Schools What is the purpose of a college education?

[twofish-quant]

Do you think the internet and the library would suffice for PhD level work?

If you add in some people willing to hand down knowledge, then that's all you need for theory.

Also a well stocked library is not an easy thing to create. Getting all of the collections can cost tens of millions a year. One thing that saddens me is that a lot of the budget cuts are hitting libraries hard.

I am talking about the deep and complex knowledge that is at the forefront of math and science.

My opinion is that the deep and complex stuff is mostly "social knowledge." I watch my adviser and the more senior people in the department solve a problem and talk with each other. I absorb that culture through osmosis, and the next generation of intellectuals comes into existence.

 

[twofish-quant]

More about education and jobs (the magic google word is "competitiveness"

http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud/PUB7202h
http://www.nga.org/cms/home/news-room/news-releases/page_2011/col2-content/main-content-list/higher-education-key-to-economic.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press...d-competitiveness-announces-industry-leaders-
http://icw.uschamber.com/newsletter-article/education-key-global-competitiveness

There's also this part of me that is thinking "get real". You think that the federal and state governments are pumping tens of billions of dollars into colleges so that people can learn French literature? If you are taking the position "but we never promised you a job" then you are skating on some really, really thin political ice.

Higher education has this huge dilemma right now. If colleges and universities take the position that what they do has nothing to do with jobs, then there is this huge massive line item that will be cut, and you'll have tenured faculty in the unemployment line. If they take the position that one of the goals of colleges and universities is to create jobs, and frankly I see no other politically viable alternative, then it gets sucked into some pretty deep politics.

 

[Vanadium 50]

start with

http://nber.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html

and then go to

http://www.phds.org/the-big-picture/scientist-shortages/

Granted, none of them are recent, and around 2007 people stopped talking about shortages in skilled labor, but I think it's a bad thing to try to rewrite history and pretend that people weren't talking about as late as 2005.

None of them are recent, and none of them are incidents of a university guaranteeing that it's BS grads will get a good salary.

Also, putting things down the "memory hole" is something that you'd expect from George Orwell. One thing that worries me a bit about everything going online is that it makes it easier for people to pretend that they didn't say things that they did.

I did no such thing and I strongly resent your suggestion that I did.

 

[boomtrain]

Yes. The internet is great at providing raw data, but its incredibly unorganized, and there are things that you just can't learn by reading about it.

It's getting more organized.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

watching those videos and trying some practice problems will give you a much better understanding of basic physics, math, chemistry, finance ect. than the average university student. Remember, lectures are given by people with tenure, who have no incentive to care about how much you learn, or people trying to get tenure (who are focusing on research).

Also, the fundamentals of math, computer science, engineering ect. haven't changed for decades (centuries?). Who's stopping you from buying a used textbook on Amazon for $10 and reading through it yourself?

as for learning by doing...
http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
http://diveintopython.org/
http://w3schools.com/

you can develop a ton of practical programming skill from the internet.

Also, the learning involved in a private certification (Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft) can sometimes be independent of classroom instruction.

Internet learning won't bring you to the leading edge of human knowledge, but it will give you some (free) marketable skills.

 

[Nano-Passion]

If you add in some people willing to hand down knowledge, then that's all you need for theory.

Also a well stocked library is not an easy thing to create. Getting all of the collections can cost tens of millions a year. One thing that saddens me is that a lot of the budget cuts are hitting libraries hard.

Hey twofish-quant =D! I wrote a post yesterday and it got deleted because the server was offline. I'll reiterate.

True, but you are greatly undervaluing the importance of colleges. Colleges aren't only about helping you learn the material. They are able to stretch your abilities by putting pressure and deadlines for you to work hard. They help unlock your potential. They are also a great community to develop your social skills, aside from being able to bounce ideas with others on problems-- which is very essential to learning higher-physics or mathematics (particularly physics because it isn't as rigorous, some things are fuzzy).

Don't forget that if you never went to school, you would have most likely never have had the incentive to do a bit of math let alone even look at it. You would have been much more occupied just trying to survive. The goals you set is much less effective then the external pressure from outside. Let's admit it, there is always those times of grind, and college gives you some external motivation to get through it.

You might argue that motivation should come solely from within etc.. but let's face it-- bottom line is its much more efficient to have an external source breathing down your neck. Often, it can bring out the best in you.

