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[Higher Education] Practical Problems and Philosophical Foundations
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True, but when you're paying $Texas for a degree, it's hard not to look at the economic forces involved.
Whose to say that there aren't some/many/most engineers that do care about their overall education? And can write? Are they not the most fearsome entity on this earth?
Ye- oh, wait that was MIT.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
The people want their toys but they don't want to pay for them, basically.
Because nobody listened to FDR
Full attendance at my UC was about 30k, tuition included.
That is what I thought we should do, though it would just increase the cost of VoTech education. Which could be good or bad, depending. VoTech degrees can be enormously expensive too, make no mistake. And it can be very difficult to suss out the real deal from all the fakes. Housing would not be a bad idea, community college is predicated on the idea that you will live at home while attending, ignoring the reality that people often have to commute very long distances for class (last year I spend my Wednesdays commuting 4 hours by bus), and that a person who has to support themselves must juggle school along with working full time, you do not get any aid to help cover housing because you are 'supposed' to be living at home. People don't live at home for many reasons, and in high cost areas it is very difficult to be full time while still working enough hours to support yourself (if you job will even schedule about your schooling). Some places don't have community colleges, requiring students to move just to attend a CC, which almost happened to my cousin. So housing is definitely a good idea, yes.
A 2-year VoTech College with a Real Campus could definitely work, I'd just be worried about it falling into the same pitfalls as Universities have.
Indeed they are gods among man.
And of course there are STEMers who care deeply about their education, I'd go so far as to say most of them do.
I just think that all of this interdisciplinary in-fighting misses the point, and I don't really like the continuing positioning of college as a super expensive job training outlet by companies.
On Beer and Boobs: the culture seems to have built up college as the place you go to learn hobbies, make lifelong friends, find yourself, have sex and have fun. And it is pretty good for that, yes. So uh, what about CC kids? What does the culture think CC is for as far as personal development? Is it a case of too bad so sad, you're too poor? As someone who started at a 4-year university, transferred to a CC, and is trying to transfer out, I've heard so much about the perils and positives of college, and I'm struck by how little people talk about CC by comparison, especially in regards to the positives. "I don't need my daughter having sex under my roof, she can wait till she goes to college" (real quote from someplace), what if this woman's daughter decided to go to CC instead of moving out for college? Basically no sex for her till she transferred, right? We don't give kids any incentive to go to community college beyond 'its cheap'. 'Its cheap and its not a lot of fun, but its cheap'. I get that community college isn't sexy but no one ever seems to question how much all those supplementary benefits of college are a matter of privilege. The poor can have 2 lackluster years getting their nail-tech license and trudge into the workforce, while college kids can have mind-shattering epiphanies while taking basket-weaving classes in between wild Greek orgies that they later blog about on Gawker. Or something.
I I just think it is interesting to bring up. It is something we need to keep in mind when we say we need more kids in VoTech. CC really isn't a lot of fun, and that was the reason that some people I knew decided to not go, opting for 2 additional years of loans instead. If we paint the working world as this bleak and boring hellscape leading into a life of quiet, uneventful domesticity, can we really be surprised that people will spend their last hurrah someplace fun, if unbearably expensive in the long term? Maybe we can make community college not suck so much, or make the working world a little more bearable. Or maybe we could downplay the Animal House aura so people come in with different expectations of happiness and how it will color their worldview later on.
Beer, Boobs and VoTech might work.
No. Every major problem with education in America stems from people and policies who want to maximize the potential economic value of those that pay shittons for education. STEM and Non-STEM students pay the same exorbitant amount of dollars. STEM students justify it by saying "Ah, but this will give me skillsets that will get me a competitive job." Non-STEM students justify it by saying "It is not the technical skillsets that get me a competitive job, but the improved modes of thinking that will get me a competitive job." Neither are proving to be true hypotheses anymore.
The "pragmatic" students choose STEM fields to offset the exorbitant costs, but that does not 1) make them superior or 2) absolve the reality that education is way too expensive in toto. Higher education has been (and will be until it bursts) a viable business model to generate revenue. This revenue generation is in no way tied to either quality of education or to the downstream financial success of the degree earners. There is no "caring" whatsoever about our potential economical value. That is simply a poor attempt to rationalize what has become a gargantuan and unfeeling machine.
This machine cuts costs at literally every possible avenue. It has replaced once prized and highly respected teaching positions with incredibly abusive adjunct positions. It has outsourced all manners of conventional teaching for the sake of cost cutting, yet, its administrators and coaches, and deans, and executive vice presidents, and alumni chairs, and boards of governors, remain the highest state paid officials. These figures do not even account for the compensatory payments they receive that come from murkily described university pools of money. These pools of money are heavily invested in the stock market and in many cases, business ventures that are at their core, incredible conflicts of interest. The revenue from these investments builds massive facilities to court more students to a particular university because it has the newest and best 2 mile indoor rock course with its own set of rapids and twelve weight rooms. This revenue is never, ever, put into new science buildings or to enrich the research side of the institute.
