programs are *supposed* to be narrow and largely inapplicable to other disciplines. That's why it's normal to get multiple PhDs in different subjects.
The real problem is that secondary and undergraduate education (culminating in the Bachelor's degree), especially the gen-ed core, has been watered down and neutered until it's essentially non-existent. Kids are routinely graduating from college -- from major universities -- without even so much as (what we used to think of as) a high-school-level education outside their major.
You have PhD students who can't even carry on an intellectual conversation with somebody outside their major, not because their PhD program isn't general enough but because their undergraduate program was severely lacking.
"What, you want to talk about _history_? Your course work has to do with wars between with the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Seleucid empire? Man, you've lost me already before you even say anything. I majored in biomed. The only Greek ruler I've ever heard of is Alexander the Great, and if you tell me he was Macedonian I will look at you like a cow staring into headlights."
(I'm not picking particularly on biomed majors or lack of knowledge of ancient history. The problem is much more general than that.)
Maybe Masters and Doctorate programs should have standardized (non-field-specific) entrance exams you have to pass, or else they send you back to take more undergrad classes first.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
By the way, Einstein would have never passed the physics qualifying exam. He would have grown tired of the problem sets and arcane, useless mathematical tricks which must be memorized in order to finish the exam on time.
After reading the article, I think he has some really good points, and a lot of what he says is true. I've seen many times how ingrown disciplines can get, and how ignorant people can be of relevant work being done in the next building over. Each field tends to follow its own course, with everyone doing things the way "everyone else" (that is, everyone in their field) does it because they assume that's the best way. Then someone will "discover" a method that's been widely known for decades in other fields, and it will revolutionize their work. How many times did the FFT get reinvented over the years? And even today, most physics engines use integration methods that were state of the art in 1900. If people who write physics engines talked to numerical analysts a little more often, they would learn that better techniques have been known for decades.
And it's not just math or science. I remember hearing a talk by a psychology professor who was really interested in literature and tried to do a collaboration with a literature professor. After explaining his own research (cognitive psych studies of what happens when you read a fictional story), the literature professor informed him, "That isn't the sort of psychology we're interested in in literature." A little surprised, he asked, "What sort of psychology are you interested in?" And, as he put it, "It quickly became apparent that the sort of psychology they were interested in was a sort no psychologist had believed in for 50 years."
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I wouldn't know. I only ever showed up for tests in non-lab, non-major classes and still got my BullShit degree. Not worth the money though, not at all.
Good news: the institution you're describing already exists, in the form of 2-year technical colleges. A bigger problem is the stigma attached to those colleges relative to universities, which more people should be taking advantage of; a 2-year degree in a trade discipline will get you a job right out of school, many of which are highly in demand. Most of the people in my high school went to college right after graduating just because that's what everyone else was doing (and perhaps to have fun), not because of any specific benefit they were hoping to get from the academics.
Lower level classes are meant to be theory based - because they form the foundation for later classes and more real world problems are less informative. Ex: Stats classes are better off using fake data that gives cleaner computations than using real world data that comes out with ugly regression curves. Same goes for calculus, lots of applications are fairly silly and contrived rather than informative. Ecology? You can't take a large class out in the field and monitor it well enough to do anything meaningful. Economics? What is gained by having precise curves initially rather than vague ones that show you tendencies without digging into the detail. Chemistry? Better learn how reactions work before trying to develop a new nanotube production process.
Filler classes are useful as they keep the idiots out of the classes for motivated students and/or provide an appropriately paced class for non-majors. While not as informative as other courses for the most part, some students probably leave with more of an appreciation for some subfields from it. They also provide a nice place to stash Division I athletes that are great at marketing the university.
Real work classes are for community colleges and trade schools, not universities which are there fundamentally to teach you how to think, not work.
Its true that Bachelor degrees are intended to be as broad as possible, attempting to give a good broad education into a particular field, A masters degree is an education focussed on a more particular area withing that field. PhD's are partially an education in a much more sharply focussed area within that field, followed by research and original findings within the field (and this is all published as part of a PhD dissertation). This is why higher degrees are referred to as learning "more and more about less and less". Its analogous to physical systems, particularly Richard Feynman's description "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom". As you start dealing with smaller and smaller bits of stuff, there is more of it to deal with. As you start breaking physical, chemical and biological, systems into smaller and smaller pieces, there are more of those small systems to examine and understand (not if they are all the same of course, but when they are different).
To get a PhD., you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing.
Having met several PhD.'s since then, I have found this is true more often than you might expect.
most universities need reform at the lower levels as well.
The costs are to high.
Some of the lower level classes are too much theory based.
There are to many filler classes.
