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[Higher Education] Practical Problems and Philosophical Foundations
Posts
@SammyF and I were talking some time ago about the 'dumbing down' of PoliSci degrees to meet popular demand. Like at my uni specifically, there is almost literally no focus on quantitative methodology for PoliSci or International Relations. With a few exceptions (read: a few genuinely challenging professors), the emphasis is really just on a superficial analysis of theory and on area studies. Our school's IR+PoliSci undergrad department seems to churn out a lot of law school students; I was in a Politics of the Middle East course where like 80% of the class raised its hand when the professor asked who was going to law school. As a result, there's also a heavy emphasis on legislative process and con law. Sammy's already seen this, but I find it enlightening to list out my school's actual courses. These are the political science (POS), political theory (POT), international relations (INR), and comparative politics (CPO) courses for fall:
Had I chosen to, I could've done all the assigned reading from the textbook plus the mountain of academic papers we'd been assigned to read (which you could also just cheese by reading the abstracts), worked my ass off on a really strong, comprehensive theory analysis paper, etc. That I didn't is ultimately my own fault, but I got my A- and moved on not really having lost much.
EDIT: I kind of lost my point in all this... basically, if you were looking to do actual Political Science -- as in, analyze politics in a rigorous, scientific way -- the best my school could do is to have you major in Statistics and PoliSci at the same time, or to major in Stats with a minor in PoliSci, or or vice-versa.
How do you draw the line though? I'm with Zag on making teaching/research separate from academic requirements and paying people for them, but until we do, it all falls under the same umbrella as course work, and I don't think there is a clear line to draw here.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
It is, sorta, but it's not one that matters beyond the Universities need for labour. You learn nothing from it.
I also quite dislike the lack of valid topics to teach students. There are no classes or course which teach ground changing events, like the Mongol Invasions, or even normal steppe-sown interaction but instead there are a 1000 courses on either Victorian culture or European history of housemaids. It is increasingly annoying that for a history degree important events are being left out and history or housemaids is being taught to appeal to those looking for passing their requirements and not for students who are passionate about history.
I would argue that you learn nothing from having a PE requirement at UG, but its the curriculum. I think that questions about what we should require are all fair and worthwhile, but I don't think that they should be answered through negotiations between a student's union and the university administration.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
I have no idea what a PE is, but I want you to understand that TA hours are busy work. They are meaningless and thus negotiating on them is not a problem in the slightest. It's just like any labour union negotiating work hours and pay because that's all TA hours are.
I don't even know how to parse this, frankly.
We do pay TAs, you don't TA unless you're getting paid for it (usually). It is already a separate part of your course that helps you get practical pedagogical experience.
And like all workers, TAs should have the ability to combat unfair circumstances.
It isn't about lines in the sand, slippery slopes, the size of the boat, or the motion of the ocean.
It's already there. Why shouldn't students have access to the same protections as professional staff?
Well, that's a pretty clear line right there.
Classwork is part of academic requirements, teaching and research (outside of classes specifically about teaching or the student's own projects) is paid work. Usual labor laws, time and a half after 40, all of that.
I'm slightly biased as I'm staff at a major University...but if a student is doing the same work as me, they should be paid - maybe not the same as me, but at least minimum wage. They shouldn't be made to do bitchwork for the professor AND have to pay $TEXAS for the privilege.
I also don't have a lot of concern that TAs or Grad Students negotiating over working conditions is suddenly going to be 'dude, change these grades to As or we go on strike' or something. It's simply not going to happen and that's a bit of a slippery slope you are starting to go down.
I'd be happy though with them not unionizing, and the government stepping in with some major regulations that better define those roles as paid employees, not 'student bitches'. After all, your professors didn't have you trying real cases and preparing real briefs and billing real clients for your work as a term of graduating, did they? It's all mock stuff I thought...maybe some volunteer / pro-bono work, but not commercial stuff.
EDIT - even the 'if you don't like it quit' standard doesn't apply here...because once a student is admitted to one of these programs, they are effectively blacklisted from getting into any other comparable program, ever.
A lot of this bullshit gets handwaved with the term "student." You have similar conversations about internships.
What gets lost is that, for many college students and all graduate students, we are speaking about adults who have rents, mortgages, families, car payments, healthcare needs (without insurance) and other expenses that do not suddenly go away when they enroll in a university. I mean, you can deal with some of these with student loans, but I think we are already seeing the poor economic results of putting entire generations of a nation's best and brightest into extreme levels of debt.
Entirely no.
We need less Technical Colleges, less employment focus, less training for being a worker bee, and more training for how to be a person. Education needs to be a means to achieving human flourishing, not a means to employment. It is a mistake to teach people job skills before teaching them life skills. It is a mistake to treat Universities as degree mills that churn out cubicle filler, as a hoop one needs to jump through before entering the workforce.
