Is A "Well-Rounded" Education a Good One? 741
"In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company.
In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages on Macintosh, they reply, "Why would I have to do that?" Most of them don't even think of Linux as an operating system, but more as a hacker's toy. Forget about asking them to make it Mozilla or Lynx compatible. They don't want to waste their
time. But the University will make sure it is ADA
compliant, since any institution that receives federal funding must require this...
Don't most "big picture" lessons come with experience, through person's journey from entry-level employee to a skilled IT/business professional? Wouldn't it make more sense to teach things that will help students early in their careers, like technical skills and other trade/foundation skills that are often required of entry-level, non-management employees? Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or CIO needs to make? Do companies really want me to spend more time diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first
place? (What about just documenting the code?) Knowing the big picture is good, but how do you get to that level if you don't have any skills?
My question for Slashdot readers is: Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
10 years is a long time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have any idea what you are going to do for your first 10 years after school? That's quite a long time. Knowing a variety of different subjects is pretty useful if your original career plan doesn't work out.
Public Vs. Private (Score:3, Insightful)
It may seem short sided now, but wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of your examples are valid, but many are not. I think that you have to realize that it is total imposible to build a Gantt chart for an entire project in a semester. Just like it would be imposible to build a entire peice of useful software. There are always corners that are cut. You need to yourself, abstract what is being taught into the general principles. Those don't change with time, your first 10 years or anything else.
I think people look at college as learning the details, it is not about the details, they are unimportant. The idea is that you need to learn the principles.
Teaching how not what (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, you will remember a good portion of the material presented when I'm being taught how to learn. But that's not really that important.
A well rounded education is going to be better anyways. People have terrible writing skills, and at least if they have to take more classes they should improve them (in theory -- but how you can get to college and not know algebra or basic writing skills is a failure of elementary/high school education).
Education vs. training (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:University isn't worth all that much nowadays (Score:2, Insightful)
There's nothing more irritating than some self-righteous hot-shot programmer type touting himself as God's gift to software development -- especially when he/she has no grounding in any formal theory or concepts that are usually better taught in a good University setting.
Specialist vs. General Practitioner? (Score:1, Insightful)
However, because my degree was from a discipline that favored the big picture over specialization, I am better at more things, rather than just excellect at one thing. Because of the broad-minded thought processes that my discipline encourage in me, I'm now the senior programmer that all the really difficult tasks get assigned to. In that regard, I'm like the old country doctor who's seen everything. The specialists (the C and Java programmers) know their craft very well, and are far better at their chosen path than I am.
However, they always fail to see the big picture. They rarely understand anything outside their craft, or worse underestimate significance (usually in areas of hardware, or systems communication), and it is a deliberate shortcoming of their C.S. degree, which preaches that skill at one thing easily tranfers into skill at another. A virtuoso violinist will have difficulty transferring their skills to a tuba, and a marathoner will have problems transferring their skills to the sprint. Just knowing C perfectly does not mean that you will be able to write wonderful programs in C++.
As a result of my broader education, and my broader experience (since I count nothing outside the realm of what I need to learn, and C.S. majors tend to ignore everything outside their favorite software of language), I am now paid almost twice what the other programmers earn.
There is nothing wrong with being a specialist. However, I find that my work is more varied, more fun, and I frequently get to chose what things I want to work on, and what menial tasks I get to assign to someone else.
Yes, I'm full of ego, but I am critical of all disciplines that encourage a narrow knowledge. It is my goal to learn all that is learnable. I don't have to be a know it all, nor am I, but I do have to know the boundaries of my education, my abilities, and my knowledge, and I must better myself, and my work, every day. If I do not know something, I readily admit it, and seek to provide an answer, or to direct the problem to someone who can provide an answer.
You must ask yourself if you are willing to fall into the trap of being a knowledge/skill specialist as your degree program is intending, or if you will deliberately, and from your own effort, fill the gaping voids in your education that you have already identified.
Which provides more fulfillment, and longer-term employment? The programmer-blacksmith, which turns you into a blue-collar laborer, interchangeable and discarded at a moments notice? Or a versatile idea engineer, who identifies changes before they approach, adapts with the changes, and presses eagerly and intelligently on?
Foundations (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not to say peripheral subjects is not a good idea - in moderation. Take a semester learning something non-technical just for fun. Among CS students in Lund, psychology and philosophy are both very popular (and a semester of psychology is what landed me in cognitive science...). The point is not to learn a useful work skill during that semester, it's to pig out on something just because it's fun to learn. The point is to do it in moderation; having peripheral subjects half of all your college time seems way too much.
/Janne
Re:No. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:5, Insightful)
For example -- the graduates from my college tend to be well-rounded thinkers not so much because the school trains them that way, but rather because it weeds out those who do not have the ability. (1100 inductees, 837 graduates, woohoo!) The graduates from Podunk U of South Carolina were probably hicks who were never good at thinking to begin with, so even if you sent them to Harvard or Oxford, they wouldn't somehow magically be transformed into critical thinkers with good leadership ability and an inate charisma.
Ad: One slightly used soapbox for sale, $.02, or highest bidder...
