At The Gods of the Copybook Headings:
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The art of dumbing down something as complicated as a university is a tricky one. If you dumb down the engineering program you get falling bridges and dead people. If you dumb down political science, well you just get more NDP voters…
Do read it all.
So much good stuff on SDA today I cannot keep away.
Mark, great article, all of it true – I can speak from experience. Thanks for posting. I am forwarding it to a bunch of people.
I would add, much to my very great dismay, that engineering is now being dumbed down as well.
Another aspect to this problem is that the administrative side of universities is becoming so bloated it is a wonder that any university can balance it books. So they balance the books by brining in more unqualified students.
Most universities now have two dozen or more vice-presidents, most with titles that are completely made up nonsense.
Sorry, one last post. If you want to see administrative bloat, just look here!
http://president.ubc.ca/files/2013/02/UBC-Org-Chart-2014Feb-High-Level3.pdf
Time for some spring cleaning in education.
I think accreditation is to blame for a lot of this. Credential-ism was used to get minorities & gender above those who had experience (by years of work in a field) for job quotas. We now see the result.
People you can never get rid of , utterly incompetent.
Take Edmonton for instance. We have a whole tribe of Women who get sent to department after department, destroying every one. They are unfixable.
Yet they stay because they have the paper that gives them absolute job security.
No matter how they mess up.
Less workers are hired every year, but never a loss in the bureaucracy of the paper shufflers.
Actually, based on a very limited sample, I suspect that the hard sciences have been dumbed down too. We had a chemistry graduate work in our lab as a summer student. Nice guy, good marks. As I was entering his test data on the database it was obvious something was very wrong with his analysis. After talking to him, I discovered he could not tell the difference between the pH meter and a conductivity meter. More disturbing was that not only did he not know how to calibrate various analyzers but he didn’t seem to understand why they needed to be calibrated.
He learned very quickly and was a good lab tech but these types of incidents made me wonder about the effectiveness and thoroughness of his science education at university. Now if you gave him a pen and paper and asked him to do a concentration equation or a Lewis Dot Diagram I’m sure he’d be A+. In the end he decided that hands-on lab and field work was not for him so he applied and was accepted into a masters of chemistry program. Maybe it’s my middle class upbringing and Gen X practicality but the choice between a high paying industrial lab job with excellent benefits and going into debt for more iffy education is a no brainier but…status marker seeking, perhaps??
Personally, having had the experience of both university and an applied science and technology institute, the applied program was superior. You had to work much harder and expectations were higher. University programs seem to be missing the connection between aquired, abstract knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge for any practical, real-life use. Maybe that’s why I don’t buy the “but they teach critical thinking” argument. Some graduates perhaps but more are of the “herd of independent minds” mentality. A superficial understanding combined with a strange certainty that they know everything about pretty much everything.
A friend with an engineering background responds:
‘Clever essay. I do feel that I’m always getting fed the same line of bullshit from every which way. We need to be more inclusive they say; except that people with differing opinions are not part of the “inclusive” club. I’d rather be exclusive anyhow.’
Mark
Ottawa
“There is nothing more dangerous to the future of a society than half-educated liberal arts majors.” Includes school admin and profs, too, I hope.
Before the first lecture (mid 70s), my mathematical logic professor stood in front of the audience of about 80 freshmen and, with a smirk, remarked: “So many of you love mathematics? Well, we’ll see.” About 20 made it through the first semester.
Nowadays I get about 10-15 talented students every year.
But when I look through the syllabi and textbooks of my liberal arts son… I think of our sessions as “refreshing my memory” but they should be called “corrective sessions.” Postmodernism has brought nothing but havoc to these once respectable disciplines. Hard science though fights back. Vide:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
My trade/profession is testing, analyzing, troubleshooting, adjusting, and fixing building mechanical systems to meet the original design intent. It’s commonly called “making engineers’ dreams come true”. In the past decade the quality of engineering has dropped significantly, as experienced practical engineers retire and are replaced by younger and younger inexperienced engineers. The quality of engineering education is obviously being eroded. I can pretty much predict that the number of problems will increase with every step of this progression: young, immigrant, female, from Quebec. It’s often an order of magnitude between ‘steps’.
Inexperienced, male, Canadian-born engineers can usually be reasoned with. Most of them will absorb facts backed by empirical evidence, and adjust their ‘book learning’ accordingly. The really smart ones will work with us to improve designs and make systems work better. The worst of the lot are the arrogant and stupid, young, female, immigrant, “Professional Engineers”. They’ll just ‘dig their heels in’ and insist there is nothing wrong with their design, even when presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, just because they have PEng certification. They’ve taken the term ‘Stupid Cnut’ to a whole new level. I’m now interviewing the design engineer before bidding on a job, and I’m turning down more and more jobs because it’s just not worth the hassle trying to deal with stupid arrogant children.
I’m working with mechanical engineers, however I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find that the arrogant mindlessness has extended to the other disciplines as well.
Wonderful article.
This article is spot on.
We’ve dumbed down life in general. No student leaving school is prepared for the modern marketplace. Whether it’s liberal arts (what is being taught isn’t even remotely traditional liberal arts) or mathematics, it’s been watered down. Schools are baby-minding centres. It’s not worth it to teach. This can’t and won’t go on. People can deal with an incompetent barista. They’ll hang the rotten engineer.
One hopes….
@north of 60 – Are you callling those engineer gals “bossy”? For shame! Tsk Tsk. Beyonce and Michelle O say that you shouldn’t be like that.
Yes, administrative bloat — no question. But as to your earlier claim that “most universities now have two dozen or more vice-presidents,” that’s ridiculous. You won’t find a single one. The reality about universities in Canada (and many, many other countries) is bad enough as it is without making stuff up.
I’ve got to disagree with you on this on No60. I’ve helped train up about 30 or so junior engineers, about 25% of them female. There’s the same percentage of useless “experts” across the sexes. There are a lot who can’t think critically though. One of my favourite “tests” for them is to ask what evidence there is against catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Less than half have an answer. I then ask about the evidence for. Most think that they are above average in knowledge about “scientific” items like this, but applying a bit of the Socratic method to what they believe (and it is a belief in almost all cases) shows that they haven’t analysed anything to come up with this view.
The good ones are the ones who will recognize on their own how little they really know. The worst of the lot are the ones who try to tell a technician or operator with 30+ years experience how the job should be done. The male useless junior engineers are frequently treated as “oh, they’re just another engineer whose pinky ring cut off the blood to his brain”. The female useless engineers are more memorable because they tend to be shrill and grate on the nerves more. Neither can effectively be trained.
In the interests of full disclosure, when I started at a minesite I was mistaken for a useless junior until I snapped on a blast pattern one day, started swearing a blue streak at the senior surveyor with the gist of “if I’m doing it wrong then don’t just undo what I’ve done, tell me WHY I’m doing it wrong so I won’t make that mistake again” and tried to throw a hammer at him (I missed by a barn-width, because he was a barn-length away). Once he realized I was trying to learn we got along great, and I learned a lot from him. My questions had come across as “I think we should do it this way”, when what I had wanted to ask was “There’s something I’m missing because I would have thought this is the way to do it but you don’t do it that way, so what don’t I know?”
Yup, most of what you’ve stated agrees with what I said. I was very specific about which segment causes the most problems, and it wasn’t just gender. The females do seem to have much bigger ‘professional egos’, perhaps it comes from spending too much time trying to prove they’re just as good as men. Yes, there are well qualified young engineers, however they’re becoming more of a minority as political correctness becomes increasingly prevalent in the education system.