I don't personally know the man outside of buying a few records from him, but ask Rockadelic, who hires people, how hard it is to find 'good people'.
The great majority of the hires I make are good, hardworking folks.....of course I only get to see them after they have passed through two HR hurdles and a background check. I do see an unusually high number of folks who have unrealistic expectations coming out of college. I've had a couple who have told me they went to college so that they didn't wind up with a job where they had to work too hard(Huh? What?)......I do chalk a lot of this up to immaturity.
Rockadelic said:
Bootstraps.....defined as "Improve your situation by your own efforts"....is a dirty word or unrealistic concept to some.
Bootstraps - By no means do I think the simplistic answer to every problem is "bootstraps". However, I don't think there is any question that those who try to "Improve their situation by their own efforts" are far more successful than those who don't. If you don't apply some level of "Improving your situation by your own efforts" who the heck do you think is going to do it for you? The fact that the mere mention of "bootstraps" is scoffed at by some is disturbing and in some cases very telling. Anyone who thinks that "bootstraps" isn't part of the solution to every problem you could face is either ignorant or totally helpless.
Bootstraps - By no means do I think the simplistic answer to every problem is "bootstraps". However, I don't think there is any question that those who try to "Improve their situation by their own efforts" are far more successful than those who don't. If you don't apply some level of "Improving your situation by your own efforts" who the heck do you think is going to do it for you? The fact that the mere mention of "bootstraps" is scoffed at by some is disturbing and in some cases very telling. Anyone who thinks that "bootstraps" isn't part of the solution to every problem you could face is either ignorant or totally helpless.
Thank you.
Big_Stacks"I don't worry about hittin' power, cause I don't give 'em nuttin' to hit." 4,670 Posts
Rockadelic said:
I interview and hire a good number of people and not once, but TWICE in 2012 I've had interviewees tells me "I'm only looking to work here for five years and then leave". The first time I heard this I couldn't believe my ears....even if you think this why the hell would you tell me!!! I asked why and they BOTH said that's what my professor told us we should do, that's how you climb the corporate ladder, in effect.
I told them both to please ask their professor next time they saw him/her how many years it took for them to get their tenure.
Colleges in this country are A) Stealing money from folks who were never college material to begin with and now have three years of loans to pay off and no diploma/job.....B) Setting unrealistic expectations for graduates in the way of entry level salaries as a way to rationalize creating $60K+ in debt that most college grads have........and C) Offering way too many degrees in subjects that only qualify you to hold pseudo-intellectual conversations while serving the customers at Starbucks!
I will admit that I am completely socially Darwinistic when it comes to higher education. It is NOT a privilege, but a right that must be earned. Only K-12 is a right in the U.S. That said, college administrations need to stop peddling that 'everyone should (or needs) to have a college degree' bullshit becaust it is, um, BULLSHIT!!! A fair share of students I encounter do not have the wherewithal to pursue a 4-year degree (or beyond). They would be better served learning a trade because (a) pursuing a trade does not take 4+ years, (b) trade work is more hands-on and somewhat less abstract, and (c) a trade can provide a substantial standard of living. I should explain (b). I said this because a lot of the students I teach lack the higher-order, conceptual type of thinking required to be white-collar professionals. These are folks better equipped complete work with more tangible results since they tend to have a rather rote style of learning. This does not lend such students readily able to construct business plans, forecast trends, etc., etc. Plus, they utterly hate dealing with ambiguity, which is certainly prevalent in working with data, ideas, etc. Owing to what I've said, I doubt the learning style I've noted will make said students either very good entrepreneurs or managers, since both also require managing others (i.e., the lack of social I witness daily is astonishing). Pardon the long response, and I'm open to constructive critique. I must qualify my words by saying my thoughts follow from my 15 years of teaching in higher education.
I interview and hire a good number of people and not once, but TWICE in 2012 I've had interviewees tells me "I'm only looking to work here for five years and then leave". The first time I heard this I couldn't believe my ears....even if you think this why the hell would you tell me!!! I asked why and they BOTH said that's what my professor told us we should do, that's how you climb the corporate ladder, in effect.
I told them both to please ask their professor next time they saw him/her how many years it took for them to get their tenure.
