| 26 OCT 2009 at 3:34pm |
SchwerpunktCommander
Posts : 1295
Joined: 29 JUN 2009
Status : Online | 10-26-09
The Appalling Decline of Literacy Among College Graduates
[H2][/H2] By William O'Neill [H4][/H4]
Everyone who cares about higher education in this country knows about the chronic under funding of public universities, which has been going on for at least 25 years but has now reached crisis levels owing to the current recession. Many are also worried by the high failure and drop out rates that result in only half of all students who matriculate actually earning their bachelor degrees. But for obvious reasons almost no attention has been paid to the appalling decline of literacy among college graduates. In December 2005 the U.S. Department of Education released its second National Assessment of Adult Literacy report. The first survey had been taken in 1992 using a sample that accurately represented the entire adult population age 25 and up. The NAAL grouped respondents into four categories, below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient according to their reading abilities. These were tested in three categories of literacy labeled prose, document, and quantitative. Prose literacy denotes the ability to search, comprehend, and use information in continuous texts. Document literacy means the ability to do these same things employing noncontinuous texts in various formats. Quantitative literacy involves having the knowledge and skills to work with numbers and figures, a figure that changed very little between 1992 and 2003 when the second assessment was made.
The other two categories showed a precipitous decline in literacy among college graduates aged 25 and older. In 1992 40 percent of all graduates were found to be proficient in prose and 37 percent demonstrated proficiency in document literacy. In 2003 the percentages were 31 percent and 25 percent respectively. Over a period of eleven years the proficiency of all approximately 37 million college graduates had declined sharply, in prose by nearly a quarter and in document literacy by almost a third. (The performance of high school graduates declined as well, from 5 to 4 percent in prose and 6 to 5 percent in document proficiency.) Apart from the oldest graduates having died the addition of ten, or at most eleven, graduating classes to the pool of college graduates, meant that the members of these classes had to have scored very badly indeed to drag down the averages of the entire population by so much. Further, the graduates tested in 1992 were themselves not particularly literate for the declining performance of college students probably dates from somewhere around 1980. Had there been an NAAL in 1970, at a guess, a solid majority of graduates would have been proficient in both prose and document literacy.
This devastating report has gone almost unnoticed in academia, and in the country at large. The New York Times ran a short story on p. 34 of its December 16, 2005 issue summarizing the report, but otherwise it has received very little attention. In one sense this is surprising, for surely the steep decline in literacy has to bear some relationship to the under funding problem. As state support for public universities, who produce the great majority of college graduates, has declined so has the size of the permanent faculty in relation to student enrollments. About half of all undergraduate courses are taught by part time instructors, usually known as adjuncts, who receive pitiful salaries, no benefits and no job security. As the wretched serfs of academic life they have little incentive to teach well and every reason to inflate grades, as most students will forgive a teacher anything so long as they receive at least a B—except for those who seldom show up and never study, who will accept a C, although such low grades are rare. In addition to buying off trouble for doing such a poor job, the entire teaching force, from adjuncts to tenured professors, is tempted to win glowing student evaluations by bribing their classes. Widely derided when first introduced several decades ago, student evaluations have become a standard component of faculty promotions. Everyone knows these evaluations are worse than useless because they penalize demanding teachers and reward the easy graders, but administrators love evaluations which sustain the illusion that the happier students become the more they learn, which as the NAAL shows, is manifestly untrue.
At first glance one might suppose that universities would have publicized the 2005 NAAL report for the collapse of reading proficiency among college graduates has to be at least partially a consequence of many years of under funding. But facing the facts would require some painful admissions. Perhaps chief among them is that in a losing effort to make up for the loss of state financial support public universities have made great efforts to increase their student enrollments and raise tuition and fees, which have gone up at a far greater rate than the Consumer Price Index. Forty years ago tuition and fees at public universities were nominal, a few hundred dollars a semester, which even in 1969 most families could afford. Today at many public universities instate tuition and fees run upwards of ten thousand dollars a year. When room and board are added the total cost for a year as an undergraduate can easily come to $25,000, about half what a good private university charges but still a great deal of money—almost exactly fifty percent of the median household income in 2007.
