I agree that the idea of a “liberal arts” education is outrageous and outdated, considering that college serves the role of 13th through 16th grade or job training for many/most middle class Americans. For a student who wants simply to be educated in his/her chosen field, I am 100% against required unnecessary courses. Like it or not, modern Universities are educating workers, not 19th century gentlemen.
If this means that certain departments/disciplines will suffer, too bad. Too much money has been wasted as it is. College debt follows many graduates into middle age, taken as time spent, a significant portion of that debt goes to pay for courses the borrower had no real need or desire to take. I say this having taught both 10th grade biology in HS and Biology for non-Biology majors at a University. The subject matter was not substantially different between the two courses, and I’m quite sure if you quizzed my former students, there would be no significant difference in their understanding of the Kreb’s cycle.
While some persons (especially those in the “soft sciences” who have a personal stake) may claim that certain courses teach students “how to think critically” or “the value of history”, etc., it is essential to weigh these benefits, actual or perceived, against the enormous financial burden that four years of college can be for a student/family.
It is all well and good to offer up the idealistic vision of the modern University as a shining white Athenian temple where the brightest chosen leaders of tomorrow go to learn for the sake of learning, but for the sad majority of students, college is a mom-and-dad-subsidized four year drinking binge away from home punctuated by episodes of real work too few and far between. IMHO, the goal should be getting the majority of students through a reasonable course of study in their chosen discipline and into the work force as soon as possible without incurring outrageous debt along the way.
If you object to this final line of reasoning, I’d suggest colleges have already begun adopting this paradigm academically, through grade inflation. I think it is only fair that the financial and time factors should follow suit.
Most liberal arts classes are writing intensive- your grade depends largely on essays and essay tests. Essays teach and hone innumerable skills. First it teaches research- how and where to gather facts, how to evaluate sources, how to deal with conflicting research and situations like anectdotal evidence. Then it teaches how to come up with an argument all on your own. It teaches how to effectively take a side of whatever argument your care to, and ideally how account for the complexities of most problems in your argument. Then it teaches the pure craft of writing. It teaches how to create the structures that allow us to effectively communicate ideas. You can read every book you can get your hands on and watch PBS for years on end, but all that knowledge is useless if you cannot communicate well.
Yes, you could learn this all on your own. But SDMB diehards excepted, who writes researched essays at home? And who has a community that is able and willing to evaluate the products of their work and the quality of your ideas? People learn practical skills better in groups where there is feedback and instruction.
College proves a few things- it proves at the least that you can wake up on time occasionally, write an essay, handle authority, deal with some bullshit, meet deadlines and stick to a long-term goal. There are other ways to prove this, but college is the most common shorthand for “I’m a vaguely responsible human being.”
You personally may not need to use a lot of the technical information you learned, but I’m sure it gave you a better big-picture concept of how computer systems work. In the future you may be in a position where you are responsible for situations that you havn’t seen before, and every bit of knowledge you have in the field contributes to your finding a solution.
I think he was quoting someone else, but I’ve not been able to find out who - but I think it is true, it is not the details of what you learn that make your education that make it worthwhile, but the process of learning itself.
You seem to be laying out the groundwork for a debate that really belongs in another thread, but I’ll steer this derailing train even further off course regardless.
There are actually people who contend that a liberal arts education has, indeed, become something of a luxury good. The fact is, there are some families for whom the cost of four (or more) years of college is no burden at all. And that students from these families are the ones who are most able and most likely to pursue liberal arts degrees. So your observation about the cost-benefit (at least in the short term) seems to be something families are already weighing. Whether or not this economic segregation is a good thing is a separate issue.
Since you dismiss the idea of critical thinking and adaptive learning as bunk, I’ll put out another concern that some people have when an all-elective, all-vocational curriculum is championed. That’s our inability to predict what a student will need to know in the future. One’s working life lasts a long time. Careers change, as do fields and industries and standard practices. So does the world and the information a person needs to be a citizen in it. Content that seems like boring general education today may actually be more important tomorrow. And the skills one develops when one is forced to grapple with ideas and methods from multiple disciplines are likely ones that will come in handy as things change.
I’ll wager there’s some U.S. business graduate managing a building project in Baghdad right now whose project is going marginally smoother for his company because he sat through some comparative religion course as a freshman. He may be no expert in the Islamic faith but he recalls enough to make a difference in his handling of things.
This is exactly right. Well, not necessarily on the payment for schooling, but that’s a separate argument. I still use the lessons I learned in my bachelors degree every day. It was a politics and economics degree. My knowledge of Soviet and French politics has not come into play outside of bar conversations. The ability to take large swathes of information and distill them in a limited time into a coherent argument is something of great use.
Even in the ‘professional’ course I am taking now, I’ve tried to focus more on the theoretical, learn to think options, and less on the bar course necessities (which I can pick up on the review course, I hope). I’m off to read some Law & Philosophy for tomorrow’s class…
Let’s look at it this way. Suppose you had gone to college for only two years, compressed all your computer science courses into that period, gotten out of school and got a good job in computer science two years earlier?
And tomorrow, your job is outsourced to India.
Now you’re looking for a new job, maybe in another field (since all the other computer science jobs are being outsourced) and all you have to show employers is that you’re technically qualified to be in computer science.
So it’s back to school for another two years to be trained in another field, and hope that job doesn’t disappear, as well.
I got my CS degree in 1973. Pretty much everything I learned in college is now obsolete. There is not much call for PL/1, Fortran or JCL anymore. But learning how to think about computers and languages, the theoretical stuff (which my college was strong in) has been a lot more useful to me. I got a PHD also. My specialty has disappeared, but learning how to do research, how to analyze a problem, how to write papers and review papers, that has let me switch areas a couple of times with great success. Your truck mechanic friend might do okay for a while, but if all the trucks become hybrids, will he be able to learn the new technology?
College also has an advantage of learning by yourself - there is someone to challenge you, to keep you from coming up with the easy answer, from reading only the stuff you are comfortable with. I think once you get exposed to that you can learn more for yourself much better. Liberal Arts classes are good for that sort of thing.