There is a line in the original The Godfather book that has always stuck
with me: Anyone can learn anyone else's job in about six weeks.
(My quote may not be 100% accurate.) I ponder that from time to time.
Although it might take a lot of education to be any physician (or
accountant or psychologist or attorney) it takes a small fraction of
that training to be a specific physician. All the great cases of people who
impersonated these professions are testament to this. When I think of
my actual routine every day, I wonder how long it would take
to train someone to do the specific job rather than train someone for a
generic profession. I have this feeling that learning the job of
college professor was done mostly by myself as a kind of independent
study project that was conducted years after any formal education.
The discussion also reminds me of an incident we had years ago with a
medical student who did not pass his boards covering the first two
years of medical school in which the students take basic medical
science. He was allowed to proceed to clinical training contingent on
studying and taking the boards again. He managed to get all the way
through medical school without passing the boards. He was
widely regarded as an excellent clinician and many of his supervisors,
many of whom felt the science years were irrelevant, wanted the
board requirement waived so that he could graduate. The case really
pitted the science faculty against the medical faculty. The
decision went all the way to the President. He decided in favor of the
science faculty. I never heard there was a conflict over this until this
case came up. Apparently many physicians believe training should be
more clinical and less science. In the 19th Century, most of the
medical training was clinical apprenticeship.
My general assessment is that there has been a gigantic inflation of
degrees and coursework. People selecting for jobs are confronted with
an applicant sample that has no variance in credentials. The applicants
are told each year that they need more and more education in
order to stand out and be selected. This absurd pressure is forcing
more and more people to enhance their credentials far and above anything
the employer needs. CSPAN recently had a panel on law school
education. The first speaker got up and said that if he now applied to his
firm with his current credentials, he would not even get an interview.
His firm was now only hiring people with law degrees who also had some
other marketable degree or specialized training. We routinely reject
applicants for grad school who have the publication credentials of
people we recently hired as assistant professors.
Mike Williams
On 10/24/11 1:00 AM, Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
digest wrote:
Re: Why Do People Need A College B.A.?
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