Reply to Article: Students increasingly treat college as a transaction

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Back when people read philosophy in college and the like, the assumption was that employers hired bright people and then trained them. The real issue today isn’t universities but employers who no longer provide any training. This puts us in the situation where either your university now teaches project management and data analysis or the student pays for boot camps and the like later on their own. The fault is really the employers who don’t want a broadly educated workforce. They just want serfs [/quote]

NP.  I actually think skills like project management and data analysis can be effectively taught alongside the philosophical ponderings and classes taken for pure intellectual pleasure.  And that universities are well-placed to deliver a curriculum that integrates between clearly-identifiable skills (certifications, etc.) and less directly-provable general thinking, insight development, and communication skills.

Perhaps the way we bucket disciplines needs to change.

i agree that college has become too expensive to allow it to cling so fiercely to its medieval origins as an institution for preparing society's most literate (and rich) men for only a handful of professions.

Employers treat employees like serfs when they are a commodity...no special skills, no above-average thinking, little direct impact on innovation, productivity, or profit.  It's not morally right, but the mere fact of employment is no guarantee of any higher goals on either side.  I think it's more likely that universities can bend to provide more useful and intellectually-satisfying learning experiences vs. employers become more charitable about financing training than they have been lately.[/quote]

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