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A modest proposal for [higher education]
Pi-r8
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Registered User regular
There was a thread here yesterday talking about options for recent college graduates, and it was incredibly bleak. Many, if not most, new college grads are unemployed. The ones who ARE employed, are usually working in a field that is completely unrelated to anything they studied in college. It seems like the old model of "study something advanced in college, and then get a job related to your studies" is dead, and the new model is more like "study whatever you want, and then use your network of family and friends to get you an unrelated job. Or work at a menial that an average highschool dropout could easily do." Really makes you question the benefit of 4+ years of higher education, and it's associated costs.
Meanwhile, there still seems to be a strong demand for people in the skilled trades. These jobs require actual training, not just an "aptitude for self-paced learning". They pay pretty well, and usually require less than 2 years of training to do. However, there's a pretty big stigma against going this route. It's basically assumed now that, if you're a good student, from a good family, you'll go to regular university, and this kind of blue-collar work is only for people who failed in regular school.
I think it's time to combine the two systems into one. Let college students spend 1 or 2 hours a day learning a vocational trade like welding, carpentry, plumbing, etc. The rest of the time they can study french literature, art history, whatever. Wouldn't it be nice to study something you're interested in, and still be confident that you'll have a solid career ahead of you? Or to work a blue-collar job, without people assuming that you're uneducated and simple-minded?
I'm still a believer in liberal arts education. I think that there IS value to studying very academic subjects, to expand your mind and enrich your life. But still, you need to eat. And it seems clear that most liberal arts majors do little or nothing to increase your immediate job prospects. This system is not sustainable- it's time to stop making people pick between getting an education vs. getting job training, and let them do both.
Meanwhile, there still seems to be a strong demand for people in the skilled trades. These jobs require actual training, not just an "aptitude for self-paced learning". They pay pretty well, and usually require less than 2 years of training to do. However, there's a pretty big stigma against going this route. It's basically assumed now that, if you're a good student, from a good family, you'll go to regular university, and this kind of blue-collar work is only for people who failed in regular school.
I think it's time to combine the two systems into one. Let college students spend 1 or 2 hours a day learning a vocational trade like welding, carpentry, plumbing, etc. The rest of the time they can study french literature, art history, whatever. Wouldn't it be nice to study something you're interested in, and still be confident that you'll have a solid career ahead of you? Or to work a blue-collar job, without people assuming that you're uneducated and simple-minded?
I'm still a believer in liberal arts education. I think that there IS value to studying very academic subjects, to expand your mind and enrich your life. But still, you need to eat. And it seems clear that most liberal arts majors do little or nothing to increase your immediate job prospects. This system is not sustainable- it's time to stop making people pick between getting an education vs. getting job training, and let them do both.
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I mean, I'm also of the opinion that k-12 should teach personal finance, personal law (ie how to not get arrested for stupid shit), WAY more civics, etc., so I stand much more on the side of pragmatism in terms of what to teach.
Mike Rowe, the guy from Dirty Jobs, actually gave a talk about this which I found surprisingly insightful. We as a culture have moved away from a utilitarian approach to self-improvement, and we're suffering for it.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
They offer both, but the two rarely intersect.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Electricians. carpenters and plumbers got massacred by the housing bust. Most of the good money in those fields comes from new construction, not one off toilet installs.
It's not a road to instant wealth, but it is a necessary occupation which you can still make a decent living at.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I caught that Mike Rowe talk, Zed. It was very cool to hear someone say those things. Especially someone like Rowe, who's a pretty darn well educated guy.
[ed] Damn, youtube videos just embedding themselves. :P Oh well, its a good talk, you guys should listen to it.
His bit about "nobody ever follows their dreams into a life as a plumber" is particularly apt these days. We need more mechanics, solar panel installation guys, etc as a society. I think that if you have an overwhelming drive to study French Lit you should totally go for that, but if you can be happy as just a hobbiest in that area we maybe need to be steering you toward a full-time field where you are doing something less abstract in terms of its value to society.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I fear that if we were to fold vocational training into degree programs we'd end up with entry-level plumbing jobs listing requirements for a 4-year degree with a vocational minor in plumbing.
The problem with the current system, in my opinion, isn't so much the stigmatization of vocational programs as it is the rising level of expected education for most jobs. I understand that it's just used as a filter to limit applicants and avoid hiring managers being overwhelmed, but if you demand that everyone have a 4-year degree to get any non-minimum wage, non-menial job then everyone is going to want a 4-year degree. Getting a vocational degree isn't bad so much because it's looked down on as it is bad because it locks you into that career with very few options should you decide that being an electrician just isn't for you. Adding vocational training to higher education programs would somewhat alleviate that but, like I said, runs to risk of shutting out people who really do just want to do 2 years and go be a carpenter.