Colleges in this country are A) Stealing money from folks who were never college material to begin with and now have three years of loans to pay off and no diploma/job.....B) Setting unrealistic expectations for graduates in the way of entry level salaries as a way to rationalize creating $60K+ in debt that most college grads have........and C) Offering way too many degrees in subjects that only qualify you to hold pseudo-intellectual conversations while serving the customers at Starbucks!
I will admit that I am completely socially Darwinistic when it comes to higher education. It is NOT a privilege, but a right that must be earned. Only K-12 is a right in the U.S. That said, college administrations need to stop peddling that 'everyone should (or needs) to have a college degree' bullshit becaust it is, um, BULLSHIT!!! A fair share of students I encounter do not have the wherewithal to pursue a 4-year degree (or beyond). They would be better served learning a trade because (a) pursuing a trade does not take 4+ years, (b) trade work is more hands-on and somewhat less abstract, and (c) a trade can provide a substantial standard of living. I should explain (b). I said this because a lot of the students I teach lack the higher-order, conceptual type of thinking required to be white-collar professionals. These are folks better equipped complete work with more tangible results since they tend to have a rather rote style of learning. This does not lend such students readily able to construct business plans, forecast trends, etc., etc. Plus, they utterly hate dealing with ambiguity, which is certainly prevalent in working with data, ideas, etc. Owing to what I've said, I doubt the learning style I've noted will make said students either very good entrepreneurs or managers, since both also require managing others (i.e., the lack of social I witness daily is astonishing). Pardon the long response, and I'm open to constructive critique. I must qualify my words by saying my thoughts follow from my 15 years of teaching in higher education.
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
Thanks for that response P......it's a cold hard reality.
I don't really disagree with any thing anyone is saying.
But, there is some over the top 'kids these days' trash talking.
A) The kids I know these day are working and studying hard and trying to move forward in a tough economy.
B) College is not trade school. If someone is passionate about Art History they should study art history. While it is treated as a big joke a degree in art history is not worthless. To attain that degree the grad has to spend many hours researching and analyzing data. They have to demonstrate critical thinking, show up on time, turn work in on time. These are all skills that are applicable to a myriad of jobs. The dream may be to work in a museum or an auction house or teach. All of those jobs exist for an Art History major, but so do lots of other jobs where research and analysis and thinking are needed.
c) I agree that too much emphasis has been placed on a college degree. True it can help an auto mechanic or a carpenter to have physics or a philosophy degree, but it is not necessary. Where I live school cuts, and college prep, have meant the end to most trade education in the schools. Bad news.
D) College debt. This is out of control. Because local, state and federal government has cut higher ed funding. Demand for college degrees have increased enrollment, which means increased costs to the higher ed system. These cuts and increased costs are being born by the students. Which often means they are graduating with unrealistic debt loads.
E) Over the last 12 years we have dealt with rising tuition first by privatizing student loans, and now raising the interest rates on those loans. Not a good idea in my opinion.
F) Someone said this will be the next mortgage crisis. True. Instead of loaning money to home buyers and business, banks are using their bailout money to make bets on student loans. They are being bundled, sliced, securitized, and being used in CDS and other risky get rich quick schemes by the banks.
G) Most poor people work hard too. Hard work is no guarantee of riches.
I was waiting for Big Stacks to come in here. I don't have much to add except to emphasize that - as he and others have said - college and trade schools are two different institutions and shouldn't either be conflated with one another.
The idealism behind "everyone should go to college" is admirable but the reality, as Stacks is pointing out, is that this presumes that the particular skills that college *is best at* are the skills everyone wants. But obviously, that's not the case. . College isn't one-size-fits-all but this is something very few in higher ed (especially the liberal arts) feels comfortable talking about.
And the reason for this discomfort is this: a more efficient higher ed system would first have to acknowledge that 1) class inequality is real, 2) that it is systemic and 3) that upward mobility will prove difficult if not impossible GIVEN that current system. But to acknowledge any of this is to basically undercut the ideal of the American Dream and that's a tough sell for anyone to do, from presidents down to students.
Years ago, when Clinton was talking about how everyone now had to go to college because you can't have a future with out a college education.
I remember wondering; how colleges were going to accommodate all those people?
How are people not cut out for college were going to fare?
What was going to happen to those people who couldn't make it?
What was going to happen when there was a glut of people with college degrees?
We are starting to find the answers.
There is a woman here in town who went from generational poverty to success through a college education.
She runs a mentoring program for others from similar background.
She talks about a college professor who told her he wanted her to learn a new language... Middle Class English.