There is a big lack of real work place based class work.
to high?
to many?
or not enuf?
most universities need reform at the lower levels as well.
The costs are to high.
Some of the lower level classes are too much theory based.
There are to many filler classes.
There is a big lack of real work place based class work.
Those pesky English classes are nothing but filler classes that cost too much.
Universities were never meant to be places to get training for the work place. They were originally centers of research and scolarship dedicated to expanding the frontiers of knowledge and theoretical understanding of existence, creation and humanity.
That most people want to turn them into mere technical training mills doesn't mean that is a worthy goal; it only means many people do not understand how basic, theoretical research, that won't be funded by business and industry, contributes to the very technologies business runs on today. If you want job training, be an apprentice or go to a two year college. Universities should be turned back over to the professors who lead research and expand the horizons of human knowledge.
I agree that the costs are too high in many cases, however universities are not supposed to serve the purpose of job training. It's unfortunate that people seem to have this idea. If you want job training, go to technical school or learn to teach yourself the skills you need. Most jobs that people would seem to think university degrees are needed for shouldn't take anywhere near 4 years to learn the required material for. As for the other jobs, good luck getting them with even a 4 year degree. You'll probably need a PhD for those...
University should be for gaining a very broad education in a wide range of subjects, NOT for vocational training.
You are assuming that Universities are for anything else except "signaling" the intellectual and motivational ability of the student to be able to make it through them.
You should know how to write a basic research paper well before going to university
So you are displeased with the socialist monopoly unionized K-12 school system?
here's a related article: Give postdocs a career, not empty promises the author advocates letting a much smaller fraction of PhDs continue on to post-docs, forcing the rest into industry, and then keeping on those post-docs who don't make the cut to faculty as career non-tenure-track scientists. makes sense to me.
So what? As long as the work is interesting to me, and that there is somebody around to talk to about it and collaborate with, isn't that enough?
The remarks stemmed from a reference to a Hindu tradition, which took such considerations quite seriously. I can't even read Sanskrit much less spell in it. However, it is spelled it seems as if human history in all cultures are filled with them.
I believe they evolved as a response to the tension created as the mother relinquishes the teat to the infant, who must then on in life fend for themselves. Often what people believe as a result of addressing this early primal fear seems to require the need for comforting figures that can provide meaning and direction when otherwise there is a fear that there may not be one. As modern technologies have advance to facilitate the transition, they have fallen into disuse, but often arise in other guises.
There is a big lack of real work place based class work.
Historically, university is/was supposed to be about academia, research, and all the stuff that is ahead of the curve and not in industry yet, and the fundamentals that industry is based on but doesn't directly deal with. Trade school, apprenticeships, colleges, and the like were about the real-world training of the work force.
Nowadays, the common jobs are requiring university degrees, even though what the workers are called to do has nothing to do with "University" focus. Is that a problem of the university itself, or a problem of misapplied expectations of university degrees and a diminishing opinion of trade schools?
Better to have a socialized, unionized public education system, where teachers are paid what they are able to get in the market place and able to associate with those whom they please and enter into contracts as they please, than no education system at all, which is ultimately what the monk and your comment on the K-12 school system is suggesting. It would be far more stable and likely to last than what one sees in private diploma mills that just raid students wallets and leave them with no mental equipment whatsoever, and they maybe on line with virtually no teaches what so ever, just a website, yet able to obtain huge subsidies out of funds otherwise intended for publication education.
Yet fools wonder why the educational system is broken. Making money off of children is not particularly responsive to their needs, which is to receive the best education possible and he best training to prepare for what comes next. It makes one wonder how people expect things to get better, when they are eager to sacrifice what little of an educational system we have left to the mantra the "private" education is best, As if those that don't get educated because they can't afford it, don't create a cost to society as a whole. Makes one wonder what planet they think they are living on. Doesn't it?
I think the problem is in part that university has just become the 13th through 16th grades. Kids are institutionalized and can't imagine living in a manner that doesn't involve a cafeteria full of peers their own age trading gossip, with lots of hanging out in the evenings. For various reasons parents are basically just expected to provide a college education for their kids - it is a matter of pride/etc.
So, when little Johnny is in 12th grade he has a few choices:
1. Join the military.
2. Find a job.
3. Hang out in the basement when all your friends are off to college, until the parents make you do # 1 or 2.
4. Sign up for college.
Just about everybody with average grades can go to college SOMEWHERE. Sure, they might not get financial aid, but parents are often all too willing to borrow $100k to finance their kids education.
Talking to my kids friends it is clear that most have no idea what they want to do in life. Many go to college undeclared, or with a major that is tentative at best. Many openly talk about being on a 5-6 year plan. Why not - college is certainly more fun than many avenues of work! It has become the path of least resistance.
