I was reading through the pit thread about health care and education. It seemed to be focusing on the health care aspect, so I didn’t want to fork the thread into dueling themes.
I have always somewhat questioned the value of education to society. There is this assumption that education is always a benefit to society.
Me for example. I went to school on a combination of scholarships, parent’s money and jobs and loans. I gravitated toward computer science, largely beacause I enjoyed it, and it seemed to be a stable career field(oops I found out on the last part). I went for 4 years, and got the degree. The actual classes I took toward my career of being a computer geek, were under half of my credits. The others were various science and humanities types. I loved philosophy classes and took many of them. But I really don’t think my reading and discussions about Plato really helped me contribute to society at all. There is the vague concept of being a better person through knowledge. But all in all I could have maxed out my contribution to society in two years of college max. And with the scholarships being payed out of tax money, did I waste everybody’s money learning about electron clouds I knew I would never have any use for? And I also delayed my entry into the job market to pay my share of taxes. All because people with my grades and SAT scores were supposed to go to a four year college for a well-rounded education.
I’m not calling for a an elimination or change to the education system, or some draconian ‘education only where directly needed’ approval system. But I do question the assumption that if everybody went to college for a four year education, we would suddenly become a better and more productive society.
This seems like a distinctively computer-science-centric view on education. For some odd reason a lot of CS geeks feel that education is worthless if it is not technical education. There is more to life, career, business, and society than just being able to read and write source code.
I suggest you go apply for jobs without putting your college degree on your resume to gain a little perspective.
Give it some time. Right now you are interested in getting on with your career and these other things seem to be a waste of time. I attended a liberal arts college and majored in Political Science. I ran a company and may have done a slightly better job if I had been a business major, maybe not. A good friend of mine also majored in Political Science and became the Senior Vice President of a Fortune 500 company. Neither of us used our major per se, but both of us value our education. What I’m saying is that you need to pursue your career and when you look back I’m willing to bet that your opinion will have changed.
Do you know how Christianity became the dominant religion in the West and how the Catholic church continues to shape history? Can you tell me why cinema is so compelling, how it became the most powerful art, and what economic structures influence it? Do you understand the history of the Middle East and why it’s so fucked up right now? Do you know what is wrong with the mind of a serial killer? Can you explain what happened when the Soviet Union broke up, or how it even started in the first place?
All of these are things you might give thought to when reading the current postings on cnn.com.
A liberal arts education (or at least a liberal arts companant to education) teachs something intangible but important. It teaches you how to examine evidence- even biased arguments, and draw meaningful conclusions- in short, critical thinking. It teaches you the cultural and historical perspective to the events surrounding us. It teaches us to not blindly trust our leaders, not to simplify our pasts and not to ignore our futures. With it, we become better citizens, families and people. Without it, you’d have trouble making any real sense of a newspaper.
That said, I think we should rethink schools a bit. University was never meant to provide jobs- it was meant to provide “enrichment” to a class of people that could afford to waste a bit of time. Nowdays, I think it should be a place for people that truely love a subject and can truely contribute to humanity’s search for knowledge- not a bunch of kids that are there because thats whats “done” and thats what you need to get a job that a few intensive trade classes can prepare you for. By treating college as trade schools we lower the standards, make it harder for the gifted and dedicated, and waste a lot of people’s time and resources that could be spent on people looking to go “above and beyond”.
good points, but I’m not sure I explained myself very well.
My OP gave my history. Let me contrast that against a fictional dude named Bob.
Bob graduated high school at the same time as I did. But instead of going to college he went to vocational school. Let say a diesel mechanic school. He graduated after two years qualified to fix big rigs. Bob got a job fixing trucks while I did my path. No that we’re both thirty what has happened.
I’m guessing that we both have comprable salary’s and benefits. He helps keep the truck moving, so the goods get shipped. I help keep the database running so the goods get where they are supposed to be. I’d call that basically a wash as far as our benefit to society. The only difference is he started working two years earlier, and started paying taxes, while I was taking humanities based classes, at taxpayer expense, that have no tangible benefit to the country.