Well rounded is better (Score:4, Insightful)
Specific skills are only REALLY directly applicable for a very short span of time. By the time you get to the place where you could use the "practical" stuff, it will be deprecated. (e.g. If your school taught you VB programming, by the time you graduate and get a job, people would expect you to know WSH or C#)
In my school I had the benefit of a curriculum which tried to balance practical information (how serial ports worked) with theory (signal propagation delay.) When I graduated I was able to make cables, because I had a bit of experience doing that, but I also understood the requisite theory behind protocols.
When I learned that ARCNet was a token-passing protocol, and ethernet was csma it helped me to make the transition. I knew more than just that the ARCNet adapters needed a unique MAC and that Ethernet adapter MACs were hard-coded. I knew enough to easily make the transition to the "new" technology - the same was true when I began to work with TokenRing.
Additionaly, the object theory I learned has been greatly helpful in my understanding of components, layers, directories, code libraries, etc. If I had merely learned the practical technology application, I would have been poorly prepared for the innovative technologies that were to come.
One thing to keep in mind is that what you learn in school is foundational for what you will learn once employed. You will learn throughout your career. If you do not, you will lose your job (or wish that you'd lose your job.) University is the place to learn more about learning. Those skills will benefit you for a lifetime. You may start out at the same level as the person who went to trade school to learn programming, but your deeper understanding will allow you to move up much more quickly than that person.
Finally, and most importantly, it's people skills and not technical acumen that determine your earning potential. If you define success as title and pay, learn to interact with others and that will help you attain your goals much more rapidly than being able to code more widgets than the next guy. (Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is an excellent book that those business majors are reading right now. That's why they are the "B" part of PHB.)
Regards,
Anomaly
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you'd like to know more about this, please email me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.
The goals of higher education (Score:2, Insightful)
The university [wisc.edu] where I did my CS degree [wisc.edu] maintains that CS majors, like other students in the college of Letters & Sciences, take a majority of classes outside the major - 80 credits of the 120 needed for a baccalaureate degree must be outside the declared major. As a result, CS grads need to have a decent background in literature, history, hard sciences, and social sciences. This does a lot for critical thinking skills. The opposing view is that CS students should be "prepared for industry", which essentially boils down to teaching some vendor's tools exclusively - Oracle DBA classes, MS programming tools, Cisco certifications.
I'm firmly of the opinion that CS students should be kept in the traditional academic program. Good analytical skills are worth more in the long run than knowing how to use vendor tools right out of the box. Bear in mind that the average adult goes through seven career changes in a lifetime - a general education will still be useful to me when the paradigms of today come crashing down.
Questioniable Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly as all studies show folks changing careers several times in their lifetimes to train exclusively for one type of position seems to me to be needlessly limiting. Furthermore the assumption that an advanced education is only obtained as a means of advancing one's-self in a profession is a remarkably presumptive one.
The skills that have been invaluable in my life weren't the slot-A/tab-B mechanical stuff that seems to be advocated but rather means of thought, formulating opinions, understanding situations, making decisions, and just understanding the world generally. Knowing how to learn, resources and techniques for obtaining and structuring further knowledge, as well as familiarity with the various world-views one will interact with in life (both professionally and privately) are things that are well developed in a broad education.
That these lessons are often taught in framework makes them appear directly relevant to their subject but these are broadly applicable skills even if not always approached as such. Understanding how to manage folks gives one insights into the actions and goals of your own management. Learning certain types of finances provides an entry into understanding all other related types of finance. Exposure to a broad range of subjects allows one to make informed decisions about what is interesting or amenable to one's intellect and what is less so.
By the way, I'm an IS professional who was seduced away from college by the lure of earning good money and a more interesting life then studying topics I wasn't interested in. I don't regret the course of my life and feel that I've obtained an excellent education from my own efforts but would appreciate at some later time the opportunity to once again devote myself to less-distracted learning in an environment so amenable.
I've recently begun running into barriers resulting from my not having a degree (of any sort) and have so far been able to negotiate these but they are becoming more and more bothersome. Indeed some peers in the same situation have begun obtaining cheap degrees simply in order to appease employers.
Back to the main point however, there are many folks with different needs and goals and a vast array of institutions for learning. It seems to me there's very little chance of determining a generalized answer and everyone need rather to determine what is right for their own unique needs and goals.
A well rounded knowledge base is a Good Thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are, IMHO, two solid things that constitute a serious education. One is a broad comprehension of many fields. When one has this knowledge, one can generalize approaches and draw on many different patterns of thought. The holder of such can be called "educated", but perhaps "instructed" might be a better term.
The second is to know at least one subject deeply -- to the point of mastery. There are major changes in how you think when you have focused yourself enough on any one field. You know its boundaries, where it is malleable, the history of the field and what questions have been answered, and how evidence is evaluated in the field. The holder of this kind of training can be called "intelligent", and it is the practice of this that creates knowledge.
Both are required to call a person fully educated, and it is laughable to think that the average person, with average dedication, can complete this by the end of their bachelor's degree at the age of 22 or so. Currently schools try to teach the former, and only in certain fine companies will the latter be picked up by the cunning. Neither one is really useful by themselves -- the unintelligent educated man can make insights, but accomplish little; the uneducated intelligent man can achieve much that is empheral or unwanted.
In response to your final question, I should say "screw what a company really wants". What is needed is for a student to know a broad enough base to keep their mind open, and a willingness to work hard to develop focus and intelligence. You are soft iron -- you will be forged.
