You’re right, it is stupid. If anyone posts to the thread and expresses the first point of view, be sure and point it out.
There is also a third point of view, equally stupid.
Regards,
Shodan
Nobody told me what to study when I went to college. I chose. I appreciated having that choice. Not everyone is going to make the best choice, and sometimes what appeared to be the best choice turns out to not have been the best choice in a few years. Sometimes the job market in your field crashes in your senior year at college, so you have to start with something else. I did not work in my field (IT) for a couple years after college, but the job I had before that (working at a neighborhood music store) was where I met my best friends. Then I got an internship, which became a full time job, and I’ve been at this career for over ten years now. Not everyone is going to have the same path, and all experience in life can be worth something depending on what you choose to take away from it. I wouldn’t change a thing, even if it wasn’t exactly how I imagined it all playing out when I started my first semester at college.
The OP has clearly argued in accordance with the first point of view, without stating it outright.
If someone goes to a hardware store, you can safely assume that they are going there because they need some hardware; you don’t need to criticize them for not going to buy bread, even if you were sure they ought to be buying some bread. Unless they are your family and they said they’d get bread.
Similarly, another person’s choice of school is not your business, unless they’re an immediate family member of yours.
And certainly what types of schools (after high school) are allowed to exist, and what courses they should teach, is the business only of the schools themselves and the students who want to go there.
I think a lot of people don’t get college. They go with this very high-school model that the school’s job is to make you do things and your job is to try to do as little as possible and get the grade you want. I have an English degree. I learned a ton–because I gave pretty much every class my absolute best effort. I didn’t just do the reading and write the papers, I strove to always do my best work, because I really loved it. I have no doubt you could coast through an English degree and not learn much, if you wrote “easy” papers instead of ones that fascinated you, if you read just enough to pass the tests, if you never stayed after to talk to professors or go to lecture series. Then you get our of college with few skills you didn’t start with. Whose fault is that?
And of course you need to be thinking about a career afterward, you can’t just assume that a degree will make that happen. I wanted to teach, so I did all the things I needed to do to make sure I could do that as soon as I graduated. I have a friend who was a communications major, which is a similar sort of thing: she got competitive internships as quickly as she could, and when she graduated she had specific jobs skills in addition to the more generic skills she learned in college. Other people in my major went on to law school or graduate programs. You have to have a career plan, or at least the first few steps mapped out. Sometimes that path starts with a liberal arts degree.
Sure. But your OP seemed to be approaching the issue from the standpoint of general trends or what colleges in general should be doing:
Does every college need one? Probably not; not every college needs a full physics, marketing or dentistry department, either. But you seem to be vacillating between trying to claim that making such cuts is appropriate for colleges in general and trying to present it as just another cost-saving option for some colleges.
Well, that might explain some things about your dissatisfaction with your English skills.
I don’t really understand why people seem to be so terrified of a field like gender studies having “little chance of career potential” just because there aren’t many jobs that specifically require a degree in gender studies.
I know several people who majored in programs with names like “gender studies” in college (e.g., Women and Gender, Gender and Sexuality, etc.), and they’re all gainfully employed in careers they like. Same for the several people I know who majored in English, history, philosophy or classics. (And these aren’t wealthy trust-fund babies, either; they all had student debt on graduating from college.)
Yes, it arguably takes more initiative and ability to parlay a humanities degree into a desired career track than it does to take the required courses in a specific vocational or technical field for a specific vocational or technical job and then go to the relevant specific vocational or technical jobs fair to find an employer who’s looking for a diploma with the name of your specific vocational or technical degree field printed on it and a warm body attached to it. But developing that kind of initiative and ability is one of the things that a broad college education is supposed to teach you to do.
What I think higher education really needs is not a narrower focus on immediate vocational training based on the transitory state of a rapidly fluctuating jobs market, but rather more serious cross-disciplinary education in all directions. We need English majors with a good command of statistics or chemistry, who could not only do interesting research on linguistic evolution and the history of science writing but also have more job options in, say, data analytics marketing or pharmaceutical development grant writing. At the same time, we need computer science majors with in-depth knowledge of film studies to develop new computer animation techniques, doctors with anthropology and political science backgrounds, and scientists with foreign linguistic and cultural knowledge to work on international teams. We should be expanding what we encourage our students to study, instead of trying to restrict it to whatever particular job title currently appears most frequently in the want ads.
To add on to my post from yesterday:
People think the point of a college degree is to get you a job. It’s not. It’s to teach you skills that will make you good at a job, which will give you the opportunity to learn more skills, which you can leverage to get other jobs. The anti-intellectuals in America honestly think college us just a rubber stamp to prove you have skills that you would have had otherwise, so they don’t understand why it costs so much or why people put so much store in it. Then they send their kids to school with that attitude, so the kids coast/don’t take it seriously/do the minimum, and so graduate not knowing how to do much. Then those kids can’t get jobs, or get stuck in an entry level job they could have done without a degree, because they don’t know how to do anything.