There is plenty of opportunity out there for those who learn a trade. College is also a fine way to equip oneself for a career, but one should be pretty sure about the career before making this kind of an investment. I'd never pay for a child to attend a college unless they already have demonstrated proficiency and dedication to the field they are choosing to go into. Want to be a teacher, well volunteer to tutor kids or something in your spare time. Want to be a chemist, well volunteer to help your teacher prep for lab or something and compete in the science fair. No need to make a million dollars before graduating high school, but demonstrate that it is more than a passing fancy that won't last beyond the first 40-hour week.
As far as universities being some kind of great noble institution of general learning - well, that is nice if you want them to go back to what they were in the middle ages - a dumping ground for the children of the wealthy. If you aren't independently wealthy then spending $100k just to feel intellectually fulfilled is a tremendous waste of money. Go get a job first, and if you want take some night classes - if you just want intellectual fulfillment then you can get it without the stress of worrying about grades or degree requirements. If you're paying for it with your own money and meeting your responsibilities then nobody has the right to criticize you.
University should be for gaining a very broad education in a wide range of subjects, NOT for vocational training.
There are many problems with that idea:
- Universities are WAY too expensive to serve only that purpose. The costs are extremely out of proportion to "This isn't meant to earn you more money in the future".
- If someone simply wants a broad education on a wide range of subjects, with absolutely zero relationship to career skills, they can just read books and watch documentaries. No need to spend the massive amount for a university eduction.
- People are largely attending universities for that very purpose. Universities are failing to meet that need.
- People that are attending solely for career options are not likely to recall or be changed by the "broad education". If we are not interested in something, we will not recall it or utilize it long-term.
- Having real-world skills and experiences is not mutually exclusive to having the "broad education" or learning the theoretical backgrounds of specific subjects.
And above all, there is a big problem in defining "very broad education in a wide range of subjects". From my view, university programs do not provide that. There are many things as an adult (I graduated from college almost 20 years ago) I study on my own simply because I find them completely fascinating. They were not part of my university education:
- Physics, at a basic level without digging into math. (Think of reading "A Brief History of Time"). I like math, too. But although I am completely fascinated by physics, I have no interest or need to spend time studying it to the point of spending my free time doing calculus.
- The history of warfare, including the significant milestones in strategy and tactics. Such as what Alexander did against the Persians and how it was significant to future use of chariots. And Hannibal's use of the pincer. And why castles rarely survived sieges. And why stone walls were made obsolete. And what changed to make armies stop lining up in front of each other and blasting away. Etc.
- A basic knowledge of how engines and transmissions work.
- Investing: stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETF's, etc. Not a "This is how you should go invest" course. But just a "This is what all these things mean and how they work, since you all hear these terms tossed around in the news so much."
- Skills and knowledge for training and nutrition. (PE/Health in high school and earlier did not teach this properly or sufficiently. Go around ask ask people how many calories are in a gram of fat, and how many are in a gram of protein or carbohydrates. It is actually not common for people to know that off the top of their heads.)
- The history of media (TV, movies, photography, music, etc.) creation and distribution. Including how it works behind the scenes.
- Basic medical concepts and ideas. No organic chemistry needed. But different than taking high-school anatomy and biology classes. I'm talking about content that is specifically directed towards the field of medicine, so people are understanding a bit of what is going on when they go to doctors, get diagnosed, take various medicines, get surgery.
- Statistics and probability, and how it relates to our everyday lives.
- Many others than I am way too tired to write about now.
Something resembling an expanded version of the above really would be a "broad education in a wide range of subjects", and would also have a number of parts (not all, of course) that would be of use in a person's normal life. Taking 7 different literature courses, 5 different history courses, 4 different biology and organic chemistry courses, etc., is not a "broad education in a wide range of subjects".
Wow, what an unexpected yet beautiful post from an AC.