Re:A course that I wish had been available (Score:2, Insightful)
Or...
* You can be right, or you can be rich.
(Humility 101)
Re:It may seem short sided now, but wait (Score:2, Insightful)
Ahh, there's the problem! You should be looking for Stanford grads, not Standford! *grin* Reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert's boss introduces a new manager from "Harfurd University."
But seriously, I know these people, too. My upper level CS classes were full of people completely incapable of making simple changes to their
A well-rounded education is one in which other skills are learned that are not necessarily directly related to one's major. Intelligence alone doesn't ensure a well-paying job. A "well-rounded" education teaches you how to think abstractly, analyze complex problems, interact with others, perhaps to even understand them better (and manipulate them to your advantage -- I'm not exactly joking).
I think people look at college as learning the details, it is not about the details, they are unimportant. The idea is that you need to learn the principles.
This is true, but many colleges (mostly public institutions) are pressured by industry to teach "the details" because they don't want to have independent thinkers that want to design the next operating system, ORDBMS, etc., they want productive drones that bang out code, or set up a router, or whatever needs doing for the moment. Students also apply pressure in this direction, because they want to have jobs when they graduate.
Re:A course that I wish had been available (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that a University is an institution of higher learning, not a job training center. Their goal is to impart knowledge and expand the scope of knowledge, not to get you a particular job. The former role is of course their historical origin, and, I think is very worthwhile, because it is that attitude that continues expansion of knowledge in many fields.
This especially applies to fields that are not terribly marketable, such as some of the humanities, arts, and pure math and science. While these may not be cash cows directly, their developement does lead eventually to innovation with commercial or political application, or enrichment of the culture as a whole. I think these are very worthwhile, even essential goals that must be maintained. Many people at Universities these days (both students and faculty) want to turn them into vocational school. While I think the school definitely has to provided guidence to resources, it is wrong to pervert an institution of higher learning into a job training center.
I think there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting an education that just trains you for a job. There are certainly places for that, places more like DeVry or Strayer, so you might look into something like that and/or interships.
Finally, I think that they don't teach all the neccessarry skills for an entry level position also as a pragmatic matter. They simply can't. The variety of requirements for different jobs are too large or it requires an amount or kind of experience (say coding a major project), that they can't provide in the limited setting of classes. I think they feel that they can't teach you the specifics, so the best solution is to teach you the things that will allow you to learn the skills you will need, and integrate them into a coherent framework.
What is the purpose of education? (Score:1, Insightful)
I think education should not be about making a living; rather it should be about making a life. How can education contribute to living better? Job training is one way, but only one.
Learning to think and analyze problems is a start to a more well-rounded education, and will benefit students more fully in the long run, whether one is a geek programmer or an English teacher.
Learn to develop your opinions and beliefs, support them by learning how to construct a good argument and to write well, and be open to revising these beliefs where appropriate.
Re:A well rounded education is good because... (Score:2, Insightful)
I believe that this hints at the (unfortunately) changing role of many higher learning institutions. At many colleges, there has always traditionally been this dichotomy between the information one learns which can turn one into a more worldy, knowledgeable individual, and what sneaks its way into the curriculum because it can prepare you for a certain occupation. I personally don't feel that colleges should be methodically turned into white collar trade schools, although that is inarguably the current trend.
When we're left with nothing but skilled, IT professionals who can't answer the first 4 questions on "Who Want's to Be a Millionaire?", then we'll know that our colleges have failed us.
no well-rounded == no Monty Python (Score:1, Insightful)
My mother showed the Holy Grail to regular high school students, advanced students and to an adult education class. Each group laughed at different aspects, with the better educated students catching much more of the humor (and laughing the most.)
Learning to code to the exculsion of anything else isn't going to help you _create_ something with your skills, like, say computer games or spreadsheets. The game Civilization required a good bit of history, politics, economics and war to create, and to play. Creating a spreadsheet requires you to know that financing and accounting exist.
A well rounded education is also a common ground you can use to talk to other, non computer people. The hardest thing about programming isn't the programming. It's trying to communicate with non-computer geeks. Translating requirements spoken in Business Suit-ese into something specific enough to code is often painful. You need a little understanding of how They(tm) think. And since you don't have the specialized business knowledge that the suits have, they need _you_ to let them know what you can and can't do with computer programs (such as knowing that they can convert their hand updated spreadsheets and printed reports into a nightly job that pulls the data from a database, formats it in Crystal Reports and emails it out to the relevent parties thus saving X man-hours of labor/budget/time.)
In short, you need well-rounded education for humor, for creativity, and for communicating with groups that don't think like CS geeks so that you can actually use your uber-elite coding skills to do something useful.
Re:A directed education (Score:2, Insightful)
however, one of the more abstract courses I took in my undergraduate degree spent some time on critical discourse analysis which has changed the way I take in information supplied through newspapers and television.
if there is one skill that I think more people need, it is the ability to think critically. if more people thought critically we wouldn't sit back and let corporations bury the average person. we would take statements from politicians that are professionally prepared with a grain of salt and instead look for the deeper issues. it surprises me that you say
god knows that the average US student is starved of the ability to critically think.Re:Preventing ignorance is more important than tra (Score:4, Insightful)
First, as an employer, I want somebody who will do what I want them to do. If that means writing content only for Internet Explorer, then so be it. Second, I want them to understand what is valuable to me. If I want Internet Explorer specific content, I don't want them to meekly submit and do it, I want them to understand why it is important to me. Fresh perspectives that youth tends to have are indeed valuable, but only when they can fit within my existing framework.
