who would support dropping liberal arts degrees to help colleges?

[SpidermanTuba]

I think the problem here is that we're using something now for not what it was originally meant to be used.

Colleges and universities were not originally intended to be vocational schools. It used to be you didn't go to college to get a job, you went to college to study the classics, or sciences, or arts, etc.

Now we use them as vocational schools, places you go to learn how to do a job. We also use them as a means to make up for shitty high schools.

Its a result of the campaign over the last few decades to get everyone to get a college degree. I ask though, to what end? If everyone has a college degree, doesn't that just mean that now you have to have a college degree to manage a McDonald's?

 

[blu]

that was a humble law school from the sound of it. grammar deficiencies in grad school?

i've been blessed with private ed for nearly my entire life, including university. i've got to admit, i dont know anything about the conditions in some state colleges. the university of california schools seem great, and their students quite bright, even through my prejudiced lens.

perhaps your frustration is misplaced. what should education really do more in order to secure a job for your kids?

i believe that in another decade, an additional third of the population wont have any jobs. half in the decade to follow. the era of labor intensive industry and services is evaporating by way of exponents. along with that, the era that you can white man yourself a job, degree yourself a job, masters yourself a job, etc... is by-gone.

prep junior accordingly.

yep. I started a thread some time ago about this. almost all jobs except those that require new research will be done by robots within our kids lifetime. even the maintenance and creation of new robots will be done by existing robots once the technology has spread and matures.

there will be a new economoy born and it won't be mass labor based

This is fascinating stuff guys -- can that thread be bumped?

there is some stuff in here. if you use firefox do ctrl+f type robot and hit hilight all to see the posts talking about robot labor specifically.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/current-events/107883-blue-collar-workers-are-screwed.html

the thread I actually strated on the subject didn't turn out that well here so I think where it did turn out well was the other forum I used to be active on that is now unfortunately closed.

I think I will make another thread about robot labor to see if we can really get some good discussion going.

 

[blu]

I had no idea the primary purpose of a public university was to generate profit.

In that case we need to drop all athletic programs as well, except football in a small handful of schools.

Also, lets just not educate students at all, because that just distracts the profit generating professors from their research.

actually research students generate a lot of money for hte school. for each reseach grant they get, the school gets money off the top plus their professor gets extra paycheck, plus there is usually money in it for new equipment, plus the student also gets a stipend

Not all research students. Physics graduate students, for instance, tend to use up much more in grant money then they generate in profits.

Regardless, though, those profits aren't generated with students sitting in classrooms. So lets get rid of the coursework to save money and send them straight to a lab.

you realize you need years of coursework or the equivalent of it in self study to be able to do cutting edge research right?

 

[blu]

I think the problem here is that we're using something now for not what it was originally meant to be used.

Colleges and universities were not originally intended to be vocational schools. It used to be you didn't go to college to get a job, you went to college to study the classics, or sciences, or arts, etc.

Now we use them as vocational schools, places you go to learn how to do a job. We also use them as a means to make up for shitty high schools.

Its a result of the campaign over the last few decades to get everyone to get a college degree. I ask though, to what end? If everyone has a college degree, doesn't that just mean that now you have to have a college degree to manage a McDonald's?

as people have attested to in this thread, some college degrees won't even give get you a job, it all depends on your field. you also can't just loaf arond for 4 years and expect great things when you graduate. you either need to be doing active, published research at your school if your field has that ability or you need to be getting relevant internships and experience starting two years before you grad

 

[Samson]

I think the problem here is that we're using something now for not what it was originally meant to be used.

Colleges and universities were not originally intended to be vocational schools. It used to be you didn't go to college to get a job, you went to college to study the classics, or sciences, or arts, etc.

Now we use them as vocational schools, places you go to learn how to do a job. We also use them as a means to make up for shitty high schools.

Its a result of the campaign over the last few decades to get everyone to get a college degree. I ask though, to what end? If everyone has a college degree, doesn't that just mean that now you have to have a college degree to manage a McDonald's?

Not really sure what you're getting at here, but I think you're referring to Medieval Universities vs "Modern" (e.g. those begun after the industrial revolution) Universities.

When you say, "It used to be," you're referring to at least 1876, when many states began to form "Agricultural & Mechanical" colleges, which often only admitted males, and often those males were also enrolled in an ROTC program.

When these schools allowed females to enroll (during the '60's), the new student body demanded more "liberal arts" classes. Lit'ture, creative 'ritin,' interpretive readin', an' such.

Essentially, course plans around these new students weren't much more than "MRS" Degrees, until the past 25 years, when women have begun to break into the "Agricultural and Mechanical" sciences for which the Universities were originally founded.

 

[Dr Gregg]

Honestly, I think a person could successfully pass the bar with 1 year of law school. In fact, see no reason why you shouldnt be able to self teach yourself.

