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Is College Bull****? I think it is.

Ooops.... Another thing I SHOULD have learnt at university. Never trust your memory with data. Me bad. :-(
 
ingoa said:
Industry and academia hire people because they HAVE been at college and have a degree to prove that they did so successfully. If this system would not work than industry would press for change (hence the many new study topics that came with the rise of computers and new media).

That was the employer view. The student might view it quite differently. If you go to college and study some obscure semi-scientific subject (NO! I do not want to mention one explicitly ;-) )than you are qualified to work in that particular field. It will not help to get you into a lawyers firm or a scientific institution. But college students are (at least here) grown-ups which are free to waste their life on anything they want. If you believe that college is nothing for you: don't go. But do not request access to jobs where the employer demands a college degree.
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Let's not misrepresent his argument here. He's not talking about employer requirements, but more specifically about state licensing requirements. I might want to be a lawyer without going to law school. Wolfram and Hart might want to hire me to work as a lawyer without my having gone to law school. In California, Virginia, Washington, and a few other jurisdictions, they could hire me and train me themselves for a couple of years, after which I can take the Bar exam and start practicing law for them. (Granted, Wolfram and Hart would probably be fools to want to go this way and pay "training wages" instead of hiring a fully-qualified J.D., but there's no law that says senior partners can't be fools.)

It's the state of Florida -- or Pennsylvania, or Alabama, or whatever -- that says that this can't happen. It could be thought of as the state overstepping its boundaries, by telling W&H and I what we can and can't agree to do by ourselves.

Similarly, I can't go to work for my father's medical practice and become a brain surgeon just by helping him out, even if both he and I want it.

The problem, of course, is that I don't see any tremendous demand on the part of employers for these alternative routes; I've never heard of hospitals calling for a relaxation of training standards for doctors (or even for nurses, which are in a critical shortage). The people who do the hiring are, as you point out, the ones who ultimately drive the trainin standards. If more people wanted non-degree-qualified nurses, there would be a recognizable demand. Hospitals and law firms hire from schools because they believe (contra Dustin) that formal education does produce measurable benefits, and that autodidacts can't cut the mustard.

So I'm afraid that my response to Dustin is the same as it is to the other whiny students that start criticising the curriculum. "You're not in a position to have an informed opinion on the validity of the curriculum. The people who are in such a position -- disciplinary experts and subject-matter clients -- want this formal curriculum, and have repeated stated their preference. I'm afraid that I have to go with the experts and clients on this."
 
You can learn surgery without attending a college. There's nothing you can do in a college that you couldn't do apprenticing with a real surgeon or practicing on kidabers.
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That's almost worth adding to my sig.
 
Apparently, Dustin isn't counting Johnny Pixels's personal experience. Sadly, I also, can only speak from my personal experience with engineering physics:

There are so many expensive pieces of lab equipment that I have used, that it is clear that my tuition alone does not cover the full costs of my education. How can I use Kazaa to download a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance apparatus? :confused: How can I download: a $2k digital oscilloscope, liquid Nitrogen, X-ray sources, photodetectors, lead bricks, vacuum systems, etc.? It is also not true that any one business has all of this kit. I had the pleasure of touring a 'commercial' lab, lately. NMR techniques are just trickling in there, experimentally.

Although books, reading, and doing equations with pencil-and-paper are a significant component of my education, I gain the benefit of working with other students, having a vast body of professors and grad students with a broad knowledge base to learn from and access to college libraries (fees covered in my tuition). There is a lot of self-learning that does go on in our program, btw.

Finally, our provincial professional engineering organizations waive their qualifying technical exams for students who have graduated from accredited institutions. People with international qualifications may apply, but they may need to take a technical exam (from APEGS):

There may be an interview, technical exams or courses assigned depending on the results of the academic assessment. Denial of the application is also a possibility if there are too many deficiencies identified in your academic preparation and it is deemed that you require further education.
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I'd like to note that this thread has touched on some of the sentiment I acknowledged in my "I'm too smart" thread.
 