My opinion is that the deep and complex stuff is mostly "social knowledge." I watch my adviser and the more senior people in the department solve a problem and talk with each other. I absorb that culture through osmosis, and the next generation of intellectuals comes into existence.

In addition, don't forget about the deep and complex problems on the pinnacle of theoretical physics and mathematics. It simply wouldn't be wise to try and self-study up to these points and expect to make some major contributions-- which brings me back to my original point.

It's getting more organized.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

watching those videos and trying some practice problems will give you a much better understanding of basic physics, math, chemistry, finance ect. than the average university student. Remember, lectures are given by people with tenure, who have no incentive to care about how much you learn, or people trying to get tenure (who are focusing on research).

Khanacademy.org sets you up with just the bare necessities of understanding the concept. While Khanacademy is organized, that doesn't mean Internet on the whole is getting more organized. You need much more resources than just understanding the basic concepts, such as, but not limited to: solving challenging problems, looking up proofs for certain things, acquiring practice problems with their respective answers, etc.

You might argue that Khanacademy is adding more and more problems; but currently they make them too simple.

 

[mathwonk]

what is the point of this thread? this could go on forever.

 

[Nano-Passion]

what is the point of this thread? this could go on forever.

Mathwonk, I am disappointed, I would expect you to be careful with your wordings. Forever implies infinite time.

Jk=p

Its nice to have a debate every once in a while: even though it might be relatively non-factual. Just look at the other threads such as "post your grade". Not every thread has to be about what college should I go to, what classes should I take, etc..

Who knows, maybe someone will pass by here and figure out if college is really for them or not. ^.^

 

[twofish-quant]

True, but you are greatly undervaluing the importance of colleges.

I don't think that I am. Part of it is that we are swimming in data, so if it was "easy" to replace a college, then it would have been done already. It's partly out of my one efforts of self-study that I appreciate how difficult it is to put together a college online.

There are a lot of subtle social aspects of colleges that need to be replicated online.

Don't forget that if you never went to school, you would have most likely never have had the incentive to do a bit of math let alone even look at it. You would have been much more occupied just trying to survive.

On the other hand school isn't the only thing that provides motivation to learn.

You might argue that motivation should come solely from within etc.. but let's face it-- bottom line is its much more efficient to have an external source breathing down your neck.

One problem here is that sometimes you need to tell the external source of motivation to get lost. Also it's not that easy to divide between internal motivation and external motivation. When you take a test in a college, it's not as if someone is pointing a gun to you and if you just leave the classroom, you aren't going to physically die. So "external motivation" requires some internal agreement. At the same time, you have to wonder where internal motivation comes from.

In addition, don't forget about the deep and complex problems on the pinnacle of theoretical physics and mathematics. It simply wouldn't be wise to try and self-study up to these points and expect to make some major contributions-- which brings me back to my original point.

Except that the Ph.D. degree is all about self-study. Once you finish up the first two years of the degree and pass your qualifiers, there are no more formal courses, and you spend most of your time in the library trying to teach yourself whatever it is that you have to learn.

Part of it is that for Ph.D. degrees it's not a matter of "knowledge transfer" between a professor and student. You are expected to do something original that no one else has done before, and that means going to the library and figuring out what it is that you need to figure out.

You need much more resources than just understanding the basic concepts, such as, but not limited to: solving challenging problems, looking up proofs for certain things, acquiring practice problems with their respective answers, etc.

Which means putting together a lesson plan. Eventually someone is going to do it.

 

[atyy]

I don't think that I am. Part of it is that we are swimming in data, so if it was "easy" to replace a college, then it would have been done already. It's partly out of my one efforts of self-study that I appreciate how difficult it is to put together a college online.

There are a lot of subtle social aspects of colleges that need to be replicated online.



On the other hand school isn't the only thing that provides motivation to learn.



One problem here is that sometimes you need to tell the external source of motivation to get lost. Also it's not that easy to divide between internal motivation and external motivation. When you take a test in a college, it's not as if someone is pointing a gun to you and if you just leave the classroom, you aren't going to physically die. So "external motivation" requires some internal agreement. At the same time, you have to wonder where internal motivation comes from.



Except that the Ph.D. degree is all about self-study. Once you finish up the first two years of the degree and pass your qualifiers, there are no more formal courses, and you spend most of your time in the library trying to teach yourself whatever it is that you have to learn.