I’m not saying that liberal arts education is bad. I think it is good, and I very much appricateine, but pramatically, is it doing anybody but me any good?. It is very much a luxury that doesn’t belong in the same class as health care. This assumption that my schooling was better, and that resultantly his education would have been better if he had had the 4 year well rounded education,and society would be better off, is where I have difficulties.
It is a luxury benfiting the individual, more than the society at large. Putting this goal of sending everybody to a 4 year rounded education, is far outside of taking care of needs, and isn’t well thought out, and shouldn’t be a measure of progress.
A country has more important needs than getting stuff from point A to point B. While commerce is important, a country wields great power. In America, this power is in the hands of the people. So it is in our best interest to make sure that those people know what to do with the power. Great masses of people have gone astray before. We are not immune from evil or disaster. Only education can keep us vigilant against evil.
Not that there arn’t practical benefits as well. Every organization benefits from having knowledgable, critical thinkers. Every organization benefits from having employees that can write and communicate well. Bob may need to communicate to his boss about an important issue, and will need to do that clearly. Bob may need to make an ethical decision about how often to replace expensive but potentially dangerous parts. Bob may be working on a job for someone that wants to drive to Brazil, and luckly Bob knows you can drive there from the US. Every day we are faced with problems that tax more than just our technical knowledge.
Another point is that many peoples’ goal isn’t for everyone to have an education. It’s for everyone that wants one to have an education. Right now so much of our education is rationed by who can afford it (or gets the chance to go to a good high school), not who can do the best with it. I say, if we are going to ration education, raise the bar, let everyone who wants to in and start letting those that can’t make it through find another way. I bet the forfeited tuitions of the drunk partyers, I’m-here-cause-Daddy’s-paying and the just plain not so bright could fund any number of our future leaders and heros.
I have to think so college graduates make $900,000 more over their life time than just high school graduates. Now either on average these people are more productive or our economy is giving free money to people who have degrees. Its obvious why having more engineers is beneficial for the economy but I am with you I don’t see the inherent value of a liberal arts education. But our economy does as evidenced by the large income disparity.
You may also think reading Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Gore Vidal, Seymour Hersh, Ward Marshall and the Nation magazine, comparing them to Ayn Rand’s “unknown ideal” may not help you contribute to society at all. But, it just may, just might help you realize that you’d be doing harm to the society by falling for Karl Rove’s tricks to make you vote for Bush.
Donno … but chances are that had you not learnt about electron clouds, you’d be most likely participating in Free Republic and Born Again forums rather than SDMB. By the way, tell us more about your truck-fixing friend. Does he also participate in GD at SDMB? Where is he these days – mentally, intellectually and politically? Does he know what his taxes are contributing to?
Oh I wouldn’t lose sleep over not paying taxes for 2 years. Just think of the total taxes that you would have paid during those 2 years this way: It could not probably pay for a single JDAM precision weapon that went astray in Baghdad and caused a lot of collateral damage. Mind you, those 2 year taxes could have helped to bail out the saving and loans institutions, or help stop the genocide in Rwanda.
Are you saying that there is something wrong to keep up with the Jonses?
You may be right there. There are lot of families in the US that need multiple jobs and wages to make ends meet. I suspect most of these people do not have a 4 year college behind them. So, the guy is putting 16 hours a day work for minimum wage, for a life time, never able to afford health insurance nor a retirement with dignity. I suppose he could be more “productive” if he worked more hours per day at lower wages, while creating higher revenues for his employers. After all, isn’t that what “improved productivity” means? Now, if he had been educated, he may have initiated a labor movement against this travesty. And we don’t want that, do we?
I think an analysis of how you do your current job, and how it helps society, is too a view. It doesn’t really look at the full potential benefits of education to society.
If people are able to be more productive and do higher-value work, then the overall standard of living increases as does GDP and tax revenue. That’s for starters.