Accordingly, publicizing the NAAL results would force universities to admit that they are charging students and their families more and more to learn less and less, an ugly truth that seems to be in everyone’s interest to ignore. Not surprisingly students seem content with a system that fails to prepare them for life in the work force but offers them four or five years of enjoyable irresponsibility. Murray Sperber, whose Beer and Circus (2000) is must reading on this subject, calls this arrangement the faculty/student nonaggression pact, according to which instructors pretend to teach and students pretend to learn. Everyone gets good grades or evaluations and presumably goes home happy. Further, since new buildings are paid for with bond issues and do not come out of the regular budgets many universities have spanking new dorms and student facilities, which mask the reality of deferred maintenance, lessened security, and other expedients. Wage slavery is disguised also, since students can rarely tell the difference between adjuncts and tenured faculty members.
So we have the modern public university on the undergraduate level, where grade inflation is rampant, student skills diminish with every passing year, what passes as teaching is conducted by exploited adjuncts and faculty members who no longer care about standards—for students, that is, the drive for ever-more qualified professors continues unabated. It is a central irony of our situation that while mediocrity among undergraduates is tolerated and even encouraged, the professoriat demands excellence of its members, and of graduate students too as they are potential members. It appears that the only people responding to this crisis are employers, who increasingly require college graduates applying for jobs to take writing tests, on site so they can’t cheat—a sad measure of our failure to teach either skills or ethics.
"Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it."
-Herman Melville
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| 26 OCT 2009 at 4:18pm |
roman2440Commander
Posts : 1036
Joined: 12 MAR 2004
Location: 0
Status : Offline | [sm=feedtroll.gif]
Seriously, are you going to believe anything in such a hate filled rant of an article that is? It sounds like someone got rubbed the wrong way by an educational system and is working out his chafing.
Of course literacy rates are changing, the makeup of the student body is changing/ has been changing for quite some time, and quite drastically over the past 10 years. You open the flood gates you're gonna get a lot more people who can't hack it. Combine that with growing class sizes (which have expanded exponentially in the past 20 years) and you're going to get different results.
But the real question is what does is mean? It means a degree is worth less than it was 10 years ago, which is less than it was 20 years ago. This isn't a big secret - its something that has been hammered constantly since I was in elementary school - don't you always here the phrase "getting a college degree is more important than ever!". All it means is that piece of paper has less and less meaning, and businesses make up for it by making their entrance more and more robust (as opposed to you gotta degree, you're hired).
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| 26 OCT 2009 at 4:59pm |
lancerunolfssonCenturion
Posts : 639
Joined: 7 JUL 2007
Location: US
Status : Offline | Given what the huge crop of MBA's we produced in the 80's and 90's has gotten us. I am not at all sure that fewer and stupider people with degrees is actually a bad thing.
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| 26 OCT 2009 at 5:26pm |
mad_max_usmcCenturion
Posts : 115
Joined: 27 NOV 2006
Status : Online | I'm not sure why all the angst. The NY Times recently ran an article (which I can't find on line) which said that 91% of all Harvard graduates in 2007 graduated with some type of honors. Ergo, college students are obviously smarter than ever, so why are you all worried?
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| 26 OCT 2009 at 5:58pm |
airboyCommander
Posts : 2754
Joined: 24 AUG 2004
Location: 0
Status : Online | Originally Posted By lancerunolfsson
Given what the huge crop of MBA's we produced in the 80's and 90's has gotten us. I am not at all sure that fewer and stupider people with degrees is actually a bad thing.
This is nonsense since MBAs don't teach college classes and are a very small proportion of total students.
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| 26 OCT 2009 at 6:49pm |
mscanoCommander
77.jpg)
Posts : 1524
Joined: 29 DEC 2006
Location: US, New York
Status : Offline | it a shame when college gradiates don't speak no good english cuz a mind is a terible thing to wast. thank god the brothers at Marist did a good job on me.
