The problem I have with this is that university should NOT prepare you for the work force.
Universities are awesome! We ruined them when we started thinking of higher education as preparation (or even requirement) for the workforce.
University should prepare you to be a thinker, a scientist and just generally an educated person. As soon as it becomes vocational the whole point is lost.
We don't need to "fix higher ed", we need to remember why we created it in the first place - to teach a small percentage of the population how to use critical thinking.
I see that as an argument that we do need to fix higher ed. We need to do some refactoring for good separation of concerns, and clearly delineate that these over here are special institutions for research and critical thinking and most people don't have any reason to go to them, and those over there are the institutions that will specifically teach you employable skills.
It's essentially impossible to ensure that you never improve your employment opportunities while engaging in Pure Education or to ensure that you never develop critical thinking skills while in a vocational program (and it would not be desirable to do so anyway), but we could certainly more clearly delineate the intent of different programs and institutions. And then people could just pay for the experience that they actually want, rather than bundling them together.
Great. They fail at that too. There have been a few studies that show that after 2 years of college, the difference in reading, writing, math, and critical thinking are negligible.
So if you're not good for the industry, you're terrible at what you're made for, what good are you?
This probably depends a lot on the course one is taking. I have a feeling (from observing the people around me) engineers are a lot better at critical thinking and logical reasoning after a couple years of college than they were coming out of high school.
From my observation it takes about ~4 years for the really observable differences to settle in ... it might also just be maturity. Difficult to say :)
It's definitely my experience that it's hard to find people with high levels of mathematical knowledge who don't have a 4-year, technical-field bachelor's degree. It's of course possible this is merely a correlation, but I would at least hypothetize that the students who've finished a four-year degree in an area like mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, or physics, have more mathematical sophistication than they would have had if they had not finished that degree and taken/passed the mathematics classes it required.
It's not impossible to self-teach, but as far as I can tell, self-taught people usually don't self-teach mathematics, at least not successfully. Among self-taught programmers without CS degrees, for example, it's quite common to find people who are skilled coders, but much less common to find people who have a strong mathematical grounding.
Heck, if you want someone who really knows statistics and data mining, to take one example, I haven't met many people without grad-school experience who fit the bill. Masters degree is good, some PhD experience is better (finishing a PhD doesn't matter as much; ABD is fine).
So far for me 100% of candidates claiming self taught can barely code a for loop, much less explain at a high level how a compiler works or the difference between a heap and the heap. In most cases they don't even know the foundations of the language in which they are most efficient.
Most people I know are also self-taught and read a lot of the theory. If they are self-taught, what in God's name are they using to teach themselves?
"Preparing for the Work Force" does not equal to "Vocational". After all, if universities do what you claim they should do, i.e. "prepare you to be a thinker, a scientist and just generally an educated person", you should become a useful member of society in the end and most probably you will be employed by someone who can use your skills.
This being said, I have a problem with the mentioned "solution". Why would you have to repay "based on 5% of their annual income, the University of California for 20 years"? - it seems like a ridiculous huge amount of money. It would make sense if it were a lot more limited, say, for the first 5 years of work, where your educational background still matters - after that threshold, I say your experience is more valuable than your academic background.
I'm with the author of the article. Let the new solutions invade the market to make current colleges rates obsolete. Change will occur by itself.
Here's the Australian Solution.
Government Supported Loans/Subsidised places. Indexed to the Inflation rate. Paid back as a % of income (a rising percentage as income rises).
Note: The US Concept of "tuition" covering Board/food/etc is basically un-heard of in any large numbers. (Possibly due to how consolidated into Major Cities we are.)
Yes I agree.
There are 2 big problems with education.
1) The society requires you to have a degree. A self taught programmer will likley get paid less than a college educated programmer. Even though the self taught one is more skilled.
2) College students blindly trust that the college education will get them jobs. What many don't know is that the the stuff they are getting taught is obsolete already. Many Occupy Wall Street protestors said that "We went to college, where are our jobs?". Who said going to college will get you a job?
Pretty much every teacher they had through k-12. That's who.
And the worst part is that because of the number of applicants you get degree-inflation where you have to spend more and more of your life in school to get a job that pays significantly above minimum wage.
Fuck it, I'll be poor.
Maybe my tune will change when I can afford college.
I'm partial to this argument, but it only works if you allow for technical education that does provide people with the STEM (or other) skills needed for the workforce. I think higher education in the US is actually very broken.
The best example I can think of that embodies that division of purpose is the UK, where you have Oxbridge and other elite institutions which function in the sense you are referring to, but you also have the Polytechnics that train people for practical careers.
In Slovenia we used to "solve" this by having two levels of university education, one was more practical and another was more theoretical.
There were a lot of execution problems with the system, so they went ahead and ruined it further with the bologna reform. Now we still have two types of university educations (on the bachelor's level), except they're both very practical and the only difference there is that the one stemming from the old theoretical tier makes it harder to get into master's programs.
Which then in turn ruins the master's because it needs to be dumbed down to enable people taking the "easier" tier to follow along and graduate.
As a result, even the PhD isn't what it used to be anymore ... at least on my faculty (CS).
Universities are awesome! We ruined them when we started thinking of higher education as preparation (or even requirement) for the workforce.
University should prepare you to be a thinker, a scientist and just generally an educated person. As soon as it becomes vocational the whole point is lost.
We don't need to "fix higher ed", we need to remember why we created it in the first place - to teach a small percentage of the population how to use critical thinking.