It’s the BA, Stupid
27th June 2011
Charles Murray is a smart guy, and he asks the right questions, but he doesn’t have a lot of answers.
The New York Times’s David Leonhardt has weighed in with a defense of college-for-all. Arnold Kling dissects some of its obvious flaws on econlog. But the larger problem is that Leonhardt misses the point. The choice should not be framed in terms of college or no college. Almost everyone needs more education after high school. The problem is a piece of paper called the bachelor’s degree that has become both the requirement for first class citizenship in this country (being “just a high school graduate” makes you distinctly second class) and at the same time has become meaningless as an indication of what you have learned. End the BA, stop requiring four years worth of courses, stop glorifying the residential campus, and create a post-high-school educational system that takes advantage of all the ways that technology offers to let high school graduates tailor their post-secondary education to what they need to realize their abilities. Forget about the percentage of people going to college and focus instead on how antiquated, inefficient, and punitive the BA system is.
Easy to say; harder to do. The problem is that, when applying for a job, it’s not enough to say ‘I know Kung Fu!’; you have to demonstrate it somehow. And an employer isn’t going to give a prospective engineer a comprehensive set of exams to verify that he is, actually, qualified to be an engineer; that’s why they ask for a bachelor’s degree. (Actually, these days, with the degeneration of the educational system, employers are more than likely asking for a bachelor’s degree to make sure that applicants have what would in the Good Old Days have been considered a decent high-school education.)
We know what the problem is. What’s the solution?
June 27th, 2011 at 12:09
These days, you can’t actually give an prospective engineer a set of exams to verify that he is, actually, qualified to be an engineer. If you try it, you will be sued. It’s either discrimination or it’s against the ADA, either way, you’re going to have to spend a lot of money defending your decision.
June 30th, 2011 at 19:42
I AM an engineer, and I don’t have a BS in engineering. Everything I do is functionally identical to that which a BSEE would do, sans calculus, which no one in automation really needs to use.
Having said that, I have on several ocaisions seen people hired as “engineers” who have demonstrated within days–at most–that they don’t really have a clue what engineering is all about. Some professions–like the law, banking, retail management, et al–can perhaps be faked successfully for a greater or lesser period of time, but engineers have to put pencil to paper and come up with workable solutions, sooner rather than later, and it is painfully evident to everyone who does know what they are doing when you patently do not.
July 1st, 2011 at 03:35
Even some of the so-called ‘professions’ don’t take that much formal education – there’s nothing that a lawyer or an accountant does that is more complicated than a high-end wargame, which teenagers can master, for someone of above-average intelligence and the right frame of mind. IT is the poster-child field here: Nothing that actual programmers do uses the stuff they teach in CS programs, because CS teachers were math majors who eventually realized that the market for mathematicians is very limited, so the got into CS — but they’re still math majors, and they’d really prefer that you were a math major too. Programming is actuallly a craft, no more difficult than carpentry or plumbing, which is why 15-year-old ‘hackers’ can wind up working for Facebook.