This feed-forward loop makes it appear that education is so expensive because it is so necessary and vital and so very important for your futures and thus requires many grand and expensive things. Yet, community colleges with far less investment in grandiose ancillary facilities provide the same education at a much lower cost. Community colleges are perhaps, the true last bastions of what education is really supposed to be about and how access to that education should be fairly priced. In the past 13 years, enrollment in community college has skyrocketed because of the exorbitant price tags for four year colleges. Initially, this highlighted the important of community college as a mitigator but now, the high enrollment is driving a microscale version of the four-year phenomenon.
I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. I think that when the higher ed bubble bursts, and it most certainly will, there will be a major culling of institutional extravagance. This will result in the loss of many jobs, especially for people who had no part in it, probably many professors. Research funding government side is crumbling and universities will no longer be able to fleece professors for that departmental money as well. I also think that our nonstringent standards for those that get degrees in education and go on to teach (thus crippling generation after generation) is probably one of our bigger academic crimes and I look forward to that changing as well. I don't think higher ed has a particularly fun road ahead.
Yeah, like there's not a single state where the highest paid public employee isn't at one of the state universities?
1.) The machine you describe is exactly what I was talking about: maximizing money instead of educational outcomes.
and 2.) Community Colleges are where traditional universities are pulling the adjuncts for all, fuck you teachers operating style. Their attendance has exploded because money for people to go to four years isn't there anymore.
Bonus 3.) STEM majors are gonna be in for a pretty rude awakening in a few years when their current, and not very established "leg up" in the job market goes away pretty damn quick.
I was actually fuming over this earlier today.
The school I work at is in contract negotiations with the faculty union right now and the sticky wicket has been the university deciding that adjuncts shouldn't be able to adjunct anywhere else.
Because we're in for hard times.
But let's ignore this building over here where everyone is making over 90k a year. Pay no attention to the man behind the desk.
2) Community Colleges hire effective teachers for teaching only. It remains a viable route for tenure track teaching. CCs have always hired adjuncts to teach courses. 4-Years got wise and realized not only could they charge way more than CCs but also teach first and second year courses with lower overhead by exploiting the adjunct phenomenon. There was no pretense that CC adjuncts ever existed to fulfill anything but to teach these intro courses.
3) STEM majors are totally in for a pretty rude awakening. STEM majors typically pursue a post-bac terminal degree and these are not paying off like they were intended. STEM majors also face incredible outsourcing pressure, ala Mark Zuckerberg et al via the drive to increase the number of H1B-Visas to allow highly qualified technical immigrants to fill technical jobs at an exploitative rate to drive tech profit margins. I am grossly uncomfortable with the opposition to H1B-Visas based on "durn furriners takin err jerbs" but I am very comfortable with the opposition to H1B-Visa increase in that it screws those that paid exorbitant amounts of money here in the US and screws the H1B-Visas who become in a way, technical adjuncts.
I've been closely watching these phenomena because it means a lot to me as I pursue my terminal degree. If the higher education system, including the research system (which thanks to the sequester is IMPLODING, and every year it remains this way yields an additive crippling to our already hindered research progress) is failing in the US, then I will have to find other employment in other parts of the world. I think this is a side-effect of globalization and I think it is something every highly skilled professional outside of the US is willing to entertain. I am not sure if it will apply to everyone in the STEM market right now, though.
These things are all absolutely why I have put off thinking about a PhD. Right now it simply is not worth the investment.
I don't think that Community Colleges are the paragons of education they've been held up as lately, but that may be exposure to local ones more than anything else.
I feel like that'd be better for the students and for companies.
I would like to see fewer "college majors" and more technical certifications, personally.
Because computer science != programming.
While this is a very in-depth and informative post, could you perhaps decompact it?
In what way does it differ from the electrician, contracting, or plumbing trade?
A technician can get by knowing generally how fast an existing search algorithm is. A computer scientist is supposed to be able to design a new one.
The key word here being "Design". Design always requires a much deeper skillset and knowledge base than execution of a known entity.
Sure, but every comp sci major I have met is doing it so they can get their first IT job.
This seems like a less than optimal situation. I am not saying we should get rid of computer science programs totally, that'd be ludicrous, I am saying perhaps a large portion of current students would be better served by a different sort of education.
One problem with this sort of gating is that we need to accurately forecast our actual designer needs for the next five or ten years in order to know how to cut the proportions.
As someone who watched anything like vocational or trade training disappear year to year while I was in school, this is exactly what happened. Funding gets cut and the "non-essentials" are the first thing to go.
It's really a statement, I think, about what we feel is important in a school.
Funnily enough, a large portion of the growth in post-secondary costs (like actual costs, not costs ot the student) is, from what I read, caused by an increase in the non-academic portions of the university system and the growth in the bureaucracy that is needed to run that.
My experience is that there aren't many engineering students who aren't largely in it for the money or who can write worth a damn. But that's mostly confined just to engineering.