Many people also believe that educated people are better citizens. They participate more fully in government and civic life, they are more likely to vote (and may make more-informed choices about candidates and issues), raise children who do better in school (and in turn pursue higher education), are less likely to commit certain kinds of crime, they make better decisions about health and safety, and so on.
That does not mean that there is not an intangilbe benefit. Often, people who go to college away from their hometowns get exposed to people they might not normally come in contact with. They get exposed to new ideas and new situations. How much growth can a person achieve staying within 15 miles of where he was born?
It almost sounds like you would limit college to just the academics and the rest should just go to specialized “trade schools” to learn a job. This is a very romanticised notion regarding universities. In fact, I would say it is the exact opposite of the “techie” mentality. Instead of all non-major courses being a waste of time, all practical course (ie accounting, finance, engineering) are more suited to “trade school”.
The reality is that college should do both. I can think of nothing more useless than a college graduate who knows Socrates, Chomsky and Marx like the back of his hand but has no practical skills.
I think most people here seem to believe that college education seems to provide intangible, but nevertheless valuable skills, such as the ability to communicate and the ability the reason and compare and contrast arguments. Frankly, I don’t believe these things can be taught. They can be learned, but the learning is in the form of absorption by doing. (By the way, this is true for technical skills as well.) One may argue that college provides an environment well-suited for such absorption, but I question whether it is really better than staying at home reading the news, some books, and perhaps the SDMB.
Are you sure that a college education is the reason that college graduates make more than high school graduates? Perhaps, those who choose to go to college are the same people who would be more successful in the workplace. How do you know that in a world where college education did not exist or in a world where college education were compulsory, those same people would not be more successful? Obviously, it is difficult to control for such variables. I would be interested in any studies that attempt to examine such issues instead of just measuring how much more college graduates make than high school graduates.
I think it is common misconception (especially among middle-class parents) that college prepares people for the workplace. This is not borne out in my experience. I think most employers view a college degree as some kind of qualification, and one may not be able to get as good a job without a degree. However, I think that most of what is taught in college will have very little relation to your job, unless you decide to become a professor.
I would go further than most and say that this is true for technical fields as well. Wolfman, my degree was also in CS; tell me, when was the last time you had to prove that a problem was NP-complete? Not that I don’t think that such things are very interesting. In fact, I might go back to school to study them one day, but that would be solely for my own edification. I think college is very geared toward academia. Perhaps, it should not be, but that was my experience.
I think that it would be better for there to be separate schools for practical skills and academic theory. Perhaps, such schools can have two-year programs, and someone who wants both can attend two different programs, but those who just want one can have a fast-track to their chosen fields.
There’s a big difference between “doing” and reading about doing.
College provides a forum for individuals with no real world experience to gather achievements they can offer a potential employer. A college degree by itself is not enough. That is why top companies also look for other achievements - internships, extraciriculars, leadership experience.
As I said, school is where you can prove you can do the job. It’s the job itself where you actually learn your trade. Even with my civil engineering degree, I would need to work for a professional engineer for 5 years before I could become one myself. Some companies offer 2 year rotational training programs. Some careers require certifications - CPA, Bar exam, Series 7, etc.
Sounds like some people just want a place where they can study bullshit while they fuck around for a few years.
I’ve done a little bit of interviewing for programming jobs, and I’ve come to view a liberal arts education as much more valuable than a pure engineering degree. The latter provides the basic skills you need to do the job, but everyone has those. It’s the sort of skills you get from the former–writing, analyzing things that are a little more fuzzy than your typical engineering problem, dealing with situations that don’t have a write answer–that are really valuable in this field.
In my opinion, the best education teaches a person how to think. That’s true whether the lesson is learned at school or in the evenings at home by a lamp and a roaring fire. I agree that if you want schooling, you ought not to make me pay for it. But I do wish everyone could be educated. It is better for me, out there in the world, when people can think. Whether I’m in heavy traffic on a major thoroughfare or standing in line at the polling place to vote, I want thinkers around me. I feel safer.
