In an NPR interview, Professor Andrew Hacker — co-author of Higher Education? — argues that what our system offers is neither higher nor education — it’s mere training.
His book is subtitled How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It — which implies that the high cost of going to college is tuition being paid by students’ parents to professors, when parents are largely paying for room and board, students are foregoing wages, and professors are getting paid via government research grants.
Again, some of his points are grounded — for instance, that tenure is more of a liability than an asset, or that when 3,000 people are writing articles on William Faulkner, that’s not exactly curing cancer — but some are very, very ivory tower — like the notion that everyone should be getting a liberal arts education, and that every young person “has a mind, has an intellect, has curiosity,” etc.
I love this argument against vocational training:
Well, first of all, one of the problems with what we call vocational training, is that the decision is made, let’s say, when a person is a senior in high school or a freshman in college. And a lot of them say, hey, I want to go to engineering school. Do you know, Tony, that almost half of engineering school students drop out? Why? Because they discover engineering isn’t what they thought it was. And by the way, the teaching in engineering is absolutely abysmal. But those kids have wasted, you know, $20,000 maybe more in those first few years of their vocational training that didn’t work out.
Yeah, half of engineering students drop out because they discover engineering isn’t what they thought it was. They thought engineering was easy.
I got a kick out of that last line. Your observation is spot on.
I get the impression that most undergraduate engineering students started in engineering because they enjoyed physics in high school, where there aren’t really engineering classes – or because physics was just their best subject. Notwithstanding the obvious links between physics and engineering, they’re pretty different, so there’s no more reason to expect that a strong physics student will both excel in engineering and enjoy it than to expect that a strong math student will both excel in physics and enjoy it.
In short: high school students should get a good taste of engineering, and high school guidance counselors should stop giving this moronic advice.
“Engineering isn’t what they thought it was.” Isn’t this the case with all career choices? How many people are in law school with totally imaginary ideas of what life as a lawyer will be like?
As a society, we do a very poor job of informing kids about the realities of various possible career choices.
I know a doctor who became a radiologist after working as a lawyer for years. He wanted to be a surgeon but found at his advanced age (40s) he could not physically stand in one place that long.
I would go a step further. I don’t think that we simply do a very poor job of informing kids about the realities of various possible career choices; we actively hide how the real world works from them. What do adults do all day? Young adults, supposedly ready to take on adult roles, leave high school with no exposure to business, law, taxation, civil engineering, agriculture, etc. How do we get food, water, and electricity? Who decides what roads go where and where to build a shopping mall? Complete mysteries beyond our ken…