Call me a radical, but I believe the most important job of colleges and universities should be teaching students. Given that the vast majority of the teaching is done by professors, I believe professors should devote a significant amount of energy to teaching and improving their teaching skills.
At too many institutions, though, that is not the case. At larger and at more prestigious institutions, teaching usually takes a back seat to research. Frequently, especially at the larger institutions, the graduate students are more effective teachers than the highly paid faculty. Yet, even for the graduate students, there is little reward for teaching excellence. At most, if they get good evaluations, they can include them in their job applications to be professors. However, that won't help them at the larger or more prestigious universities. Do you see a disturbing pattern here?
However, that pattern does not end there. At the smaller institutions that do care more about teaching, they also tend to place far greater emphasis on "preparing students for the job market". They do this because otherwise they won't get students. Parents today are demanding that their children receive "marketable skills" so they can quickly and easily get a job after college. The institutions know that if they don't cater to this, then they won't get students.
Herein lies the problem. The steps taken to "prepare students for the job market" don't actually prepare them for the job market. It is based on a very shallow and underinformed understanding of the job market economy.
Let me explain it this way. The perception is that two of the most "marketable" majors are in business and engineering. It is probably true that you are more likely to quickly get a job out of college if you major in one of those areas. However, once you get the job, you are going to be somewhat trapped. Studies have shown that people in those majors, while they get jobs quickly, advance within their companies far more slowly. This is because, due to demands made my parents and students, the students in college are taught how things work at the time they are in college. As business practices and technologies change, their training is now useless. This is because too often students in these areas are not taught how to think and learn how to do things for themselves. As things change, they are left in the dust. They are far more likely to lose their job 15-20 years after graduating from college.
Now let's look at a couple of "impractical" majors: literature and philosophy. If I am an employer and I have a job that requires a lot of writing, I hire a lit major. I don't hire a business major, even if she took a "business writing" class because she won't be able to adapt her skill to different situations. Literature majors, however, learn to write by reading excellent writing. They have far more capacity to adapt their skills to different situations. Good writing is good writing. It is much easier to teach a good writer to adapt to a given style than to teach someone competent in a given style to be a good writer in another style.
Similarly, if I am an employer and I have a position for which there is really no specific college training available, but does require intelligence, I hire a philosophy major. I hire a philosophy major because, at the very least, a philosophy major knows how to learn and think critically. She can see problems that others don't and come up with solutions that others might not think of. Philosophy majors are highly adaptable. They know how to think.
This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest problems with a lot of college training today. Students are not taught to think. They are trained to memorize and regurgitate information in given contexts. They are not trained to problem solve or adapt to new situations. This may help them get an initial job, but when the job changes, which it inevitably will, they are stuck, lost, and getting passed up for promotions by those humanities majors who were mocked in college for being impractical.
I think this is why employers are so much more ready to hire students from elite colleges. You can safely assume that these students at least know how to think critically. They get trained to do that in many of their classes. There is no guarantee of students receiving that type of training at the local state school. It is, frankly, unfair to the students who do not have access to the elite colleges. It is a disservice that those of us who serve them at these we buckle under to the demands of the parents and students to "just give them what they need to know". In reality, we should understand that what they need to know is to develop the skill of thinking, not merely vocational training.
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