March 10 2008: The Purpose Of Tertiary Education
Filed under Uni/Work
There’s been some debate over the past few days by several different people regarding what purpose university actually plays. It appears as though the two who have most invested in this argument (Nellie and Alex) come from two entirely different educational institutions, and thus, unsurprisingly, have two different viewpoints.
The experiences one would have at the oldest tertiary institutions in Russia, with Russian Presidents (or, one current, and one potential) and seven Nobel Prize winners among the alumni, would, I imagine, be completely opposite to the experiences one would have at a university which, as far as the Wikipedia entry for it shows, can really only boast a world-ranked rowing team as its one shining example of human achievement. Different educational institutions, as well as a number of differing factors such as teaching staff, would all play a large part in how one views their tertiary experience, thus the viewpoints of any person would be valid, as it’s what they, themselves, have experienced.
So, consider the following musings on the purposes of tertiary education as merely the experiences of someone who attends what is purported to be one of the top universities in Australia, and which ranks amongst the top 50 in the world:
To network
To get ahead in life, it’s a sad fact that sometimes, you simply do have to know the right people. Meritocracy is an excellent idea, one that all businesses should follow, but which they don’t always. By networking and associating with others in your chosen field whilst you’re still surrounded by people aiming to enter a similar career field (i.e. associating with others in your course while at university), you’re building a strong foundation of potential business contacts that you can call upon in future years.
For that reason, I do like to dress somewhat professionally (or at least, not sloppily), whilst at university. You never know who you might meet.
To broaden your horizons
I vaguely remember a thread at Snark whereby several people had commented that while they understood that the world was multicultural, they had never been exposed to diversity in their day-to-day life. They may have attended predominantly white (or Asian, or black, or whatever!) schools, or simply lived the majority of their life in a fairly secluded town. While as someone who’s ethnically Asian in a highly multicultural society, that concept of lack of diversity isn’t at all familiar to me, I can understand this lack of worldliness.
University I think, gives you the chance to broaden your cultural horizons. It’s not even necessarily a matter of being an exchange student and doing a semester of study in a foreign country, though I do recommend it to all as my stints in China were fabulously fun. The sheer act of attending university is bound to throw one in the path of those who are ethnically different to yourself, as universities tend to have anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 students enrolled at any one time. Chances are, one in that 100,000 are black, or Asian, or white, or Latino, or different from you.
To gain work skills
Not necessarily ‘work skills’ in terms of “I’m going to be a lawyer, I have to learn about the legal system”, but more ‘work skills’ in terms of the skills that everyone has to learn and use repeatedly throughout a stint at university, no matter how long they attend, how little they attend, how many lectures they skip, or what course they’re doing. Skills like successful time management, effective summation of material, the ability to express oneself coherently, to communicate at a higher level, social skills, these are the skills that you take away from university that matter most, which can be applied to any future career.
As an General Arts graduate (or someone who will be one at the end of this year), the one thing that the employment services have always stressed, is the fact that I may even find it easier to find a job (any job!) post-graduation as the generalist subjects I have taken have given me these broader work skills that employers like. As an example, a financial consultancy firm told me that I should apply to work there on the basis of my Chinese fluency – the fact that I’ve never once taken a finance/economics class in my life simply didn’t matter to them as they would “train me in the field”.
And thus
Anything beyond these three aspects of tertiary education is simply additional material. Though learning the necessary material is valuable at the time you’re studying it (how else do you pass the subject?!), I can’t in any way see how reading Manuel Castells as part of my completed Media and Communication Studies major will apply to the ‘real world’. Whilst working as a press advisor, or journalist, or in advertising, or what have you, I’m hardly going to have to refer to any of his theories in order to complete my day-to-day work. And yet, the study of his work plays such a large part in Communication studies.
The same, I think, could possibly be applied to many different fields – General Arts, certainly, but even finance and economics, information technology, art and design, education. The only fields where what one learns at university might actually apply in one’s future career are medicine, law, science, and engineering. The bulk of university students however, will never again use the information they learn in the course of their tertiary education.
But again, these are the musings of a General Arts student, in a particular university. Unless you’re one yourself, you’ll probably have nothing but hate and vitriol to spew at me for daring to discredit the true purpose of university.
11 Responses to “The Purpose Of Tertiary Education”
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When I first left school, I was really against going to uni. All I saw it as was:
- a place to be sociable
- lectures
- partying / drinking
- debt
None of those appealed to me. I’m painfully shy a lot of the time, I’d just had two years of lectures (why have three more?), I’m not good with parties, I don’t drink, and I really don’t have a lot of money.
However, now that I’ve had a couple of years out in the real world, I’m not completely against the idea of university anymore… Of course, I’m still not sociable / a partier / a drinker / financially well off, but… I can see the bigger picture.
