Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
The problem with universities, if there is one, is that too many people in today's society confuse them with vocational schools and think the purpose of higher education should be to prepare students for a specific career. In the 1000+ years that universities have existed, that's only been a recent phenomenon in the last few decades. Prior to that, it was understood that universities developed well-rounded academic thinkers.
About 90 years ago, my grandfather completed a Master's degree from Cambridge with what many posters here would describe as a "useless" liberal arts degree in ancient Greek and Latin. Outside of academia, what kind of job does that prepare him for? And yet he enjoyed a very successful and varied career working for the British government, management positions in the private sector, and serving on the boards of several non-profits. Until relatively recently, it was understood that a university degree -- any degree -- was demonstrable proof that the graduate had developed solid critical thinking, research, and writing skills and had a well-rounded education in a wide variety of subject areas. This was very highly valued by employers.
If you belong to the Boomer generation (when a much lower percentage of the population attained post-secondary degrees), it was typical that almost every university graduate would be actively recruited right out of school and fast-tracked into management positions. University graduates were seen as the future leaders in every organization. Seeing the career trajectories of university graduates vs. non-graduates, many Baby Boomers pushed their children into universities whether they belonged there or not, creating a huge glut of university grads and watering down the value of a degree. Most jobs shouldn't require undergraduate (or higher) degrees, but that was seen as the best road to career success. So now we have a situation where degrees are undervalued because too many people have them. Entry level jobs that required only a high school education 40 years ago now require a bachelor's degree (often in a very specific subject) for no legitimate reason other than employers can make that a requirement and still attract enough suitable applicants. At the same time, there's this widespread attitude that an academic education should substitute for job-specific vocational training, and any degrees outside of a select few subjects with a direct career path (STEM fields, engineering, business, medicine, law, etc.) are looked down upon as undesirable. That was never the purpose of universities.
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Occupations have become more specialized. The base knowledge required to do some jobs at even a junior level has increased massively. Unless places like SAIT are willing to do 3 or 4 year programs they're never going to fulfill that role.
And there is a world of difference between taking a couple of philosophy courses and pursuing the degree. I do think it's really important to branch out of one's major but that only seems to work one way - take some "liberal arts" courses. I don't think I had any philosophy majors in my first year CS functional programming course.
You do like to complain about how poorly things were run in the past - maybe that's because the people in gov't weren't suited to the positions. I'm sorry but a person with the qualifications of your father should
never be in positions like deciding fiscal policy, for instance.