In a post at RealClearScience, Tom Hartsfield presents what strikes me as a novel and potentially extremely disruptive strategy for reforming higher education. Following the guidance of Alec Trebeck, I’ll put his proposal into the form of a question: why are colleges accredited rather than individual classes?
The philosophy is simple. The most important qualification for a job is qualification itself, not the calligraphed paper that represents it.
If a job requires some knowledge of biology, it often demands a degree in the subject. Why not, instead, ask for just the particular set of biological knowledge germane to the task?
One applicant to a job opening could present an entire preciously expensive degree showing their breadth of knowledge. Individual accreditation would allow a second applicant to instead present a smaller, leaner, more targeted package of professionally certified skills to compete with the first at a much lower cost.
A can think of a response to that. Courses of study, not just individual classes but whole courses of study, are designed by professional scholars and represent what an educated person is supposed to know about the subject matter.
Of course, colleges and universities largely abandoned that strategy nearly a half century ago which strengthens Dr. Hartsfield’s case considerably.
It’s an interesting thought.
I think the assumption being made by Hartsfield is that the purpose of education is to supply a body of knowledge. There are a number of competing theories, including improving critical thinking, problem solving skills, and teachability. These might be described as signaling or indirect skills.
In either case, the person in the hypothetical who got a conventional degree in which a variety of topics were covered is going to get paid substantially more than the person without such a degree. At the minimum, the person with the bachelor’s degree will be seen as a harder worker, more likely to acquire future needed skills, and better academically than a student who didn’t pursue the degree.
“At the minimum, the person with the bachelor’s degree will be seen as a harder worker, more likely to acquire future needed skills, and better academically than a student who didn’t pursue the degree.”
Some of our biggest tech giants — Jobs and Gates — might disagree with that statement.
The purpose of primary education is to warehouse children until their imaginations, individuality and ambition are fully suppressed.
The purpose of college is to allow high school kids to avoid adulthood for another four years and to acquire debt in the process.
There are of course additional effects. Many people meet their future spouse. Others make the connections that will allow them to overcome their own mediocrity and rise to a level of success. And of course it’s a great way to keep lots of educators employed and off the street.
Every now and then some student actually discovers a subject that interests them and which they can then pursue independently and thus acquire education. But that’s a hit-and-miss affair.
At the minimum, the person with the bachelor’s degree will be seen as a harder worker, more likely to acquire future needed skills, and better academically than a student who didn’t pursue the degree.
Yes, because college students are known for their sobriety and dedication.
I dropped out a couple of classes short of a Masters in Mathematics. Of the jobs I’ve had since then, and those I’ve applied for, absolutely none of them required any knowledge I acquired in university. I could have DONE any of them after I dropped out of 11th grade midway through the year. Under no circumstances would I have even been considered for any of them, though, without the degree.
Modern living is a bitch.
jan, in another thread you asked, “And this has been working out so well, hasn’t it? Health care and higher minimum wage paid for by whom? Training for what?”
I’ll tell you what they trained people for: IT work! And then, of course, they shipped in the Indians to make certain that American IT workers were getting fired in droves. See how this works?
This sounds like a ridiculous scam. And it won’t have the utility of the scam of the current university system.
#Disruption of the educational system will not be coming from people trained in college to think outside the box.
I don’t think that disruption of the educational system will be coming at all. Which is a shame because the two sectors most in need of disruption are education and healthcare.
Everyone happy?
MM: “This sounds like a ridiculous scam. And it won’t have the utility of the scam of the current university system.”
I agree. I think the current scam would be reduced by allowing bankruptcy on student loans on terms similar to other countries, and greater investment in vocational schooling at the high school level.
Ellipses: From my p.o.v., higher education is mostly a positional good as far as employment is concerned. For a math-related job, the employer will prefer the person with the more advanced degree. I don’t know why you didn’t complete your masters, but my friends who didn’t complete their learned about good employment opportunities and jumped-off. In essence, their post-grad education was simply an extended queue, waiting until the job market improved, or more specifically, their relative educational position put them at the top of the theoretical queue.
The students get over-educated (and over in debt), and employers pay some of this cost in terms of higher wages, but most of the cost is borne by the student, and even worse by the college student never gets close to a position which would pay college-graduate wages.
My greatest objection to present policy and higher education requirements are that they completely write off about half of the population. In major cities the high school graduation rate is about 50%. What are the other 50% expected to do?
Whatever the merits of Bernie Sanders’s free college proposal it doesn’t address that. If you can’t get a kid to graduate from high school, how the heck are you going to get him or her to graduate from college? That’s why my preferred solution is a diverse economy with the possibility of people without college degrees earning decent livings.
I like Kasich’s educational ideas — mainly encouraging students to clear the first two years of college in less expensive community colleges, transferring those units to 4-year institutions. That’s what I did. Second, he supported vocational education in the early teenage years, which would not hinder students from going to college should they want that path.
PD , why your friends jumped off is basically why I jumped off. That & realizing the the academic job market was even tougher than I thought. At some point you wonder, “Why am I doing this?” And the department did a very poor job of pointing out other opportunities for PhDs.
Jan, Kasich’s ideas do know good if too many of the jobs go to immigrants of one type or another.
Kasich gets auto corrected to Masochistic.
Have to wonder if Hartsfield has ever hired people. Exactly where are you going to find the time to interview people to find out that they have just the exact knowledge you need? How often are you going to know exactly what you need beyond the immediate future? From the POV of an employer (we have grown from about 20 people to just under 100 now in the past 15 years), that degree they have simplifies things quite a bit. It tells me they probably have most of the knowledge and skills I needs. It also suggests that if they don’t they can probably learn them. It represents a combination of signaling (in the positive sense) and possession of useful skills.
Also, I am sure there must be jobs like the ones the author describes, where all you really need is knowledge and ability in a very focused area. However, there are also an awful lot of jobs that also require the ability to communicate well. The ability to adapt and integrate knowledge beyond one narrow area. If your applicant is a bio-wizard, but can’t write up a results, or communicate with others about what he is doing, what use will he be?
That said, I think he is close to being right about what we need. People change jobs more than they did in the past. Jobs change faster. One of the things people need is focused education to help them learn specific skills later in life well after they leave their initial educational system. They mostly don’t need to go back and get a full degree, just add on a bit.
Steve
” Exactly where are you going to find the time to interview people to find out that they have just the exact knowledge you need?”
So degrees are just a way to save employers time when hiring a position. No wonder our labor market seems so screwed up.
BTW, I heard on NPR this evening about test comparisons with other OECD countries. Supposedly, our college graduates are well above average in math and communication skills, but our high school graduates without college perform on par with high school drop-outs in other countries….
I think steve summed it up in his first two paragraphs. And Andy, it’s more than just time. Steve is alluding to more breadth and adaptability. Else you just have trade school grads. And what happens to trade school grads in a dynamic job market………?