<p>I get the notion about education being focused on education. That would be nice in an ideal world where students would come from financially “ideal” families. The problem is that this is the U.S of A and everything costs. Because of the high tuition rates, most folks have to have “return on investment” on education. True, one can have a “passion”, but ACME Mortgage Company could care less about passion. ABC Academy School with it’s good middle school/high school rankings could care less about the parents’ “passion”.</p>
<p>It would be nice if these non-R&D firms only required a trade school certificate or paid workers the same for having a trade school certificate instead of the BA/BS/MA/MS/MBA, but they don’t. Pay levels and promotions are still somewhat tied to academia accomplishments.</p>
<p>It has nothing to do with an ideal world. I personally think there are a lot of people who go to college that don’t really belong there (far more than people in the opposite situation). The thing is, a lot of those odd jobs that now “require” a Bachelors didn’t used to be that way. They got that way because more and more people are going to college, and more and more people are entering the workforce with a BS and a lot of them are now working in jobs that would traditionally not require a BS.</p>
<p>I suppose the solution is to get a Masters degree now, as it more and more has become the equivalent of what a Bachelors used to be. Still, I find it a bit troubling when I run into people who got an undergrad engineering degree somewhere and their education was so far on the practical side that they don’t really understand the physics behind the engineering that well. It is tough to be an engineer when you don’t understand the physical situation.</p>
<p>Eh?..if anything that has become more “professional or practical” it is Masters degrees. More and more companies are less and less determining a difference between M.S. and MEng degrees. One thing I do with some of my spare time is look at current programs and their structure (I know…weird interest) and the number of actual “required” Masters courses for a degree is not only decreasing, but varies a lot from school to school.</p>
<p>As far as engineers who “don’t really understand the physics behind the engineering”, chalk that up to more schools requiring less Physics or just requiring Physics I & II. I can speak more for the CS/SoftE area and I don’t think Diff Eq nor Calculus III should have been removed from the major. I am pretty sure my fellow CS majors from when I was an undergrad would not approve of this either. I thought that was the purpose of the I.S./I.T. major…having minimal science/math background…not CS.</p>
<p>I meant along the lines of setting you apart from the pack. A BS doesn’t really carry with it the weight that it did in, say, 1970 simply because there are more to go around now.</p>
<p>I think this is a very interesting discussion that I want to explore some more, but I am seriously about to pass out due to lack of sleep the past 2 nights, so I will have to take a rain check.</p>
<p>“The purpose of education to, you guessed it, educate.”</p>
<p>Yeah, but that’s not the purpose of a degree. That’s what people go to college for. If you really want to be educated and don’t care about the degree, don’t enroll in college. Just move near a university and sit in some classes. Save a bundle on tuition and the result is mostly the same, hell, maybe even better. No general eds or majors, you decide what you want to learn.</p>
<p>" If you want a purely practical education, you don’t need a 4 year degree, you need a couple years at a trade school and experience."</p>
<p>Yeah but it doesn’t make people think I’m really smart and make them want to pay me a lot of money.</p>
<p>Either way, change happens through large amounts of money and firearms, wishful thinking and conceptions of an ideal world not required.</p>
<p>Note that I have not said that I think that in the current day and age that going to trade school would necessarily get you where you need to go all the time. I only said that as far as skills go, it should. Believe me, I know wishful thinking doesn’t solve problems (for example, the idea that we could do universal healthcare without inflating the deficit). I suppose I am merely lamenting the fact that recent trends have flooded the applicant pools with college graduates who have little more in the way of skills than someone from a trade school, yet they get the jobs over the trades school guys a lot of times. This in turn causes more people to go to college to get ahead, exacerbating the effect. It is one big cycle, and in the process, certain jobs traditionally covered by trade schools are being taken over by universities.</p>
<p>I am probably getting incoherent now, so this time I really am going to go to bed.</p>
<p>Yeah it’s probably best that if we continue to discuss this we do so in another thread. I’m afraid we’ve hijacked this poor guy’s thread enough and I certainly had no small part in making that happen. My bad.</p>
<p>“Note that I have not said that I think that in the current day and age that going to trade school would necessarily get you where you need to go all the time. I only said that as far as skills go, it should. Believe me, I know wishful thinking doesn’t solve problems (for example, the idea that we could do universal healthcare without inflating the deficit). I suppose I am merely lamenting the fact that recent trends have flooded the applicant pools with college graduates who have little more in the way of skills than someone from a trade school, yet they get the jobs over the trades school guys a lot of times. This in turn causes more people to go to college to get ahead, exacerbating the effect. It is one big cycle, and in the process, certain jobs traditionally covered by trade schools are being taken over by universities.”</p>
<p>Agreed…but add in that college is a business and “wanted in” on that part of industry that teaches folks skills that make them “job ready” immediately.</p>
<p>Case in point, a computer science department would teach ONLY theoretical concepts of database systems (like C.J. Date) and would care less about an “Oracle” or “SQL Server”. Now colleges want to cut into trade school/training vendor profits and incorporate practical concepts into academia.</p>