This sounds like asking to have your cake and eat it, too. If you want to hire yes men, go right ahead. But at the same time, don't try to encourage understanding if you're coming across as inflexible. Here's our general office criteria (and maybe this is what you were getting at): Decisions or thought processes by management are adjustable to employee imput. We do occasionally encouter some resistence when we rip into an idea that we think is utter crap. But, the basis for our arguments is we are where the work is done and hence have working knowledge that perhaps doesn't occur to folks who repesent the dept in meetings six hours out of eight. Ultimately, we'll do as we're asked, but we won't hide our opinions along the way. By and large, our manager is good about listening and making adjustments where they need to be made. It's expected that no one is above discussing the reasoning behind a decision.
Secondly, we've found that management "existing frameworks" can lead to valuable ideas being ignored or dismissed when raised by "new employees." Instead, we can find ourselves behind when six to nine months later, it becomes part of someone's "existing framework"
It doesn't matter what they "push" (Score:3, Insightful)
Your education is your choice.
The guidance is for that 94% of students who are in college because it's what teenagers do after high school and because HR departments act mechanically when sorting resume's and creating pay ladders. They don't know where they're going, so it shouldn't matter to you if they go nowhere. The school is just trying to make it look like their tuition isn't being as wasted as it is.
If you want to use your 4-10 years as training rather than renaissance-man building, that's what you pay the big bucks for. Load up on technology intelligence (math, science, engineering, writing), and take an archaeology or history class if you want to be bored in a different way for three hours a week.
A lot depends on when you went (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead of doing this, I spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek and reading ancient literary and philosophical texts. I think the course where I learned the most was a seminar when we read and analyzed Plato's Phaedo. There were only three guys in the course, so when we decided to meet five times a week instead of three, no one stoppped us.
Of course, this was long before Bjarne invented C++, when there was no fork1() around, and no pthread library to play with. However, the syntax of classical Greek is about the only thing I can think of that is actually more complicated than the syntax of C++. Well, maybe if you through in all the subtleties of STL...
Many of the guys I've worked with have similar diverse backgrounds. We did what we wanted when we were young, and then settled down to earn a living. That's the meaning of school, after all; I don't have to tell you Greeklings that 'skholia' is the word for leisure.
One of the sharpest consultants I ever met, who is very well paid and always in demand, never even touched a computer until he was in his early thirties. He majored in art, drove a taxi, ran a theatre company, went to law school, etc, etc. He told me that the best way to live is to be retired during your youth, because if you wait until you're old to retire, you won't be able to do what you want.
Bad Sample Set (Score:2, Insightful)
The main purpose of undergraduate study is to prepare a student with the skills of how to think. If high school is seen as the time when a student learns how to absorb knowledge, then the university makes much more sense as a place to learn how to _use_ knowledge. How to go beyond synthesis and regurgitation. The classic humanities and sciences curriculums serve not merely to teach mathematics or history or english or chemistry, but they teach a student how to think.
Over the past fifty years, the American academic system has been under siege by pundits insisting that school teach students things that they can use immediately. This is what allowed business schools to gain legitimacy in the academic system, and what has caused much of the natural and social science curriculums to become much more geared to "the first year in the workforce".
In short, the types of majors that are increasingly taking over the American university system are disciplines that would have been found at trade schools or colleges two generations ago.
Is this a good thing? Absolutely, for the businesses who profit greatly from cheap, well-trained labor that schools churn out each year. However, having computer scientists who have no background in other areas of study does a disservice to both the individual and to the society. When Jefferson and the other radical framers of the Constitution talked about a well-educated populace, they were not talking about a group with advanced skills, but people who were well-rounded contributors to society. Their focus was not merely on the paycheck and spending power, but on the well-informed and active intellectual contribution we all should make.
Not having the skills and information to be well informed is one of the greatest dangers to democracy and the university is one of the final preservers of this institution.
Re:Education--don't get me started again! (Score:2, Insightful)
I was a CS major [cornell.edu], and I learned a lot about algorithmic designs, etc. More importantly, I spent those 4 years with other students from all over the country, I spent a year in Germany, and I took classes outside the core CS curriculum. I sucked at them, but I took them anyway.
College isn't about learning a skill, as some one else pointed out: Tech schools are about learning technical skills. College is about broadening yourself beyond the ability to read slashdot, and understanding why other people might not read it. For a lot of people its about getting out of home and not living with their parents: learning self sufficiency. It's about people who don't come from the same little burb they live in, and it's about learning to deal with people who have vastly different experiences and backgrounds from themselves.
I'm all for a broader educational experience. Six years after school, I wish I had learned more history, I wish i had learned more writing skills (as this post is witness to), and I wish I had learned more about other non-CS related sciences.
If you don't want to learn that stuff, then good. Don't go to college. Learn your skill, and be a grunt for the next 20 years of your life. If you want to learn, and understand , why you're doing something, then accept that the whole situation has to be a little more broad.