I'm only a bit disappointed.
It also doesn't help that liberal arts programs grant credit for any number of laughably low-level classes. High school kids from my town who can walk into local community colleges better prepared for freshman courses than some college freshman or sophomores. Remedial courses are necessary, but there is no reason they should be included in the credit count towards and undergraduate degree.
A liberal arts degrees needs to ooze elitism again before they reacquire any inherent worth. At the moment, only the prestige of the originating university imbues a degree with any sort of respectability.
Rather than watering down the liberal arts further by integrating them with practical trades, I would like to see the standards for a good bachelor's degree raised high enough to prevent the whole college system from being the safety net for indecisive high school grads that it currently is.
Probably wouldn't hurt to fix the US's public high schools before that, though. Wouldn't want to see another generation written off as a loss like the current grads.
I'm glad engineering degrees are the exception to this, because they are wickedly tough to get.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Usually the occupational programs have an option where you get an A.S. instead of just a certificate, in exchange for extra liberal arts coursework. It's a nice combo. After two years, you have a nice skill (plumbing or whatever) and two years towards a B.S.
When you get down to it, lots of degrees only teach you the bare basics of what you eventually use in your job; the rest of it is going to be learned on-site. Also, many of the Gen Ed requirements are entirely useless for almost any job you get - most people are never going to use their college algebra, psychology, or biology 101 classes after the end of that semester.
However, I personally believe a great deal in the idea of personal enrichment as a goal of education, and I think society would greatly benefit if more of our members had an understanding of basic concepts of cultural anthropology and geography; so many of our society's problems are caused by ignorance of other places and cultures, and the world is so much smaller than it used to be. But it would be better if these subjects were dealt with at an earlier age, such as in public high school.
That doesn't make sense. More people than ever are acheiving college degrees, for good or ill. So it doesn't make sense to use it as a method of class distinction and doing so doesn't explain why a college degree is more necessary now than it used to be.
IMO there are a few factors. Credit for education (using credit in terms of borrowed funds here) is easy to come by due to subsidies by the government. At the same time, we have a societal narrative that tells us that a college degree is a good fit for everyone. Not even just 'education', but a degree in particular. This leads to a number of effects.
First, we have an excess supply of 4 year degree holders for which there is no underlying need. Their degree simply isn't pertinent to any likely future jobs, it is only valuable to employers as a means of signalling that the person is capable of doing a sustained task for 4 or more years. Since the cost of obtaining such education is pushed onto employees, who very often aren't well equipped to evaluate the monetary worth of their education (this is different than joy of learning, I'll get to that in a sec), employers may as well use it as a metric.
Second, the narrative pushing for a degree means that people who may just have a passing interest in some subject are incentivized to grind out something like 60 credit hours in that subject, plus another 60 in miscellaneous other subjects to make them 'well rounded' and obtain a certificate that largely isn't relevant to any likely career. They do so at a huge cost, both to the government, who is subisidizing part of the cost, and to the person (or their family), who is making up the rest. We would be better served just trying to change that narrative from 'obtain a degree' to 'learn what you want.' Maybe keep some form of subsidy in liberal arts to artificially lower the cost of taking those classes, but remove the incentive to do so much grunt work in something that is just an interest and is unlikely to ever be a career. Sure, some colleges may offer full on degrees in things like English Lit, for those who really want to pursue a career as a professor of English Literature or something similiar.
I disagree. There is only a finite number of things that can be taught before graduation. The most important thing then to teach children is a set of critical thinking skills. Geography is largely useless. Being able to recall where the Congo precisely is on a map is almost without worth when that information is easily available and rarely relevant. Cultural anthropology is ephemeral at best to most people's lives and the lesson 'value differences' is something that I think every grade schooler is taught anyhow. Finance, civics, literacy and critical thinking are far more important IMO, since they are far more relevant to the everyday functioning of a society.
Also, geography is much more than places on a map - it's about having a basic understanding of the culture and history of various areas on the globe and how those regions interact. This is a necessity for responsible engagement of the public. If our public schools had bothered to give most people an education that described the differences and conflicts between various groups in the Middle East, I'd say a lot of people would have been a bit more wary of going into the Iraq war. But as it was, most people didn't know a Sunni from a Shiite from a Kurd (or even know there was such distinctions), thought it was all just a bunch of brown people and figured we'd be out of there in a couple of years at most.
