This post is in semi-response to this article, about person who is "breaking up" with the University of Saskatchewan because of the supposedly poor way that arts students are treated.
As far as I am concerned, universities are possible because of a cultural mandate. For hundreds of years now, we in western civilization have valued the broad education offered by universities. Certainly, there are many benefits. This produces more culturally-aware people. Art and music are very important, as far as I am concerned, as is the study of numerous social and soft sciences. But it doesn't follow that we need so damn many.
Let's talk about the more artistic things first. I think that there's a disconnect in numbers in these fields. How many art majors go on to make important pieces of art? Likewise for music. Not every aspiring artist is going to make a splash, of course, but it would be interesting to see just how many graduates of these programs actually make something worthwhile. Of course, there are other reasons for this. Governmental patronage is important outside of university as well, of course, and many will say that we don't have enough. Good point. So let's stop sending so many damn people to University and instead support the people who count. That would be some money better spent.
For social and soft sciences, such as psychology, sociology, etc., my argument is similar. Many of these people make important contributions to their fields, but does that mean the university has to churn out 9 sociology grads who go on to middle management in completely different fields for every 1 that actually contributes to sociology? There are other ways to gain these skills than spending thirty or forty thousand dollars and three or four years of one's life to get a degree that you get only directly.
We've been doing this to ourselves in Canada. We have one of the highest rates of college-goers in the world (statistic heard somewhere sometime). I'm not sure this is a good thing. Not everyone needs to go to college. I think we've been dumbing down the system for a while. We let people get by on 50s and 60s, which is complete crap, because university is already not that hard. Thousands of students go to university just to party. This is not a problem in and of itself; the problem is that they have the money, so the universities like to keep them around, and further dumb down the system to accommodate them. When the system is dumbed down, the more driven students do not derive as much benefit from it.
I may come off as quite extreme from some of what you see here. I'm not. I believe in arts degrees. I just think that we don't need so many. We should encourage people who take other paths to success. We should support artists, sociologists, political scientists based on merit, instead of supporting everybody just because we can't stand to see somebody fail.
I'm still working out what I think about it all. What do you think?
3 comments:
Interestingly, the statistic I've heard somewhere at sometime was that liberal arts degrees seem to convey the most benefit onto those who obtain them, based on economic outcomes. It does, however, take around five years after convocation for those benefits to begin to show. I can't reenter exactly where i heard that, but it doesn't sound terribly crazy to me. It certainly seems reasonable that the value of say a philosophy degree is more likely to be found in the eventual fortitude of the individual with it than in the salary offered in the first four years after university.
One thing i think it is important to think about when we talk about the value of education is to remember that your education is what you make of it. I think way too many of us are beholden to the idea of a career working for someone else in exchange for regularly metered out deposits in our chequing accounts. It is entirely possible, when you don't find your dream job our maybe even a job in your field, that it is because you haven't created it yet. I'm fairly confident that the ability to create, rather than the ability to duplicate, will be becoming increasingly important as our economies evolve in a global digital age.
I agree with the comment above and would like to add the following. I went to university to enrich my mind, to help me understand the world around me, to develop my ability to ask and answer the questions that matter. I think that was the original point of universities when they started up in Europe hundreds of years ago. I did not go to university to get a job, that would be missing the point. I find that many of the career specific degrees which people take at university; accountancy, law, medicine, engineering, etc, have no place at a university. Those disciplines should be at technical colleges or trade schools. In my opinion the whole system has been skewered by those subjects which have sneaked into universities over the past 100 or so years. They've changed the nature and dynamic of what a university is, what its role and purpose in society is. There is not much we can do about it now, universities are career factories and yes, businesses, should they be? Most of the people who come out of universities having not strayed to far from there career specific courses are lacking in any real ability to understand, on a meaningful level, the world around them. In short, their intelligence has not improved at all, their skills have. They've been groomed and programmed and prepared for the working world, just as the working world wanted it to be, and they question very little about the world around them. Is that what a university is, is that its place in society, I wonder?
I'm glad there's disagreement! I guess my view is pretty utilitarian, which was not the original intent of universities.
I think the reason that universities are now career-factories is because we have been treating them as such, at least in Canada, for 50+ years. I know it was my parents' belief that if I went to university I would be 'set up' for a good job (which, coming from a very career-directed college, I was/am). If that's the belief, then it's going to mould the university. Whether that's the 'right' thing to happen is a dodgy question but thinking about it does bring me back to a thought from my original post.
If universities are to be a place of critical thought and improving intelligence, I think they have to get away from the culture of being afraid to see people fail, which is a problem across Canadian and possibly North American culture as far as I am concerned. Let those who can form a coherent thought and add to the conversation be the ones who make up the university crowd.
Marc, I think the downside of moving those disciplines outside of the university environment is losing the broad-based education that they currently get at universities. I would have missed out on a lot if I had taken engineering at a tech school - like learning French, having communications classes, learning history and classics. But I think you're right that having those disciplines has coloured our views of what universities should do and be and produce.
Well, no one will ever accuse me of being brief. One more paragraph! Nick - I think you're right, in that lots of people will get a lot of value from their arts degrees in that they will be more well-rounded individuals. Your second point, though, I am not sure about, and I think we should talk it over over a beer some time!
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