1) Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago. What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away. Reading has been replaced by Wikipedia. Yet, the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. Students spend very little time actually studying and internalizing information.
2) College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students, delivering an active, 40-hour week of education as opposed to 1-2 hours of lecture per day. The problem with liberal arts degrees isn't that they are liberal arts, it's that the actual activity requires reading a little bit and writing a little bit. There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline.
To silicon valley, technology in education means Khan Academy. In the real world, it means a semester worth of papers written by Wikipedia in a few hours and midterms furtively answered by iPhone.
For the amount of money students are spending to attend, Universities should be able to provide a more engaging, transformative product. While this may seem abhorrent to self-starters and outliers in this community, the reality is that the demographic shift of universities has been towards exploding numbers of people with average intelligence who sincerely need full-time instruction.
> Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago.[...] Yet, [sic] the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty.
If your statement is correct, you wouldn’t know it from reading the schlock that students pass off as papers even at “world class” colleges. Doing all the reading and writing clear, solid analyzes of difficult material is just as hard as it ever was. Harder, even, because there are a whole bunch of distractions that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students
Good god. High school is a stultifying swamp of concentrated terribleness. The whole point of college is that treating people like adults leads potentially to adult-quality thinking. Teaching college like high school completely undermines the purpose: raising a new generation of capable scholars and citizens.
> There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline [in liberal arts subjects].
Just because none of the liberal arts majors you took the trouble to really engage with actually took their studies seriously doesn’t mean that serious liberal arts students don’t exist.
* * *
Overall, I think you’ve confused the difficulty of making good grades in a college program with the difficulty of doing the assigned work. If you measure your growth by how many A’s you can pull, education is always going to be intellectually unsatisfying for you.
I don't refer to grades anywhere, that's a projection.
I'm addressing the day to day experience of most students. Most students spend very little time actively learning, and the work they do is diluted by technology.
Large universities aren't treating students like adults- they aren't engaging them at all.
I'm not recommending a high school format curriculum, but the trope that students spend two hours reading/working for each hour in lecture is used as a de facto standard explaining why students are receiving a full-time education. In practice this premise is false.
Regarding 2/
In France, most good universities/schools have a high school approach to teaching students. The problem of the high school model is that it was already debilitating in high school... and it does not make it more fun in college.
For having studied in both US and FR systems, I can tell you that I was more excited about working on my own or in teams and doing homework when I was in the US than feeling I was in HS again in France or elsewhere.
Freedom and ability to explore is actually THE main advantage of the US college system.
Now slackers will remain slackers whatever "platform" you put in front of them...
> What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away.
I own 100s of books the content of which is in no way googlable, available via ebooks, or anything else. They are undergrad level books... nothing fancy. Your comment shows you haven't been to a demanding university.
> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students, delivering an active, 40-hour week of education as opposed to 1-2 hours of lecture per day.
I thought we were talking about universities. It sounds like you want to continue being spoon-fed all your life.
> Universities should be able to provide a more engaging, transformative product. While this may seem abhorrent to self-starters and outliers in this community
Uh, how about this: we leave university degrees as only available to people mentally prepared for doing hard work on their own, and we give people who pay to be force-taught fischer-price toy degrees in bright colors? Laminated in case they slobber all over them.
But there already are universities that do what you want. Degrees from them are worthless unless the person hiring doesn't know the difference; and in that case you can bet the company is full of idiots and will fail anyways.
Comments
IMO, the two problems with universities are:
1) Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago. What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away. Reading has been replaced by Wikipedia. Yet, the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. Students spend very little time actually studying and internalizing information.
2) College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students, delivering an active, 40-hour week of education as opposed to 1-2 hours of lecture per day. The problem with liberal arts degrees isn't that they are liberal arts, it's that the actual activity requires reading a little bit and writing a little bit. There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline.
To silicon valley, technology in education means Khan Academy. In the real world, it means a semester worth of papers written by Wikipedia in a few hours and midterms furtively answered by iPhone.
For the amount of money students are spending to attend, Universities should be able to provide a more engaging, transformative product. While this may seem abhorrent to self-starters and outliers in this community, the reality is that the demographic shift of universities has been towards exploding numbers of people with average intelligence who sincerely need full-time instruction.
> Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago.[...] Yet, [sic] the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty.
If your statement is correct, you wouldn’t know it from reading the schlock that students pass off as papers even at “world class” colleges. Doing all the reading and writing clear, solid analyzes of difficult material is just as hard as it ever was. Harder, even, because there are a whole bunch of distractions that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students
Good god. High school is a stultifying swamp of concentrated terribleness. The whole point of college is that treating people like adults leads potentially to adult-quality thinking. Teaching college like high school completely undermines the purpose: raising a new generation of capable scholars and citizens.
> There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline [in liberal arts subjects].
Just because none of the liberal arts majors you took the trouble to really engage with actually took their studies seriously doesn’t mean that serious liberal arts students don’t exist.
* * *
Overall, I think you’ve confused the difficulty of making good grades in a college program with the difficulty of doing the assigned work. If you measure your growth by how many A’s you can pull, education is always going to be intellectually unsatisfying for you.
I don't refer to grades anywhere, that's a projection.
I'm addressing the day to day experience of most students. Most students spend very little time actively learning, and the work they do is diluted by technology.
Large universities aren't treating students like adults- they aren't engaging them at all.
I'm not recommending a high school format curriculum, but the trope that students spend two hours reading/working for each hour in lecture is used as a de facto standard explaining why students are receiving a full-time education. In practice this premise is false.
Regarding 2/ In France, most good universities/schools have a high school approach to teaching students. The problem of the high school model is that it was already debilitating in high school... and it does not make it more fun in college. For having studied in both US and FR systems, I can tell you that I was more excited about working on my own or in teams and doing homework when I was in the US than feeling I was in HS again in France or elsewhere.
Freedom and ability to explore is actually THE main advantage of the US college system.
Now slackers will remain slackers whatever "platform" you put in front of them...
> What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away.
I own 100s of books the content of which is in no way googlable, available via ebooks, or anything else. They are undergrad level books... nothing fancy. Your comment shows you haven't been to a demanding university.
> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students, delivering an active, 40-hour week of education as opposed to 1-2 hours of lecture per day.
I thought we were talking about universities. It sounds like you want to continue being spoon-fed all your life.
> Universities should be able to provide a more engaging, transformative product. While this may seem abhorrent to self-starters and outliers in this community
Uh, how about this: we leave university degrees as only available to people mentally prepared for doing hard work on their own, and we give people who pay to be force-taught fischer-price toy degrees in bright colors? Laminated in case they slobber all over them.
But there already are universities that do what you want. Degrees from them are worthless unless the person hiring doesn't know the difference; and in that case you can bet the company is full of idiots and will fail anyways.