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…
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All true. But there’s no going back to a world where only 5-10 per cent of people go to university, they all study Socrates, Shakespeare, the basics of biology and finance, and how to write grammatically and rhetorically perfect papers, and then are immediately swept up into the economic and cultural elite upon graduation.
Can you imagine the public outcry if entrance requirements were dramatically tightened? Parents and students would go ballistic. High school would have to become far more rigorous, and students graded much more severely. Our secondary education is moving the opposite direction, with streaming abandoned and academic rigour relaxed in the name of equality.
Businesses today simply aren’t set up to train new employees. They don’t have the skill or processes in place. And they - with good reason - don’t expect those employees who they might invest heavily on training will stick around long enough to make the investment worthwhile. For better or worse, we no longer live in a world where people stay with the same employer for 20 or even 10 years.
And universities themselves can’t seem to come up with a better way to grapple with budget woes than unrelenting expansion and increased enrolment. What problem did the transformation of MRC to MRU solve? Students now go to school for twice as long and pay twice as much, but their degrees are no higher value than before. As someone on the hiring side, graduates are no more better prepared for their roles. I can’t see any benefit besides increased prestige, money, and jobs for MRU administration and staff.
Post-secondary education needs to be disrupted. Dramatically and fundamentally disrupted by external forces. Because the status quo is one of the starkest examples of an institution widely recognized as inadequate and dysfunctional, but seemingly incapable of self-reform.