Posted on 01/13/2020 3:59:56 AM PST by Erik Latranyi
Yes, they do.
I am not focused at all on trade degrees. Those could best be handled by trade schools. Most posters here are confusing trade schools with universities.
Most university degrees do not prepare a student for a job in the real world as it exists.
That is not their original purpose. They are supposed to broadly educate "the whole man". It turns out that universities do, in fact, prepare people to take on jobs. They also prepare people to fit into society at the highest levels and with understandings of society in order to vote intelligently and to participate in self governance.
There is nothing in a university that could not be provided by the private sector so they can select the best students as future employees.
The private sector would provide training for their own needs, probably in a narrow spectrum. They would have no interest in training in the broad sense. Education in those topics would then be restricted to only a small number of people.
I earned a BS in Computer Science. The university required me to take physics, chemistry, biology, and courses in a few other disciplines. When I graduated, I was employed in Huntsville because I knew physics. I beat out all other contenders who did not have physics courses. When I left Huntsville, I got a job in Atlanta with a company that made telephone apparatus. My physics and electronics courses enabled me to, once again, beat out the competition. Later I went to work with with a company that made instrumentation for chemistry labs. Yep, my base knowledge positioned me to beat out the other applicants.
So, a broad educational base turns out to be best, in spite of what I thought while in school.
I agree you need the hands-on with the equipment....but a university is not the place to do it. They suck at modern techniques and equipment....and you know it.
The private sector can provide "lab" space and access to equipment.
Stop thinking inside the box.
In the 70’s at $3/sem. hr., it was cheaper to attend college than stay home.
Today, it’s $15k/sem. min. for tuition.
I’d have made much more by becoming a plumber.
You obviously never attended a tier 1 research school. They are the bleeding edge of techniques and equipment, including building new things that simply do not exist outside of that lab. They are a place to get experience and education that cannot be found anywhere else.
Private labs may match university labs for cutting edge work, but they only want university grads with experience in their research work. The only place to get that experience is in a university lab. The private sector absolutely WILL NOT pick up the slack. They will just hire foreign grads with that experience. US science and engineering decrees are counted the best in the world and we would be stupid to give that up.
Political correctness and bad administration may have destroyed the rest of the education system, but we need to protect rebuild the STEM education because that is irreplaceable.
Oh, and many universities are private institutions.
Maybe that’s true at your school but not at the one I graduated from or the one’s I have worked with over 37 years. I will say this there is now a crisis at colleges & universities over money available for O&M on equipment & money for basic science. So maybe what you see is due to that!
Almost every company I have worked for or worked with had or made minimal capital investment in equipment. Reasons being the need to keep overhead rates low by having minimal to no equipment O&M costs. IMO that in itself causes long term problems in both personnel & knowledge\experience retention. (You solve it by just hiring another engineer - experience/knowledge/appropriateness be damned!), etc. the MBAs say they’re replaceable like any other industrial commodity!). Anyway who thinks long term these days?
The company I consult with currently uses the local university for lab space, lab technicians, equipment & deep expertise. It’s considerably cheaper then going out and getting the equivalent in private industry. (I have priced this out so this in not me talking out of my ass!)
For example, companies once trained their programmers because there were no schools outside of industry. Assembler was all they taught, and the scope of that was limited strictly to the needs of those industries? So, where did the higher level programming languages come from? First there were computer scientists like John von Neumann, pure academicians or note. The first languages came from the department of defense working with folks at MIT. C/C++ came from the Bell Telephone Laboratories, but the authors had schooled at MIT. It is important to notice that companies do make significant contributions from time to time, but at pure research facilities. They do not train those researchers, they higher them out of universities. All of this babble is given just to illustrate the notion that there is a difference between "programmers" and "computer scientists".
Yes, and many would be better off with the latter. Or at least being able to study online without having to complete such extraneous courses as i mentioned.
I have a feeling that online now exceeds ground schools.
Actually, it’s not. The research is pretty overwhelming. It may “look” overrated specifically tied to education, but the collapse of genuine critical learning is undercut by online habits.
That was then and this is now ...
My understanding is, they give A LOT of credit for Certifications … and young kids are tending to go that route
We do agree on this. Hard core STEM and Computer Science courses are, however, not best served up through online courses.
In theory that sounds good but I have witnessed more than a few students who simply cannot do the online classes, they need the in the classroom setting to learn. I wouldn’t touch any online math class other than basic math with a vaccinated crowbar. I have watched students who were really good in higher math, such as algebra, calculus, trigonometry, etc... struggle to get a C and in some cases just drop the class and turn around, take it in a classroom setting and ace it. And the cheating that goes on with online classes is something to behold.
Colleges are pricing themselves right out of existence with their constant increases in tuition. My wife worked at four year university a few years back as a Controller, she came from the real world business setting as did her boss at the time the VP of finance. One budget year was looking lean and my wife and the VP were looking at cuts to keep the budget balanced and in the black and the assistant VP who had never been outside academia suggested why don’t we just raise tuition to cover the difference, that is what I have always done, she had been the acting VP up to that point before the new VP was hired.
My wife and the VP looked at her and finally my wife said what is the formula you are using to determine at what point your tuition increase starts costing you enrollment? Deer in headlights look, then what do you mean? When you raise the cost of something my wife explained eventually you start cutting out the number of people who can afford it, how are you determining this? More deer in headlights and the new VP says, we are not raising tuition, you balance your budget on the spending side. A few months later this assistant VP went to teaching and was gone from the finance department until my wife’s boss took another job a few years later, then they brought Ms. Just Raise the Tuition back. Within months my wife was let go by Ms. Just Raise the Tuition.
There is no simple answer.
Some college degrees are well worth the money. If I were a young(er) man, I’d go into petroleum engineering or robotics, or some other field where you learn something that translates to a well paying job. Online just doesn’t match making the connections you do at a school, if you do it right.
Lot of college programs are just babysitting and lots of degrees are worthless.
Online learning is great for some skills, particularly if you know exactly what you need to learn, but not everyone does at 18 or 22.
Khan University ( https://www.khanacademy.org/ ), MIT Opencourseware ( https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/ are free and online now, good times.
Those courses are free and online; however, you cannot get a degree from MIT unless you pay full course fees and take the final exams.
Many people are forgetting a few very important things: First, the people you go to school with are how you find your jobs. Second, we are a society. There is no substitute for socializing with people who share your interests. Online learning accomplished neither of those.
Except, of course, for freedom. A company that trains you will require a contract to be an employee for a period of time. Many will also stipulate that when you leave them, anything you create that is appropriate for their industry will be their property until a specified number of years elapse. They will most certainly train you for a specific role. That role is unlikely to be research.
If companies were to become the only source of training, then people would have to work for large companies in order to get their training. That means that there would be no startup companies organized by younger people.
Do you really think this Nation needs to go down that road?
” First, the people you go to school with are how you find your jobs. “
I’ve always thought that was the main reason some people go to the Harvard and Stanford level schools. You don’t get a degree worth 40X as much from an Ivy, but you meet the people who can make your career even if the actual education isn’t much better than a state college.
Socializing and sharing interests is great, but another important part of actually going to school is having to interact with people very different from you, with vastly different backgrounds, and experiences, and beliefs. Bubbles are*NEVER* a good thing, be it in terms of religion, or science, or politics; a Christian who hasn’t had to defend their beliefs against intelligent and deeply read Jews, Muslims, and Atheists is the poorer for it, same with any conservative or liberal who hasn’t had to deal with equally intelligent and educated folks taking the other side. Just my opinion.
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