Dustin said:
As a person who has read THOUSANDS of scientific papers and edited dozens of wikipedia articles...I'd say it's nearly the same with a few minor differences.
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Given that you previously listed John Romero as a guy doing science, I'm a bit sceptical about your definition of "scientific paper".

Look at a comprehensive wiki article like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ww2

It's detail and citation of sources.
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Its detail is on a level of a quick introduction to people who know little about WWII. Which is good for an article of that type but hardly what I would call "detailed". (Not to mention that the details currently include "Nazi-controlled Germany led by Adolf HitlerAnd Keith Landers", though this
particular act of vandalism will quite probably be fixed soon)

And what comes to the citation of sources, the references section is not too long (13 entries is hardly impressive) but enough for an overview article like this especially since it includes several general WWII histories. However, the text itself quotes several other sources that are not included in the references, like Krivosheev and Erlikman. The Erlikman reference is particularly beautiful.

Then look at a common short scientific article in some medical journal.
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Why not compare a common short Wikipedia article with a common short medical journal article, instead of taking one of the longest Wikipedia articles? Or you could compare the WWII article with some monograph written by a scientist. Apples and oranges (Sandford 1995).


References:

Sandford, S. Apples and oranges: a comparison, Annals of Improbable Research 1995:1(3)
 
While I continue to defend colleges/universities as institutions, I have to say that some stuff universities (or mine, at least) offer is bull****. Example: some time ago, some bureaucrats from high-up decided that in order to improve teaching standards in universities, university teachers should be encouraged to get a mini-diploma in Education. In a shameless attempt at CV padding, I attended the introductory course the Faculty of Education had set up for this purpose -- twice. I went twice only because we had a break of 3 or 4 days between the first and the second session, and in that time I had managed to convince myself that it just couldn't be as bad as I thought it was. And it wasn't, the second time was much worse.

Thankfully, the idea was abandoned fairly quickly, mainly because just about everyone dropped out from these courses.
 
Dustin said:
You can learn surgery without attending a college. There's nothing you can do in a college that you couldn't do apprenticing with a real surgeon or practicing on kidabers.
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When you go through the training that it takes to become a surgeon, then you can make this statement. You have no idea what you're talking about.

ETA: Kidabers? I rest my case.
 
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timhau said:
While I continue to defend colleges/universities as institutions, I have to say that some stuff universities (or mine, at least) offer is bull****.
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Of course. So is some stuff -- most stuff -- that peer-revieweed journals offer. For that matter, so is some stuff that Wikipedia offers, and most of the music at the top of the charts at any given point. Have you ever heard of Sturgeon's Law?

The "university curriculum" is something of a misnomer. Every university and every department has its own curriculum, and the curricula themselves are constantly changing, both to reflect new development in the fields and to experiment with more effective and efficient teaching methods. New ideas get trotted out to be field-tested all the time. Unfortunately, since most new ideas are bad ones, they get trotted out and then whipped back to their stables.

What you're really seeing, whether you realize it or not, is how good the typical university curriculum actually is, since it's difficult to improve upon. And that's part of why autodidacticism is generally a bad, or at least, inefficient, idea. Law schools have been a running Darwinian experiment in how to give students the most effective understanding of the law for the past two hundred years. If there were an easy and obvious way to improve upon a typical law school curriculum, it would have already been found.
 
Dustin said:
I don't have any websites or statistics showing the number of college students(in America) who have grants or scholarships however I have seen the statistics before and I can tell you only a small fraction of college students actually get grants or scholarships. Something like 5%.
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You're only off by more than a magnitude...

During the academic year 2003-2004, approximately 90% of the student population received some type of student financial aid assistance. Of these, 89% of the students received loans and 55% received some type of scholarship or grant.
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http://www.psm.edu/Student_Affairs/Financial_Aid/programs.htm

Aaron
 
Dustin said:
3% seems low if you haven't done the math. Compound that 3% over several years and you've got a good amount of money you owe.
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Wow... who hasn't done the math?!?

That 3% is tax deductable... so subtract a third for 2%.... 2% fixed minus inflation IS LESS THAN 0%! It's a PROFITABLE LOAN WITHOUT COLLATERAL!