We need to focus on the Humanities: Philosophy, Literature, Philosophy, Art, Music, Anthropology, Philosophy, Philosophy. Students need to understand logical fallacies, to genuinely grasp why an ad hominem is a shitty argument, how reason works. They need to understand, and grapple with, their existence as an existential question rather than a precondition to the question, "What is the least terrible job I can do until I retire?" College needs to be an opportunity for intellectual exploration, for growth, for engaging with great thinkers and testing one's beliefs.
In every class I teach, no matter the actual subject matter, I have a day in which I start by saying: "So, I do not know if you realize this, but you are all going to die." We talk about what that means, what life means, what they are doing, why there are in college, why they desire the jobs they desire. Towards the end I do my, "You need to think about this shit. Because what you do not want is to wake up at 45, look in the mirror, and think, 'What the fuck have I been doing for the past 20 years?'" This usually starts with the students staring at me like a crazy person, but by the end most of them are thanking me because, if nothing else, no one else has said this shit to them. They have never stopped and pondered their existence, or had someone in a position of mild authority tell them they should do this, that it's ok to do this. Many of our students have gone from kindergarten to college without ever asking themselves why they're doing this. That is fucked up.
Teaching our students technical skills, employment skills, without ever engaging with them over the larger questions of the human condition is a gigantic failure on the part of educators, and our culture as a whole.
College isn't about learning to be a plumber. College is about asking how to be a person.
Damn it.
I love how thoroughly and completely you missed the context of that statement. It's absolutely astonishing.
Like, seriously, your reply made my day with how completely it does not understand what was being discussed.
It sounds like what you really wanted to be was a priest, not a professor.
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Actually when I pointed this out the first time, I wasn't trying so much to signal that poli sci had been dumbed down at the undergraduate level to accommodate popular demand; rather, I think academia has gone out of its way to dumb down political science at the undergraduate level in order to generate popular demand. Especially because the academy of poli sci is interested in minting new poli sci professors (and not people who work at think tanks), we must create more positions to teach poli sci at the undergraduate level. The problem is that not a lot of undergraduate students want to go on to become poli sci graduate students in the first place, so the academy expanded the definition of poli sci at the undergraduate level to also mean "pre law."
Psychology and sociology are, I believe, in sort of similar boats. Psychology as a hard, research-based science is kind of small field, but at the undergraduate level, the scope of the program is widened to include people who want to be special ed teachers or BCBAs or LPCs. The difference is that the APA at least recognizes people who study psychology without practicing psychological research as being respectable human beings who made a valid life choice. Being a poli sci PhD who works in a think tank has the same negative stigma as an MBA who works the cash register at a Wendy's.
It sounds like you do not understand what professors ought to be.
This was my favorite part of visual basic 101.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Not agreeing with what you think a professor ought to be is not a lack of understanding.
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns
I do what I can.
When students first enter their first philosophy class, they usually treat it as if it were Visual Basic. They think they are acquiring some set of skills / information that can be implemented in context-C to achieve end-Y. Because that's all education has ever been to them. They've compartmentalized their reality to mirror the structure of their education. I go to this room to learn about Visual Basic. I go to this room to learn about math. I go to this room to learn about Literature. And all of those topics, to them, are the same collection of skill / information acquisition for the sake of test taking.
It's quite fucked up for large groups of people to conceive of their reality in this way. And it's not fucked up in the "oh we just need to teach them critical thinking" trope way of dealing with it. These kids made it to their mid 20s without ever being a people, without asking what they're doing and why they are doing it.
That is a problem.
Sure it is. If we go into your reasons we'll find some fallacious assumptions.
If you expand this to include soft skills like "ability to learn a new skill" and "critical thinking to determine new life paths", I totally agree with him. Technical training as a substitute for college is a long-term disaster in the making.
The reason why is that there is no job - absolutely none - that issafe from the changes brought by new technology, cultural shifts and the march of time. What the last century should have taught us is that "training for the job" is an abject failure for long-term prosperity. Jobs change and citizens who have narrow educations and training get left to waste away in rust belts.
The problem is that there is a mismatch between what has traditionally made a good employee in the past (college educated generalist with a good work ethic and ability to mesh with company culture) to today (hyper-specialist with the right list of qualifications). A good network can smooth that over, since the vast majority of jobs still only require someone with a general education and average intelligence, which is why networking has become the number one route to a position in today's economy.
In context of your post I assumed you refer to all professors. Did you intend to restrict the statement to a subset of professors?
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns
Way back in 2002ish, as part of an application for a grant, I was asked to write about whether liberal arts should be taught everywhere or if public schools should take on more of a pragmatic focus. I argued that the true liberal arts program was basically dead at all levels. I think that is even more true now than it was then. The last vestiges of liberal arts programs at universities now are largely the result of departments trading prerequisite requirements so that they can keep enrollment in their 101's up enough to keep justifying the size of the staff. And students seem to recognize that being well rounded is not valued, as they look for the easiest classes that satisfy prereqs and spend the rest of their time focusing on classes in their major (or a sub division of major courses which they think will be better for grad school applications). I think this is a real shame, since we have replaced college as a place to learn new and varied things with a program where you trade time and money for a credential.