[sm=Bolt[1].gif]
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| 26 OCT 2009 at 7:28pm |
lancerunolfssonCenturion
Posts : 639
Joined: 7 JUL 2007
Location: US
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By airboy
Originally Posted By lancerunolfsson
Given what the huge crop of MBA's we produced in the 80's and 90's has gotten us. I am not at all sure that fewer and stupider people with degrees is actually a bad thing.
This is nonsense since MBAs don't teach college classes and are a very small proportion of total students.
Not saying MBA's (Master Business Administration) teach school. Actually they would probably cause less damage if that's where they were. What I am saying is that our "educated" Business class has failed us utterly. We could do with fewer of them. The stupider they are the less good they can do for themselves. Which translates directly to more good for everybody else.
Medford Oregon Gamer Group + Free Miniature Rules and a Print and Play Board game.
[link=http://lancerunolfsson.googlepages.com/home]http://lancerunolfsson.googlepages.com/home[/link]
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| 26 OCT 2009 at 7:31pm |
RurudyneCenturion
Posts : 191
Joined: 9 FEB 2009
Status : Online | Originally Posted By lancerunolfsson
Given what the huge crop of MBA's we produced in the 80's and 90's has gotten us. I am not at all sure that fewer and stupider people with degrees is actually a bad thing.
Having debated some fresh or not-long out of college kids on different subjects I sometimes feel that the disparity between those with a clue and those without is getting worse.
This seems especially true of basic philosophy more than literacy though. I find myself frequently having to rehash even the most fundamental differences between grammarians like Socrates and rhetoricians, the Sophist, their much hated rivals. It wouldn't be bad except that some of this stuff is simply nothing other than applied logic and reason (especially the bits about the limits on knowing anything for sure).
Originally Posted By lancerunolfsson
Not saying MBA's (Master Business Administration) teach school. Actually they would probably cause less damage if that's where they were. What I am saying is that our "educated" Business class has failed us utterly. We could do with fewer of them. The stupider they are the less good they can do for themselves. Which translates directly to more good for everybody else.
Blame the economist they listen to as much as anything else. It's like they say in different circumstances: a false prophet can lead a host astray. Especially prophets of false profit.
[align=center]Standup Philosopher [/align]
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 1:45am |
KevlarSocksColonel
Posts : 5988
Joined: 11 SEP 2005
Status : Offline | Its not the MBA (ive posted a Dilbert blaming them before), its the desire for empire. Ive worked with engineers that are more self-centered and greedy than any MBA but bankers. At least the MBAs are trained in how a business can come apart. The engineers or scientists that do business make a real mess. They should stick to their area of training. Someone good at technical problems should do technical problems. Accountants are bad too. The business world has changed significantly from the problems accounting was created to look at. Their system doesnt work well anymore. Or maybe its being applied to more and more where it has no business. Such as Operations.
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 4:18am |
bayonetbrantColonel
Posts : 7052
Joined: 18 MAR 2007
Status : Offline | When I was teaching as a grad assistant, I was appalled at what was considered acceptable levels of knowledge coming out of high school. I'm sure Airboy could outdo any "holy crap" story I could tell, but I couldn't believe the lack of basic knowledge that the kids had.
Check out GrogNews for wargaming / mil news.
http://grognews.blogspot.com
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 6:28am |
John_in_VACenturion
Posts : 494
Joined: 31 MAY 2009
Location: US, VA
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By Rurudyne
...especially the bits about the limits on knowing anything for sure....
I guess that puts Schrodinger's cat completely out of the question! (Within a margin of error.)
Every so often you see public outrage expressed that half of anything (school grades, especially) is "below average." "We should increase the quality of our education system so that all students will have above average grades!" Uhh...yeah.
It's like Mikkelson or something: "Cornbread are square; pi are round!" "What dya mean, 'Pass the molassas? How can you have molasses - you ain't had none yet!'"
[]
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 7:01am |
SmuckatelliColonel
Posts : 7965
Joined: 8 JUN 2004
Location: US
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By bayonetbrant
When I was teaching as a grad assistant, I was appalled at what was considered acceptable levels of knowledge coming out of high school.
