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Thursday, September 15, 2005
Education in the 21st century
Here. The gist is that a fifty-something professor of anthropology enters the university where she's tenured, as a student living in a dorm. She's trying to figure out why her students sleep and eat in class, and why her main engagement with them is not over ideas, but over the details of class requirements. What she discovers is that many students are up to their eyeballs with class loads and part-time jobs, struggling to find enough time to sleep or to eat.
I doubt that it's much different in Canada, even at private. undergraduate institutions. One of my classmates carried eighteen to twenty hours of classes -- full-time status started at twelve -- and held down a full-time security job nights on which she could study between making rounds. Others drove school bus morning and afternoon and fit classes in the in-between and evenings. Then there was the compulsory, unpaid service required either during the week or on weekends. Summers were less about internships in their fields than just trying to earn as much money as possible to have money in hand for tuition and first month's rent. Even so, many accumulated healthy student debt loads.
And that was nearly twenty-five years ago before tuition really started to skyrocket.
Not much time for contemplation or shootin' the breeze over coffee or whatever . . .
I wonder . . . Should it be public policy to make it tougher to matriculate and enter university, and offer more "full-ride" or near full-ride scholarships? Might this encourage more to consider apprenticeship to the skilled trades? Or, maybe our approach to post-secondary education is wrongly premised as skills acquisition. Should we, instead, return to the model of a generalist, liberal arts education with a view to the kind of person that comes out? Should pursuing an undergraduate, liberal arts education disqualify one from considering the skilled trades over a career in business or the professions?
I know, I know: low tuition fees and student awards and grants tend to
subsidize the children of upper-middle-income parents. But if
matriculation and admission standards were tightened, wouldn't we,
then, cultivate talent and reward hard work, irrespective of incomes?
(Cross-posted from Burkean Canuck).
Posted by Russ Kuykendall on September 15, 2005 in Canadian Politics | Permalink
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The missing 18-year old got off shift at 1:00 AM at a fast-food outlet; she had classes next day at high school. No trace of her since.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sun, September 11, 2005
'Culture shock' hits community in wake of disappearance
By Laura Czekaj, Ottawa Sun
The residents of the quiet suburb of Barrhaven are questioning their safety and that of their daughters after a young woman vanished on her way home from work.
"It's a very safe place where people feel safe and love to raise their families," said Coun. Jan Harder. "It's such a culture shock for the people out here. That's why they are just baffled."
The search for missing 18-year-old Jennifer Teague had area residents buzzing about how something so out of the ordinary could happen in this "bedroom community."
Harder, who stopped in at the Ottawa police search command post on Jockvale Rd. yesterday, said everywhere she went people were talking about the missing girl. "They are just in disbelief."
Jennifer's co-worker Szilvia Szaraz said the young woman's disappearance has left her scared.
"This is scaring everyone. I wouldn't walk home at that time of the night by myself. You never expect it to happen this close to you." >>>> Ottawa Sun
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-09-15 7:44:22 AM
Take a look at the latest Economist magazine - it contains a survey on higher education.
(http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4339960)
One of its conclusions:
"America's system of higher education is the best in the world. That is because there is no system."
And isn't it quite remarkable that 17 out the 20 highest ranked universities in the world are American?
Canadians among top 100 (not too bad actually):
#24 UoT
#37 UBC
#67 McGill
#90 McMaster
Posted by: Johan i Kanada | 2005-09-15 8:38:01 AM
I teach in a small university, where 2/3 of my students work at least 15 hours a week. I also taught two semesters at a wealthy private American Ivy League university, where no one in my classes had a part time job. This must make a huge difference to the university experience. For one thing, my students have no time (and many have no inclination) to read books other than those assigned as course work. It's a shame.
Posted by: BillBC | 2005-09-15 9:57:04 AM
With all the drek we are bombarded with about Canada as the socialist utopia with it's social safety nets and universal helath and welfare systems, we have the shittyest record of secondary education funding.
I would gladly stop my libertarian braying, pay the horrendous tax load and become a happy utopian IF this utopia worked as promised and there were universal access to secondary education in this nation.
But it's not to be ..at least in the near future because we have surplues that must go to communist China in aid and hungry Quebec Ad companies and corporate welfare clinets.
Posted by: WLMackenzie redux | 2005-09-15 10:13:29 AM
I don't think it's necessarily bad that many students have to work so hard to pay for their education for several reasons.
-they will value their education more because they put their own sweat into it
-it prepares them for real life where their employers will expect hard work from them and not to be sitting around contemplating the meaning of life
-it teaches students how to prioritize because they have to choose which courses they put the most into and which ones they just do the necessary requirements. (And let's face it there are a lot of stupid courses at university and some deserve more attention than others)
-it encourages instructors to provide a stimulating class experience and useful assignments that will make students think about the information they are being taught. While many are there just to get a degree, the instructors have the opportunity to be creative in ensuring they get an education, despite the financial and related time constraints that their students face
Just a few musings
Posted by: timmyz | 2005-09-15 11:26:06 AM
York University was #500 on that list, tee-hee. Manitoba, the "high school after high school" wasn't even on it!
