“To realize the dream of a university without job training…”
Clearly, training is a subset of what happens at a university, but it is a proper subset. In my post, I didn’t intend to mean that we remove training-oriented instruction from universities, merely that we may want to stop chasing enrollment from students who only want training. We can do this by explicitly guiding them to these other institutions; even forming “strategic partnerships” (which must be better than ordinary partnerships) with them.
The alternative is to make it an explicit goal that all our graduates have an understanding of how the breadth of their education is more than the sum of its parts. When I was and undergrad, this wasn’t necessary, as pretty much all students were hungry to learn (and thirsty for beer). Even so, for engineering students, “arts and crafts” electives were something to get through as quick as possible. We would have benefitted from a carefully crafted, thoughtful common humanities core. I think this is even more applicable today, when not all entering students value learning in and of itself. Perhaps the real elitism is assuming that everyone can afford the luxury of learning for learning’s sake.
Fair enough Micheal.
Clearly, training is a subset of what happens at a university, but it is a proper subset. In my post, I didn’t intend to mean that we remove training-oriented instruction from universities, merely that we may want to stop chasing enrollment from students who only want training. We can do this by explicitly guiding them to these other institutions; even forming “strategic partnerships” (which must be better than ordinary partnerships) with them.
The alternative is to make it an explicit goal that all our graduates have an understanding of how the breadth of their education is more than the sum of its parts. When I was and undergrad, this wasn’t necessary, as pretty much all students were hungry to learn (and thirsty for beer). Even so, for engineering students, “arts and crafts” electives were something to get through as quick as possible. We would have benefitted from a carefully crafted, thoughtful common humanities core. I think this is even more applicable today, when not all entering students value learning in and of itself. Perhaps the real elitism is assuming that everyone can afford the luxury of learning for learning’s sake.