Rachael on March 10 2008 #
Medicine, law, science and engineering students would encompass a sizeable bulk of Uni students I should think (especially science; there are so many different fields of science).
I think one shouldn’t underestimate the place of “additional material” that one picks up from one’s degree, especially if one’s degree is relatively specific (like finance or education). Sure you might not need to remember the names of theorists you’ve read for day-to-day work, but many of the general principles that you pick up at Uni probably seep into how you regard your job and stuff. For example, with law, I wouldn’t ever need to apply the historical legal development for whatever area of law, but it’s important when I am confronted with a real life problem to understand the context of what that law is to know the best way to engage with it. In the same way, for example, with accounting, you might not need to apply everything you learn in your degree but the… vibe of what you learnt would give you an edge to the whole field than someone who didn’t have such a background.
I agree with you that the three generic skills you listed are important (as well as just being a likeable person) for any work place these days, but the education you get from your degree shouldn’t necessarily be devalued as merely additional.
Reply: Again using my own university as an example, I find that the amount of buildings/allocated resources to the Arts and other faculties I’ve mentioned is much larger than that of medicine, law, science, etc. etc. From that, I can only conclude that the faculties and the people within them far outnumber those of the scientific fields. And this is from a university renowned nationally for its medical and scientific research!
While not dismissing the additional material out of hand, I do think that a lot of it is simple common sense, or common knowledge to those who read broadly for even just half an hour a day. To take your example of education as a relatively specific field where one would need to recall the general principles…well, after two years of studying education, the majority of the lectures, seminars, tutorials, I attended were based around the simple concepts of: a) everyone has different learning methods; b) people learn differently at different ages; c) there can be cultural barriers to effective teaching. All three concepts are fairly common-sense type knowledge, correct?
So well…essentially while I agree that such ‘book learning’ shouldn’t be dismissed per se, the core principles of many ‘basic’ degrees, that you can actually use in future life are, largely speaking, painfully obvious to anyone who can think logically.
Belinda on March 10 2008 #
I’m more or less satisfied with the stuff I learned in university. And that is saying something as I never went to the library or did independent study.
Fact is, for computer science majors, you can read treaties and essays all you want, but unless you actually sit down and write the code, it doesn’t mean anything.
So, I’m happy that my university gave me all the foundations to write basic Object Oriented Applications, so that I could easily fit in a my workplace, by just skimming through the theoretical part of the various documentation.
I didn’t much care for socialization, but then again, my job is not that of acquiring business partners (I develop software, and not take care of the company’s business relations).
Vera on March 10 2008 #
University has not taught me anything new in terms of how to academically perceive and analyse however it has helped me build an excellent social network of friends, employers and professionals which will benefit me later in life. I also feel that I am somewhat well spoken compared to when I was fresh out of college but that could be age more than anything else.
Cultural horizons I’m inclined to agree with, although university has taught me more about the UK than it has the world. We have a handful of Chinese students who barely speak a word of English and are either a) asses who laugh whilst others are trying to give presentations of their work or b) too timid to even partake in conversation.
Obtaining work skills is a hazy area. I’ve worked in the industry and university gave me a leg up in terms of time management and team building. These skills translate well into a working environment, but I think my university doesn’t teach them at an appropriate level. At university they say do a project with a partner to hand in three weeks from now. At work ten of us would have a meeting to discuss a design from which I’d have to come up with three possible variations within a two hour time frame.
On a somewhat irrelevant note – I like Castells even though some of his work is a little dated. His heart was in the right place when he wrote Internet Galaxy.
And everyone knows the true purpose of university is to need a liver replacement before graduation ;)
Lil on March 11 2008 #
Our rowing team FTW! (Our Computing and Mathematical Sciences department is the best in New Zealand too, by the way!)
As I said in my most recent entry, I haven’t been at university long enough to get anything other than a little further extension on what I already knew. It’s probable I will find something outside of simply learning the course content as I progress, but for now, that’s all I’m getting from my experience.
