Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site opus.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!think!harvard!seismo!hao!nbires!opus!rcd From: rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) Newsgroups: net.cse Subject: Re: The purpose of Universities Message-ID: <135@opus.UUCP> Date: Wed, 16-Oct-85 03:02:55 EDT Article-I.D.: opus.135 Posted: Wed Oct 16 03:02:55 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 19-Oct-85 03:55:32 EDT References: <699@bu-cs.UUCP> <6431@duke.UUCP> <797@terak.UUCP> Organization: NBI,Inc, Boulder CO Lines: 77 > What indeed do universities "purport to sell"? A panacea, methinks. > Whatever it is that you desire, a college/university degree will help > you get it. Not if they're being honest. (The size of that "if" depends a lot on the university.) I'd like to hope...no, wait, I DO hope...that they're trying to provide an education which (by contrast with trade schools and/or hard experience) is: - broad rather than deep, trying to cover a lot of ground so that you have a chance to develop the ability to look at the large perspective of problems and tasks - concept-oriented rather than fact-(or experience- or...)oriented, so that you have a chance to develop skills for looking at new problems and taking new approaches > Personally, when I attended college/university, I was looking for > "learning" that would make life better for me. Not necessarily job- > related (I attended a liberal-arts college). A fair objective--much fairer expectation than some of the crappo flaming of previous postings in the group on the topic. > Sorry to say, I found little of value there. In the end, I came to the > conclusion that a person would learn more in four years of life than in > four years of college. Several thoughts here: - Yeah, perhaps, but they'd be a lot different. - You can lead a student to knowledge but you can't make him think. - They won't all be gems. The proportion of college profs that are absolute dorks is not terribly smaller than the proportion of dorks in the population at large. I figured that about one good prof a semester was OK. Some are inspired; some are jerks; many are ploddingly passable. I had about the same approach to my courses--inspired in a few, screwup in a few, plodded thru the rest. Grad school was a lot better for both profs and students. >...And I think that most serious college students > would agree that they experience very little "life" during their college > "four year sentence". Some of them sure seem to have a helluva good time. The really serious students are often the ones who dive into the courses and ignore "life". If you go at the coursework really hard, it takes most of your time. If you look at the average student, he's plodding a lot. So what? If you look at the average adult, he's plodding most of the time. > Look around your university. Do you see many adults attending classes? > (That was rhetorical). The reason that you don't is because college > is attractive mainly to people who don't yet know what they want, and > so don't know what they want from college. If you don't know where > you're going, any road will do; the road through college is popular. And if college provides that, what's wrong with it? College is oriented toward people at a particular (strongly formative, intellectually) time of their lives. You don't see many "adults" because most adults either went to college at the traditional time or decided not to go. The older adults you see in colleges are the ones who decided not to go to college, or were unable to go, early in their lives--but then acquired the time/money/... or changed their minds. Of course that's a small number. > So, friends, tell me I'm wrong. Tell me what a college/university has > to offer its students that will be of value to those students and which > can not be obtained elsewhere at less cost in time and money. OK, you're wrong (but at least you're being sensible and asking decent questions). You can get exposure to a wide spectrum of ideas, theories, structurings of knowledge. You can meet interesting people with good ideas, get connections to some of the real movers and shakers, sometimes learn by doing in an environment protected enough that the world doesn't collapse under you if you make a big mistake. You can learn the techniques that help you find information when you need it, even if you don't know it. (You learn what knowledge exists and how it's organized even if you don't learn it all.) -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Simpler is better.