But Alberta and Calgary were both there. Well done.
Posted by: Scott | 2005-09-15 2:06:06 PM
The poverty and unhappiness of students in our socialist education system is the same as the poverty and unhappiness of people forced to live in socialist systems everywhere. Check out the looks on the faces of people in your local hospital emergency department, or living on welfare in any large North American city, or waiting for a food ration in North Korea. The degree of unhappiness is equal to the degree to which freedom has been violated.
There should be no public education policy, period. A free market in education would quickly and efficiently sort out all of the problems which you describe, the way out it sorts out every other thing in which it is allowed to do so.
Don't try to cultivate other people's hard work and talent - cultivate your own. And give other people the credit for being able to do the same for themselves.
Posted by: Justzumgai | 2005-09-15 3:50:13 PM
My daughter, a college student, tells me most of the kids on her floor have part-time jobs. Some have two or three, out of necessity. Those kids are so tired they fall asleep in class. Sounds like a real fun way to get an education to me.
Posted by: old squid | 2005-09-15 3:56:28 PM
Professor Small notes that "One of my classmates carried eighteen to twenty hours of classes -- full-time status started at twelve."
When I was an undergraduate, students in my faculty had 38 hours of classes per week, distributed across seven courses, with an assignment per course per week (one due every day), a couple labs per week, and term projects in two or three courses per term, and I worked part-time on the side.
That's why we had to get our beer drinking done while working on assignments at midnight in the high-voltage lab. Let me tell you, we sure had fun!
And all this in spite of the state teachers collective being forced by evil capitalists to teach 30 to 35 of us little brats per class throughout K/12.
You tell that to kids today; they won't believe you ( http://tinyurl.com/dzr2g ).
Posted by: Tony | 2005-09-15 4:38:00 PM
For the record, Tony, that was one of my classmates. Every post-secondary institution defines their "hours" differently. For every hour of class, one could expect two hours of reading per credit hour each week, whatever additional was necessary to prepare a summary of the reading to be submitted weekly, regular testing plus a mid-term and final exam, and one or two term papers for every class -- usually translating to five or six term papers a semester. Additionally, the compulsory service for which there was one hour's credit actually took from two to five hours a week, plus whatever prep time was necessary beforehand.
But I don't wanna brag . . . ;-)
Posted by: Russ Kuykendall | 2005-09-15 5:49:36 PM
Some Canadians are trying extremely hard to save money for their kids' college educations, but the government is very happily destroying their savings through the wonders of inflation. Because as tough as it is to put away money in a cookie jar for your kids to use 15 years down the road, it's much, much harder to pay millions of healthy adults to do not much of anything (except vote). Fortunate the people with the latter responsibility have an invention called the printing press at their disposal. The rest of you may have to settle for a library card and careful nurturing of whatever wits God gave you.
Posted by: Justzumgai | 2005-09-15 5:59:31 PM
I don't consider your presentation of interesting anecdotal considerations to be bragging, Russ.
Posted by: Tony | 2005-09-15 6:37:18 PM
I wrote earlier:
"Canadians among top 100 (not too bad actually):
#24 UoT
#37 UBC
#67 McGill
#90 McMaster"
But then I noticed that Sweden, with only 9 million people, also have four among the top 100 (incl Uppsala University, my own alma mater):
#45 Karolinska Inst Stockholm
#60 Uppsala Univ
#93 Stockholm Univ
#99 Lund Univ
So perhaps there is need for some changes/improvements in Canada?
Posted by: Johan i Kanada | 2005-09-15 8:20:52 PM
What we need is to increase tuition rates. Then use the money to provide more fully-funded scholarships (including rent, books and food). This would improve the access to university for the deserving poor at no extra cost.
The message of Russ's anecdote not that students are being driven to part-time jobs. It is that lots of students are squandering the education that costs them $2000/semester and costs the taxpayer $10,000.
University is an expectation of a large part of the population. Fine! let them have their expectation but not on the public dime.
Posted by: pete e | 2005-09-16 1:00:46 AM
Public and secondary schools are not giving Canadian students any education at all so the university students are totally unprepared for any critical or comprehensive thinking. They have no foundation for advanced education so they lower the standard of a degree with their poor marks - no matter how much it costs them - it costs society much more!! Young people are squandering 12 years in school, I say start at the basis of the problem - schools. Uneducated people are much easier to brainwash and a little education is a dangerous thing. The 12 years of 'free' time should be spent learning how to be a good, productive citizen, not lazing around. Have a look at the grade 8 exam in the WS for students in 1905 if you need some convincing.
Posted by: jema54 | 2005-09-16 8:07:40 PM
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