Post: The Demise of University

[AnarchoSocialist]

Universities do have their problems, there is little question about that. But I think a bigger problem is what Hipster Duck mentioned, students who are totally unprepared for life after high school.

And to be fair, a lot of times it isn't their fault. Some high schools do a better job than others presenting students with post secondary options from apprenticeships up to university.

Parents are also no help in many cases. Many parents really push high expections and class based ideals onto their kids and make it seem as though university is the only option and anything less is unacceptable. There are other family, society or even teacher influences that are very unfair to kids who should be presented with as many options as possible. Of course all generations of parents have some people who try to use their kids as a way of projecting their own success but the boomers really seem to have turned it into a fetish.

Overall I agree with most people here. I think if people where better prepared and able to make better choices about their post-secondary education then it would lend itself to universities being utilized in a better, more efficient, manner and reducing a number of the problems the article mentions.

 

[Chuck]

I think that Engineering would be best as a professional program, likely not requiring a full bachelor's degree, but at least a few years of general (likely science) undergraduate education.

Having graduated from Engineering myself, it is my opinion that Engineering is best suited for undergrad. However, the biggest problem with the current curriculum is that it does not provide students with a well rounded education. It would have been much more beneficial to replace 4 of the 8 or so mandatory math classes we had with additional arts and science electives. I wish I could have taken more arts courses.

But in terms of preparing you for the working world, Engineering undergrad is great. In my graduating class, those who actually wanted to work all had $20+ per hour full time jobs lined up before they even finished exams.

 

[Admiral Beez]

I realized that there's a world of options out there, started a business and just finished a history degree, something I enjoyed.

Now that I've been working for ten years or so, I'm thinking of going back to uni for my Masters, but likely won't take it in any field that will directly help my career. For me, any return to unversity will be purely for higher learning and personal growth - I've already got the great job and income - so now it's time to work on my brain power. So, I'm thinking of taking my Masters in History with a minor in Religious Studies or something along those lines. We'll see. First step is to get this family home from Fredericton.

 

[Observer Walt]

Hipster Duck makes an excellent point. Too many people (incl. me, at one time) are at university without a clear idea why they are there. I think there is a lot to be said for the British tradition of the "gap year", where people take a year off after high school and before going to university. It would be a chance to gain some exposure to that thing called the "real world", and some additional maturity.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

It would have been much more beneficial to replace 4 of the 8 or so mandatory math classes we had with additional arts and science electives. I wish I could have taken more arts courses.

There are only 3 courses that I'm forced to take, including stats and a computer course...more than half the courses I'm taking are 100% free electives and I'm taking all sorts of arts courses. I think I'd go nuts if all my classes were made larger and flooded with kids from engineering or commerce, though...there certainly wouldn't be much more than a trickle of arts kids taking ENG or business courses if allowed to cross over the other way. Maybe it's just the school I'm at that makes me feels this way, but I agree almost completely with unimaginative2. If I was more insulated from all the undergrads around me who are there only for a future career, I'd be much happier.

 

[afransen]

Having graduated from Engineering myself, it is my opinion that Engineering is best suited for undergrad. However, the biggest problem with the current curriculum is that it does not provide students with a well rounded education. It would have been much more beneficial to replace 4 of the 8 or so mandatory math classes we had with additional arts and science electives. I wish I could have taken more arts courses.

But in terms of preparing you for the working world, Engineering undergrad is great. In my graduating class, those who actually wanted to work all had $20+ per hour full time jobs lined up before they even finished exams.

As a mathematician, I'm going to beg the question of what math you think is worthwhile. A calculus course or two, surely some statistics, and linear algebra? I suppose that might be acceptable, but the math courses I have taken with engineers (either software engineering or system design) revealed that they tended to be underequiped to handle some topics. For instance, I took a queuing theory and experiment design course, and the professor spent an hour and a half trying to explain the memoryless property of the exponential distribution, with comments coming up along the lines of "if it doesn't happen at time infinity minus one, it will certainly happen at time infinity?"

I think the way to fix engineering programs might be to make them 10 terms. Engineering is highly multidisciplinary, and cutting any one facet might be rather detrimental to the quality of their education. But, this is a (close) outsider's point of view, looking in.

 

[Anth]

As a mathematician, I'm going to beg the question of what math you think is worthwhile. A calculus course or two, surely some statistics, and linear algebra? I suppose that might be acceptable, but the math courses I have taken with engineers (either software engineering or system design) revealed that they tended to be underequiped to handle some topics. For instance, I took a queuing theory and experiment design course, and the professor spent an hour and a half trying to explain the memoryless property of the exponential distribution, with comments coming up along the lines of "if it doesn't happen at time infinity minus one, it will certainly happen at time infinity?"

I think the way to fix engineering programs might be to make them 10 terms. Engineering is highly multidisciplinary, and cutting any one facet might be rather detrimental to the quality of their education. But, this is a (close) outsider's point of view, looking in.