When I was standing Post 1 in Prague, I also was appalled.
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 8:11am |
airboyCommander
Posts : 2754
Joined: 24 AUG 2004
Location: 0
Status : Online | A lot of what the article discusses is accurate. Tuition has sharply increased at public schools because of sharp cuts in State funding. Another problem with college costs is Professors are expected to teach so few classes - so more classes get taught by instructors or doctoral students.
When I was an undergrad, one of my professors was editor of the #1 journal in a core business discipline. He taught 3 classes annually. Now faculty at the same school that are new hires teach only 2 classes a year.
Research is important - to a point. I've been ranked in the top 5 in my field internationally for 20 years (I'll provide references to Longblade to prove this if someone disputes it). But.... what parents pay professors in professional schools such as business, engineering, nursing, etc... is to provide the training necessary to get a first job and excel in their field in the future.
But the way teaching is evaluated is destructive. Most schools (especially research schools) evaluate teaching in terms of student evaluations only. Student evaluations are great for classroom process issues and student empathy. But.... students respond negatively to having to work (like writing papers) and students simply don't know what SHOULD BE TAUGHT in the class.
Let me give you an example. If you talk to recruiters some of the essential skills they want from any business graduate is ability to write, use Excel (spreadsheets) and tie business decisions into specific cash flows.
I teach the hardest elective in my department. I require a minimum of 3 written case studies (max of 5 if they want to drop low grades), 4 spreadsheet based homework assignments, and they have to understand how their decisions specifically impact costs & revenues. I have a 50% drop rate in the class. (The students that remain absolutely love the class).
But..... our recruiters and alumni surveys show over and over that students who can't use spreadsheets, write, etc..... are unemployable.
We have to put together reports for accreditation. In these reports we have to show examples of analytical thinking, writing skills, etc..... My classes are among the very, very few in the entire College that require individual writing assignments and spreadsheet analyses. It just takes too much time from a faculty member to teach and grade assignments like this.
Incentives matter. If you reward faculty for skills based outcomes, you will get skills based teaching. If you reward making undergrads happy at that moment in time, you will give away grades like candy and require little in the way of work.
I do what I think is right in the classroom. I can do this because I have such an outstanding research record. I also have great student evaluations - but very very high drop rates. At some schools you get a lot of pressure to "fix" this. I'm also independently wealthy from owning several successful businesses and being able to do consulting. Thus, I'm pretty immune to pressure to change what I do in my classes. When I have gotten orders from administrators to "lower your drop rates" and "make the students happier so they don't complain about the work" I tell the administrator to put the order in writing and sign it if they want me to follow these instructions. Administrators always back down from this because it would really come back to bite them. But junior faculty can't do this (OK - I did it as a junior faculty member but I was such a strong researcher, etc..... that I can get away with it).
My goal is to make RECRUITERS happy and to make STUDENTS HAPPY 10 YEARS FROM NOW. I frankly care little if students are happy right now or not.
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 8:35am |
FarAway SoonerCommander
Posts : 1008
Joined: 23 OCT 2005
Status : Offline | If it makes anybody feel better, as a country, the US spends more on advertising than we do on higher education.
I'm not sure how to fix that without making a hash of the Bill of Rights, but it does speak volumes about our social priorities, and how poorly the free market allocates resources to a positive externality like public education.
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 12:28pm |
ComradePColonel
Posts : 6889
Joined: 1 JUL 2006
Location: NL
Status : Offline | I don't think the problem is less significant on Dutch universities.
One of the main things I dislike is that students/I have to write papers without a clear purpose, or any long term goal in mind. I write a paper, which the teacher might even read and might even comment on, but after that it gets shelved and nobody cares. One of the best ways to waste bright minds is to make them do stupid sh!t like that. Writing papers is good if something is actually done with it. Writing papers just because teachers have to tell students to write papers is nonsense.
I lost almost every bit of motivation for about half a year because there was virtually no intellectual challenge to be found at all. I don't attend classes in order to make exams that are not all that different from writing a summary of the book we had to read for the course.
