What is the goal of a university? Why do humans get college degrees? Here are some common options for why a human should go to college and earn a degree.
- Humans should earn a degree so that they can get good grades. You might think this is a joke of a reason, but it’s not. Many people actually think this way.
- Get a degree to get a job.
- Get a degree to prepare you for a job (this is slightly different than the previous).
- Go to college to learn to think – critical thinking skills.
- Graduate from college with a degree to boost the university’s graduation rate.
- College is all about the party and fun times. Meet some people too.
But what do I think is the reason to go to college? I pretty much agree with Chris Lee in this very insightful post about higher education. We like to say that the structure of courses in a university degree program are designed to promote critical thinking, but this isn’t always true. Historically, spending 4 years in college was a way for young adults to gain maturity before getting down to actual work (but not ditch digging work – you know, bank work and stuff).
Does this mean that it is worthless to go to college? Well, if your tuition is very high it might not be a good value. However, I think that people can still gain quite a bit by going to college and spending some time working on some difficult problems.
I always tell students: college is what you make of it, it’s not what college does to you. If you just sit back and take courses, then courses will be all that you have. If you participate in extra activities, and go to class, and do some research, and make some friends – in the end you will have something valuable.
Producing a Workforce
This seems to be a common theme these days. Administrators and politicians are emphasizing the importance of colleges in their role of producing an educated workforce. More people in college means more people that can work at higher level jobs. Clearly, I don’t think this is true (see above). Yes, humans with a college degree would be better at some jobs – but you can’t make a college degree job training.
But what if we did? What if we optimized the whole higher education system to train and develop humans to be work-ready? Here are some things that we should do:
Stop having college majors. Why major in math, physics or english? Those aren’t jobs, they are fields of study. Of course there are already some majors that have acceptable titles – accounting, nursing, and even biology-pre med. The courses in the majors would still have to change. Maybe business majors would be ok – not sure.
No more silly required courses. Why should everyone have to take algebra and a science course? If a student wants to be a high school english teacher, why should that student study algebra? Oh, they have to average grades and stuff? No, that is not true in the modern world. A computer could do it. Why should a marketing major take science? If they need any science ideas, they can just “google it”.
In fact, why have classes at all? If it’s job training, then there should be training courses. How do you use particular software packages that your career uses? How do you put together a TPS report? Things like this don’t need to be a semester long class, they could be shorter presentations.
No more grades. Instead of grades, there should be proficiency exams. If you pass, you move to the next skill-based test. Actually, this really isn’t a bad idea.
What about internships? Maybe the best way for students to be work-force ready is to just send them out to a job. Really, this would be win-win. The students would pay the university tutiion so that they could become an intern. The employers would get free workers and train them in the processes. Everyone gets something (really, this is win-win-win).
The Problems With Workforce Development
Perhaps I shouldn’t write a post like this. There is a small chance an adminstrator or politician will read this and say “Hey! What an awesome idea!”
I obviously don’t think this job training version of a college degree is a good idea. Here’s why:
- A job training strategy only works for jobs that you know about. How do you train for jobs that don’t yet exist?
- If you come up with a way to train the workforce, wouldn’t this just be pseudo-code for a robot? Once you really figure out how to do a job, a robot could do it for cheaper. This would just speed up the robotification of society. Dear Google, please make sure my posts are top hits for “robotification“.
- This workforce developement plan is short sighted. It might actually produce more “workers” in the next 10 years, but it could have terrible effects for the long term future.
- I really think that if you want the best worker-training program, you should just start working. Why waste 4-5 years of time in a university? Start working right away.
- Clearly a workforce training program would kill one of the best aspects of a college experience – the opportunity to explore what makes us human. Being a human isn’t listed as “workforce ready” – but maybe it should be.
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