Stop falling for the university con job

I think there's a danger in the erosion of the liberal arts education, for one. I've been in too many workplaces where critical or original thinking are met with ignorance or suspicion. Even good communication skills seem to be on the wane, and not that highly valued. This doesn't make for a healthy, educated society that is self-determining. I think it also contributes to the general dumbing down of public, esp. political discourse in our society.

Still, a balancing out and away from the ivory tower model of social and economic mobility is a good thing, and I think young people today are much more willing to embrace a technical or manual-oriented education. No doubt primary and secondary school education can be optimized away from the 12-year warehousing model and towards more practical as well as critical thinking content that is available in higher liberal arts education. This would probably be more interesting for kids than the garbage they have to sit through now, and would help them make more informed choices as they enter the adult world.

Sigh! Students pay tuition fees to enrol in credit courses. I suppose one could say they were ripped off if the courses weren't taught.

 I believe tuition fees should be abolished and our post-secondary education system funded exclusively though tax dollars.

Your hyperbole  has no substance and empty rhetoric as it stands NortReport. Do you want to try to turn it into an argument? I promise to be gentle with my marking. Of course, at this rate you might still feel ripped off.

Written by leading historians of higher education from around the world,
these nine essays identify “key moments” in the internationalization of
higher education: moments when universities and university leaders
responded to new historical circumstances by reorienting their
relationship with the broader world. Covering more than a century of
change—from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first—they
explore different approaches to internationalization across Europe,
Asia, Australia, North America, and South America. Notably, while the
choice of historical eras was left entirely open, the essays converged
around four periods: the 1880s and the international extension of the
“modern research university” model; the 1930s and universities’ attempts
to cope with international financial and political crises; the 1960s
and universities’ role in an emerging postcolonial international
development apparatus; and the 2000s and the rise of neoliberal efforts
to reform universities in the name of international economic
“competitiveness.”
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/universities-2030-learning-past-anticipate-future#ixzz30MsD0slj

Inside Higher Ed

mersh wrote:

Post-secondary institutions are becoming increasingly fused together, with colleges able to grant degrees or advanced standing in related university programmes.

Exactly, way back when I was a university student there were exactly two degree granting non-universities in Canada.  The situation is very different today.

Call me naive, but I think universities do more good than harm. There are people who want to advance human knowledge, and people who just want to get a credential, and people that are in between. All these people can collaborate to some extent, although they will surely not agree on everything.

I think that history, literature and philosophy are necessary for a healthy society.  But I don't know if a liberal arts degree is the proper method anymore.  We need to recognize that a lot of what people attend post secondary education for is related to what they plan to do for a living.  Not all of them can go on to teach their favorite discipline, but even aside from that why should this education be reserved for university track individuals.  Surely plumbers can benefit from understanding history just as much as lawyers.

The funny thing is, undergraduate degrees (and MAs increasingly) have become seen as a gateway to employment -- universities do indeed act as job factories, just in different ways. Liberal arts programmes also help fund other, smaller, programmes, so eliminating them would undermine emerging revenue streams (like specialized or professionalized degrees or certificates).

But there is this tension, right? Knowledge can indeed be empowering and productive, and can also help build skills that are useful outside the university. But the outright commercialization of post-secondary education has by and large subordinated that potential to much more neoliberal thinking: return on investment, learning as banking, etc. With rising fees and greater barriers to employment, students often get caught worrying about the usefulness of what they're doing, as well as the financial costs of failing or receiving less-than-desired grades (which may prevent them from getting into law of business school, or (more common) teachers' college).

So NorthReport, I can't really make sense of your argument here. Yes, debt for university (or college!) education stinks. It certainly doesn't come with any guarantees, and for many, can be a miserable experience. But you seem to want to separate out universities from the greater political economy for extra scorn. I don't get it.

NorthReport wrote:

I couldn't agree more.

Get a trade and you'll have a decent job, a family, a home, group benefits, and a pension for life.

You also run the risk of being just another part of the non-questioning, non-critical thinking masses who fall for political and economic propaganda such as: environment vs. prosperity; development vs. "living in caves"; socialism vs. "free enterprise"; pipelines = schools; austerity = fiscal responsibility; terrorists vs. rational western diplomacy, and so on.

Yes, a university education won't necessarily immunize you from this kind of thinking but you won't have any excuse for ignoring rational argument.