And rocket science.

And brain surgery.

Don't forget electronic engineering.

'

Why not? Why do you despite self made men and women who educated themselves?

What's the point of paying thousands of dollars for an education when you can learn the same things by simply going to the library and reading books? When you can experiment for yourself? Or when you can apprentice yourself to a master to learn that way much cheaper?

Because you can't put on your resume that I've read a lot of books. Grades test your knowledge, and show you know the material. Plus not everybody can educate themselves. I learned most out of the book, but not everybody can, especially some of the more difficult topics

 

[SpidermanTuba]

you realize you need years of coursework or the equivalent of it in self study to be able to do cutting edge research right?

No you don't. At least not in the way its currently done. In the u.S coursework is dominated by lecture time. In other nations this is not the case. You meet once a week and work independently the rest of the time.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Look up the books the college courses require and read them.

Duh.

of course, were there no longer the curriculum to reference...

If liberal arts degrees were discontinued, I am sure one could find what used to be taught and what books used to be used in the very same free library.

While I am a huge fan of voracious reading, and encourage everyone to do so, I have to honestly say that I don't believe the learning acquired from attending class can be replaced by merely reading the coursebook.

 

[eagleseven]

there is some stuff in here. if you use firefox do ctrl+f type robot and hit hilight all to see the posts talking about robot labor specifically.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/current-events/107883-blue-collar-workers-are-screwed.html

the thread I actually strated on the subject didn't turn out that well here so I think where it did turn out well was the other forum I used to be active on that is now unfortunately closed.

I think I will make another thread about robot labor to see if we can really get some good discussion going.

I remember that thread!

 

[Samson]

of course, were there no longer the curriculum to reference...

If liberal arts degrees were discontinued, I am sure one could find what used to be taught and what books used to be used in the very same free library.

While I am a huge fan of voracious reading, and encourage everyone to do so, I have to honestly say that I don't believe the learning acquired from attending class can be replaced by merely reading the coursebook.

Plus, you cannot pick up sexy co-eds by "merely reading the coursebook."

 

[antagon]

you realize you need years of coursework or the equivalent of it in self study to be able to do cutting edge research right?

No you don't. At least not in the way its currently done. In the u.S coursework is dominated by lecture time. In other nations this is not the case. You meet once a week and work independently the rest of the time.

it must depend on the school. there were lectures and labs even for lit classes when i was at uni. altogether, our universities are superior to international unis, altogether.

 

[Madeline]

that was a humble law school from the sound of it. grammar deficiencies in grad school?

Regionally prominent at the time. Nationally, mid-range I suppose. It's apparently climbed to regionally predominant since I graduated. Good enough for a kid like me, in any event. If you didn't attend a Top 10 law school, these rankings are a bit amorphous.

You would be amazed/horrified/pissed off if you could see what I see from other lawyers. Contracts, drafts of bills, deeds, pleadings -- you name it -- I have seen glaring grammar errors in them all. (Probably made a few too, but I had a traditional Catholic school education with the Latin and the diagramming of sentences, etc. So I hope not many.)

Some of this is due to pcs and spell/grammar checks. The writer grows far too dependent on that damned machine to signal when he has made an error and can no longer parse out the meaning of his own words.

Lazy people also do not read Strunk and White "On Style" once a year, or spend their leisure time reading well-written books. Their skills, such as they were, atrophy. And believe you me, there are lazy lawyers.

Things really are this bad in terms of ground lost in education K-12 and look to do nothing but get much, much worse. That pushes up to pressure on the colleges and universities, and I'm not sure what should be done to address it.

But it's a factor in the mix that cannot be ignored.

law is a great example of an employment and entrepreneurial market which is played on merits beyond the degree and the exam. lionel hutz from the simpsons sums that field up. you can be a john chochran or a hobo.

I do not know The Simpsons, but I disagree with the point you made, or the one I think you made. The explosion in the number of lawyers is not some Great American Brain Suck of alot more intelligence into one field of endeavor. Just the opposite. The phenomena of using the LSAT to quantify admissibility and the Muli-State to quantify suitability to practice law has obliterated the focus of the Socractic Method, or teaching people to think. We now instead value people who CANNOT think, but who sure can parrot.

To an extent, great lawyering is about rhetoric -- the ability to fling better bullshit than the other guy. You cannot hone your skills in rhetoric or debate by trying to memorize and reguritate faster, better, more without regard to any other sort of intellectual exercise. It's no wonder we see so many "patterns of lawsuits" in this country. We've trained a couple of generations of lawyers now to think and believe that rote memorization and exact duplication are the pathways to success. And oddly, to a degree, they have become just that.

Lionel Hutz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

is diagramming really just a catholic school thing? like i said, i have no idea what public schools are doing with their time and money.