If you finished college feeling like you didn’t learn much, it’s because you actively avoided the opportunity. Then when you get a job, you likely do the same thing, which means you stagnate professionally because you never get better. College doesn’t fix that problem, but it didn’t cause it, either.
Let us, for the sake of argument, wind the clock back to the 1970s. Are you saying that if fewer college students at that time studied liberal arts, and more studied steel production, that both they and the country would be better off?
I think one thing that hasn’t been brought up here is the literally forced BS classes you need to take to get your degree that serve no real educational purpose, but make up ~half of your college credits if you want a degree.
I attended college long enough ago that I didn’t have to worry about non-dischargeable debt slavery haunting me the rest of my life, but in today’s college-cost climate this has got to be an even bigger issue - why should student’s interested in math and physics have to spend half of their $100k college expense on BS “gen-ed” requirements (or conversely, why should underwater basket weaving majors have to take math)?
In theory, there are ways you can certify that you are able to write a coherent paper or are capable of “aesthetic and interpretive inquiry” and suchlike without the classes. But in practice, those don’t really exist. You can test out of the lowest level of these with AP exams and CLEP exams, and I did both, but STILL had to take more than a year’s worth of ridiculous classes that didn’t really teach anything and were merely gatekeeping courses.
I resented it mightily at the time, and would have been even more irritated if I had been forced to pay $25k-$50k in non-dischargeable debt to take those, because these low level classes don’t actually teach anything, and only waste time you could have spent actually learning something that interested you.
That’s the primary thing I think of when I hear “liberal arts education,” is the colossal waste of time (and now money) that is being forced on millions of students to no real end. Sure, in theory a breadth of education is great and creates well rounded people with the skills to succeed in the changing job market, but the actual practice of it teaches precious little and involves soaking up $50k and 2 years that could have been spent actually going deeper into the topics that most interest students and would involve more actual learning.
I would be fine with it if there were actual ways you could test or certify your way out of all of them, or if sufficient 400 level classes (representing actual learning and skill deepening) in any given field could cancel out meaningless gen-eds in another (that are forgotten as soon as the last final is taken), but that’s not available anywhere.
Part of the problem is that we’ve got two separate issues here: what’s best for student learning, and the burden of student debt.
I think we need to address the problem of college financing separately from curriculum decisions. If a college education is supposed to be (at least for certain students) a good thing irrespective of specific career choices, then we shouldn’t have decisions about it constantly skewed toward monetizing college degrees by the pressure of massive levels of debt.
You have a point, but when it comes to decisions (and in the ideal world, curriculum policy and decisions), those are inseparably intertwined, though.
It IS two separate issues in the sense of what level of society you need to engage to address the problem (ie individual college-level vs federal debt-legislation level), but for the individual students, who are quite literally bearing all the costs both on the educational quality and financial fronts, I think they are part of the same whole that informs the questions of “should I go to college” and “what should I study in college.”
I don’t understand why this is a political issue, but I’m with the conservatives here. Trade and vocational schools teach trades. They don’t teach the skills required for white-collar jobs. The OP is effectively arguing that universities should teach more practical skills that translate to desk jobs, and I agree.
They’d be no worse off, and the country might in fact be better off because we might have become more efficient in steel production. But here’s the thing: not every liberal arts graduate would have been studying steel production. Some would have studied life sciences. Some would be in computers/IT. Some would be studying electrical engineering. Some would learn accounting, and so forth.
I think the missing piece of this puzzle is a major that trains students for the sort of posts they are likely to end up with: administrative assistants, government functionaries, managers, etc., without being overly focused on a particular white-collar field.
What low level, BS classes that don’t actually teach anything are you referring to?
I feel like Manda JO may have already answered your complaint.
I.e. maybe it’s your own fault that you didn’t learn much in those “BS classes.” You had the opportunity to learn from them; you just didn’t take advantage of that opportunity.
Or maybe those classes were poorly designed or poorly taught. As I said earlier, just because something has been done poorly doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing well.
Or maybe those classes really did cover things that you had already mastered. In which case the school should have done a better job with placement, and/or you should have done a better job choosing your classes.
Do you mean like a major in “Business” or “Management”? Those do exist.
I specifically quoted Manda JO in my response, because I felt she was ignoring the possibility that there are classes that are merely gatekeepers, that don’t foster the teaching of new “skills” to any great extent, and which have no real way to verify pre-existing skills that would mean you don’t need to take the class. So no, she didn’t answer my complaint.
As for me, as I said, I demonstrated mastery wherever I could - I had top scores on a handful of AP exams and took the CLEP exam for everything else I could, and it still wasn’t enough - minimum credit requirements and specific disallowing of CLEP credit in various departments still led to me having to waste my time in poorly-taught cattle-call classes whose grades depended on things like “attendance” (a sure sign of lack of real learning, IMO).
