Andrew Delbanco: "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-07-12/andrew-delbanco-college-what-it-was-and-should-be
Princeton University campus, Princeton, N.J.
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications
The traditional four-year college experience is in danger of becoming a thing the past. As more students graduate with staggering debt and fewer job prospects, many are questioning the value of a college degree. College is becoming a place where a growing number of students go to gain credentials. It used to be a place where young people discovered their passions and tested ideas with the help of teachers and peers. Andrew Blabanco says that kind of experience remains central to America’s democratic process. He and Diane discuss why he believes a liberal arts education still matters.
Guests
Andrew Delbanco
the Mendelson Family Chair of American Studies and the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.
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Read An Excerpt
Excerpted from "College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be" by Andrew Delbanco. Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
Comments
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The problem is not with the Colleges, it is with the Businesses.
All Business Persons are born chiselers always trying to get a little (or a lot) extra even if the extra is of no real value to them.
If they don't want the Liberal Arts, History, whatever, there are plenty of schools that will teach the minimum prerequisites necessary to enable learning the specific skills and knowledge the business needs.
In the 1950s and 60s, IBM would hire bright kids out of High School and train them in house. The sky was almost the limit and those Men (mostly) could rise to the highest levels of the Organization.
Monte Haun mchaun@hotmail.com
mnemecek,
You have hit the nail squarely and hard. Right On !
Peter Drucker used to say that an effective manager was one who made the correct decision 50% of the time. Programmer/analysts are never given that much latitude....nor are any other front line workers. It is especially true in education: principals do all the hiring and firing (unions can bargain for due process). Principals, like programming managers, make most of their decisions on the budget - i.e. if the employee will work cheap, they get hired; when they appear to be more experienced (aka expensive) they get dumped. It's only when there is an unique technological need that the budget is temporarily set aside.
I did neglect to mention that "caring, smart" employees have to keep educated technologically too. All those folks who stuck with mainframe-only knowhow are as scarce as hen's teeth..... and mostly unemployed. A worker does have to adapt to the situation. (I once took an 18-month low level contract and evolved it into an 8 year stint.)
Thank God for local community colleges and tech schools. (I even taught 6 years in a community college in the evening to stay as current as my so-called "students". Had a discount for software and classes too.)
mnemecek wrote:
I too work in Software development and my productivity would be significantly higher if I could spend more time on my core responsibilities instead of "reminding" the liberal arts majors the basic tenets of good coding. Think of how much more productive you would have been from the get go if you had the basics programming logic when learning a new language instead of writing spaghetti code for the first 3-5 years.
mnemecek wants to pretend that the world began with C++ or whatever was there at the beginning. Hey, where do you think software came from? Where do you think the idea of computers came from? And all the hardware, that physical stuff you program? For mn... at one time physics was philosophy, it was why are things the way they are? Mnemecek, believes that everything that is just came from..... now! The humanities that led to the questioning of how the world works that led to physics, that led to chemistry, that led to modern mathematics.... and on and on... all that was just there at the beginning of the making of money. What an ignorant self serving homo sapiens. Oh, yeah where did they come from?
50% of the time, programmers are not given that latitude? Windows NT? Windoes Vista? Have youu ever used a windows product, something developed by programmers with the first two years of its release? Two years is the rule, if it still exists and is stable after two years, then it will probaboly work. Programmers have to be right all the itme..... right....
vagelger,
There would be "executions in the parking lot" if programmers only had to produce correct code 50% of the time. Since when is a programmer allowed to choose the language or environment for an app? Having started programming in the "days of iron men and wooden computers", I know that management sets all the parameters and rules. If a shop requires EAM machines and wire boards, that's what programmers must use. If it's VB and C++ or C# then no programmer has the latitude to use Pascal or COBOL or Apache.
Most projects fail first because of uncommitted customers and second because of mismanagement. Managers and customers define the specs......analysts are charged with making sure the specs are accurate and THE solution.....programmers implement them in the specified environment.
First: I think that the discussion that assumes that "going to school" and "working real jobs" are mutually exclusive is unrealistic. A large number of us do both many times simultaneously.
Second: Not to disregard Mr.Delbanco academic and professional status, but there are a great number of people I'd rather listen to speak on this issue. Is there a scholar out there who was a working mother going to school part time while she earned the ability to be paid to do research. Or, is there one who perhaps attended a community college in matriculation to higher degrees? I would even prefer to hear from someone who complete their PhD research at a state school and would even accept a scholar holding degrees from prestigious private institutions if he or she was currently teaching at a public university.
When listening to this scholar, it helps me to keep in mind that he studied and received his degrees from Harvard and now teaches at Columbia. I don't want to rely to heavily on Dr. Delbanco's experience (especially since according to his own tone in responding to a caller- that would make me so obviously foolish) but I'd like to use one of his antidotes, and extend it to try to describe my own experience of listening to him on this show: Listening to Mr. Delbanco discuss education was like listening to a recent high school graduate discuss war and warriors in the Odyssey in the presence of an Iraq war veteran.
As far as I can tell from this show (which is admittedly very limited) this speaker is a beneficiary of private schools academically and professionally.
Especially in the Humanities or Liberal Arts there is no need to continue to rely on a model of higher education that is so clearly broken. As young people we may go into debt pretending we can afford it but most of us can not. This is a fact regardless of the actual costs and regardless of weather what we have paid or promised covers the "actual costs" of our education.
We need to demand something different from our current institutions, make new ones and change the way we conceive of education. Private schools and their scholars can not do this for us.