What’s the time limit for them not delivering and who decides that?
Just because you don’t understand something, it doesn’t mean there’s no value.
900,000 students coming in…
- Thread starter mimico_polak
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What’s the time limit for them not delivering and who decides that?
Just because you don’t understand something, it doesn’t mean there’s no value.
We understand that many many many people graduate and work at starbucks. If post-secondary institutions tracked gainful employment as opposed to employment which was easily obtained with only high school, that would be a good start. As a first cut, I am even willing to ignore the focus of the study. If you graduate with a degree and have a job where a degree was required, call that a win. Even with that low bar, some programs will stink. I have no problem with private money being used for whatever useless quackery people want to learn (cough homeopathy) but there is not unlimited public funds for unlimited programs that do not benefit society.
I just ignore the absolute values as I know they are meaningless and a complete game. Rank or percentile in class are far more useful metrics as they can't be gamed nearly as easily.
As for fragile egos being hurt when they go from 97 in high school to 65 in university. Good. That is one of the important lessons they need to wrap their heads around. No matter how much you mom says you're smart, there are times you need to prove it to others. This is one of those times. Again, marks don't matter too much for most people assuming they aren't low enough for you to get the boot. Once you graduate your first job may look at the marks but I'd have no problem hiring someone with mediocre marks if they interviewed well and seemed interested in learning. After the first job, most won't ask for marks again (with some exceptions).
Except sometimes it’s not fragile egos being broken, it’s a suicide or an attempt because of the thought that you must be a failure. That’s about as dangerous as this situation gets and it doesn’t help these kids. This makes me mad enough that I don’t attend school board meetings as I won’t hold back. I used to go to talk about ways to introduce high school kids to what life at university would be like.
There’s other consequences too, if you’re told you’re a 95% average student then you convince yourself that you must be destined for medical school and it’ll be easy. You choose all those courses and find it’s not. Too late and many thousands of $$$ later. I wish someone would try to sue a high school sometimes. It’s out of control.
I agree a better approach is fixing high school marks. I wonder if Douggie could do it. Force high school class averages to be something like 70. You are pushing mental health issues earlier in development though as the kid in high school will quickly realize that their dream of being a doctor is a hard no. I don't know if that improves outcomes or makes them worse. At what point are people supposed to learn that life is hard and you don't always get what you want? JT still hasn't learned that lesson and he has 1.5 degrees (BA and Bed).
Step #1 is to allow kids to actually fail a grade. Sure it can bruise their self confidence for a time, but no greater motivator (for me) to improve one’s duo after a big failure.
High school should be where kids start to learn that! For the love of everything holy don’t kick the can down the road so that I sometimes have to teach that life lesson to some of them for the first time. Apparently no-one fails at high school it seems. How can you know if you truly succeed if you’ve never experienced failure? I’m going to stop. No more clouds to shake a fist at and no kids on my lawn to shout at.
Mad Mike
Well-known member
There is no time limit, the measure is whether public education meets the needs of society.
If we need more nurses, direct funding there. More carpenters, send colleges more of the public share.
Govt together with edus need to do better. Not with the quality of their programs, but with the way they manage their businesses, the public interest and purse.
Re: high school grades , friends daughter was drowning in a business accounting program at Waterloo. She goes to see the TA to pitch her case for struggles . “ I was the valedictorian at my high school and student council pres, and a lifeguard! “ , comes the reply , “ so were the other 97 people in your class, anything else?”
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Street psychology is good, what's that person trying to do to my head but are more shingles on more walls counterproductive?
If we raise insurance coverage do we not encourage people to sue for more? More nannies and greater expectations, more diapers that don't change themselves. (Clean up your own s**t)
Tech stuff but, I was the go to techie for the company control systems and whenever there was a problem with a new system we had installed I had to boogie across the city to fix it. Then they called when I was out of town for three or four days (Pre cell phones).
When I got back there was a message from the client. When I called them to get an idea of the problem they said "Don't bother. We fixed it ourselves." They never called again. They took responsibility for their stuff.
There is no such thing as useless knowledge with a lot of it being valuable in hobbies.
I wonder about ratios and whether students from financially struggling backgrounds tend to go for courses that are more likely to provide financially stable futures.
IMO and experience...people from disadvantaged backgrounds don't typically go for BS courses (I'm sorry to anyone but some are BS) and they go for those that are more likely to provide financial security.
I'm sorry, but the chances of a BA working out in your favour are small...but who cares when mommy and daddy provide everything you need and you can't fail.
I've known a handful of 'students for life' that do nothing but travel from university in one continent, to a different university in another continent, and then another...because who cares if mom and dad are paying?