How it's done in Ireland (Score:2, Insightful)
In Ireland we have a broad curriculum up to school leaving age (18). Everyone has to do English, Irish, and Maths. Most people do at least one foreign language, usually French. Most people do three or four more subjects.
In Irish universities a typical undegraduate degree is three or four years. The first year is often quite broad, but only within faculty limits. A physical science student might do chemistry, physics and maths. A biological science student might do several biology topics, chemistry and physics. The course gets more specialised in year 2. Year 3 (and year 4) are essentially single subject in most science courses. Arts courses often have two majors in the last year or two. Vocational degrees like medicine, law, and engineering usually have separate courses, though biological science and medicine overlap to some extent. Our idea of university education is different to yours - not better, not worse, but different.
The end result in medicine is, in my experience, similar enough. Good people are those who can think, and use common sense in applying what they know. Bad people are those who can only regurgitate what we've taught them. Good doctors are primarily those who are good with people.
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:4, Insightful)
How people here have taken a "General Education" course or a "Western Civilization" course and ended up learning the same thing you learned in High School? How many have taken Math courses that could be transplanted to 11th grade with no changes?
You should be a "Well-rounded" person when you graduate from High School. Able to talk coherently about current events, understand most of the points of the English language, hell, even be able to find the area under a curve.
The current "need" for a BS when applying for an entry level job is simply a reflection of the failure of our public schools to make a well-rounded education a requirement for graduation.
College is for learning a specific skill ie. Doctor/Lawyer/Ph.D whatever, NOT for learning (Yet again) about the vagaries of the 2 party system.
-madajb
Your paying to prove yourself (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who is in the position to hire people, I don't look so much at certifications, and I don't even look so much at degrees. What I look for is a broad experience base, and the willingness to learn new things.
If you came to me looking for a job saying that you took all the courses for your degree except the general education classes, because they were a waste of time, there's no way I'd hire you. Says to me that you don't have patience, and aren't open minded enough to take on tasks that may require learning new skills. May be wrong, but that's tough, employers are going to call them as they see them.
Re:A course that I wish had been available (Score:2, Insightful)
Studying many things does NOT make one ignorant of all of them (as the lead stories writer so erroneously pointed out) it makes one well informed and gives one a broad bas from which he can draw knowlege and expand in many directions. A person who is trained in one thing only will not be able to synthesize information from many sources, will not be able to branch out and will be continually trapped into whatever their "practical" education gave them. Furthermore, it isn't as if there is no specialization in college....did the original writer graduate, I wonder?....once one declares his major, that becomes his focus. In the first two years I was "well rounded" taking foreing language, history, english, astronomy, psychology, chemical biology among other things. I declared as a history major and that become my primary (though not singular) focus.
A University education is meant to make one EDUCATED! The purpose is not to make one a great job candidate. To elevate the human race as a whole, and rescue our culture from the gutter, it is neccessary for each one of us to become as enlightened and educated about as many subjects as possible while maintaining a core sbject we are excellent in. For those who want practicality to come from their after-high-school education:
Get your second rate education at Devry and shut the fuck up.
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:2, Insightful)
Every level of one's education, one either intuitively aquires skills needed to perform their tasks, or the are taught them. In high school, they tried to teach proper "life skills", which would help us benefit in the future, but since there was such a broad audiance, there was no way to suit everyones future ambitions.
Collage / University is just the process of narrowing down the sample so that the individual is getting the teaching and skills that are most suited to their interests.
In my school, the graduates were not necessarily the most intellectual or brighttest, but the ones that could best adapt to the situation that they were put in.
Re:Teach Thinking! start early! (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe I missed the definition of "well-rounded", but this sounds well-rounded to me. I would not drop out of this sort of education, if I were you. I would add some sort of literature and writing class, if you haven't already taken enough them, but, clearly, you write beautifully and factually already.
It really hurts to read your description of how a wonderful class was ruined. All I can suggest is to think of that as a lesson, too, not that that makes the situation any better.
Re:Teach Thinking! start early! (Score:2, Insightful)
The first thing they did to us when I went to post-secondary, the grouped us randomly into roughly 20 people, and these people were your life line. Almost every project done was in groups, and all the classes were taken with the same people. This is the way life is when you are in the real world, so it makes sence to teach that concept in school. You don't chose the people you work with, but 99% of the time, you will be forced to work with people you: A - Hate, B - think are incompitent, or C - Can work well with.
I am telling you son, it will be a hard life for you if you can't play nice with the "idiots". Maybe you can be like me, and concider everyone the same.
St. John's, Annapolis--Interesting School (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, back to St. John's
Slowly things change. I realize that I'm accelerating myself into a dead-end of my life. For some reason at one point I actually wanted my own cubical. Why?