In the Dutch case, it seems that one of the reasons why certain aspects of literacy are dropping is because students learn in high school to read a text, collect the required information and write about that bit of information. Assignments requiring you to do anything with the actual text are pretty rare.
I'm pretty sure I've learned more over here than over at university, and I'm 100% sure I had a more enjoyable time in the process.
airboy: you might not care what students are unhappy with, but I'm guessing that is one of the main reasons for the many drop outs. Judging by your description, it seems you're mostly teaching courses where you end up with a very small group of students, which basically means you're teaching the elite of your particular educational institution. If you're constantly with the intellectual elite, everybody else becomes dumb quickly, from your perspective.
Having said that, I am quite horrified by current educational standards in the Netherlands, and hope they will be fixed soon.
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 1:03pm |
GusingtonGeneral
Posts : 18089
Joined: 16 AUG 2004
Location: US, USMA
Status : Offline | Universities are factories assigned to produce students.
It is not in any school's best interest to make their standards higher or make the coursework more rigorous because they will then lose students and their money. That's the way the system works and we shouldn't expect that to change.
On a personal level, I only taught for a few years at a public high school level in a few different New York and New Jersey counties (Albany, Orange, Passaic). But I was both happily and unhappily surprised with what I found.
Happy with the amount of kids that genuinely really enjoyed what I was spewing, and unhappy with the sheer number of total idiots that came into the classroom. I shouldn't have been surprised by that, now that I look back.
Granted this was high school (sophomores, juniors, and seniors) and these kids had to be there. But a respect for education begins with parenting. If parents don't give a crap, why should their kids? So much depends on the kids' home environment. A stable, supporting environment leads to more stable kids.
If parents took more time to parent and get their kids on point, everyone would benefit. But parenting is frickin' hard (as I am learning dearly) and there are a LOT of people out there with kids who shouldn't have them, because they can barely take care of themselves. And as populations grow, the numbers of these mouth-breathers sauntering around like zombies will only grow too. The rest of us will just have to deal with it.
Maybe it's simpler than we think: the number of morons in the world is directly proportional to the total amount of people.
[off soapbox ]
I'm glad my character uses a shield because I may be taking a bashing here soon.
- Rayfer
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 1:34pm |
airboyCommander
Posts : 2754
Joined: 24 AUG 2004
Location: 0
Status : Online | Originally Posted By ComradeP
airboy: you might not care what students are unhappy with, but I'm guessing that is one of the main reasons for the many drop outs. Judging by your description, it seems you're mostly teaching courses where you end up with a very small group of students, which basically means you're teaching the elite of your particular educational institution. If you're constantly with the intellectual elite, everybody else becomes dumb quickly, from your perspective.
Not exactly. Almost everyone who enrolls is capable of doing the work - they just don't want to. If you don't have to apply spreadsheets, track your decisions to cash flows or write papers - then many drop the class to take something that requires less work. I tend to get a mix of undergrads who stay: some are very bright but many are just interested in obtaining the work skills (even at the cost of doing more work).
I think it is cruel & unprofessional to entertain undergrads while failing to teach them the skill set they need to both get a decent job and to prosper on the job.
My MBAs and Executive Education people absolutely love me. But they have a much better grasp of the skills necessary to prosper and don't mind doing the work if they think it is useful. They can also see an immediate application of what I am teaching on their past jobs or current jobs. Undergrads due to their lack of business experience, have difficulty making that connection.
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 2:54pm |
Braz24Centurion
Posts : 737
Joined: 3 AUG 2006
Status : Offline | You guys have posted some interesting points. who knows the motivation for why people are even in college...everyone's reason is different.
