Yup. When I was taking Engineering Economics, the professor made sure to take time to calculate out the rate of return in salary both with and without a masters and a doctorate. The masters and doctorate started at a higher rate, but they started later and never made up the loss of those early earning years.
The lesson, he said, was that you got your BS, went out to work, and if a higher degree was necessary, you got the company you were working for to send you back to school. The only excuse for getting a PhD right out of the box was having a sincere desire to teach at the college level.
If it helps, the kids who raised their hands are probably :rolleyes: at the others on the inside, and thinking the same thing you are. “How did these idiots get here?”
I went to college for the first time straight out of high school, and failed miserably at it from the third year on. I am going back (this is my first semester at the local CC), and I have discovered that the idiot kids that I despised the first time around are still there - they’ve just changed bodies and taken off half their clothes. Any day now, I’ll be shrieking at them to pull up their pants, do their homework, and get off my campus!
Case in point: the girl in my voice class who claimed that her “brain just doesn’t store things like that! Trying to remember the exact words is HARD!” 'Cause, you know, she’s never had to do vocabulary exercises before, or learn what the right word is for the part of the body you’re using.
Actually, the thing is, I’m not one of those professors (I’ve had them; I know what they’re like). I like my students, I like teaching, and my students like me; I almost never fail to establish a good, relaxed rapport with my classes, where we can banter and kid along with the serious stuff of teaching. So I don’t think the problem is that they knew and didn’t feel comfortable raising their hands; I think the problem is that they really didn’t know.
Well, I was thinking about this after class, and I pretty much figured that they wouldn’t have learned about the big bang in high school. After all, high school physics is not going to get into big bang cosmology (unless you went to a high school very different from mine); and AFAIK most high school students don’t take astronomy (our high school didn’t even offer it). But I figured that any person who paid any attention to what was going on around him, in magazines, on TV, etc., would have learned what the big bang was, even if that person didn’t know any real details about it.
I went to a small, selective liberal arts college, took only bio in high school, and could have told you about Planck’s constant and virtual hydrogen and red shift and all that business. I can’t speak for contemporary high school science training, but that sort of thing was, y’know, ambient in the gestalt in my day.
Bah. Anything which I wanted to learn I simply looked up in the nearest book or encyclopedia (or went to the bookstore or library). The problem isn’t that the kids don’t know about the Big Bang so much but that they associate learning and knowledge acquisition strictly with the classroom, and not as a prime directive for every human being to pursue on their own terms. The thirst for knowledge simply isn’t there in the first place, and you can’t teach that; instead they have learned that if they jump through Hoop X and slip Tab A into Slot B they get the grade they want, and the knowledge is forgotten a year or three later, havong served its short-term purpose.
[Okay painting with a broad brush to make a broader point]
I too find it difficult to believe that someone at that age would never have even heard of The Big Bang. I remember when I was a kid, watching a Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, and one of the episodes referenced it. That’s right, even children cartoon shows mention it. I’m guessing that they had at least heard of it, but they don’t really know what it is. Like if someone hadn’t been exposed to any Christian lore or art growing up, and heard the phrase “The Last Supper” before, but wouldn’t be able to say what it is exactly.
In Spanish, el Big Bang. This is NOT a Pulp Fiction joke.
Whomever wrote Spain’s current law of Compulsory Education must have been in cahoots with the No Child Left Behind folks. They’ve made it pretty much impossible for a student to repeat a course, they’ve redefined repeating a course as being “a failure” (uhm, no… a failure is when you get people who are 21 and still retaking 8th grade because that way they get to leech from Mom and Daddy rather than get off their butts and work), and we’re getting people who reach college without being able to “write a sentence in non-1337-Spanish” when requested to do so.
Hear, hear. Count me among the liberal arts types who thinks science and math deserve enormous respect and everyone is responsible for being scientifically and mathematically literate. The OP’s students should be required to take some kind of remedial coursework before being allowed to graduate, if they can’t do any better than that.
I was in two different grad schools in the 1980s. In one there were only three women in our grad school department, all foreign-born. In my other school, I was the only American doctoral student (there were, in the time I was there, two US-born Master’s students, too).