When someone buys something, they are happy with their purchase if they actually buy what they think they are buying. If reality does not match expectations, the consumer is naturally unhappy with their purchase.
What is it university students think they are purchasing when they to go a university? What do the universities think they are selling?
Purchasing versus Earning -- the university merges the two, which is creating confusion as students increasingly think they are purchasing a degree rather than purchasing the chance to gain knowledge that will earn them a degree. The university thinks the students are purchasing access to knowledge so they may earn a degree. One earns a degree by proving one has gained the knowledge one has purchased.
Students think companies want people with degrees. Companies need to make t clear that they want people who have the knowledge the degree says they have and not just a degree. Indeed, they are trying to send that very signal because, as more degrees are given to people who do not have the knowledge, more advanced degrees are becoming required by companies.
Therefore we need stronger, not weaker, collaboration and communication between business and academia so that business can more clearly communicate that they want people with knowledge, not just degrees -- that they want people with a full university education.
3 comments:
Therefore we need stronger, not weaker, collaboration and communication between business and academia so that business can more clearly communicate that they want people with knowledge, not just degrees -- that they want people with a full university education.
I suggested something similar a while ago:
http://independentsources.com/
2007/07/28/the-open-university/
At least in the liberal arts, it's hardly surprising that students are unable to properly appreciate discipline, scholarship and achievement when they're being taught by a bunch of snide, nihilistic rockstar wannabes that nothing means anything, all authority is spurious, education is a cynical power game and "knowledge" and "truth" are just products of ideology.
I know it's too easy just to blame the postmodernists, but goddamn, they've made a mess of things.
Blame away -- they are to blame. What's worse is that it's not confined to the liberal arts (though if it were, that would be bad enough). They are also dominant in the social sciences as well. I would call it a cancer, but cancer at least is out of control growth -- what the postmodernists are doing is making everything slowly rot and putrefy. Most of them are failed artists with science envy, which is why they work to tear down everything that is good and beautiful, and do so with plastic terminology that means less than it sounds like it means. Once you get through the dense crap that is most pomo writing, you find there is less there than you thought, and that it really wasn't worth the effort.
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