Eventually, in my mail I received something from a college named St. John's. I didn't know what to expect. But it was a lot different than everything else. This [sjca.edu] was the entire curriculum. And honestly, for a long time I would have rather died than read a single item on that list. But
Most of the people here, yes, will scorn at a liberal arts school and laugh when they realize you don't get a real degree there. But you'll learn something much more important than the fastest algorithm to sort though this list or the "least ass" way of formating your Java code. You'll learn about life. You'll read about people's successes, failures, and have an additional 4 years to understand where you really want to go with your life. I wasn't born to be a code monkey, or a lemming. I want to live the best, most full life I possibly can. And if that means I'm gonna drive a Ford, live in suburbia, have kids that come before my drunk fragging on weekends, so be it. I will love every minute of it. And if this post somehow makes someone look at their live and decide to change it, it would make me completely overjoyed. And if this post gets a score of 2 and gets buried in the database--so be it.
In conclusion, everybody will go where they want to go. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we're all destined to walk around with keyboards implanted in our chests and plug into boxes all over the planet. I bet some people here would be so happy and somehow manage to wire the Quake XII output directly into their brain.
What's so well-rounded about that? (Score:1, Insightful)
Honestly, I really don't think that sounds like a horribly not-well-rounded curriculum the poster was taking. Only programming and busness courses were listed. A well rounded curriculum is supposed to make you a better citizen, be able to talk intelligently about a broad range of topics, and other things of that nature. Art, literature, politics and a variety of sciences. These are things that will perhaps not affect your earning potential but help society in general (by passing knowledge on to your children and by knowing enough about the world to not elect morons to public office) and might make you more than the lifeless automaton your courseload suggests you desire to become.
If you do want to become just another computer guy, perhaps you want to get some hands on training. An internship could get you what you want. You could acquire skills quite quickly this way.
Re:No. (Score:2, Insightful)
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet,
balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take
orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze
a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Re:Teach Thinking! start early! (Score:2, Insightful)
I've found that working in groups too early on promotes the "someone else will do it" mentality. I like what they're doing with this kids school and I wish mine was like that back when.
TO THE POINT: A well rounded education is a great thing. Nothing seems to help people out more than forcing them into a good logic or philosophy class; the earlier the better.
Right now my education is everything plus computer science. I can't complain.
Tell me, what will you be doing in 10, 20,30 years (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that universities tend to teach a well rounded education, a little of everything, but this will almost certainly pay off in your later life, especially if you plan to move around a lot and get very high paying jobs. If you want a pointed career without a lot of advancement opportunities, then you can go for a much more direct approach to education, like college. However I know that all of the people that I have heard complain about how university was a waste of their time have changed their tune after the downturn of the economy, and a lot of the college grads who were laughing suddenly are unemployed.
When the time comes that you are bored with your job / get unemployed and get an opportunity for that job that was 15% better paying than before, there's a much better chance that you would be qualified for that job because of a much more "rounded" rather than "targeted" education. Yeah, in Grade 5 I didn't want to study french, "Why the hell would I ever want to go to France?" and here I am, living in France right now. In the early years of university I kinda skimped on the math side of courses, but I learned enough and had enough BS skills to wind up getting a great job doing cryptography. (It helps that I'm a very quick learner as well). There have also been a few other opportunities that I haven't been able to take because I was of the opinion that "Bah, why would I need to know how to do that?", and similarly there have been numerous times when knowledge of physics, astronomy, calculus, algebra, psychology, and many other "side courses" that I took have come in handy.
Finally, it's 5 years out of your life. Perhaps 2 or 3 more than taking a college degree. Consider it an "investment" in your future. Not only are university degrees looked at more favorably than college degrees, but you leave a number of doors open instead of closing them. I think spending 3 years of your life to leave your opportunities open in the future is a very smart idea, but then again that's just my opinion =)
College... (Score:2, Insightful)
How many of you have run across the sort of Comp Sci grad who can espouse the virtues of the Booch Method but can't write a freakin' shell script to save their life?
I don't care HOW you got your knowledge. If you spent $$$ for four years at Carnegie Mellon, fine. If you spent you evenings reading books and writing programs while you were working at McDonalds, fine.
What really matters is how well you can do the job that you are supposed to do.
College sometimes (and even often) helps, but it just helps.
Re:You mean, a liberal arts education? (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on, let's be serious. Is a broad range of knowledge what employers want? Not explicitly, but they do want people that can think critically and analytically.
More importantly, a liberal arts education has as its goal the development of GOOD CITIZENS. That is, citizens who will contribute to the dialoge and process that makes up a society and government.
Now, of course, you can know quite a bit about history and politics without ever taking a college class; you can also learn most of programming without taking a class (IMNSHO).
Regards,
Mark
An Education vs. A Trade (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll let anecdotal evidence speak for my argument: I have a friend who, in May, graduated with a degree in computer science. He works for a company doing web development and programming. He told me a couple of days ago that, while he can "program a mean computer," he feels, to a great extent, that he didn't get much out of his education. He started work for this company as an intern during his sophomore year. Mostly through working there, he acquired all the skills he needs to do his job well. The CS degree was just icing. I, on the other hand, am an English major spending my time studying literature and postmodern philosophy; none too "useful" stuff. The point my friend made was that, while he had picked up skills during his four years of college, he wishes he'd spent that time doing more what we'll call "critical thinking."
To me, an education is NOT about job training. I think that's a sad outgrowth of our current system. The simple fact of the matter is that most jobs do NOT require anything one learns in college. And, for those that do, the employee would've been better off entering into that job and getting four more years of experience in it than four years of a college "education."