Part of it is that for Ph.D. degrees it's not a matter of "knowledge transfer" between a professor and student. You are expected to do something original that no one else has done before, and that means going to the library and figuring out what it is that you need to figure out.



Which means putting together a lesson plan. Eventually someone is going to do it.

How about the Open University? Not online, but they started before the internet, and seem to be in the spirit of what's being discussed. http://www.open.ac.uk/

Phoenix seems to be quite respected too - I gather you've taught there?

 

[twofish-quant]

Phoenix seems to be quite respected too - I gather you've taught there?

Yes. Lots of mixed feelings about it.

For some things. I think of University of Phoenix as the "McDonald's" of higher education. It's not a five star restaurant but it gets the job done.

The things that I find annoying about University of Phoenix is:

1) it's not intended to teach physicists. They don't even have calculus. The have an assembly line method of teaching that works very well for business degrees. I don't know if it can be made to work for anything math intensive.
2) They treat teachers like McDonald's workers. You are an interchangeable part in a giant machine.
3) Their resource allocations are a bit shocking. They spend 10% of their income on teaching and about 40% on marketing. Their return on investment is also scary since it's a money making machine. Also the people that are students at UoP tend to be older which means that they don't have to spend time and money on babysitting.

So University of Phoenix is what you get if you take a university and then strip away all of the romance and sentimentality. I'm of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, there is quite a bit less hypocrisy. If you are a teacher there, you are a cog in a machine, you make some extra money, and no one pretends otherwise.

I don't know of the UoP model work work for anything mathematically heavy, and University of Phoenix cares nothing about research. I do know that Open University cares a lot about research and science.

 

[chiro]

Yes. Lots of mixed feelings about it.

For some things. I think of University of Phoenix as the "McDonald's" of higher education. It's not a five star restaurant but it gets the job done.

The things that I find annoying about University of Phoenix is:

1) it's not intended to teach physicists. They don't even have calculus. The have an assembly line method of teaching that works very well for business degrees. I don't know if it can be made to work for anything math intensive.
2) They treat teachers like McDonald's workers. You are an interchangeable part in a giant machine.
3) Their resource allocations are a bit shocking. They spend 10% of their income on teaching and about 40% on marketing. Their return on investment is also scary since it's a money making machine. Also the people that are students at UoP tend to be older which means that they don't have to spend time and money on babysitting.

So University of Phoenix is what you get if you take a university and then strip away all of the romance and sentimentality. I'm of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, there is quite a bit less hypocrisy. If you are a teacher there, you are a cog in a machine, you make some extra money, and no one pretends otherwise.

I don't know of the UoP model work work for anything mathematically heavy, and University of Phoenix cares nothing about research. I do know that Open University cares a lot about research and science.

Hey twofish-quant I had just a question that came to my mind and am interested in your response.

Do you think a kind of forum based approach will ever be adopted for learning in the spirit of say physicsforums?

I know many institutions have their own online learning system with forums, but they have a boundary of being completely within some network like the university network.

So just to clarify, could you see a completely (or at least largely) open model of education where everything is more or less open including the content, the ability to ask and answer questions, and the ability to do assessments and have the whole process go through an open process (in a kind of 'analog' to how open source software is created, managed, and maintained within that respective community)?

This would require organization (quite a bit) but I can visualize an environment like physics forums evolving into some kind of system that I described above.

 

[ColonialBoy]

Hey twofish-quant I had just a question that came to my mind and am interested in your response.

Do you think a kind of forum based approach will ever be adopted for learning in the spirit of say physicsforums?

Its common.

http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/About_Moodle
http://www.blackboard.com/

 

[chiro]

Its common.

http://moodle.com.au/
http://www.blackboard.com/

Thanks for that link, very much appreciated.

I guess the next question that is a followup, is could this model end up becoming an acceptable form of learning that is recognized and taken seriously by employers, researchers, government, and industry?

 

[ColonialBoy]

Thanks for that link, very much appreciated.

I guess the next question that is a followup, is could this model end up becoming an acceptable form of learning that is recognized and taken seriously by employers, researchers, government, and industry?

During my current education degree we use moodle & blackboard. Those two are the standard for online course delivery, and online courses are becoming far more common in universities. You get course content, forums, assignments, courses documents, exams all in the one place.