And, while there is a finite amount of things which can be taught before graduation, many of them currently emphasized are useless. I haven't done any precalculus since I was 17. Chemistry, earth science, meteorology, biology? How often does anyone use this stuff? The only possible use of earth science I can think of is educating people regarding climate change. Other than that they have almost no impact whatsoever on anyone's life who doesn't go into academia or research. I think a firm understanding of history and cultural studies would be more valuable to society as a whole.
Also, finance and civics I don't disagree with, and I would argue that critical thinking would be greatly enhanced by doing cultural studies, because the discipline as a whole teaches self-examination. And literacy - I never proposed we get rid of the English curriculum.
You're right, I should have gone with that in the OP.
Most of my friends have spent most of their adult lives staring at fucking spread sheets. Colleges should require this for at least Business degrees.
I guess if you wanted to you could also spend more time teaching vocational trades to high school kids, so that anyone who doesn't continue to college could still make a decent wage. As it is now, so many employers just won't even talk to you if you don't have a college diploma, regardless of what your other qualifications might be. However, I don't think that integrating a liberal arts degree with a practical trade would "water it down". Wouldn't it be the opposite? It would still have all the old requirements, this would just add one more.
I agree with most of the things you said, but I think you're over-emphasizing (or over-estimating) people getting degrees in things that sort of interest them for sake of that interest. Our society basically demands a degree for success and, outside of occasions where the degree is actually required for the content rather than just 'having a degree', it doesn't matter what it's in. So people take degree programs that are perceived as 'easy', which are usually liberal arts. I really doubt that the number of people actually genuinely interested in Literature is anywhere close to the number of English majors out there.
I don't know whether the glut of 4-year degree holders or the increased demand for degrees came first, but I think that the latter is the driving fore behind the former at this point. If people didn't need a degree to get a job I think far fewer kids would choose to go to university and get a degree that isn't important to a future career.
I'm not sure if you're talking about primary school here or higher ed. If it's the former then I think having a diverse curriculum is pretty important. Unless kids are exposed to a wide variety of subject matter in elementary and high school how will they know if they want to pursue more education in that field?
How would you fit a full 2-year vocational trade education into a 4-year liberal arts program without diluting it? I guess you could take out the electives and the 'core curriculum' stuff that's not strictly part of an English or whatever degree, but isn't that killing part of what makes a 4-year degree special? I mean, we've turned universities into a requirement for getting a job, but nominally a 4-year degree is supposed to differ from a 2-year degree in that you're getting a full higher education with advanced maths, introductory sciences, and exposure to fields of study beyond your major.
I get that the OP is proposing exactly that because the 'well rounded education' isn't helping people get jobs, but that wasn't meant to be the point of university education. If you get rid of the aspects meant to broaden the student's scope and replace it with vocational training I'm pretty sure that you would rapidly see the development of post-secondary programs designed to replace those lost electives and non-major requirements, and likely not long after that you'd see non-vocational jobs wanting applicants to have 6-year BA+ degrees.
I feel like a standard 4-year liberal arts program really isn't that difficult. They're designed so that you can take 15 hours of class per week, and graduate in 4 years. If you're doing a standard 40 hour work week, that leaves you 25 hours a week to study and do homework, and you'll still have evenings and weekends free. I realize that a lot of people drop out, but it's rarely because the program itself is too difficult- mostly it's because of other stuff outside of school that takes up too much time, like working a job. So sure, if you're working full time and going to school that'll be difficult, or if you're trying to do some sort of crazy triple major. But if you're just going to school full time and doing a standard program, there's no reason you can't squeeze in some extra hours for vocational training. And maybe if you do that, you'd be more comfortable taking out student loans and wouldn't need to work an outside job as much. if the training was some sort of apprenticeship program, you might even get paid for it.
See, I think that is an outmoded and uneccessary conceit. Why four years? I mean presumably six (or seven or twenty) years would make a person even more well rounded, and yet we don't push that. It seems to just be a historical relic that we have an unhealthy fixation with. Hence why I'd rather just attempt to get people into classes on an ad-hoc basis and reserve degrees for things that actually require them (and the term could float, maybe computer engineering is fine at 4 years whereas chemistry is best served by 5, or whatever).
I think you are misunderstanding the pressures on hiring people faced by firms. They can't just demand whatever requirements they want in a vacuum. Their hiring requirements are driven by both the requirements of a given job and the supply of applicable candidates. They require college degrees currently largely because they can afford to do so.
If there were suddenly a dearth of people with college degrees they would drop that requirement wherever that requirement wasn't particularly relevant to the job in question. I mean, they may still require mechanical engineers to require mechanical engineering degrees, but that is only because the cost and risk of training Joe Public into a mechanical engineer is prohibitive for the firm for extremely uncertain gain. So not all college degree requirements would vanish, but many of them would.