And unfortunately, both my aunty (who got her Masters degree from The University of Waikato) and Sam (who is doing Honours this year) can’t seem to tell me if I will get any more than that because they didn’t. *sad face*
I’m hoping I do get more from it though. After hearing about what others have gained from university aside from their degree, it’s given me a little bit of hope that I will learn something outside of the classroom/lecture theatre. (But the people here aren’t exactly friendly, you witnessed that! :P)
Nellie on March 11 2008 #
[...] right now, that’s why I’m thinking this way. I was reading about Amanda’s post about tertiary education and its importance and I agree with everything there. I want to get a degree, I want to get a [...]
yummeh.net » Figuring Things Out on March 11 2008 #
You brought up a lot of valid points in a very interesting post, though there are several things I’d like to address:
1) If I were a math, physics or comp sci grad, I could toss my degree in the air and realistically expect manna from heaven to come crashing down upon me, sweeping me up in a wave of ecstasy. I just mentioned this in a reply to the comments I got – my university isn’t known for any particular “strength” in poli sci, which is particularly sad since field reputation (as opposed to general reputation) is becoming increasingly important these days. I’ve heard people who’ve sat on poli sci hiring committees at American schools say that if they needed someone with a strength in one particular field that, say, Washington University (St. Louis) is awesome at, they’d be more likely to look at a WashU PhD than a Berkeley PhD, even though Berkeley is obviously widely known as the “much better” school. So yeah, we’ve got our Nobel Prize laureates and politicians and such, but that’s gotten me next to zip in terms of “prestige recognition”; if I’d been a physics student, I’d obviously be whistling a different tune. I was fortunate enough to have a handful of awesome professors, but I also saw the dark and creepy underbelly of the whole system, so it hasn’t all been puppies and cupcakes and rainbows. To my knowledge, no one with a poli sci/int’l pols degree from my department has ever been successfully employed abroad, which naturally means that I have ZERO networking opps to work with and I’m pioneering uncharted territory here.
2) I’ve learned a LOT of what I’m applying/will be applying in my career at uni. Sure, I’ve had to tweak the system to make it work to my advantage, but that doesn’t mean I’m not largely riding on the knowledge/experience I received while there.
3) The viewpoints of any person attending a specific school on that specific school and the education they’re receiving there would surely be valid. However (!!!), making an unfair and largely ignorant generalization of grad students/uni experiences the world over certainly isn’t. That was my beef with the entire statement – had it said that Nellie wasn’t fond of particular grad students at her particular school, since it seems to her that all her particular school does is X and Y, so the grad students there must only possess X and Y as skills/knowledge sets, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, I sure as hell wasn’t fond of quite a few aspects of my uni, a select group of grad students included.
Alex on March 11 2008 #
Uh. The majority of the grad students I know are online, therefore saying that I dislike the grad students at my own university would only be a half-truth. Actually, it’d be only an one-eighth-truth.
It was a generalisation, and I have admitted to this more than once, but anyone with half a brain would have realised this. How can one person know every grad student in the world?
My opinion of grad students has worsened from this experience although it has very little to do with whether they think they’re smarter than anyone but more to do with how they deal with unimportant, trivial issues. Even though the way you’re acting has very little to do with your being a grad student.
I know I’m an advocate for not using the phrase ‘It’s only the internet!’ but I think it’s applicable in this situation.
OMGZ! SOMEONE MADE A GENERALISATION WHICH INCLUDES ME ON THE INTERNETZ! MUST WRITE PATRONISING BLOG ENTRY AND HARP ON ABOUT IT EVERY CHANCE I GET!
^ That’s how I’m viewing your behaviour.
Did you ever stop to think about commenting or sending me an e-mail letting me know that you’re offended by my generalisation and ask me to clear things up before going off and making assumptions? Even though you ended up becoming part of my generalisation anyway, I would have realised my mistake and made changes.
Anywho, this is pathetic. You’re pathetic for caring so much when we’re never going to actually co-exist with each other, I’m pathetic for replying when I know you’re just going to continue to challenge every last damn thing I have to say. So I’m going to stop being pathetic as soon as I hit ‘Submit’ and I hope you’ve already stopped being pathetic.
Sorry about this, Amanda. You have full permission to give me an earful (or eyeful… it’s the internetz!), because I deserve it.
Nellie on March 11 2008 #
And some just attend university because they feel they ‘have’ to (family pressure) or to experience student life and just don’t care about the aspects you wrote about here.
I have to say I agree with the reasons you gave here though. University (or college for that matter) is a great way to broaden your horizon in many different ways AND to find out more about oneself too. Who you are and what you stand for are things usually learned in uni as well as that’s the time when you (have to) stand on your own two feet for the first time.
My experiences in college and university were great and I look back on an awesome education not just the materials learned for my profession but also the things I learned apart from that.
Chans on March 11 2008 #
Nellie – I’m not a graduate student (yet). My issue wasn’t with the fact that it was a generalization per se, it was with it being an unfair one based on limited experience. I didn’t feel the need to email you about anything – as I mentioned in my post, you brought up a common myth I wanted to dispel. If I’d read it in the New York Times, would you have expected me to email the editor to tell him/her about my opinion? I blogged about it because I felt like blogging about it, it’s an issue I’m interested in and part of what I actually hope to be doing as a career (international education).
Alex on March 12 2008 #
:(
Nellie on March 12 2008 #