> I understand everything you said, and I agree that college coursework should > modernize, but I think you may be missing the point of a college education. > > The point of a college education is not to prepare you to step into a job > immediately. That is not its purpose, and never has been - even for such > 'professional' degrees like engineering and CS. The purpose of the college > degree is to provide you with a a reservoir of general knowledge upon which > you can draw, as well as practice in life-skills such as problem-solving, > critical thinking, and time-management. In essence, you learn how to learn.
In the abstract this is a nice thought and perhaps how things should work. In practice, university seemed to me to be mostly about learning how to impress a bevy of preening mandarins who have long since lost any relevance to the world at large. By removing accountability, tenure enforces this irrelevance. There are some wonderful teachers and amazing researchers to be sure, but they tend to be focused in disciplines which are very much practical in nature such as medicine which are preparing students for real world tasks. The real reason that college programs are far behind the times technologywise is not because of any noble liberal arts approach to learning. It is because the people on the cutting edge of technology are working for companies that can remunerate them better than schools. There is no fundamental benefit to studying old technology over new outside of inculcating some small sense of nostalgia for an age when you could almost know everything about the field. At issue is a lack of people qualified to teach at the cutting edge. >They hire him because he has proven in > college to be a hard-worker who knows how to think critically. This is > these companies put such an emphasis on GPA - not because they actually > think the subject matter has anything to do with the job, but because a top > GPA indicates a strong work ethic and a supple mind. That is generous. A high GPA indicates a strong work ethic and an ability to coax the results that you want out of the system often by agreeing with a prof whose theory you disagree with. This is a warped form of Kuhnean "puzzle-solving". University does very little to encourage shifting paradigms. In my short academic career I watched scholars rail against paradigm shifts because they invalidated their life's work. Rather than revising their disproven ideas they fought tooth and nail to preserve them. Heaven help you if you contradict them. Supple, capable minds merely *survive* formal education they aren't produced or even nursed by it. > To wit - look at the top management of any large company and notice how by > and large everybody is a college graduate. Look at Congress - everybody's a > graduate. Clearly that means that there's something going on, and that the > degree isn't totally worthless. In fact, consider the case of the most > famous dropout of all - Bill Gates, who himself has chosen to fill the > entire ranks of Microsoft's top management with college graduates. Gates > could have put whoever he wanted into those positions, so if the degree > really wasn't valuable, don't you think Gates would have figured this out by > now? If even Gates agrees, I would say that clearly there is something > valuable about that degree. I think you are committing 'post hoc ergo propter hoc'. Gates values smart people and as most smart people go through university it is moot whether it is the diploma that is significant in getting them the job or their intelligence that is more important. Though I do not have a degree, I most certainly have an education. For me the CCIE was an entry into a whole different realm of career possibilities. Not once in any of my interviews was I looked at unfavourably for not having completed my degree. All of these tokens, be it degree or certification are only for getting an interview. If one presents poorly even an Ivy league degree won't save you. If one presents well, even a high school dropout has a chance. What is important to decide how to achieve one's goals is an honest assessment of one's aptitudes and interests. For instance, I prefer to study independently. As such, the certification process was allot more fulfilling for me than university. If I want to read Hawthorne or Thoreau I grab a book from the shelf and read it. I don't need any external validation for that. I think it is a terrible shame that we rely so much on an arid pedagogy to teach us the truly important lessons of life. Perhaps this more than anything is to blame for the current atmosphere of corporate malfeasance. Our learning is done apart from moral context and apart largely from the world in which we live and breathe. Do whatever it takes to maintain personal authenticity. Trying to figure out your path statistically by determining whether you have a better chance of getting a job by doing a degree or getting a certification is leaving too much to chance. Figure out which suits you better and have confidence in it. > Now, again, that's not to say that significant improvements can't be made to > the college education. I agree that many college curriculas do need to be > updated. But I look askance at demands that colleges transform themselves > into glorified vocational schools. If all they're doing is teaching the > technology du-jour, and neglecting the building of fundamental thinking > skills, then I think the heart of what higher education is really all about > will be lost. To reiterate, what is lost by using the most current paradigm? Thinking skills are independent of the subject matter so in this field you might as well learn them in the context you will be using them. Apologies for my longwindedness, Geoff Zinderdine CCIE #10410 Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=60097&t=59481 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