I firmly believe that one should get a college education because they love learning, not because they want a job. I believe there are ten times as many people enrolled in universities as there should be. If the only reason you're going to college is because of societal expectations or to acquire a piece of paper so you can get a job, then those four years seem like a waste of time to me. If, however, you want to go because you genuinely want to learn then, by all means, enter into the wonderful world of academia.
If anything... (Score:1, Insightful)
In retrospect, however, it does seem to help, in the long term, especially if they're concentrating primarily on attaining a degree in Computer Sciences. It's much harder for a CS major to get a job in an unrelated market during recessions such as the one we're getting close to feeling now.
Re:A course that I wish had been available (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that you miss two important points. First, as valuable as a modern education is to somebody who learns from it, not everyone has the intelligence or personality to benefit from it. Having an alternative system so that people who don't fit in to the modern educational system are able to learn something and become productive members of society is very valuable. Second, that system still does exist and is actually quite strong still. Vocational education and even straight apprenticeship programs still exist; many union jobs, for instance, follow more that approach more or less closely. Also, much as it pains me to point it out, graduate school is much, much closer to a traditional apprenticeship program than most academics are willing to admit.
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:3, Insightful)
Understanding the concepts is a sign of intelligence. Being able to use applied knowledge is the same.
It kills me when people think they're really intelligent just because they got a 4.0 GPA or becuase they did really well because they "memorized the answers", not learned how to dod it....
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree. I think most of us would agree that memorization and intelligance are not one in the same, but being able to remember individual bits of information is clearly one part of a well-functioning brain. I happen to be quite bad at remembering pieces of data, so it's unsurprising that I chose a field of study in which it is more important to be able solve problems than remember things. However, I would say there are professions in which it is incredibly important to be able to remember and recall lots of information quickly. For example, when a good lawyer looks at a case, he or she should be able to immediately recall some other related cases that set precedence that might be relevant.
Don't underestimate the importance of memory.
Cheers,
Benjamin
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are taking classes that could be straight out of a high school, your college is guilty of dumbing down their curriculum. As someone with friends and family working in smaller colleges, I know there is a lot of pressure by the student body (and therefore the administration who watch the purse strings and attendence numbers, especially at smaller community-college-type private schools) to dumb down the curriculum.
There is an astounding gap between the intellectual ability of a high school senior and a college senior in terms of their ability to learn. Colleges are there to further refine your learning ability as you mature.
I work with some of the most gifted kids in the country (I work at the Illinois Math and Science Academy). These are kids who are going to go to Ivy League schools and places like MIT. And they struggle with some concepts and some of the more college-based ways of approaching subjects. Does this mean that our high schools are failing them? No, it simply means that they have not developed fully intellectually.
Colleges teach things like getting information from research journals, and learning from those. How to effectively look at original documents and judge their veracity.
What you are suggesting is that the only difference between a high school senior and a college senior is *what* they know. You obviously have not been around students in a learning environment if you truly believe that.
Colleges teach *how to learn* the same as elementary and high schools. They simply teach it at a much more advanced level.
Education in a Democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason I would be wary of such a focused education is for two simple reasons:
(1) Education after high school should be trying to mature the student's thought processes. Earlier education only hinted at how to do things right, in college you should realize from scratch what's the right way to do something, either to appease yourself or to meet the requirements in some deteremined process.
(2) Education in college, though not only limited to the classroom, must have at its core some level of civic responsibility built in. We need students who are educated and aware of issues in their democratic government so that beyond the day to day job skills they will acquire, they might be able to positively contribute to the society at large and preserve democracy.
This is coming from the perspective of a student at a 'national' university where one might hope students weren't always driven by concerns of wealth and prosperity in a position at some banking firm.
What companies want. (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no way 'starting a business' could be taught. This changes for each business. Networking and luck are at least as important as a good idea and hard work. You could study history to find out how other businesses were started, but there is no one formula for how to make it work.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
If the planning phase results in code that I can come along and modify in 6 months or a year, then it's well worth it. If a brand-new engineer comes on board and can understand how the whole thing works because of this documentation then it's worth it. Maintenance and adherence to the code vision for an organization is key.
Coding, and engineering in general must be thought of in a holistic sense. "How does it affect the organization?", "How does it fit into the product?", "Is this efficient relative to the rest of the product".
Too many people seem to write code in a fire and forget way that makes maintenance impossible.
In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company.
This is an interesting point. I'm thinking that people might be better employees if they had even an inkling of what their managers faced each day. (yes, I'm a techie that has become a manager, and it's not easy, at least for me).
In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages
The hardest thing for me to learn when I got out of school was that I didn't know the best route my company should take. I thought I did, and I had lots of opinions, but until you start your own company, and are faced with decisions like "do we support Macs?" or "do we support opera" or "do we use Microsoft Office or StarOffice?", you won't appreciate all that goes into such a decision.
Don't most "big picture" lessons come with experience
Rather than be down because your college tried to teach you big picture stuff, accept that no college can teach you everything. To grow to the limit of your capacity, you must keep educating yourself. Go to the library, go to professional meetings (even as a student). Ask questions, *listen* to the answers. Almost everyone can teach you something...you just gotta dig out what it is, and then pay attention.
My question for Slashdot readers is: Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
My company wants people who:
Will we find these people? I hope so, they're the kind of people I want to base my company on.