This is a must and a stumbling block for many who might be able to succeed if they, and their teachers, understood the problem.
i worked in poor inner city high schools for almost a decade and constantly saw the "preparing you for college and 21st century" refrain in action. sure its a good thing, but for many kids this was a nebulous concept: 4 more years of education, at a high price, that was preparing you for what exactly? few kids had family members with degrees. the goal of college is more of an alien concept than a motivator of diligence. everyone had family working in trades, culinary, government. schools should prepare people for both. Our public education system doesnt prepare a large demographic of the population for anything besides service industry and lack of employment. kids graduate struggling to read, write, articulate, compute, think critically, be organized, or understand basic global politics/geography/economics.
patrick crazy, you completely lost me with your anti-tax, anti-government spending stance. government should be putting more people to work on more education and infrastructure projects. i have extremely little trust in the private sector filling the vacuum left by a sharply reduced government. private sector has proven over and over that it will look out for its own wealth at the expense of the common good. right now government is completely run by big money. like thes wrote, make election publicly funded and try to cut out the influence of big money and let gov get back to actually regulating shit properly.
also wanted to say, liberal arts education shouldn't be demonized. do we really want a population with little exposure to the arts and humanities? higher education should be MUCH more affordable and accessible for anyone who cares to enrich their intellect...like it was at state schools barely twenty years ago. but with the costs shooting through the roof, inflicting a lifetime of student debt, people have to equate education to an investment that must deliver financial returns. its a shame.
rock, i think the aversion to the "bootstrap philosophy" is that it is generally spouted by people who are completely ignoring their own privilege and the severe obstacles faced by many poor people and minorities. sure, it can be done and should be encouraged, but that doesn't mean that every program trying to facilitate "bootstrapping it" has to be cut and attacked as a handout (PELL grants for prisoners, for instance).
It's no mystery that NYC has some of the highest taxes, cost of living and longest work hours in the nation, get it how you live or step off hops. We need your tax dollars for our freaky van, word to tripldub
rock, i think the aversion to the "bootstrap philosophy" is that it is generally spouted by people who are completely ignoring their own privilege and the severe obstacles faced by many poor people and minorities. .
This is a case where you can kill the messenger but not the message!
I'm almost 30, I have an Associate Degree and now, am taking classes - advanced Spanish right now - just for the hell of it. I have a good job that isn't related to any classes I have been taking. That said, I think there's no substitute for or any classes to teach how you to be social and knowing how to talk to people.
"Improvement will require breaking down our large institutions as often as possible into smaller groupings of learners by creating first-year learning communities, salting in more seminars into the curriculum, capping upper-division courses, encouraging undergraduate research, and requiring senior projects. In these ways, teachers and students can learn to know each other again. Improvement will also mean stiffer requirements in fields that have severely lowered their expectations for learning. In larger classes, it will require many more opportunities for students to participate in class, both in old and new ways. It will require more opportunities for students to be held publicly accountable for performing what they are learning ??? not just in anonymous tests and clicker polls, but in the presence of their classmates ??? much as musicians and athletes publicly perform what they learn in practice. And it will require an end to the all-too-prevalent attitude among under-motivated students that ???the only thing that matters is the credential.???
In short, we will need to turn our backs on assumptions of our most fervent boosters of universal higher education: that access alone is the primary purpose, and that when students and teachers are co-present, education occurs. The challenge will be to reweave the uneven and tattered undergraduate experience in more durable and vivid patterns."
I also think Louis Menand's essays on higher ed are well worth a read. This one is concise and asks more questions than it answers but also, a worthwhile read:
Big_Stacks"I don't worry about hittin' power, cause I don't give 'em nuttin' to hit." 4,670 Posts
Hey,
There are some wonderful thoughts going on in this thread. I have to say, I totally agree with people pursuing EDUCATION, as opposed to getting a degree. Another disturbing trend I notice in higher education is students' over-the-top emphasis on grades, or as I put it, 'earning the credential.' It seems as if education has left the building in that students seem to place little priority on LEARNING (or a 'learning or mastery orientation', as Carol Dweck puts is), relative to memorizing to do well on exams and to pass classes (what Dweck terms a 'performance orientation). The focus is too heavily placed upon class outcomes versus the procedural dirty work of reading, studying, and subsequently, learning the content presented in a course. This is evident from national student survey results that revealed how 59% of MBA candidates cheated on exams, as well as yesterday's report of the cheating scandal in the government program at Harvard. Extrinsic performance concerns seem to trump instrinsic interest in learning for learning's sake.
