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Joined: Jul 2011
Posts: 2,007
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Joined: Jul 2011
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Indeed and all the more ironically funny in this context because it almost slant rhymes with 'Uni' - LOL Whenever anyone uses the word "uni" in this context, I assume I'm not talking to an American. Although I could be wrong. I came up with that geographic tell about 15 years ago. Do Canadians use "uni"?
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Joined: Nov 2012
Posts: 2,513
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What is to give light must endure burning.
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Joined: Feb 2011
Posts: 5,181
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Indeed and all the more ironically funny in this context because it almost slant rhymes with 'Uni' - LOL Whenever anyone uses the word "uni" in this context, I assume I'm not talking to an American. Although I could be wrong. I came up with that geographic tell about 15 years ago. Do Canadians use "uni"? B.C. ones tend to. Which is probably how I picked up the habit. And yes, I'm an American who says Uni.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Joined: Nov 2012
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In reality, I think that he's suggesting that from a societal standpoint, that $$ could have been better invested in someone in the top 20% who actually was DRIVEN by love and passion and would stay in the field, rather than the top 1% driven by nothing more than ennui. You price a failure rate into your scholarship allocations. Ennui students are just the education equivalent of bad debt. The distribution around a top 1%er is going to be tighter than for a top 20%er. Of course you can draw an observation from the 20% population that exceeds the 1% population*, but that will represent a statistical minority. Mathematically, I'd take those odds. ETA: *=in observed post-bac economic and non-mometary value
What is to give light must endure burning.
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Joined: Nov 2011
Posts: 280
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Education is supposed to be about exposing a student to important ideas and getting him to really think about the world around him. If that is the primary purpose, then taking 4 years and paying anywhere from $100K - $250K is an expensive way of doing it in terms of both time and money. A typical college student may take about 15 hours per semester, and classes will meet for ~16 weeks each semester. That's 480 hours of instruction per year, which if I am doing my math correctly is $52 - $130 per hour of instruction. If it was just about learning to think, I could very easily pair up my children with a few other gifted children and pay talented individual teachers to teach our select group in depth and at a faster clip. They might get more out of that in a year than in 4 years at many universities. But college has never been about just learning to think. An important part is that a college degree serves as an immediate external signal as to either intelligence (Stanford, Amherst, U. of Chicago, etc.), marketable skills (engineering, CS, business, etc.), or both (e.g. engineering at CalTech).
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Joined: Mar 2013
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But college has never been about just learning to think. I would go further and say that that is the trouble with a lot liberal arts programs - they end up brainwashing feeble minded people that have no place being at college in the first place. Someone ought to already know how to think before even applying to college let alone attending one. IMO education is about enhancing the mental tool kit, no more. Exposure to new ideas, methods and perspectives is what it is about. But the thinking part should already be there. ( begin rant) It is just case of enabling a person to draw their own conclusions in a rational manner - not about reciting the latest politically correct (read insecure and hypochondriacal) dogma which is basically all liberal arts programs appear to be these days (End rant)
Become what you are
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Joined: Jan 2008
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You leave this topic for 24 hours and pages are written.
No one said that the arts were not important, but we were talking about job prospects. And if you saw the recent jobs report, they are disappearing rapidly.
Who is suppose to subsidize your kid during and after school because they wanted to learn to be a creative thinker and then let someone else get creative after he/she graduates on how they should put that creative talent to use?
Now with all the creative talent you learned in school, you should come up with a good answer. I, who took engineering, think practically. Job prospects = tuition subsidies. If you want something that doesn't link into job prospects, pay your own way.
And that is the way I was brought up in my middle class neighborhood in Canada. The fathers fought in WW2, got educated, bought a home, had kids and told us that we go to college to get a job, like they did, 95% of whom were engineers. And the kids did. They became engineers, doctors, dentists, physical therapists, accountants. Or, if college didn't work for them, they got a trade like boiler maker, pipe fitter, electrician. I do not know anyone I went to high school that thought about going to get a liberal arts degree to learn to be creative. And even my school roommate, who now has a MFA, chairs the art department at a high school because it pays the mortgage. Practical education.
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640
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Education is supposed to be about exposing a student to important ideas and getting him to really think about the world around him. Science and engineering have a very important place in education, but when we elevate these subjects to being the only areas that "matter," we become narrow and unimaginative as a society. And we elevate these sorry characteristics the status of virtues. A practical defense of the value of subjects other than science and engineering is that as society becomes richer, consumers place as much value on aesthetics as technological prowess. Think of Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs. Neither graduated from college, but the former certainly had the brains to get a math or computer science degree from Harvard (from which he dropped out). Gates' techie skills served him well, but the company founded by Steve Jobs is now more valuable, because it makes beautiful products, inspired in some cases by study of the humanities: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.htmlCommencement address at Stanford delivered by Steve Jobs on June 12, 2005. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
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Joined: Jan 2008
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Bostonian, is this your argument that tuition should be subsidized across all subject matters and majors?
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Joined: Feb 2010
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That same crass approach ultimately dries up innovation in the sciences (and by extension, later technology transfer) as well, because it only looks at relative simplistic/short-term cost-benefit and risk analysis. Basic research? Who needs it! All just a waste of money and resources. Those people should be making better widgets and at lower cost... Is it possible that in some subjects, basic research has reached a point of diminishing returns? At Harvard the the very smartest physics majors went on to become string theorists (string theory is a branch of particle physics theory). There are smart people who think string theory is a dead end, and it has not yielded physical predictions. Even if it did, would it matter? The atomic theory of matter had profound consequences, but has the theory of quarks done so? I wonder if support for research in pure math also draws the brightest people away from productive endeavors.
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