I guess I can see that. I did a double major in physics and math in 3 years and worked 40 hours a week, so I tend to think that anyone should be able to do any major. But I know a lot of people seem to have trouble with degrees as-is, and not everyone is cut out for vocational-type work in the same way that not everyone is cut out to be an editor or writer or whatever your liberal arts degree is nominally meant for. As long as jobs are still requiring degrees I'm not sure we should add any additional onus on people trying to get one.
At what point do you call it a degree, then? I mean, is a chemistry degree what prepares you to be a lab tech? A chemical engineer? A research chemist? A chemistry professor? How about for fields where the degree doesn't really translate directly to a job except at the professor level (English, Art History, Math, Physics, Philosophy)?
I get that, but the proposed vocational addition thing isn't going to fix any problems. As I see it there are two possible outcomes:
1) The increased class burden causes a lot of students to drop out, making it even harder for them to find jobs (until, eventually, there are few enough graduates that hiring departments stop asking for unnecessary degrees).
2) People go anyway and get the additional vocational training, flooding the vocational market in the same what the entire market has been flooded by people with liberal arts degrees. A few people get jobs who otherwise wouldn't and there are more plumbers/carpenters/etc. around, but for folks who get a 2-year vocational degree instead of a 4-year it's even harder to find a job.
Unless you make getting a degree extremely difficult it's going to take a long time before enough people don't get them that the degree requirements for jobs go away.
College as an investment only works if it helps you get a job. College at 40k a year, hell 20k a year, is only worth it as an investment in your future. So typical liberal arts degrees seem like they're not really worth it. I think a better idea would be to make bachelor's degrees much more streamlined and shorter, and increase the number of post-grad degrees, increase the amount of low-cost education available to adults, for those topics which are the more liberal arts ideals.
I apologize if this doesn't make a lot of sense, I'm still working things through in my head and trying to sort out what I think the problems and solutions are.
Institutions can sort it out, alongside industry. For those jobs where a degree doesn't translate to a job, they would hopefully back off of requiring a degree if we shaped the incentives accordingly. I'm not going to deny that shaping those incentives would be an enormous challenge, but our existing education market isn't functioning all that well.
For fields where a degree does make sense, I would hope that some sort of equilibrium would be reached. For lab tech jobs, maybe a 2 year Lab Tech degree would be created. If firms thought they didn't need that much education (presumably 2 year Lab Tech graduates would be demanding higher wages to recoup their educational investment), they would start hiring one year grads. The problem with this line of thought is that the transition from one system to another would be risky and perhaps a freer market wouldn't work. But it is extremely hard to tell since the current market is so distorted.
Oh yeah, I don't like the votech/liberal arts combo idea. I mean, I'd rather try to change the cultural narrative and modify the incentives offered. Though again, easier said than done.
I'd definitely agree that our existing system needs work at all levels: primary, secondary, post-secondary, job-requirements... But there seems to be a theme both in your post and in the OP that, to one extent or another, the point of higher education is job training. I don't think that I agree. A degree in engineering trains you to be an engineer, but I feel like the job is less the point of the degree and more a byproduct. Turning universities into job-training centers might improve the quality of job applicants, but I think that doing so would be destroying something important. Knowledge for its own sake. Learning for its own sake. Maybe we're destroying it anyway by increasing the cultural expectation that everyone should have a 4-year degree, I don't know. But I think that universities serve a critical role beyond getting people ready for their career.
That's why I think it's a much more desirable goal to see job requirements drop, allowing universities to serve those students who actually want to learn rather than being High School Part 2 and "proving that you can work on something for 4 years". When I was in highschool that was, word for word, what I was told the point of highschool was. Of course fewer students would only mean higher tuitions... but university tuition is a whole other kettle of fish.
Professional, vocational/occupational, and technical degrees/certificates are supposed to be job training.
With rare exceptions (pre-med, pre-law, nursing, etc.) I don't think that any 4-year degree is meant to be job training. Even technical degrees like the physical sciences, computer science, etc. don't really prepare you to go start work the day after graduation. They give you a background in the relevant theory and how to solve problems in your field, but being a research chemist is pretty different from being a chemistry major.
Unless you meant technical degrees like as given by technical colleges and such, in which case <thumbs up>.
I noticed that there was very little attention put towards vocational training in high school. My grade 8 teacher even discouraged students from doing anything nonacademic. Much attention is put into getting students into colleges and universities but is it really necessary? Seems silly to me. It doesn't benefit society from having people accrue debts as a student for no reason...