The tendency to emphasize passing exams (and the class) versus pursuing mastery shows up crystal clear on my class project (masters-level Statistics). The project requires the students to analyze real organizational data, and then prepare a corporate report on the results in layperson's (non-statistical jargon) terms. Also, they have to make a presentation to senior management, and I play the role of Senior VP of Human Resources (who lacks great statistical sophistication). I tell them up front that if they confuse me with a bunch of statistical jargon, I will question the hell out of their asses during the presentation. I warn that I will interrupt abruptly with questions because I don't have to defer to them since I'm a senior manager. I basically give them a simulation of what I had to deal with as an HR consultant back in the days before I became an academic. I couldn't spout off industrial-organizational psychology babble to the fire chief for whom I was developing a lieutenant promotional exam, and he wanted me to explain the test development, validation, administration, and scoring processes to the Personnel Board. Probably, he nor the Board would be impressed by the technical jargon or comprehend a word I said if I conveyed it.
It's astonishing how cats just want to regurgitate statistical terms from the book, versus translating the material in the easy-to-understand language. It's obvious that they 'study-up' for exams, learn how to apply the statistical formulas, but FAIL to truly develop deep understanding the material. Some get it, but most don't demonstrate a true depth of understanding. I find it extremely disappointing to see this tendency upon masters-level students at one of the top-50 U.S. Research I, state institutions. I think part of some students' difficulties in obtaining work is that they lack the depth of learning necessary to apply their skills (or to explain how they would do so if hired during an interview) at work. Finally, we as faculty have to design course material that requires learning to master, and if they cannot demonstrate mastery, fail their assess accordingly. Otherwise, we're cheapening the degrees we hand out, so the sheepskin isn't work shit!
Stacks, O, How much worse are things now than when you started?
How much better, or worse, are your best students?
How about some helicopter parent stories?
Seems any discussion of entitlement should start with them.
One thing I have heard educators talk about is, students focused on getting the degree (as quickly and easily as possible) with no interest in learning. I think this is tough job market related.
Stacks, O, How much worse are things now than when you started?
How much better, or worse, are your best students?
How about some helicopter parent stories?
Seems any discussion of entitlement should start with them.
One thing I have heard educators talk about is, students focused on getting the degree (as quickly and easily as possible) with no interest in learning. I think this is tough job market related.
#1: I don't see it like that. For one, I don't have a good point of comparison...I first started teaching my own classes more or less 12 years ago but different campus ,different system. I don't think I've seen major changes on my current campus since starting six years ago.
The "worse" is less about the students and more about the climate. Massively hiked fees. Reduced budgets. The belief that universities should be run more like corporations.
#2: I haven't dealt with helicopter parents. Many of my students are first generation college students. I've very rarely dealt with students with "entitlement issues". What I get is general apathy and kids bitching about having to read shit that's "not on the exam" as if that's the only reason they should be learning things.
#3: I polled my class last semester about how many of them were there primarily to earn a credential and I think the answer rate was about 40-50%. Maybe about 10% said they were there strictly to make their parents happy but otherwise, didn't want to be there.
I think the thing you're leaving out here isn't just about the job market. If anything, being in school allows students to wait out a bad job market. *It's student debt.* They want to get out of school faster so they stop accruing debt. The amount of debt that the average student carries is *staggering*. Especially as the father of a 7 year old, I'm just projecting what a state school might cost in about 10 years and the shit is depressing.
I also think the culture of college - as a learning environment, where the goal is to learn - is largely... learned behavior. You learn it from your parents (assuming they went to college) or maybe the books you read or movies you watch. To think of college as this rarefied space for growth and self-discovery isn't an automatic association; it's a socialized relationship and increasingly, I don't think this is the ideal of college that's being pitched. It's about the degree and the credential. So it shouldn't be surprising that so many students reflect that ideal of college (credential-gaining) rather than the older impression (shrine to higher learning).