I'm a U of T Engineering alumnus and I think you've summed things up quite well. Although I would've loved to take more non-technical courses, I couldn't possibly imagine cutting anything out of an already incredibly packed and demanding multidisciplinary program, especially not math even though I took four calculus courses, linear algebra, probability, and a ton of applied math. In my experience, four years is nowhere near enough and for every arts course I would've liked to take, there were at least another five technical courses I could've used.

As for whether engineering belongs in universities at all, I'm honestly surprised that anyone would still doubt that in this day and age.

 

[unimaginative2]

I don't think anybody doubts that it belongs in university. Just that it should be a professional, rather than undergraduate program. I mean, engineering is a profession just like medicine and law.

 

[Urban Shocker]

Is it? I thought only the clergy qualified to join the other two.

 

[unimaginative2]

POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION

More business suits than berets
Ontario College of Art and Design becoming more of a job factory than an art school, critics say

ANTHONY REINHART

E-mail Anthony Reinhart | Read Bio | Latest Columns
For all the talk of innovation and imagination at the Ontario College of Art and Design yesterday, they certainly played it safe when it came to security.

Bags had to be left at the entrance of the venerable school's auditorium if you wanted to see Chris Bentley, Ontario's Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, announce funding for OCAD's new digital-media program to a crowd dominated by well-attired business types, school administrators and faculty.

"Apparently, there's been a student group following him around" and causing trouble, an OCAD spokeswoman explained afterward, an evident reference to a protest in which students posing as journalists disrupted a February appearance by Mr. Bentley.

As for the new program, known as the Digital Futures Initiative, it promises a safe track for students looking to secure careers in the "imagination economy," where their talents can be exploited by developers of new technology and the software that runs it.

As Mr. Bentley put it, to a crowd dotted with far more business suits than berets, Digital Futures will open doors "to previously unimagined opportunities for Ontario students, while creating new applications for a wide spectrum of Ontario industries."

His announcement of $2-million in annual funding from the province was followed by similarly positive words from officials from IBM and Xerox, just two of the new program's many private sponsors. (The Globe and Mail is also a sponsor.)

Sara Diamond, president of OCAD, heralded the program as a way to "bring Ontario to another level of actualizing the contribution our institution can make to an integrated and imaginative world of digital technology and culture.

"We believe that our digital imaginations can have a profound impact on many industrial and social needs, including business, entertainment, games design, health care, scientific visualization, fashion, resource sustainability and technology design."

Outside on the McCaul Street sidewalk after the announcement, Jasper Moester, an OCAD art student who graduates this year, painted an uneasy portrait of a school that has become more of a job factory in the seven years since he arrived to study painting and drawing.

"The school is a school, but it's also a business," said Mr. Moester, 29.

"I'm worried that they are treating it more like a business than a school sometimes."

While OCAD has been known in the past as a cauldron of ideas and collaboration, Mr. Moester worries that "if we get too corporate and too business-oriented, we're going to lose sight of that, especially on the art side where we need it the most."

David Blackwood, a painter and printmaker who stands as one of OCAD's most accomplished alumni, was more blunt in his assessment of the new venture.

"It's heartbreaking," said Mr. Blackwood, who, at 65, has led an entirely independent career aside from a one-day-a-week teaching job after he graduated from what was then the Ontario College of Art in 1963. "There's more to art than technology and big business and so on."

He considers himself lucky to have attended the college when working practitioners taught "design and drawing and colour and painting," in the tradition of Germany's seminal Bauhaus art school.

Now, he said, the need to secure funding in a competitive educational world may be overshadowing that approach.

"It's very attractive to government to see an institution producing people for industry," Mr. Blackwood said.

"I think [OCAD is] really moving into the whole international computer-digital thing and, boy, if you want to learn to paint or draw, forget it," he said. "Don't go there."

To hear the wistful tone in Mr. Moester's voice, that might just be the way of the world these days, "especially in the GTA, where," he says, "we're very much an individualistic society.

"We're very much 'What is this going to do for me?' and we're very much about money and power."

 

[Chuck]

I'm a U of T Engineering alumnus and I think you've summed things up quite well. Although I would've loved to take more non-technical courses, I couldn't possibly imagine cutting anything out of an already incredibly packed and demanding multidisciplinary program, especially not math even though I took four calculus courses, linear algebra, probability, and a ton of applied math. In my experience, four years is nowhere near enough and for every arts course I would've liked to take, there were at least another five technical courses I could've used.

As for whether engineering belongs in universities at all, I'm honestly surprised that anyone would still doubt that in this day and age.

I support the three first year math courses 100% as well as one probability course, but that's where I would draw the line. In most fields of Engineering, you just don't have to use all of that advanced math. The hardest math I do on my job is add up quantities of materials installed since my last site visit.

Hey Anth, while on this topic, did you at least have Burbulla in first year calculus?

 

[salvius]

It is true that large amounts of people are not prepared for the undergrad experience. I don't think removing the OAC was necessarily the problem, but I really wish we introduced the 'gap' year concept.