I spent nine years of undergraduate and postgraduate work before I got my PhD and I can categorically state that with the exception of one class on logic I would have been better off using my tuition money at a good book shop. Indeed, I've often argued that university actually held back my education because it cut into my reading time. If I needed one word to sum up my twenty years in academe, I'd use "disillusionment". I went in expecting a mind-expanding world of study, argument and hard work pulling back the veils of ignorance and instead I encountered a nightmare of time-wasting, egomania, empire building, totalitarianism, political posturing, featherbedding, corruption, graft, sexual misconduct, intimidation, exploitation, and toadyism. And that was just among the cafeteria staff. As for "scholarship", it's a wonder that the shade of Aristotle wasn't howling through the corridors demanding blood given what utter crap was being passed off as serious work. The only bright spot was that I spent 14 of those years in field research, so the damage wasn't too bad.
Mind you, I retired from all of this fifteen years ago and from what I've seen, things have got increasingly worse with lives of thousands of graduate students being destroyed as they give years to the locust in exchange for a squandered youth and a blighted adulthood. Given the cost, the exploitation, the time, and the appalling chances against getting a job, it's a wonder anyone goes for anything beyond a BA these days.
Indeed, I even doubt the value of an undergraduate degree. If things don't improve by the time my daughter is old enough for university, I plan to tell her flat out to forget it unless she plans to go into medicine, engineering or one of the hard sciences. She currently wants to be a marine biologist, so there's some hope there. If she plans to go for a liberal arts degree, I will do such things–what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth! Or at least I'll tell her to bank her tuition instead of handing it over to a ponzi scheme posing as an institution of higher learning.
6 comments:
How much use a logic class is depends on the teacher.
My first Stochastic class had one who knew the subject up, down, and sideways. After he had to go to hospital for open-heart surgery, he was replaced by an import who started the second semester with the statement, "The study of logic is done for its own sake, as it has no practical application in the real world."
My response?
"I'm sure that would have come as a hellish surprise to Aristotle."
To say nothing of generations of engineers, doctors, physicists, etc.
The rest of the year was a total loss in that class. And we students knew it.
Moral; In college, even a straightforward and important subject can be turned into a waste of time, with a sufficiently stupid and/or ideological "professor".
(Heinlein covered this in "The Number of the Beast", as well.)
cheers
eon
For me, my degree in engineering was never more than a way of leveraging more pay and more demanding jobs in the private sector. It has never had any eigenvalue whatsoever.
"When I die I want no part of Heaven,
I won't do the Heaven's work well;
I pray that Devil takes me
to work at fiery furnaces of Hell."
In my opinion, the only academia really worth of going to is those faculties which really give you professional skills and profession-related education. That is: economics, medicine, military, law, technology and hard sciences.
Anything else is waste of time and money.
Ironmistress;
Agreed. That's why I studied criminology.
cheers
eon
Agree with Ironmistress, who beat me to what I wanted to say. My degrees are in engineering. Software. That field has grown surprisingly quickly, from nothing, in 50 or 60 years. Undergraduate level (U of Michigan) was about getting comfortable with the machine, languages, analog and digital electronics up to breadboarding a small computer, intro operating systems, intro theory, some specialized classes like AI. That left a lot of follow-up classes in more advanced... all of the above, actually, and plenty of depth for the theory---proving theorems about complexity and computability with that logic which eon's prof found so useless. All this went into grad school. I think the theorem-proving classes did the most for me, actually, because they contributed to my education in thinking.
Maybe the question is, does the discipline include a concept of, if you do it wrong, your thing that you built is going to catch fire and fall down?
" . . . study, argument and hard work pulling back the veils of ignorance . . ."
Some would say these were the true goals of University. That and aquiring a love of learning and a curious, yet disciplined, mind.
It's sad that, at best, University is often seen as a way of getting a piece of paper entitling one to a bigger wage packet.
And very, very sad that that's often how University is seen "at best." :(
Ah well, perhaps it's as well I was too thick to go to University . . .
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