I think the earlier comment about parents with regard to the kid's education and a stable environment do have a big impact on how there kids do in school...On the other hand, if the kid is a follower and follows a bunch of morons, then unless the parents can conduct an affective "intervention", the kid's education will suffer regardless of how bright the kid is...unless the kid figures it (the prudent path) out on his or her own. I also am unfortunate to bear witness to kids with a very stable environment, with ANYTHING (mom and dad have money and aren't in an unstable realtionship, for example) they want or need squander away their parent's educational savings with easy classes and still score low...lack of ambition or not wanting to do the asssignments or even to study. The end result (so far) is a big waste of money to the parents and the kids are still lazy in school and life...very unambitous in jobs (meaningful jobs that is). On the other side of that same coin, I have also seen that the community college in question is a huge joke...I believe I could pass the classes without even reading the books or studying.or attending...they are that unchallenging.
There are bright kids out there. There total diots out there. There are total idiots that are actually pretty bright if they would apply themselves. The problem is, some of them all come to colleges...
I also think that regardless of the kid's pre-college aptitude, or level of "brightness", mom and dad need to give junior a kick in the pants and turn off the video games (at least turn them off more than they do now) , moderate junior's time at the mall, time with friends, and make the kids study and try to force the kids to get decent grades... expect grades that realistically the kids can accomplish...In other words be loving parents but be parents and NOT the kids best friend...that come come later when they're grown up and on there own. The parents should insist on the kids prioritizing their own schooling over this leisure time activity (with a healthy balance) and also insist that the kids respect their teachers. I think this kind of behavior would better ready kids for college and also make them more receptive to the harder work that colleges (should!) require the kids to do in courses. I think that this would also help the literacy topic percentages in college too. The parents know better. It's up to the parents to pass this on to their kids...it's called teaching the kids discipline...Not the punishment aspect (even though, kids need to know that there are consequences for bad behavior)...but the part where discipline causes a person to think in a certain framework or mindset (not brainwashing) rather than doing just whatever you feel like at the moment...Hopefully you guys know what I mean here...
The topic of whether a required textbook is used during a class or not was mentioned. It's my opinion that the professors do that if they don't like the "required" text (who determines that anyway) for the subject they are teaching, maybe have extensive notes that they teach from (rather than the text) etc. The point is that there are many possible reasons for this...good and bad. I think that if the professor doesn't use the textbook the students purchase for a class, that the student needs to know this before enrolling in the class and avoid wasting school money...It could be better spent on current or future classes.
One thing too is that just because a person has the educational requirements to become part of the faculty and teach in a university doesn't make that person and good teacher. You get you share of really bright and inspired instructors who love their work at school teaching. You also get people collecting a paycheck for teaching and aren't worth a poop. either they're lazy, burned out, or uninspired. You also get professors who KNOW their subject (and may love the subejct they teach about) but aren't very good at teaching it or conveying their knowledge to students. Then mix in the three kinds of students I mentioned above, and then the mix can become a mess.
The thing I would take from this is that students should thank their lucky stars when they find a professor that inspires them, or loves the subject they teach, even when it is a subjec the student is weak in or not really interested in (they could be there for a requirement toward a specific degree). On the other hand, the professors out there should thank their lucky stars when they have found a bright student that they can inspire, share their passion for what they teach, or profoundly motivate a student to want to learn the professor's class.
Schools, students, and professors, and the world are pretty imperfect and certainly not consistent with regards to to each other...In a perfect world, they would all be in sync with each other. As the world is now, it's a crap shoot in the kind of schools, students, or professors you find out there.
I had a friend who once said that 15 percent of the world's population seems to have it's head screwed on reasonably well and know where they're going and where they've been. 85 percent are lost, probably idiots of a bunch of sheep...fill in the blank....The world (unhappily) is geared toward those 85 percent. The trick is to figure out which group you belong to.
I know that those percentages have no statistical validity, but if those percentages were reasonably accurate, have we humans been like that just in recent times? Or is this something that "plagues" humans throughout all time, past, present, and future?
Interesting thread!...I'm just adding in some (likely obvious) food for thought...
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 3:42pm |
GusingtonGeneral
Posts : 18089
Joined: 16 AUG 2004
Location: US, USMA
Status : Offline | ^Good post.
To your last point, I think idiocy always has been and always will be with us.
I'm glad my character uses a shield because I may be taking a bashing here soon.
