Category: College

What do we expect from the institutes?

Welcome to this second-part in this two-part blog on ‘is college worth it?’

So what do we mean when talking about education more fun and interesting? Well, let us take a practical example. The two main criticisms of university put out by various commentators is:

1) Of a time cost – the amount of time you spent in University. Some say it is too long.

2) Its financial cost – it costs too much. Many students are graduating with tens of thousands in debt these days.

What policy really helps us really explore and can help us touch upon education outside of the institutions that we have already built. What do I mean by that?

This is a more detailed practical example. Let us say hypothetically, we have to learn about education policy and let’s say a charming young man puts a little video online about education policy and I watched it. You can reach it with the internet connection from your home for virtually free whereas a University lecturer will take place with an old man at the front of the lecture room with a rather large salary and even larger building.
Another example of this kind of this poor thinking policy is in terms of time…

Okay, so we are all grouped by age in the university or school system, but why? For example, let’s say, you were really strong in history (or some other subject which was your favourite) when you were young, say, twelve, but you still had to sit with a bunch of idiot twelve year olds who knew nothing about history. How is that efficient to your learning or their learning?

So to sum up our points!

When we ask the question “Is the University worth it?” we are essentially asking the wrong question. You get two points down in this social and economic cost and benefits of this degree versus that degree, and it is just not productive to the debate. Without question, mass education for all has been nothing but a benefit for the entirety of mankind. The question we should be asking ourselves is how can we get this great experience of learning stuff regardless of what it is, whether it is sociology or chemical engineering, how can we get it so everyone can share that experience to the lowest social and economic cost we can manage?
Thank you for reading.

If you are confused by anything we said because we it was quite an incoherent piece then please feel free to post your comments below and we will try to answer. If you are interested in education policy like in a broader sense, then you’ll have to ask those questions as well. Thanks for reading again.

Hello, interested happy people and The Uni Tutor’s blog readers!

In this two-part blog entry, we are going to discuss the importance (or unimportance) of University (College, as you North Americans call it).

Now, there seems to have been a lot of discussion lately about the importance of University. Is University worth it? Most of the discussion seems to stem from a result of the ever-increasing university fees, both in the UK and the USA. To make matters worse, the ever shrinking job market is playing a role in the increasing doubts over the usefulness of a college (or university) degree.
We’re more than certain that this controversial topic will raise a few eyebrows. That said, however, we are going to ensure we cover a wide variety of viewpoints.

But what we think many commentators are lacking in their critiques is that don’t get the objective of university from a policy perspective.

So that is what we are going to do discuss because the internet loves policy, right?

I think first what we should cover before we get into the details of whether university is worthy or not, is exactly what we expect education institutions to do.

So firstly, I think it is important that education teaches us to be better people. Whether you like it or not, learning is something we do to better understand the people and the world around us, to understand our place in the universe. I am not sure whether you are studying physics or philosophy you are answering a fundamental question, do you? ‘Why I am here, where is my place?’

We have asked people of who have that sort of education about where they stand in the wider world, the more reasons to be socially conscious with their actions and politically active. And these traits, we are sure you can agree, is important in society. And secondly, what I think we can agree with importantly is that education is designed to prepare you to be useful to the economic system that we have (voluntarily or involuntarily) embraced. So you want to start. To do that, you have to participate in market economics. You have to get a job, you have to be useful. And education is supposedly and should be designed to help you be a part of that. So we study something that we enjoyed. Hopefully we got a job that we enjoy so we can enjoy life and have stuff and everything will be great.

A good example of this kind of thinking is in Germany. Germany does not consider education spending to be part of a social policy spending programme. They consider it to be part of an economic spending program. This is because an educated workforce is the best economic asset a country can have. So the trait goes that the more educated we are the more socially active we are, the more political active we are and the more economically affluent and responsible we are, right? So how is this linking on what they are talking about across the globe about the worth of university degree? Well, if we agree on what Universities and indeed the education system as a whole is for, which is to make people more useful economically and socially, which I think we can agree on to a greater or lesser extent.

So if we can agree on that, the question for us as informed policy makers becomes, how do we make education worth it? In our next series in this two-part blog, we will be talking about how can we make it more efficient? Because if we can agree on that then as an informed policy-makers the questions becomes less of how can we make University worth it? In other words, how can we increase the economic and social benefits of it? Two, how can we make universities less boring and more fun and useful? Put another way, how can we decrease the economic and social cost?

We hope you enjoyed this first series in our blog. Please join us in the next series when we further elaborate on the issues and reach several important conclusions.

Brendan Davids