"Accrue." That's a word, right? When the hell did I pick that up?
Well, my proposal was to seperate degrees from education to some extent. So a degree would imply a certain level of relevant job or pseudo-job related experience in preperation for a career path. No, an engineering degree isn't going to get you the exact same experience as that of a working engineer, but it gets you a pretty good distance there. At least compared to someone going from Art History to working as a human resources person for instance. And said degree certification could be divorced from the traditional path of 4 years = degree. Sort of like a somewhat more advanced vo-tec where your period of training would extend past 2 years.
And on the flip side, you could still take classes in whatever you fancy. And we could retain varying levels of subsidy if so desired. It would just be seperated from an actual BA/BS degree. So try to orient people to take classes in Mozart or whatever isn't traditionally rewarded by the marketplace, and yet don't bind them into taking on staggering levels of debt to get a degree in Music Theory if they wouldn't be well served by it in terms of a career. I am advocating making the pursuit of interesting topics fundamentally different from the pursuit of a 4 year degree.
This is pretty much exactly the case, to me, it's already destroyed. That ideal of learning only existed in universities as long as the people in them didn't need to work for a living. Once those people started to need to get jobs, the focus changed, as it should. Especially now, when there are much cheaper options. If you want to learn for its own sake, there are plenty of books, documentaries, lectures, and web sites you can visit on your own, for much cheaper than attending a university. This isn't the 16th century any more, learning materials are widely available.
The only reason colleges exist is for the degrees. The purpose of a degree is to show to someone else that you did the work there and are competent in something. The only reason to get one of those is for a job, or some other position where you need qualifications.
Trades are necessary, and often go unfilled because.... well many reasons probably. Hard work, shitty conditions, on call, less pay, etc. But people have been taught that a carpenter is less valuable than X profession. So people stopped being carpenters and went to college to get a degree to become X.
Fuck thats all over the place, but I'm sure you get my point.
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I have a comp science degree and I went on a few interviews post-graduation, which made me realize my degree alone didnt get me into a position to confidently say "i can help your company"
I then took a job at geek squad (which my degree did let me confidently say I could do a fine job at) and then looked for work. I eventually took an unpaid internship on the side, which was "embarasing" since I had my degree already. But that landed me a full time position with that company, and that led me to experience which led me to find more work.
I now have a "big boy job" and with every year of experience, will likely lead myself to find work easier in the future.
Even with a degree as useful as mine, it still didnt mean I can just hop up and land a great job.
My brother has a communications degree and is 28 and lives at home and works retail.
I have a friend who got a design degree, luckily he is very very talented and will find work. However, even without a degree he would probably be fine. Theres too many people in his school that have little talent and expect their degree to let them do what they love.
On the flip side, I have a buddy who has a degree in marketing, and is making twice as much as me to "project manage" (bug me and other friendson AIM). He just graduated and quickly moved to the city and landed a sweet job. Then again he is very social and has tons of connections.
I also know a guy who had a poly sci degree, and depsite dedicating his college life to that degree and knocking it out of the park, then getting a masters, he cant do anything with it. Why? Because what good is a poly sci degree?
To say the issue is that universities dont offer these courses is to miss the point. The point is that no kids these days (generally speaking) grow up aspiring to be a plumber/builder/carpenter/electrician. The demand is for higher academic pursuits. What the educational institutions are guilty of is perpetuating the myth that there are jobs for all the students at the end of it. But then it's their business to do so...
I studied HR and L&D, but it was under the heading of "Management". We had a lecturer in one of our classes ask "how many of you are doing a business management degree" *most peole raised their hands*. "How many of you are taking any Maths/Stats/Accountancy courses as part of your degree?" *Only a fraction of people raised their hands*. the point was that you could get a business degree without these elements. A pretty bizzare thought. But why? Because people don't like maths... By removing it from the sylabus, it increased the demand for the course - especially in an industry that is so competitive.
So, I fear that many people act under the false assumption that Higher Academic Institutions have any other movive other than to make $.
I do acknowledge that some schools trade off their name, so there is a driver for them to hold the quality of the education higher - but these are definitely the minority.
While this is true I still believe that studying engineering or comp sci is going to be at least an order of magnitude more applicable to a job than say a degree in English or art history.
Pretty much everyone I know in the engineering school at my college is now doing something directly related to their degree. Most of the people I know who did liberal arts degrees are not doing anything related to their degree because how many writers and sociologists does this country need?
You can bust your fucking ass off fighting other job candidates to answer a congressmen's phone in a local office and drive them around when they are in town.