- Rayfer
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 4:58pm |
bayonetbrantColonel
Posts : 7052
Joined: 18 MAR 2007
Status : Offline | step 1: decide what you want your university to be. is it just advanced-level job training? or is it more about giving your students the intellectual tools to succeed in life regardless of what gets thrown at them? there are arguments to made either way, but to me, this is the first decision to be made and it drives almost every decisions to be made after that.
Check out GrogNews for wargaming / mil news.
http://grognews.blogspot.com
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| 27 OCT 2009 at 7:13pm |
KevlarSocksColonel
Posts : 5988
Joined: 11 SEP 2005
Status : Offline | Its also for the student to decide what you want your education to be. It is your education. What is important to you? What do you need to understand more about? Dont just jump through hoops because the school puts those hoops there.
When you get to a certain level you dont really need the prof. I had several that wrote the book on the subject. What do they go over in class? What they spent months or years putting together in the book of course. So if you can understand it you really just need to read the books. Thats probably why mosts schools wont let you do a second degree. You are ready to move on. Either move on in grad school or good luck out there. If you need to know more you have the tools.
Profs are there for when you hit a mental wall. You cant break through to get to their perspective. I have had a few times when discussing something with them you feel this mental shift. They made a statement with a level of precision that was remarkable. Suddenly you understand exactly what they are talking about. Teachers like that are great.
I have three pieces of paper on my wall. I am not those pieces of paper. No matter how people try to categorize others for convenience your abilities are something else. People are always able to surprise. Sometimes its Wow! I didnt know you could do that! Sometimes its aw crap, that didnt work out.
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| 28 OCT 2009 at 9:55am |
airboyCommander
Posts : 2754
Joined: 24 AUG 2004
Location: 0
Status : Online | Originally Posted By bayonetbrant
step 1: decide what you want your university to be. is it just advanced-level job training? or is it more about giving your students the intellectual tools to succeed in life regardless of what gets thrown at them? there are arguments to made either way, but to me, this is the first decision to be made and it drives almost every decisions to be made after that.
I agree 100% if you substitute the word "degree program" for "university." You can have degree programs within a university that are 100% applied (Poultry Science) and pretty much 100% nonapplied (Political Science).
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| 28 OCT 2009 at 10:02am |
SmuckatelliColonel
Posts : 7965
Joined: 8 JUN 2004
Location: US
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By bayonetbrant
or is it more about giving your students the intellectual tools to succeed in life regardless of what gets thrown at them?
This is exactly why I want my children to continue thier education past high school.
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| 28 OCT 2009 at 11:03am |
bayonetbrantColonel
Posts : 7052
Joined: 18 MAR 2007
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By Smuckatelli
continue thier education past high school.
and other reasons as well, I'm sure []
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http://grognews.blogspot.com
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| 28 OCT 2009 at 11:13am |
logan40kCenturion
Posts : 330
Joined: 9 JAN 2004
Location: US
Status : Offline | Question to everyone - Is it also possible that there is in society (American society, cannot speak for others) a new sort of blue collar / white collar class of Tech workers who can perform highly technical jobs without being literate in a broad sense. As an example, I taught myself how to do HTML, PHP, Cold Fusion etc... but I was in my late 20s and early 30s when I was doing this. My contemporary learners were teenagers. So when they are 18-21 they can already do what I can do at 33-35. I have seen this in a number of tech related positions across the board. They havea set of skills, get a foot in the door, and learn new skills as they move from job to job. They eschew formal education and when they do go I have seen them do average or poor in classes like English, history, and math. It is not because they are stupid but they are not literate / learned outside of their very narrow area of interest. They also struggle in interpersonal relationships and have poor communication skills when speaking to people as opposed to machines. For the most part none of them have seen little use for higher education as they see classes they do not want or need, professors who they think know less than they do, and computer science courses that they perceive are useless and impractical in the real world.
In a very real sense those that do go to college are there simply for the purpose of the piece of paper much like athletes who go to college simply as a means of getting to the professional level.
Again, this has been my observation and experience, it may not be true or significant across the board but I personally feel it is a contributing factor.
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