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:2, Insightful)
What are you all talking about? (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole point of college to do all the things that you can't do in Real Life. Going on 72 hour drinking binges, waving "save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus [zapatopi.net]" placards, and most of all, screwing like a rabid weasel on heat. That's what it's always been about, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't been, doesn't remember, or has a personality short circuit (and is probably wearing sandals and a knitted waistcoat).
This isn't a frivilous post, I just take a dim view of being condemned for "wasting" a college education. Let's see, I was such a wasted slacker at college that I barely passed the exams, but scamming my professors stood me in good stead for scamming my employers until I actually learned some useful skills. You can't be taught those kind of "life skills". Now, here I am ten years later, with the degree I wanted, a good job, the academia that I couldn't regurgitate on demand in an exam is actually coming back to me, and I have absolutely no regrets over missed opportunities.
You get one chance at life. Working your nuts off at college will get you a better degree and an early start on your career, but you have the rest of your life to work on your career, which is coincidentally the same amount of time you have to regret your missed opportunities. Ten years after graduating, your career will probably be the same either way, but one way you have pleasant memories of drunken orgies with hot chicks, and the other you have a lot of memories of hunching over a book.
College is about improvement. To my mind, hedonism is a goal, not something to be frowned on. We always hope that our children will have more than we had: I sincerely hope that I can provide my kids an opportunity to spend four years naked, vomiting and not giving a damn.
Switch to lifelong learning (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that you can, as part of a degree program, be "exposed" to various courses and that this will somehow make you well rounded is absurd. You only become well rounded when you struggle to organically integrate disparate kinds of knowledge and skills. Making an attractive and functional user interface is a good example of this kind of struggle. Ideally, you understand art, psychology, programming, as well as HCI as a distinct discipline in itself. Probably, you need a team to do this well, one that brings people with different backgrounds and temperments together who somehow can manage to avoid talking past each other.
The problem with making this happen is that our idea of education is ridiculously outmoded.
Our model of education is medieval. When the University was created, lives were short and the human store of knowledge small. At twenty one, a recent graduate had lived nearly half is life expectancy, and in four or five years could reasonably have been expected to plum every store of human knowledge to some depth. Furthermore, he could be confident that while he was on his deathbed, newly matriculated students would be receiving an education exactly like the one he did. The modern student graduates with perhaps three quarters of his life ahead of him. And each decade brings more change in the state of knowledge than entire centuries did before. Imagine how the medieval model of a gentleman's education would have changed if it had to prepare it's recipients had life spans of five hundred years.
In the standard University model, education is like collecting bricks to form into a tidy little cottage that you will live the rest of your life in. The challenge for the modern student is more like being prepared to swim and turbulent, uncharted ocean with unpredictable weather and treacherous currents. Ideas that safely lived on far shores, such as Islam, now affect us in our day to day lives and demand our attention and understanding.
Economic forces are undermining the value of University education too. Some years ago I participated in a symposium on higher education sponsored by the President's Council on Sustainable Development, as part of the Rio accords. The attendees were the most forward looking academics from every field of study. One of the greatest concerns that they had was elitism. Practically any dunce can get a University education provided he has enough family support. However promising students are often derailed by personal or economic setbacks. As University prices rise, this problem will eventually engulf the entire middle class of students. Universities, unless they change both their educational financial foundations, are in danger or becoming hawkers of meaningless tokens of class status (degrees).
I believe that there is an answer that is simple in concept but difficult in execution: We should scrap practice of dividing our lives into a "learning" epoch followed by a "doing" epoch, and live our lives as a single phase of "learning-doing".
The first steps in this program would look like this:
(1) Emphasize cooperative education programs (where students work in various fields to pay for and to enrich their educations.
(2) Provide more affordable paths to the current benchmark degrees (BS/BA) for nontraditional students.
(3) Deemphasize the four year path to degrees in favor of much longer ones intermixing work and study.
(4) Introduce more specific technical credentials (e.g. networks or compilers rather than Comp Sci) that could be achieved in shorter times. Use these rather than broader BA/BS degrees for entry level credentials. Creating these credentials should not be left to people with an economic interest in mindshare (e.g. MSCE). BA/BS should be more honorary, and require actual real life contributions in the field (e.g. a novel written or a computer system developed).
(5) Change the relationship of Universities to their alumni. Universities likewise divide our lives into a "student" epoch (when we learn) and a "alumnus" epoch (when we fund). Universities should use technology and other means to change their relationship so that people who would otherwise be "alumni" will still continue to learn from them and get academic counselling for the rest of their lives. As it stands, the system is now a fraud, where a sentimental fiction of connection with the alumnus is maintained so he can be milked for cash. The relationship to the alumnus should be real, substantive and robust.
(6) Provide for educational sabbaticals in all jobs, especially professional ones. These sabbatical should be used both for liberal pursuits as well as gaining technical skills.
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:5, Insightful)
University is about getting some basic knowledge in a number of fields so you learn how to think about different types of problems. How you tackle a history essay is different from a mathematical proof is different from a studio art assignment. University is meant to make you a well-educated person, not a well-trained person. If you are concerned about your technical skills in a particular field, go to a technical/vocational institute and take a training course. University is not job-training.