It's about the degree and the credential. So it shouldn't be surprising that so many students reflect that ideal of college (credential-gaining) rather than the older impression (shrine to higher learning).
i have a friend who is working at Wharton right now and says that there is absolutely no studying being done and the students couldnt care less about the grades. each year the students put up to a vote whether grades can be reported to employers and its always voted down. students barely go to class and professors have little influence. she painted a pretty harrowing picture. basically its an elite club where financial predators go to network. wharton is a very atypical example,but i guess its another side of whats become of our ed system
From the convos I've had, campuses have all but accepted that business schools are in their own world. Their main hope (not shared universally, esp. with administrators) is to prevent letting the business school mentality from infecting the rest of campus.
Come on bros, are you really going to go on some ridiculous stereotypes like that? All the people I work with and know that did either Wharton undergrad or MBA are fucking brilliant, humble, and to say the very least, hard working dudes. Talking down on the campus that's employing you on some "financial predators" shit is total hypocrisy. And if business school mentality = actually getting a job after graduating then um...
I have a question for the professors/teachers, forgive me if I am going off topic a bit. I have always wondered what you guys have thought of students opting to take online courses. Do you believe that this hinders a students chances of actually learning something? Or is it better in your opinions that a student shows more incentive attending a class physically instead? Either way a student can just skate by for just a credit instead of the joy of actually learning something correct?
I have a question for the professors/teachers, forgive me if I am going off topic a bit. I have always wondered what you guys have thought of students opting to take online courses. Do you believe that this hinders a students chances of actually learning something? Or is it better in your opinions that a student shows more incentive attending a class physically instead? Either way a student can just skate by for just a credit instead of the joy of actually learning something correct?
I'm a big fan of cross-disciplinary learning, and it's hard for students to do that given the narrow leeway for electives of many programs (particularly in the sciences). So if an online course helps motivated students get more specifically qualified, I'm all for them.
In my field, students who skate through degrees are not going to be having an easy time findings fulfilling jobs (e.g., they'll be short-term contracts and they won't let you have much control over your work). You need to have a career path in mind and then develop specific types of skills/experiences that specific employers need.
Comments
The great majority of the hires I make are good, hardworking folks.....of course I only get to see them after they have passed through two HR hurdles and a background check. I do see an unusually high number of folks who have unrealistic expectations coming out of college. I've had a couple who have told me they went to college so that they didn't wind up with a job where they had to work too hard(Huh? What?)......I do chalk a lot of this up to immaturity.
Bootstraps - By no means do I think the simplistic answer to every problem is "bootstraps". However, I don't think there is any question that those who try to "Improve their situation by their own efforts" are far more successful than those who don't. If you don't apply some level of "Improving your situation by your own efforts" who the heck do you think is going to do it for you? The fact that the mere mention of "bootstraps" is scoffed at by some is disturbing and in some cases very telling. Anyone who thinks that "bootstraps" isn't part of the solution to every problem you could face is either ignorant or totally helpless.
Thank you.
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
Thanks for that response P......it's a cold hard reality.
But, there is some over the top 'kids these days' trash talking.
A) The kids I know these day are working and studying hard and trying to move forward in a tough economy.
B) College is not trade school. If someone is passionate about Art History they should study art history. While it is treated as a big joke a degree in art history is not worthless. To attain that degree the grad has to spend many hours researching and analyzing data. They have to demonstrate critical thinking, show up on time, turn work in on time. These are all skills that are applicable to a myriad of jobs. The dream may be to work in a museum or an auction house or teach. All of those jobs exist for an Art History major, but so do lots of other jobs where research and analysis and thinking are needed.
c) I agree that too much emphasis has been placed on a college degree. True it can help an auto mechanic or a carpenter to have physics or a philosophy degree, but it is not necessary. Where I live school cuts, and college prep, have meant the end to most trade education in the schools. Bad news.
D) College debt. This is out of control. Because local, state and federal government has cut higher ed funding. Demand for college degrees have increased enrollment, which means increased costs to the higher ed system. These cuts and increased costs are being born by the students. Which often means they are graduating with unrealistic debt loads.
E) Over the last 12 years we have dealt with rising tuition first by privatizing student loans, and now raising the interest rates on those loans. Not a good idea in my opinion.
F) Someone said this will be the next mortgage crisis. True. Instead of loaning money to home buyers and business, banks are using their bailout money to make bets on student loans. They are being bundled, sliced, securitized, and being used in CDS and other risky get rich quick schemes by the banks.
G) Most poor people work hard too. Hard work is no guarantee of riches.
Truth.