I did not like this approach as a student, and I tried to take a large range of classes. But when it came time for law school applications, I was advised that even though I had enough credits for all of my honors philosophy (with concentration in philosophy of law) major and psych, classical studies and criminal justice minors, I should not formally declare the minor to avoid looking too "unfocused." I was literally told that it looks bad to have explored diverse interests in undergrad. . .
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
I'm just going to quietly point out that Shryke was talking about the Canadian definition, not what American colleges should turn into.
So...
Two of them! Hahahahaha.
Shhh!
This is getting funnier and funnier.
Clearly reading comprehension needs to be reinforced in America's technical schools.
It's especially good since the rest of the post was about why the focus of higher education should be to teach students the critical reasoning skills necessary to analyze and critique an argument.
AMFE says he thinks money spent on CS degrees may be better spent on things like certifications in the world of ground floor IT.
Jiggity _J_ says college shouldn't be specifically about employment.
I think both of these ideas have the same problem behind them. And that is the fact that it is still perpetuated strongly in American culture that you must, MUST have a degree or you will be behind the counter at McDonald's or spraying people with perfume in the mall. This is what so many people are told from day one, and it absolutely makes college all about employment. It doesn't matter what it says on that piece of paper (barring specific fields), but you HAVE to have that piece of paper to succeed. And sometimes its not just that you have it, but where you got it from.
And what does this do? It just feeds the machine. HR departments love it because now they have an easy pass first line filtering system in the hiring process. College administrations love it because it doesn't matter how much they charge in tuition, people have to come to them or you will have nothing but hard times in your career path.
Something is gonna have to give. We need for people to start thinking about real acceptable alternatives to what can make a successful employee. And I know that the job of hiring sucks. The process behind hiring sucks. And making it harder by taking away the degree / no degree easy button would make it even more of a pain. But hiring standards aren't doing anything but feeding the beast.
I don't want to diminish the strength of a degree at all. I just want it to stop being the baseline for what is ABSOLUTELY necessary. Not every job realistically requires a degree. Hell, people in this thread have even said that their high end degrees actively did nothing to prepare them for their profession. I think a lot of the cost of education could probably be spent in a better place if your goal is job preparation. But that will never happen as long as people are told they must have a degree, and HR nods blankly.
School costs too much time and too much money to dick around with "becoming a more well rounded human being" in many ways. There's too many difficult classes that a student actually needs to work hard in and learn and pass for the gen ed requirements to be anything more then "take the most interesting thing I can find that won't take up much of my time". That's the way it was in STEM shit anyway.
Funnily enough, my school's philosophy department actually had classes to handle this. They designed ones specifically for people taking them as gen eds which had much lower work load and who's sole purpose was to introduce various parts of the subject to a bunch of people who'd never actually done philosophy before.
Aww. You're my favorite, too.
Are all those STEM classes really needed for the degree though? If most of what you need to know to do the job is on the job training, maybe we would be better served relaxing the requirements for majors to create more room to explore.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Alot of what you learn on the job is built off things you learn in school. And remember that a job generally uses a specific part of your knowledge set. Even a more application-focused degree like engineering covers a wide variety of things because they don't know what specific type of job that person will have.
They don't want to pigeon-hole you for the same reasons you don't want university to just be vocational training. Because they don't just view it as job-training. That's what on-the-job-training is for after all.
But more generally, I don't think it would matter. No matter how much you relax the requirements, gen eds are still just "for fun" and/or "because I have to". They are not why you are at university and so they aren't seen as important enough to want to do alot of work for.
And that's not even related to job training or anything. Even if I'm just at university to learn shit, I'm there to learn shit about the subject I majored in, not a bunch of other stuff.
Perhaps there would be some virtue in changing these things.
Changing what things and how?
On some level, knowledge has become far too specialized for universities to be churning out Renaissance (Wo)Men.
Sure, there would be.
But I'm not paying $500 / credit hour and risking a hit on my GPA just so I can learn about Modern French Abstract Interpretationalism.
The 'per credit hour' model is kind of fucked too...I get WHY it's that way, but it's not just about taking the classes, it's about paying for them too.
EDIT - or taking extra time to graduate, which in and of itself is a major opportunity cost.
But to what end are we specializing? How many people use the subject that their degree is in as the basis of their current career? I just walked around and took a quick poll of my coworkers here in IT. One has a degree in culinary arts, one in mechanical engineering, and one in English. Hell, the only people with MIS or CS degrees seem to be the developers. It didn't matter what specialized knowledge they had when they got hired. Just that they had a degree.
That depends on the degree and the career, now doesn't it.
Maybe they want to make sure their graduates can be those developers if they want and not just the guys in IT.
A BA is basically just a box you're required to check for white collar work nowadays. It almost does not matter what you major in.