[rant]Contact Hour Billing

[Jeunemaitre]

As for raising the bar, well, if the average level of education goes up, and companies start demanding higher degrees, then great! A better educated population, more quality jobs, higher standards for intellectual quality. Sounds like a good idea to me. You still won't need a PhD to do plumbing, though.

I guess I missed a chance to reply to this when it was the most recent point, but I wanted to make one more point on the raised bar issue. I should have mentioned this in my last post, but I didn't think of it then:

You're right that you don't need a doctorate in hydrodynamics to be a plumber, but I would counter the notion that industry demanding higher degrees would be a good thing. With industry demanding higher and higher degrees, the bar would indeed be raised, and the problem would be what happens to the people who are an inch too short to reach it when the jump: these people would not be able to attain the advanced degrees required, and would have nowhere to start in their field of choice (carrying the "need experience to get experience" paradox to the extreme). These people would then have to fall back on careers they find less lucrative and less rewarding. The effect would be a polarization of the national workforce with an intellectual elite who can choose the job they want, and everyone else who will have to take what comes along

Can you really blame them for asking for a degree confirming that you're good at what they're employing you for?

I think the point of Selby's statement was that the degree is not an adequate reflection of performance in many cases. I fought hard to get "cum laude" on my diploma, and damn near got the "magna" part too, but so many people I knew spent senior year reciting the mantra "D is for Diploma."

I would like my world to have both Accounting and the Arts, Engineering and Philosophy, Journalism and English Literature.

I highly agree that the state of education is sorry if we're setting out to improve minds instead of providing vocational training. I bit of both might be better suited to most students, but given the traditional time constraints of higher ed, there isn't enough time left to experience all of those things that you might be interested in. As it was, they were ready to cancel my schedule for fall semester junior year because I hadn't declared a major. I wish that I could have taken three or four courses in all of those things that I only got one course into. I think that offering such a broad base of subjects might help accomplish Jester's goal of improving people, but it will take a much higher level of attention from students, and a much higher level of patience from employers.

Now the Registrar's office? Don't have a single good thing to say about them...

Yeah, my favorite was the "application to graduate." After registration for spring semester (or the semester which you anticipate being your last) you had to fill out a form requesting that they notify the college recorders' office that you'd like to graduate. The recorders' office is supposed to give you a degree audit and tell you that you either have enough of the right credits, or what you're missing. Problem is, you only find this out after it's too late to change your schedule for that semester, so if you need a class, you have no way of taking it until the following semester.

[edit: I can spell... S-P-L-L]