Thank you,
BearClaw
The idealism behind "everyone should go to college" is admirable but the reality, as Stacks is pointing out, is that this presumes that the particular skills that college *is best at* are the skills everyone wants. But obviously, that's not the case. . College isn't one-size-fits-all but this is something very few in higher ed (especially the liberal arts) feels comfortable talking about.
And the reason for this discomfort is this: a more efficient higher ed system would first have to acknowledge that 1) class inequality is real, 2) that it is systemic and 3) that upward mobility will prove difficult if not impossible GIVEN that current system. But to acknowledge any of this is to basically undercut the ideal of the American Dream and that's a tough sell for anyone to do, from presidents down to students.
Years ago, when Clinton was talking about how everyone now had to go to college because you can't have a future with out a college education.
I remember wondering; how colleges were going to accommodate all those people?
How are people not cut out for college were going to fare?
What was going to happen to those people who couldn't make it?
What was going to happen when there was a glut of people with college degrees?
We are starting to find the answers.
There is a woman here in town who went from generational poverty to success through a college education.
She runs a mentoring program for others from similar background.
She talks about a college professor who told her he wanted her to learn a new language... Middle Class English.
This is a must and a stumbling block for many who might be able to succeed if they, and their teachers, understood the problem.
I'm feeling like my mom wants to wack me because I don't like bread.
id campaign and go door to door for 4year graduates platform.
been thinking a lot about an important article i read last week about the state of higher ed. maybe a touch conspiratorial, but hits the mark in many ways that are also reflected in k-12: https://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university-was-killed-in-five-easy-steps/
i worked in poor inner city high schools for almost a decade and constantly saw the "preparing you for college and 21st century" refrain in action. sure its a good thing, but for many kids this was a nebulous concept: 4 more years of education, at a high price, that was preparing you for what exactly? few kids had family members with degrees. the goal of college is more of an alien concept than a motivator of diligence. everyone had family working in trades, culinary, government. schools should prepare people for both. Our public education system doesnt prepare a large demographic of the population for anything besides service industry and lack of employment. kids graduate struggling to read, write, articulate, compute, think critically, be organized, or understand basic global politics/geography/economics.
It's no mystery that NYC has some of the highest taxes, cost of living and longest work hours in the nation, get it how you live or step off hops. We need your tax dollars for our freaky van, word to tripldub
This is a case where you can kill the messenger but not the message!
http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/post/12835528594/the-educational-lottery
"Improvement will require breaking down our large institutions as often as possible into smaller groupings of learners by creating first-year learning communities, salting in more seminars into the curriculum, capping upper-division courses, encouraging undergraduate research, and requiring senior projects. In these ways, teachers and students can learn to know each other again. Improvement will also mean stiffer requirements in fields that have severely lowered their expectations for learning. In larger classes, it will require many more opportunities for students to participate in class, both in old and new ways. It will require more opportunities for students to be held publicly accountable for performing what they are learning ??? not just in anonymous tests and clicker polls, but in the presence of their classmates ??? much as musicians and athletes publicly perform what they learn in practice. And it will require an end to the all-too-prevalent attitude among under-motivated students that ???the only thing that matters is the credential.???
In short, we will need to turn our backs on assumptions of our most fervent boosters of universal higher education: that access alone is the primary purpose, and that when students and teachers are co-present, education occurs. The challenge will be to reweave the uneven and tattered undergraduate experience in more durable and vivid patterns."
I also think Louis Menand's essays on higher ed are well worth a read. This one is concise and asks more questions than it answers but also, a worthwhile read:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand
There are some wonderful thoughts going on in this thread. I have to say, I totally agree with people pursuing EDUCATION, as opposed to getting a degree. Another disturbing trend I notice in higher education is students' over-the-top emphasis on grades, or as I put it, 'earning the credential.' It seems as if education has left the building in that students seem to place little priority on LEARNING (or a 'learning or mastery orientation', as Carol Dweck puts is), relative to memorizing to do well on exams and to pass classes (what Dweck terms a 'performance orientation). The focus is too heavily placed upon class outcomes versus the procedural dirty work of reading, studying, and subsequently, learning the content presented in a course. This is evident from national student survey results that revealed how 59% of MBA candidates cheated on exams, as well as yesterday's report of the cheating scandal in the government program at Harvard. Extrinsic performance concerns seem to trump instrinsic interest in learning for learning's sake.