Aaron
 
Dustin said:
In my opinion college should be the judge of whether someone gets a job or not. Their SKILL should be the judge of that. College should simply be there to help educate people who can’t educate themselves. That’s it. Period.
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Wow. I don't know what to say about this. First, I'm assuming he meant "college should NOT be."

Proving skill is difficult. As an example, I don't want a surgeon taking me apart if he's self taught, unless he's performed a whole load of previous successful surgeries. But who goes under his knife first? The medical schooling is designed to tell us uninformed people who is qualified to do surgery and who isn't.

Say you want to hire me to do some physics work for you. If you don't understand physics yourself, how can you verify that the work I'm doing is correct? If I were to just say "trust me. I've studied this stuff on my own for years, and I rule." How would you verify that what I say is correct? I happen to have a Master's in Physics from the University of Iowa. There, now you can trust that I at least have a verifiable background in physics.

It's not a perfect system. But it's the best we have for now.
 
Almo said:
Say you want to hire me to do some physics work for you. If you don't understand physics yourself, how can you verify that the work I'm doing is correct? If I were to just say "trust me. I've studied this stuff on my own for years, and I rule." How would you verify that what I say is correct? I happen to have a Master's in Physics from the University of Iowa. There, now you can trust that I at least have a verifiable background in physics.
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what you don't what this guy who claims that energy is really mv not 1/2mv^2, because he looked at some rocket equations and saw that mv was concerved?

You need a review process to correct missunderstandings in technical fields and college is a process used. An other reason why aprenticeships will not work for say medicine is that medical knowledge advances and you want any doctor to have the best basic training they can get. Then they go out and work under other doctors is what could be seen as an aprenticeship program under a different name.
 
Almo said:
Proving skill is difficult. As an example, I don't want a surgeon taking me apart if he's self taught, unless he's performed a whole load of previous successful surgeries. But who goes under his knife first? The medical schooling is designed to tell us uninformed people who is qualified to do surgery and who isn't.
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Well, that's the point of the apprenticeship system.

You don't need a "college" to certify that you have a particular skill; any sufficiently skilled practitioner of the skill itself can certify it. Of course, we then get into the problem of identifying "sufficiently skilled" practitioners, but one easy way to do it is to establish something like a guild system, where the "master surgeons" train "apprentices," who then become "journeymen" that can work, but can't yet train others.

Of course, it would be really nice if we could get all the "master surgeons" together in one place, both to establish recognition for the group (so that everyone knows the name of the certifying group instead of the individual surgeons), and to allow a more efficient way of sharing expertise and equipment.

I'm sorry -- this is going to be yet another way in which I've re-invented the medical school, isn't it?
 
ponderingturtle said:
what you don't what this guy who claims that energy is really mv not 1/2mv^2, because he looked at some rocket equations and saw that mv was concerved?
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Just... wow...

:(

M.S. in Microbiology said:
I was thinking about Einstein's equation which says that the energy in matter is equal to its mass time the velocity of light squared. It occurred to me that he would have had something if he hadn't squared the velocity of light, because nothing can move at velocity squared.
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Stupid Einstein. He was so close to an insight... :p
 
hgc said:
Did he say kidabers?
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Well, the dictionary can't teach you how to spell. And even google can't help you on that one.

/off to get some cadavers to teach myself surgery
//at least that'll be my excuse...
 
Jorghnassen said:
Well, the dictionary can't teach you how to spell. And even google can't help you on that one.
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Yeah, you know you've really butchered it then!

Anyway, Dustin is absolutely right. College is a very flawed way of guaranteeing someone is really cut out for a job and another one is not.

Just like capitalism and democracy are flawed in guaranteeing everyone will get a fair shake in life.

But until he or anyone else presents a better idea...
 
I'm still chuckling about Dustin insisting that it's illegal across the board to practice law without going to law school when his own wikipedia citation gives examples of several states where it is, in fact, possible to practice law without going to law school.

And I wonder if he even knows why his use of the word "kidaber" is funny. :rolleyes: Self correction, my ass.

Dustin, do us all a favor. Go to college for 4 years, then come back and read this thread over and see if you feel the same way.
 
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