I don't know if diagramming sentences is only a circa-1950's and 1960's Catholic school phenomena. Doesn't seem very likely. But like teaching penmanship, it is nowhere to be found in American K-12 education anymore, as far as I know. (We still see some effort to teach "cursive writing", but the penmanship of my generation, my parents' and grandparents', etc., is no longer valued. And maybe that's okay, but I think we've lost ground, not gained it, as a result. I'm a dinosaur I guess.)

Public schools are using their time and money largely to babysit and to train the children to perform well on standarized tests in hopes of gaining more time and money in the next school year. Here in Cleveland, nobody even bothers to pretend anymore that educating kids is even a small part of the mission.

written and verbal communication are the most valuable bits of my classroom education, by far. they should be stressed above everything else, because they facilitate everything else.

Well, I am not sure I agree. Elevating "communication skills" a la reading and writing above all leaves math and science, for example, without a place on the agenda. It seems like wishful thinking to me that this generation and future ones are going to be competitive without stronger math and science skills.

To a degree, though, it matters less what the content of a lesson is and more on how it is taught. When kids are educated, they acquire skills like reasoning, perception and critical analysis. When they are "taught to the (standarized) test" they learn only that which is on offer: Act A gets Result B. Over and over, in an endless loop.

nevermind i refuse to use the shift key on here, and toss my commas arbitrarily.

Style in creative writing is desirable and necessary, a la e.e. cummings. But adherence to grammar and punctuation rules are critical to legal writing, and to most forms of "professional" writing. Correct punctuation is just another means by which the writer assures his ideas have been stated with some precision, so that the reader can decipher them. Ambiguity of meaning is at least one underlying reason for most lawsuits and a tremendous drain on the nation. It is a form of waste, and should not be tolerated -- never mind celebrated Yet we do.

 

[Zander]

Exactemundo ... plus, who really needs to know why politicians decide they way they do (PolSci) or why have certain armed conflicts gone for as long as they have (History/Int'l Affairs) or how to solve such conflicts (Int'l Affairs/Conflict Resolution). Such things are just so dang useless! We can see it in the world we live in today after all!

After over 100 years of the world's universities turning out PoliSci, History, and International Affairs majors...

...have our politicians improved?

...have we stopped repeating history?

...have we stopped having conflicts?


Contrast this with how science and mathematics majors have changed our world.

Of course you're right. China and India are producing the worlds Doctors, Mathematicians, Scientists, and Engineers. We are producing Teachers, Lawyers and Politicians.

 

[antagon]

Regionally prominent at the time. Nationally, mid-range I suppose. It's apparently climbed to regionally predominant since I graduated. Good enough for a kid like me, in any event. If you didn't attend a Top 10 law school, these rankings are a bit amorphous.

You would be amazed/horrified/pissed off if you could see what I see from other lawyers. Contracts, drafts of bills, deeds, pleadings -- you name it -- I have seen glaring grammar errors in them all. (Probably made a few too, but I had a traditional Catholic school education with the Latin and the diagramming of sentences, etc. So I hope not many.)

Some of this is due to pcs and spell/grammar checks. The writer grows far too dependent on that damned machine to signal when he has made an error and can no longer parse out the meaning of his own words.

Lazy people also do not read Strunk and White "On Style" once a year, or spend their leisure time reading well-written books. Their skills, such as they were, atrophy. And believe you me, there are lazy lawyers.

Things really are this bad in terms of ground lost in education K-12 and look to do nothing but get much, much worse. That pushes up to pressure on the colleges and universities, and I'm not sure what should be done to address it.

But it's a factor in the mix that cannot be ignored.

I do not know The Simpsons, but I disagree with the point you made, or the one I think you made. The explosion in the number of lawyers is not some Great American Brain Suck of alot more intelligence into one field of endeavor. Just the opposite. The phenomena of using the LSAT to quantify admissibility and the Muli-State to quantify suitability to practice law has obliterated the focus of the Socractic Method, or teaching people to think. We now instead value people who CANNOT think, but who sure can parrot.

To an extent, great lawyering is about rhetoric -- the ability to fling better bullshit than the other guy. You cannot hone your skills in rhetoric or debate by trying to memorize and reguritate faster, better, more without regard to any other sort of intellectual exercise. It's no wonder we see so many "patterns of lawsuits" in this country. We've trained a couple of generations of lawyers now to think and believe that rote memorization and exact duplication are the pathways to success. And oddly, to a degree, they have become just that.

Lionel Hutz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



I don't know if diagramming sentences is only a circa-1950's and 1960's Catholic school phenomena. Doesn't seem very likely. But like teaching penmanship, it is nowhere to be found in American K-12 education anymore, as far as I know. (We still see some effort to teach "cursive writing", but the penmanship of my generation, my parents' and grandparents', etc., is no longer valued. And maybe that's okay, but I think we've lost ground, not gained it, as a result. I'm a dinosaur I guess.)