The tendency to emphasize passing exams (and the class) versus pursuing mastery shows up crystal clear on my class project (masters-level Statistics). The project requires the students to analyze real organizational data, and then prepare a corporate report on the results in layperson's (non-statistical jargon) terms. Also, they have to make a presentation to senior management, and I play the role of Senior VP of Human Resources (who lacks great statistical sophistication). I tell them up front that if they confuse me with a bunch of statistical jargon, I will question the hell out of their asses during the presentation. I warn that I will interrupt abruptly with questions because I don't have to defer to them since I'm a senior manager. I basically give them a simulation of what I had to deal with as an HR consultant back in the days before I became an academic. I couldn't spout off industrial-organizational psychology babble to the fire chief for whom I was developing a lieutenant promotional exam, and he wanted me to explain the test development, validation, administration, and scoring processes to the Personnel Board. Probably, he nor the Board would be impressed by the technical jargon or comprehend a word I said if I conveyed it.
It's astonishing how cats just want to regurgitate statistical terms from the book, versus translating the material in the easy-to-understand language. It's obvious that they 'study-up' for exams, learn how to apply the statistical formulas, but FAIL to truly develop deep understanding the material. Some get it, but most don't demonstrate a true depth of understanding. I find it extremely disappointing to see this tendency upon masters-level students at one of the top-50 U.S. Research I, state institutions. I think part of some students' difficulties in obtaining work is that they lack the depth of learning necessary to apply their skills (or to explain how they would do so if hired during an interview) at work. Finally, we as faculty have to design course material that requires learning to master, and if they cannot demonstrate mastery, fail their assess accordingly. Otherwise, we're cheapening the degrees we hand out, so the sheepskin isn't work shit!
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
How much better, or worse, are your best students?
How about some helicopter parent stories?
Seems any discussion of entitlement should start with them.
One thing I have heard educators talk about is, students focused on getting the degree (as quickly and easily as possible) with no interest in learning. I think this is tough job market related.
#1: I don't see it like that. For one, I don't have a good point of comparison...I first started teaching my own classes more or less 12 years ago but different campus ,different system. I don't think I've seen major changes on my current campus since starting six years ago.
The "worse" is less about the students and more about the climate. Massively hiked fees. Reduced budgets. The belief that universities should be run more like corporations.
#2: I haven't dealt with helicopter parents. Many of my students are first generation college students. I've very rarely dealt with students with "entitlement issues". What I get is general apathy and kids bitching about having to read shit that's "not on the exam" as if that's the only reason they should be learning things.
#3: I polled my class last semester about how many of them were there primarily to earn a credential and I think the answer rate was about 40-50%. Maybe about 10% said they were there strictly to make their parents happy but otherwise, didn't want to be there.
I think the thing you're leaving out here isn't just about the job market. If anything, being in school allows students to wait out a bad job market. *It's student debt.* They want to get out of school faster so they stop accruing debt. The amount of debt that the average student carries is *staggering*. Especially as the father of a 7 year old, I'm just projecting what a state school might cost in about 10 years and the shit is depressing.
I also think the culture of college - as a learning environment, where the goal is to learn - is largely... learned behavior. You learn it from your parents (assuming they went to college) or maybe the books you read or movies you watch. To think of college as this rarefied space for growth and self-discovery isn't an automatic association; it's a socialized relationship and increasingly, I don't think this is the ideal of college that's being pitched. It's about the degree and the credential. So it shouldn't be surprising that so many students reflect that ideal of college (credential-gaining) rather than the older impression (shrine to higher learning).
i have a friend who is working at Wharton right now and says that there is absolutely no studying being done and the students couldnt care less about the grades. each year the students put up to a vote whether grades can be reported to employers and its always voted down. students barely go to class and professors have little influence. she painted a pretty harrowing picture. basically its an elite club where financial predators go to network. wharton is a very atypical example,but i guess its another side of whats become of our ed system
Thank you
I'm a big fan of cross-disciplinary learning, and it's hard for students to do that given the narrow leeway for electives of many programs (particularly in the sciences). So if an online course helps motivated students get more specifically qualified, I'm all for them.
In my field, students who skate through degrees are not going to be having an easy time findings fulfilling jobs (e.g., they'll be short-term contracts and they won't let you have much control over your work). You need to have a career path in mind and then develop specific types of skills/experiences that specific employers need.