It makes one wonder how people expect things to get better, when they are eager to sacrifice what little of an educational system we have left to the mantra the "private" education is best
I'd be more than happy to have publicly FUNDED but privately RUN schools. Compare a private school in the US to any public school and in almost every case, the private school is infinitely better. Hell, even if we just had vouchers we could help improve this situation because then parents who send kids to private schools wouldn't be paying twice (once for the public school that the kid isn't going to and once again for the private school they attend). Please, go watch the documentary Waiting for Superman - it's a real eye opener about the American education system and what the real problems are.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
It depends on the job. Yes, there are many that say they require a degree when they really don't - they just use it to weed out people that they feel would be worse employees despite the fact that they may be highly skilled in that area. On the other hand, do you really want to hire someone to be a mechanical engineer that doesn't have a degree in Mech Eng? Would you want someone working as an accountant that didn't major in accounting? You see, several majors really are relevant to the workplace because it really does take awhile to learn the in's and out's of that field in order to use it in a business environment.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Nobody wants to be a General Practitioner anymore. The hours are long and the remuneration not in line with what specialists earn. If one wants good GP treatment, we have to leave USA and Canada for other countries such as Latin America, (even to Cuba), and / or to go abroad. GP = 80+ hours per week. Specialist = 35 hrs per week.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Like you see in management in the computer sciences with their "can't you make the sky green and the grass blue, yesterday? I mean, it should be easy to do!" crap:
"Great ideas come from great analogies, those are frequently not from science." - by gtall (79522) on Tuesday April 26, @06:24AM (#35939876)
The devils are IN THE DETAILS, you stupid dork. Any asshole can come up with a "10,000 foot view idea" & say it's easy and it's "his idea"... which is why patents generally require a proof of concept. If not, the entire patent thing would go outta control & be a worse sham than it is already.
It's also clear you're probably on a degree track for some such English, Philosophy, or other bullshit degree track as well and you're trying to defend your weak crap that accomplishes next to nothing and is generally quite useless (other than sucking up monies that could go to actually useful sciences instead).
No modding. I'll just wait until the modding is mostly done, and then reply. Usually, when people make a joke, they include some truth (or truth as they see it). Same is true for trolling. So I'll answer you as if you were serious.
Let me start by saying that the preponderance of evidence seems to imply the Bible is true. Considering that a miracle is best defined as a documented historical event that defies our understanding of our world, go and google "Catholic miracle", "Methodist miracle", even "Mormon miracle". Then pop over to a few other religions: Islam, Buddhism, Judaism. You'll find that Judaism has very limited miracles after 70 AD. Aside from the star in the moon, Islam has only those of the classification of "potato chips that look like a praying muslim." Buddhism doesn't seem to have much, and so on. But where they do have miracles, is when they involve Christians. Christianity has them regularly, and they are convincing.
But to answer your question, let me go you one better. Consider the lament after the two exiles, "they took the young men to grind, and the children were crushed under the wheel." Basically, you conscript 10 men to pull a large stone roller around in a circle, grinding grain. But if a couple of them are children and wear out, and you're beating them to go so fast that the children get crushed into the grain... well... it begs the question how a loving God can use such attrocities as a means of grace?
Thing is, He doesn't. He warns them ahead of time that if they go running after other gods, it's going to come to this. Moreover, the Bible identifies the other gods as thieves and demons, and pronounces a judgement of death upon them. So those other gods basically are like kidnappers who lure children away from the schoolyard with treats, only to kidnap and murder them when it's too late for them to return.
So the Creator God wants to preserve His creations, and the false gods are out to kill and destroy. It isn't the creator God's will at all. But if he publicizes the case, the bad events can at least be a warning to others.
But what do you do, then, with those humans who actively participate in luring children out to the kidnappers? Normally, that's a capital offense. Now, the Bible does also identify men who lie with other men (among others) as those who are given to that because they worship the creation, not the creator. So that may apply to your answer.
But as a Christian, I tend to prefer Jesus' answer to the adulteress: "go, and sin no more" (repent, and stop sinning. Then we don't need to condemn you. We can forgive you.)
So how do you repent? Peter noted the difference between himself and Judas: that worldly repentance leads to death, but Christian repentance leads to righteousness not to be repented of. But you can't have Christian repentance, unless you have a clear vision of God. Peter saw how he had hurt Jesus in denying him (Jesus looked at Peter, and Peter was grieved and ran away in tears). So you have to ASK Christ to give you a clear vision of God for repentance, and then seek Him with your whole heart until He does.
But it should be easy to start to see Him. Pull out the Gospels of Christ, and read them as a hero story. It's more poignant than the made-up story of the movie "Titanic." God likes hero stories too. Then look through history, and try to find what true hero stories you can, that even come close to matching them.
First of all, you'll see that there are very few, percentage-wise. But among those you do find, you typically are going to find that (a) they were not such a hero until they were empowered by Christ's own death and resurrection, and (b) that they did it by emulating Christ, and underlying His own hero story. It's only in such a context that you can find the Mother Teresas, the Maximillan Kolbes, and the John de Brebeufs of the world, as well as the Bernadette of Lourdes', the St. Patricks, and the stories of Peter, Paul, the Atlas Seven ("Of Gods and Men"), and others.
And no, these are not fictional. Part of their perfection is that they really happened.
To troll your troll (but in all seriousness):
The Name of God is admirable. Get with it.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Oh HELL yes, you said everything there is to say on this article. Nice job.