Public schools are using their time and money largely to babysit and to train the children to perform well on standarized tests in hopes of gaining more time and money in the next school year. Here in Cleveland, nobody even bothers to pretend anymore that educating kids is even a small part of the mission.



Well, I am not sure I agree. Elevating "communication skills" a la reading and writing above all leaves math and science, for example, without a place on the agenda. It seems like wishful thinking to me that this generation and future ones are going to be competitive without stronger math and science skills.

To a degree, though, it matters less what the content of a lesson is and more on how it is taught. When kids are educated, they acquire skills like reasoning, perception and critical analysis. When they are "taught to the (standarized) test" they learn only that which is on offer: Act A gets Result B. Over and over, in an endless loop.

nevermind i refuse to use the shift key on here, and toss my commas arbitrarily.

Style in creative writing is desirable and necessary, a la e.e. cummings. But adherence to grammar and punctuation rules are critical to legal writing, and to most forms of "professional" writing. Correct punctuation is just another means by which the writer assures his ideas have been stated with some precision, so that the reader can decipher them. Ambiguity of meaning is at least one underlying reason for most lawsuits and a tremendous drain on the nation. It is a form of waste, and should not be tolerated -- never mind celebrated Yet we do.

i went to catholic schools on the west coast in the '90s and we diagrammed sentences.

i feel that language skills are what imparts much of math and science, and that these other studies suffer from shortcomings in literacy education. not until university did math come down to teachers whose english was hardly intelligible and abstract equasions you'd be hard-pressed to draft word problems for.

to clarify my stance on attorneys, i feel they're a case in point to my earlier contention that a degree alone, or a profession alone will beget a living. proficiency in that profession and in selling one's self into that profession will ultimately be the determining factors.

in light of these roles, i don't believe education should be biased exclusively to job-worthiness. that will always be an onus on the individual. education should indicate that some competencies and knowledge is imparted in a way which is effective for study. it should judge how effectively a student has performed in this paradigm. the employer should use this information as they see fit, and the student will invariably have to establish themselves beyond the mere merits of their degree and demonstrate themselves to be the best employee for the post.

schools' effectiveness is judged by the success of their alumni; i think they do well to prepare and grease the way for their grads, however, some of those efforts are reproached here, paradoxically.

 

[geauxtohell]

Seeing how many colleges now are facing steep budget issues, who would support mass dropping of liberal arts degree programs? Obviously some introduction liberal arts classes are needed for all majors, but the idea of getting a 4 year degree in liberal arts is just ridiculous and a waste of time. These programs are also a drag on the college as they bring in no research or other money and must be completely funded by tuition, which also drops during bad economic times. Unlike liberal arts programs, students and professors in math, science, and engineering actually make profits for the school through grants and commercialization of products in conjunction with local businesses.

Actually, look at what happened at Tulane after the storm. They dropped virtually every engineering program because they couldn't afford it. Liberal Arts are cheap departments, engineering cost the school money.

So I dispute your last sentence. It all depends on the university.

 

[Samson]

i went to catholic schools on the west coast in the '90s and we diagrammed sentences.

i feel that language skills are what imparts much of math and science, and that these other studies suffer from shortcomings in literacy education.

not until university did math come down to teachers whose english was hardly intelligible and abstract equasions you'd be hard-pressed to draft word problems for.

"not until university did math come down to teachers whose english was hardly intelligible and abstract equasions you'd be hard-pressed to draft word problems for."



You ended the sentence with a preposition.

"was hardly intelligible"=> hardly was intelligible

What does "did math come down to" mean?

 

[antagon]

sentences can end in preps. that's a ridiculous rule.

i'll rehash..

when i was in highschool, math was easy. you could make word problems for virtually everything. in college, the role of english in math classes was dramatically reduced. some of the professor's english was difficult to understand. they had strong accents from exotic places. interestingly enough, the word problems were gone.

 

[Samson]

sentences can end in preps. that's a ridiculous rule.

i'll rehash..

when i was in highschool, math was easy. you could make word problems for virtually everything. in college, the role of english in math classes was dramatically reduced. some of the professor's english was difficult to understand. they had strong accents from exotic places. interestingly enough, the word problems were gone.

WELL WELL WELL

I bet the Catholic Nuns didn't put up with "dangling modifiers."

There is a different curriculum for High School vs. College Math

In high school math the curriculum is based on the theory that you MAY use it, one day, eventually, to read a pie chart in USATODAY and use that information to buy a gallon of gas, or calculate when Train A and Train B will pass each other, given distances and speeds.

In college math, it is assumed that either A. you have no intention of ever really using it, or B. If you really wanna use it, you will Major in Engineering, or C. you are from Taiwan.

 

[antagon]

yes, sister samson.

I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".

 

[Samson]

yes, sister samson.

I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".
I will say "for which" instead of dangling "for".