One of my cousins studied in LA, Sao Paolo, Sydney (Australia), NYC, and in the UK.
Her job now? Started a fashion brand thanks to mom and dad bankrolling the startup, location, inventory, and everything else in between.
Priller
Well-known member
Re. the focus of university degrees on 'employable vs unemployable skill', my recently retired father worked for a major civil engineering firm for many years on the management level, doing a lot of hiring and firing.
The first thing he learned was not to hire the kids with the top marks in the class. They were generally unable to function as part of a project team as their collaboration skills were non-existent, and struggled to manage the nebulous deliverables that come with working on larger projects.
Secondly, he felt that the quality of graduates had declined markedly over the past 30 years, with recent grads needing more and more time to become productive employees. His belief is that with the increasing focus on job-specific education and getting away from the broader course requirements of the past, that grads are much less skilled at critical thinking and approach problems with a much narrower skill set. In other words, all the efforts to make engineering grads more focused on their job skills have actually made them notably worse at their job.
Separately, as I also work for an engineering firm, I know a lot of engineers with post-grad tech education. Not one of them works in the field they studied for their masters or PhD, and all say it was a total waste of time and money and did not make them better engineers.
The first thing he learned was not to hire the kids with the top marks in the class. They were generally unable to function as part of a project team as their collaboration skills were non-existent, and struggled to manage the nebulous deliverables that come with working on larger projects.
Secondly, he felt that the quality of graduates had declined markedly over the past 30 years, with recent grads needing more and more time to become productive employees. His belief is that with the increasing focus on job-specific education and getting away from the broader course requirements of the past, that grads are much less skilled at critical thinking and approach problems with a much narrower skill set. In other words, all the efforts to make engineering grads more focused on their job skills have actually made them notably worse at their job.
Separately, as I also work for an engineering firm, I know a lot of engineers with post-grad tech education. Not one of them works in the field they studied for their masters or PhD, and all say it was a total waste of time and money and did not make them better engineers.
Gal in my greater circle is a recently retired PEng proffessor from Mac and Brock . She was a concrete stuctural specialist , and her view is many of the engineers in her program should never had made it as far as they did . Enough marks to get in , but not smarts to pass all the tests . I cant do basic math without breaking a sweat so I'm envious, but the bar isnt as high as many think.
My favorite was a group project in maybe second year where they were analyzing the motion of an old school single panel garage door. They had to present to the class. At the top of the motion their analysis showed the door was moving at many times the speed of light. Nobody in the group caught on that maybe there was an issue with their analysis.
Mad Mike
Well-known member
This is a tricky area where personal and family responsibilities are too often abdicated. I'd consider a guidance counselor's advice, but I'd never blame them for a student's bad post-secondary decision.
It can be hard at 17 to decide on a career path -- I get that. IMHO a couple of years of subsidized basketweaving at University isn't the best way forward for the public or the student. I'd prefer the undecided be directed to community colleges first, there's always the opportunity to return to university if their direction forward comes into focus.
One thing I’ve learned about teaching large classes is that every year something new will come along. It’s easy to say that most students have family support to fall back on but I’ve met plenty that don’t. I’ve met students that are so petrified of failing their parents’ unreasonably high expectations that they worry themselves sick for example and others that have estranged themselves from families. The pressure on the kids is phenomenal right now in this current environment I wouldn’t want to be a student right now. I worked hard but was doing something I enjoyed when I was a student. Money was in the background but it wasn’t the focus as we didn’t have tuition to pay. I got a grant to go to university and lived in an eventually condemned building to save money (that I used to travel around Europe). Very very different.
I have a lot of sympathy for these kinds of issues but I also know when someone’s pulling a fast one.
Mad Mike
Well-known member
I believe k-12 should have a return to the skip/fail elevator. When my kids were growing up a gifted or advanced kid wasn't offered the option to skip, and children performing below 'pass' were automatically pushed through, only to fall further behind.
A more common sense approach to educating kids would be to have them promoted and held back based on their capability.
Yup. The whole education system of no man left behind sets everybody up for failure (or at least disappointment).
Too many nonsensical electives for what we pay (imo). One can argue there is tangible benefit to networking or learning critical thinking, time management, etc. But can all this not be learned outside higher 'education' and not bury people in debt?
By and large my view on almost all university courses is they are a degree paper mill and education is a by product at best.
Signed,
U of T 2nd year dropout (Economics)
By and large my view on almost all university courses is they are a degree paper mill and education is a by product at best.
Signed,
U of T 2nd year dropout (Economics)
