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Originally Posted by PaperBagger'14
I have only a tiny bit to add here, but between my education at SAIT and U of C (which are directly related), I gained far more skills and technical knowledge at SAIT.
My instructors at SAIT were definetly not considered academics (with 1 exception), but when I look back at my time at both of those places, SAIT was far superior.
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I feel the same about MRC (before it was MRU) vs U of C . Better instructors, more focussed coursework, and more engagement with the school and fellow-students in general. It’s never been clear to me how having instructors who are top researchers or highly published actually helps the typical undergraduate. Or why universities pay them so much more than people who are good at teaching.
One of the elements people don’t like to talk about is our assumption in Canada that two-thirds of young adults can and should pursue an academic education in the expectation of getting white-collar work. What if there aren’t enough skilled office jobs to employ all those people? And what if a lot of students attending university today simply aren’t intellectually or temperamentally suited to higher education?
A friend of mine is a sessional instructor in the history department at the U of C, and he says most of his students can barely be arsed to do the bare minimum, and about a quarter are functionally illiterate. But he lets it slide and passes almost everyone because he’s been advised by older faculty (he’s 32) that negative student feedback will undermine any chances he has of getting a permanent position.
A great many students in university today would be far better suited to trades or vocational training (which is one of the reasons I hated the change of MRC to a university). It’s possible to be middle-class without being white-collar, and even many office jobs don’t require four years of academic education. But this gets into issues of class that Canadians don’t like to talk about.