Classes, in general, feel nothing like an actual job in rhythm or in expectations. In that sense, they are an abject failure as job preparation, regardless of the knowledge involved.
In my experience, the vast majority of people can't write worth shit. STEM majors just tend to feel like it doesn't matter anyway cause they can do math.
Engineering is super job-focused though in my experience. To a creepy degree. They are more job-preparation then most university courses though, if only in that they are alot clearer on how X will help you in a job.
It's all about the way we view university vs college education. You get a university degree in CS because you want to program or whatever for a living and because university > college. It looks better and it opens more doors.
I would say though that in my experience, your CS student gets a much broader education then your college programming student and, on average, can be more useful because of that.
In America college and university are the same thing, just for anyone reading this who might get confused.
Canada lingo explained to Yankee Devils:
College == Community College
College =/= University
As I understand the American system anyway.
College == University
College == College
University == University
Eh, sort of. More dual enrollment than straight community college.
Huh? Dual enrollment?
In Canada, anything that grants a degree is referred to as a University. A College grants diplomas or certificates or the like. Many colleges are associated with universities these days and have various links to move between the two institutions.
You Americans are crazy folk who use 2 different words for the same thing.
The thing is that the degree in engineering, and the things it teaches you (including how to learn other things you will pick up when you land a job), is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for success in the workforce.
Like, merely knowing how to design or analyze circuits or systems does not mean you are ready to be an actual working engineer. There's much more to it, that you will be trained on in your actual job. But it is still important, and it's what separates me from the technicians I work with. On many levels, they are actually better at the low level "I need to troubleshoot this transistor or chip" tasks. But most of them cannot look at an overall schematic and just understand what that circuit is doing, at least beyond some pretty basic stuff. Or easily figure it out. Whereas I can, and I'm expected to.
Which, I guess, is why I feel like engineering doesn't belong in a tech school. Because actual engineering requires a foundation in theory, and abstract concepts, and logic and reason, and being able to research and learn on the fly. And engineers are actually expected to have a pretty broad range of knowledge, outside their very narrow field and specialty.
What's funny, is that most of the classes that seemed very "job focused" when I was in school...weren't. Like, maybe there are engineers doing that stuff too, but not me, and not many of the guys I've talked to after school. They were teaching us a job we'd never actually do, as a tool for teaching other concepts. Or....something.
I agree that many engineering majors do minimize non-major classes. Particularly basic writing and speech classes. On the other hand, pardon me for sounding like an asshole, but those classes were full of absolute mouthbreathing remedial fucktards. Because most of them are freshman-level core classes. None of those kids have been weeded out yet, those are the dipshits fresh out of high school that never should have been accepted into college in the first place. So pardon me if I don't take my writing or public speaking class seriously, when it's full of the 60% of students who will never graduate, because they should never have set foot on campus to begin with. I took English 101 my final semester, with (mostly) a bunch of 18-year-olds. We'd do peer proofreading and shit. These were kids that, if their life depended on it, could not string five complete sentences together in a row. Though they did manage to drop some very convincing fragments. Oh, and when they would whip out a thesaurus, magic would happen. And by magic I mean hilarious examples of why you cannot just drop a "synonym" in a sentence without an actual understanding of the connotation the word carries when used.
Sorry, rambling. But seriously.
A question. Do we even have any large, accredited, not-for-profit vocational tech schools?
Yes. God, yes.
Except I've found little improvement as people are weeded out. 10 typewriter-enhanced monkeys could pass the literally requirements for any STEM degree and it shows. The odds of the people who can survive 4 years of, say, engineering having good writing are no better then among the entrants. Nothing about the material covered in any of the courses did anything for the problem other then winnowing out the truly illiterate.
It's more, as stated earlier in the thread, a problem with pre-university education and the general value our society places on these skills.
I was probably unclear, but I was more trying to say Engineering is only really more job-focused in that they kept fucking talking about your career after school. No other program or class I was ever in did this.
For computer engineering I believe you could take all the classes you needed and with a bit of planing in your major-electives end up with a CS double major. Because a CS degree only had 36 required credits.
Think about that out of 120 credits to graduate and get a CS degree(or most majors through L&S), you needed 30-40 credits. You are in school for 4 years, to take two full semesters worth of course work.
Adding to that "Physics/Chemistry for non-science majors" are its various ilk are insane. It's college class, to teach high school science. So many schools seem to treat making students take a class using math like making them take a comparative lit class in a second language they haven't studied.
UW had a 'science' class called Companion Animals, i knew several people who took it for a science credit. It was every bit as science intensive as you'd expect.
Community Colleges grant associates degrees, which are two year programs that let you get out of most lower level courses at a four year college.
Dual enrollment is a program some districts run where high school students can truck up to the local comm college and take some courses that will help them skip ahead when they go to university.
We would call your colleges high school, really, but it's inaccurate so I go with dual enrollment.