Guest post: We identify success as the paper
Originally a comment by iknklast on In middle-of-nowhere Arizona.
Omar, as someone who is a higher education faculty member, I feel the answer to the question of what is the product is of utmost importance. As you said, many see the diploma/graduate as the product. It is not. You said the experience. I think that is important, giving the student experiences that no other setting offers; they may or may not enhance their future career, but they add richness to life.
But the most important product of education is…education. Learning how to think. Learning some facts so you can think about things. Learning how to learn. Learning how to work with others
The product is education; the diploma/degree/certificate is just a certificate of authenticity, verifying that said student learned (or was able to fake learning well enough to fool the faculty, all too easy with some faculty) what the paper says the learned.
Because we get this wrong – the product misidentified – we make huge mistakes in how we approach education. We approach it toward a goal of success, but we identify success as the paper, not as what lies behind the paper. A student who does not complete the degree, but learns tons, is more use than one that completes the degree but learns nothing. (Trump comes to mind for the last; Dubya, too.)
Many of the studies I see on “effective” education seem to interpret success as ‘student is happy’, because few of them that I have seen have actually shown any improvement in learning with the new methods. Those that do, the effect size is so small, and they get significance by generating a larger n, it isn’t worth throwing out things that are working as well and remaking the entire system around a nebulous maybe.
Try telling administrators that. Their eyes gleam at significance, and they never notice small effect. They get to start new projects, hire new administrators, and torture educators, so they will jump on board the newest, latest bandwagon. A year later, that will be declared “ancient” methods and they will move on to the latest shiny squirrel.
Spot-on, iknklast! The latest thing in Britain (well, not so late, alas) is the belief of Gove and other Tories that education may be measured by ‘success’, by which they mean the amount of money you are able to earn after graduating. The fact that many people have no interest in making piles of money, since they have more interesting and valuable things to do, escapes such minds as they have.
Re “education may be measured by ‘success’, by which they mean the amount of money you are able to earn after graduating”: that’s very much the case in the US, compounded by the fact that education often involves great personal expense, so certain areas of study can mean taking on debt that will be difficult or impossible to repay. So, a “good education” is one where you can end up debt-free quickly. Not at all a metric I find appealing.
Colleges in the US are similarly catering to students who want degrees solely to advance their careers, not so much because they seek the knowledge provided by the degree programs. Employers give incentives for degree level, or for degrees in certain areas. Business-oriented programs abound. They fill a need, but it’s a different conception of what the point of college is, and it seems, I don’t know, sad to me.
Iknklast, you must be seeing this. “Make the student happy”, “provide the education the student wants”, “drop philosophy in favor of accounting”, that kind of thing. Thoughts?
I’m reminded of the time (approximately 0850 on a September morning in 1985) when one of my final year chemistry class mates announced “Well, lets face it, we’re all just here to make contacts and get a well paid job.” There were genuinely stunned looks on peoples faces. I replied “Well, I’m here because I like chemistry, geology and I want an education.” Ok, I was young and idealistic and still hadn’t figured out what my calling in life was.
Point being – the vast majority of us at university at that time were genuinely interested in the subjects we were studying and in learning to think. That last probably more than anything. Earning an ok income was a side benefit. I mean, I was an idealist, not naive. I knew I’d never get rich studying geochemistry.
This commodification of education and reducing it’s value into future earning potential sickens me. It cheapens everything t touches and sucks the very soul out of society, culture and the essence of being. It detaches us from the world around us, each other and turns both art and empathy to dust.
One of the latest trends is to allow the student to decide how they are to be assessed. Interpretive dance to demonstrate your knowledge of mitosis? I thought that was just a joke when I heard it, something satirizing the trends in education; then my boss started pushing for that.
The assumption is that the student is the expert on themselves and knows what is best for them to demonstrate their knowledge. Now, why would a student who has just started their higher education career have a better idea on how to assess learning than those with years of experience in the field? No, what they mean is that the student is the expert on what they want to do. They don’t say that, of course, because that gives the game away.
Rob, I remember my first year in college, in 1978. I was in the advisor’s office waiting my turn, trying to decide what classes I was interested in taking. I chatted with some young fellows (slightly older than me; they were third year, and I was 17). They found my idea of taking classes in subjects like Chaucer…well, amusing is probably the best word. One of them said “I am not interested in being an educated leader in my field. I just want to earn a lot of money.” That was the first I had heard such an idea; my set in high school was more likely to take classes in Chaucer or Shakespeare, classes in critical thinking or social theory, than classes in accounting or business, which is where most of the students wanting primarily a money path were going. One of my favorite articles by PZ, one where I thought he was spot on, was when he attacked the idea of business being a degree path in a university.
There are some things that should not be market-driven. Among those I put education, human health, the environment, and the arts. Money tends to diminish all of those things.
Rob @#3 and iknklast @#4:
A faculty member at one leading Australian university years ago (Sydney or Monash in Melbourne) did an interesting study. She asked a cohort of freshers to fill in a questionnaire at each of 3 stages of their course: 1. on entry, 2. eight months into their first year and 3. on graduation. A key question at each stage: Do you expect/have you found your studies to be interesting for their own sake? The results were: Freshers 100% affirmative; 2. 50% affirmative; 3. 25% (of those remaining) affirmative.
Her conclusion: the experience had turned 75% of the students into anti-intellectuals.
I do not know if this still applies today.
Omar, I’d be fascinated to know when that study occurred. Anytime since the late 19080’s and I could well believe that precisely because of the money before education bullshit Iknklast and I are talking about.
I look at the graduates we employ. Most of them are smarter than me and better prepared for the working world than I was. I spend most of my time with them teaching them how to write clear and precise reports. One of the reasons they struggle with that is because they don’t think clearly and logically about the task at hand to begin with, so the second largest (maybe it should be first largest?) tranche of time is spent showing them how to deconstruct the task to identify key elements, which then leads to a bullet point list of inputs and outputs to base a report on, which makes the report 10x easier, plus better to read, plus shorter.
The scary thing is that because I hang out on line with you lot (waves hands vaguely), feel very inadequate much of the time. How am I supposed to mentor these kids?