Yes, the school would ideally have done a better job with placement or testing-out alternatives, which don’t really exist in a comprehensive way. Or even better, could adopt something like I suggested, where additional 400-level classes could cancel out gen-ed requirements, because those actually demonstrate learning and deepening of skills in a way gen-eds will never foster. But they didn’t, and to my knowledge, the vast majority of colleges still don’t do this, and still require a substantial chunk of your education time and budget to be wasted in this way.
Mine is not an anti-education stance, it’s a pro-education stance, in the sense of wanting to favor the classes that actually result in the most real learning and engagement from students.
Thanks for the response. I’m still curious which specific classes you’re referring to. And whether you’re claiming that those classes shouldn’t have been offered, or that they should have been but you personally shouldn’t have been required to take them, or whether they should have been designed and taught differently.
When I think about my “ridiculous gate keeping courses”, I feel like I learned a lot that was useful to me. Did you really not learn anything about how to write a “coherent paper” or “conduct an aesthetic inquiry” in those courses? Were you–and all your classmates–really already so good at those things that the class had nothing to teach you? I (like most Dopers) was definitely one of the “very smart kids” in high school, but college still had a ton to teach me. There were classes I blew off, and I didn’t get much out of them, and there were classes that were dumb because of how they were taught, and I mourned the missed opportunity, but when I look at what the curriculum is trying to accomplish, it looks to me like has the capacity to produce people who are likely to be much more skilled, overall, than if we cut out everything non-major related.
It’s been many years, but I remember these as being particularly pointless requirements:
Biology 101 and 102 level
Micro economics 101 level
Psychology 101 level
Eng 101 level
Eng 102 level
History of the United states
Lit crit
Poli sci
Native studies (required in the state my college was in)
As to my opinion, I have no issues with any of them being OFFERED, and think it’s a good thing they are - people come to college with varying levels of knowledge in various fields after all, and various interests. I have issue with them being required to graduate with a degree which is a travesty and huge waste of time/money for a lot of people.
You can argue that there are alternatives such as AP tests and CLEP tests - believe me, I explored and exploited those alternatives to the maximum extent I could, and it still only got me out of about a year’s worth of those (and a little more than 2/3 the list, but there were more beyond those that were forgettable enough I just can’t remember that I had to take them).
On design and teaching, largely because they are required, the classes end up being cattle-call classes with disengaged TA’s droning to crowded rooms of freshmen who are mostly only there because they need to be to graduate.
If we moved to a model where they weren’t required (or at least could be comprehensively tested out of or compensated for with other 400-level classes), only the 10-20% of folk who are actually interested in the subject matter would be there, and the teaching quality could go way up - and as a bonus, all of the students who were only there because they had to would be in classes they were actually interested in, actually learning.
Certainly, I learned some things in those classes, but it’s largely a question of marginal utility - those classes have an absolutely HUGE cost in time, and now money, that far outstrips the limited amount of learning they imparted.
And yes, I personally might have been ahead of the curve and would have welcomed any means of testing out of the remaining gen-eds I couldn’t test out of (because I would have passed the test), but I believe this argument is true for a large chunk of the students in those classes, even those who might not be able to test out of them.
I get it - students largely come into university ignorant of many areas. I TA’d in college too, and I agree that there are huge bodies of people with absolutely atrocious math / writing / bio skills and knowledge who probably shouldn’t be trusted to write proposals or solve differential equations or explain how weight loss works. But you know what? Track them 10 or 20 years later and they’re exactly where they started - the semester or two of forced math, writing, or biology lessons left a fleeting impression, and as adults in the workforce they STILL shouldn’t be trusted to write proposals or solve differential equations or explain how weight loss works. And for the most part, I doubt those forced one or two semesters was actually a net positive for them, given the opportunity cost of what they could have learned in 400 level classes that actually interested them.
You realize you just used a concept you learned in Microeconomics to describe why microeconomics was not useful to you?
I’m happy to quibble about the exact curriculums schools should offer, and to discuss ways to make them more useful, but I’m not prepared to let go of the idea that a broad education makes you smarter: it gives you more ways to think about things, more analogies to hang new knowledge on, more lenses to see things through. And classes have more of an impact than you think. Fundamental Attribution Error is a know cognitive problem: however people end up, we tend to assume they would have been like that anyway and devalue the things that got them there. Those people that can’t write? They may well have been even worse without at least some instruction. And some of those people who can write might have been terrible.
For example, a few years ago, they revamped AP US History and AP World History. Both became much less about fact memorization and much more about analysis and writing. I teach AP English, and I can’t tell you what a difference it made in my kids. They write much, much better now, and they know a ton less history. I don’t exactly know how I feel about that, but it’s undeniable that the education they get shapes what they can do. But what’s funny is I bet most of those kids wouldn’t identify their history class as the place where they learned to write, and before, a lot of those kids after a while assumed that all the stuff they knew about history was just “general knowledge” that everyone knows. People are bad at remembering where they learned things, and once we know something it seems inevitable that we would.
The problem is not the bankers, the problem is the government is issuing these loans. The problem is status competitions are all zero sum. So while it may help an individual to receive subsidized loans for college from a societal standpoint it is a waste of money.