In fact I'm in Australia & we did one course jointly with Canadians https://blackboard.ucalgary.ca/webapps/login/

 

[Rayquesto]

they should keep the chalkboards! I can now relate to those who say that it makes everything related to learning much more meaningful in a way!

 

[twofish-quant]

Do you think a kind of forum based approach will ever be adopted for learning in the spirit of say physicsforums?

Already been done. University of Phoenix is based around online forums.

So just to clarify, could you see a completely (or at least largely) open model of education

No idea how all of this is going to fit together.

 

[chiro]

During my current education degree we use moodle & blackboard. Those two are the standard for online course delivery, and online courses are becoming far more common in universities. You get course content, forums, assignments, courses documents, exams all in the one place.

In fact I'm in Australia & we did one course jointly with Canadians https://blackboard.ucalgary.ca/webapps/login/

That's not what I meant to ask.

What I meant to ask was given a platform that was open to the general community (using these tools you mentioned) with some kind of voluntary system of educators, could both the platform and the nature of the open system (voluntary members, free access, open educational protocol, all forums open to the general public, and an open accreditation process) be taken seriously?

In other words, could this kind of system above, eventually be a model of education that people whether they be employers, researchers and scientists, government and industry take seriously.

Again I'm not focusing on the technological aspects per se, but the combined application of the technology with some other processes whereby an open educational model where much of the content, accreditation process, and the ability to socially acknowledge the platform as something to be taken seriously could or would be probable.

In other words, could an open university that is accessible to the general public, with a strict accreditation protocol similar to what universities have with organizations like the IEEE for engineering, and scientific societies for science degrees and so on, with volunteers who also have to meet requirements that are outlined by the relevant accreditation policies, with open content, open assessment, and open involvement using the technology you posted about (moodle/blackboard) ever get off the ground, and if so/not so, then why not?

 

[twofish-quant]

I guess the next question that is a followup, is could this model end up becoming an acceptable form of learning that is recognized and taken seriously by employers, researchers, government, and industry?

For business that battle has already been won. University of Phoenix puts out 100,000 degrees each year, and I know enough managers and HR with people UoP degrees that you are putting your own career at risk if you don't take them seriously.

The problem with physics degrees is that that there isn't the demand for it. People get MBA's because they think they can turn the MBA into cash and pay for the cost of getting the degree, whereas people don't see the payoff in physics degrees.

Look at all of the people complaining in this forum about their difficulty in getting jobs. Now imagine if we made it *easier* to learn physics.

Suppose instead of having 1000 Ph.D.'s graduate each year, you had 10,000 or 100,000? Suppose you had ten million people with bachelors of science in physics, what happens? You have 2 billion people in China and India, a billion people in Africa. Suppose you develop distance learning so that 20% of them suddenly have the same education level as people in the US. What happens?

At that point you have to go into core beliefs. I happen to believe that an educated society is a good thing, and if we can't structure our economy to find jobs for 100,000 new physics Ph.D.'s each year or 10 million new bachelors in physics, then we just have figure out how to change our economy so that it can.

 

[chiro]

For business that battle has already been won. University of Phoenix puts out 100,000 degrees each year, and I know enough managers and HR with people UoP degrees that you are putting your own career at risk if you don't take them seriously.

The problem with physics degrees is that that there isn't the demand for it. People get MBA's because they think they can turn the MBA into cash and pay for the cost of getting the degree, whereas people don't see the payoff in physics degrees.

Look at all of the people complaining in this forum about their difficulty in getting jobs. Now imagine if we made it *easier* to learn physics.

Suppose instead of having 1000 Ph.D.'s graduate each year, you had 10,000 or 100,000? Suppose you had ten million people with bachelors of science in physics, what happens? You have 2 billion people in China and India, a billion people in Africa. Suppose you develop distance learning so that 20% of them suddenly have the same education level as people in the US. What happens?

At that point you have to go into core beliefs. I happen to believe that an educated society is a good thing, and if we can't structure our economy to find jobs for 100,000 new physics Ph.D.'s each year or 10 million new bachelors in physics, then we just have figure out how to change our economy so that it can.

But isn't that a resource allocation problem? And if that is the case, is this tied directly to the financial system, since the financial system controls the issuance of credit and hence indirectly (or directly) control the allocation of resources?

I guess the followup question to that is "Is there a better way of resource allocation"? I do know a great deal of people think and actively write about this, but since you are actually working within the environment yourself, I'm wondering if you have thought about this yourself and have any advice in this regard.

