Has the market corrupted the goal of education?

[Posy McPostface]

Forgive my rather philosophical posted question; but, having been in college for little more than a year, I can't but help to feel that what was once considered a noble goal of 'conditioning the soul' (as Plato might say) via education has instead been turned into the gratification of wants and needs imposed by the workings of the market. Please don't get the wrong idea, I'm not professing a Marxist interpretation here in regards to capitalism and free market's directing resources to the most profitable endeavours of education, be it engineering or computer science; but, increasingly there's been a lack of policy guiding education in the US, at least in my opinion or rather that policy (as seen in STEM programs) has been guided by the amount of utility to be gained from studying a STEM field. This seems like some sort of affirmative action or implicit bias towards those who study STEM majors instead of the humanities and such.

Nowadays, students face a hard choice in choosing their future jobs by diverting their time to professions that are lucrative and with a higher return on their investment, via debt accumulation by going to college. Art, humanities, and other rather humanistic endeavors face budget cuts to their programs due to not being as profitable as say engineering or computer science.

I hope I'm not coming off as making a value judgment; but, that seems to be the case when deciding to pursue some educational programs instead of others due to the working of the economy.

What can be done, or whether anything should be done about this is my question for posting this thread.

 

[ZapperZ]

Oh no, not THIS again!

Don’t you have any homework to do?

Zz.

 

[Drakkith]

Forgive my rather philosophical posted question; but, having been in college for little more than a year, I can't but help to feel that what was once considered a noble goal of 'conditioning the soul' (as Plato might say) via education has instead been turned into the gratification of wants and needs imposed by the workings of the market. Please don't get the wrong idea, I'm not professing a Marxist interpretation here in regards to capitalism and free market's directing resources to the most profitable endeavours of education, be it engineering or computer science; but, increasingly there's been a lack of policy guiding education in the US, at least in my opinion or rather that policy (as seen in STEM programs) has been guided by the amount of utility to be gained from studying a STEM field.

I don't see the problem. I would argue that the primary goal of college is to help students develop into capable professionals in a chosen field. All other considerations are secondary to this. (Note that I said secondary, not that they are pointless) College represents and enormous amount of time, effort, energy, and money. The returns that students get for putting in all of this should be worthwhile.

Note that Plato's opinion of what education should be suffers from being 2500 years out of date with current civilization. Education in his era was not as long, not as in-depth, and the potential applications for their skills were much more limited than they are now. The dominant profession in that time period was subsistence farming and science and engineering did not yet exist as established professional fields. As far as I'm aware, Craftsmen were not taught in a school, but rather by on-the-job training as apprentices. Indeed, I would argue that part of the reason that early schools focused on "humanities" was because those were the only subjects which either couldn't be taught on-the-job or didn't have many practical applications.

Nowadays, students face a hard choice in choosing their future jobs by diverting their time to professions that are lucrative and with a higher return on their investment, via debt accumulation by going to college. Art, humanities, and other rather humanistic endeavors face budget cuts to their programs due to not being as profitable as say engineering or computer science.

I hope I'm not coming off as making a value judgment; but, that seems to be the case when deciding to pursue some educational programs instead of others due to the working of the economy.

Again, I don't see a problem. If the market is over-saturated in a specific field, then new students should be aware of this so that they don't spend 4-8 years of their lives only to graduate and work at a convenience store because they can't get a job in their field. Likewise, if a field is hurting for people to fills its empty positions, then the educational system should respond and work to increase the number of graduates in that field.

As for the budget cuts faced by the humanities programs, well, I don't have much to say about it at this time.