 

[twofish-quant]

But isn't that a resource allocation problem? And if that is the case, is this tied directly to the financial system, since the financial system controls the issuance of credit and hence indirectly (or directly) control the allocation of resources?

Yes. It's a massive political/economic/social problem, that I don't think that anyone has any clue how to solve. Part of the purpose of *academics* is to think about these sorts of problems.

Also, one "thought experiment" that I've had from time to time is to imagine a society in which you could snap your fingers and then instantly any physical object that you imagine would appear. Or else imagine a world in which you could instantly learn anything you want. OK, now what? There are some science fiction writers in this forum and maybe they could take crack at that.

I guess the followup question to that is "Is there a better way of resource allocation"?

I always start with the assumption that things can be done better. In any case, it's not a problem that I think can be avoided. You can't uninvent the internet.

I do know a great deal of people think and actively write about this, but since you are actually working within the environment yourself, I'm wondering if you have thought about this yourself and have any advice in this regard.

One other thing that I'd suggest is that there are anti-Wall Street protests that are starting to break out all the over the US, and it would probably a good idea to join them. I think it's a good thing that people are protesting.

Also read history. Something that occurs to me is that we are living in a world in which things can change very quickly, and one thing that makes me feel old is having to explain the mindset of the 1990's to people that are in college now. Basically in 1991, it was assumed that "history was over." The US won, the Soviet's lost and thanks to technology we would be living in permanent prosperity. It hasn't turned out that way, but even thinking about how we got from 1991 to 2011 should give some clues as to what happens next.

 

[Nano-Passion]

I don't think that I am. Part of it is that we are swimming in data, so if it was "easy" to replace a college, then it would have been done already. It's partly out of my one efforts of self-study that I appreciate how difficult it is to put together a college online.

There are a lot of subtle social aspects of colleges that need to be replicated online.
On the other hand school isn't the only thing that provides motivation to learn.
One problem here is that sometimes you need to tell the external source of motivation to get lost. Also it's not that easy to divide between internal motivation and external motivation. When you take a test in a college, it's not as if someone is pointing a gun to you and if you just leave the classroom, you aren't going to physically die. So "external motivation" requires some internal agreement. At the same time, you have to wonder where internal motivation comes from.
Except that the Ph.D. degree is all about self-study. Once you finish up the first two years of the degree and pass your qualifiers, there are no more formal courses, and you spend most of your time in the library trying to teach yourself whatever it is that you have to learn.

Part of it is that for Ph.D. degrees it's not a matter of "knowledge transfer" between a professor and student. You are expected to do something original that no one else has done before, and that means going to the library and figuring out what it is that you need to figure out.

Which means putting together a lesson plan. Eventually someone is going to do it.

I agree with what you said, there are a lot of people that go through the bare minimum in learning even though there is external motivation.

Most of your post was spot on, and I agree with most of your reasoning. However, it is in my opinion that you don't see the importance of authority. It would be much more harder to try and self-study all by yourself with no outside authority. The importance of college stems from its ability to assume authority, while I agree that an internal agreement is absolutely essential-- it doesn't strike me as highly assumptive to say that both external and internal motivation can unlock more of your true potential than either one alone.

Of course you can self-teach much of the material, but that leaves out the essential social aspect of being able to share ideas and meet other like-minded people. College is a great institution to bring everything together. I am a big optimist and I would love the internet to take off with education, but as of now I do feel it might have its shortcomings. A stupendous amount of information lies at the internet a click of a button away at relatively easy (or at times not so easy) access. BUT, its inability to bring minds together and communicate in a comfortable environment is its current problem-- and that is a big but.

But who is to say that won't change in the future? The internet has immense potential for education if you really think about it.

 

[chiro]

But who is to say that won't change in the future? The internet has immense potential for education if you really think about it.

The internet is basically right now a major educational tool. Never before have we had the ability to not only get access to so much information both refined and unrefined, but also the speed at which we get this is mind boggling.

The biggest challenges are, in my opinion, the ability to get the "information from the data" and all relevant aspects to this. This includes the ability to organize data, the ability to find data, and the ability to put this data into the context of something else.

Right now I feel we are only at the tip of the iceberg in doing this, and it will be amazing what we achieve in the next century, and even the next decade!