Since we all can be smarterer
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.”
That quote, of course, from the movie Good Will Hunting. And it’s accurate for the most part. I never felt I was paying for the material as much as the method and the instructors. I was the one who really didn’t like it when a GTA showed up to teach a class.
College students who didn’t pay for their education usually love a student teacher. The teacher is just as busy with a social college life as the students are and tend to be a bit more lax on grading. Usually, a graduate student is teaching as a means to help pay for their education, but that doesn’t mean they have any teaching ability at all.
I will admit that GTA’s tend to relate the material better to students pending they are comfortable with the material themselves. I’ve had GTA’s for labs whom I’d consider excellent. I even had one GRA that I thought was almost good enough to be a professor herself. She was just finishing up her thesis for presentation the semester I attended, and that seemed to mean she was very in-the-know on anthropology.
But on to what actually got me excited enough to write this post. MIT now offers a great deal of educational content on line as part of its OpenCourseware concept. And it is free. They don’t seem to be doing this lightly either. Courses are well divided and categorized and from the ones I checked out, the materials are thorough.
If you are a self learner, then this is pretty awesome. If you require or benefit from instruction, good luck! I now feel more affirmed that higher education is more about certificates rather than academics. While I can provide several other good reasons to go to a university versus some on line coursework, this really does demonstrate that a great part of what you pay for in higher education is the stamp of approval of an accredited program.
What this free course ware does is more than provide information, however. It also provides a guided way of learning material, a path, if you will, towards understanding a greater concept. If you’ve ever tried to just pick up on a new ‘field’ such as programming or biology or astronomy, you know that developing your own system of learning can be very frustrating. Books can help, but then you are limited to what that author was interested in.
If you go through guided coursework, it tends to stop you from over-investigating in wrong directions, saving you time and misconceptions. Guided learning also has the drawback of ‘in-the-box’ thinking when you are done. Even a mix of ideas presented through one professor is still subject to bias, especially due to ego.
Professors, in my experience, have a tendency to believe they are right. The good professors are usually experts in their field, publishing papers on current topics and active in the community for which they speak. The bad ones are harder to spot, but generally they’ve worked in the ‘private sector’ and will usually talk about one of the places they’ve worked at as if it’s the ultimate experience in the field you are studying.
I think I will have to do a post on good and bad professors I’ve had at some point in time. The University of Kansas provided several impressive professors during my time there, but I definitely had a few that I thought I had a better chance of teaching them then they did I.
Maybe I’ll concatenate a list of their names and e-mail them the MIT site so they can finally say they were educated at MIT.
I had a professor once whom when asked for help, told me “I dunno, try Google”. I kind of look at this web-based learning the same way: “what am I paying you for?” If I’m paying money to go to school, I want something more than what I can find on the web.
I had a calculus professor once who always thought he was right, and it was funny because, in class at least, he was. There were two students who also always thought they were right, and it was just hilarious to watch them claim they were right and he was wrong, and then him prove them wrong, step by step.
Sometimes professors who have worked in the private sector can be good. It usually happens if they’ve been employed in more than one place, so when they say “when I worked…” it’s a more broad generalization instead of just how something was done at one particular company. In fact, if they can compare and contrast the methodologies used in different places, and point out when and where it is best to use each, it can be a tremendous help. However, they really can suck if everything just becomes a lesson about what they did at company X.
Comment by Adkenar — July 31, 2005 @ 08:46
Had a terrible experience with an English GTA for one my mandatory writing courses. I would regularly argue with him–and usually win. On the other hand, it was a GTA that turned me onto philosophy in the first place as he taught my Logic and Critical Thinking class. It’s usually a crapshoot.
As for degrees just being pieces of paper–it really depends on your approach, I think. If you go in like you do…with questions, expectations, and a genuine desire to learn, then you’ll do well and get a lot out of it. College degress carry the weight that you give them.
It’s an unfortunate byproduct of the democratization of the university environment. In order to maintain enrollment and discourage drop-outs, colleges “dumb down” classes. Departments offer watered down courses for the general curriculum to get more butts in the seats. It’s all very depressing to me.
And one last thing: a guide, written by a Harvard Business School grad, on reading books for your own personal MBA. Link.
Comment by Jesse — August 1, 2005 @ 11:06
I think my history of somehow running into bad teachers ruined my usefulness in going to college unless it was simply for a piece of paper (of which the papers I need are merely opt out tests that cost 300+ bucks a ticket). It’s funny how you put that quote at the beginning because I tend to use the library more than anything when there is a subject I’m intent on studying. As far as a selflearner as myself is concerned you have to discern when smoke is being blown up your ass and when there is actual fact at hand. Then it’s just looking through the smoke and fire and getting the information you need out of it. It’s impossible to teach yourself anything unless you have already decided on a goal in what exactly it is your trying to learn.
Your example of programming strikes home as I’ve taught myself on the subject from the ground up, as you already know. The classes I took on the matter were nothing new to me and provided no challenge, giving me boredom in which I took to maliciousness just to make a point that I need a little more of a challenge then “hello world” in C. I find that if the library does not provide me the information I’m so inclined to learn, a book store with a dedicated section on the matter is a haven to coup up in for a couple hours to read up on a particular function I’m trying to create. Of course, I don’t program much anymore as I’ve been focused on other matters, but I’ve never hesitated to pick up a book when there was something I needed more information on. The internet, while it has its precious gems, is a folly to take serious as a learning tool, unless of course you find one of the gems.
It never phases me anymore when people ask me why I’m not in a computer related field… “I don’t have the paper to prove that I know what I just told you.” is the answer, and “That’s stupid.” is the reply.
So there it sits. I could bring a computer back to life, but I could never be paid to do it because of a piece of dead tree with ink on it stating my name and that I know how to do so.
So why fork out the $150,000 for college and sometimes iffy teachers?
For the little piece of paper that says you can.
Comment by alphapyro — August 5, 2005 @ 07:06
Important Edit to the Post… the MIT Opencourseware is FREE.
Comment by JT — August 6, 2005 @ 16:42
Yeah, MIT Opencourseware is great; I’m probably going to be taking 6.001 from it before the end of the summer. There’s pretty much no other way that I could get a course that advanced at my age, so I’m very happy about that.
My parents recently spent a fairly large amount of money for me to go to a camp and take math courses for most of the day. The thing is that we just read the textbooks and did the problems until we felt that we understood them, and then moved on. There were teachers for when we needed help, but they ended up mostly just giving me the tests and grading them. I did get a piece of paper at the end that would let me not take those classes at school. I’d say it was better than learning it at a school, though. (Though now my schedule is completely screwed up because of my math class.)
Comment by Dr. Dolphin — August 8, 2005 @ 06:22
I think I got the most out of the courses I took and JCCC. The “instructors” for my business courses were “from the field” as it were. Most of them did in fact work at more than one place and would bring that experience to the classroom. However, my mind would get distracted by the thought, “If he/she knows thier stuff well enough to get hired by JuCo, then why are they teaching and not doing?” Surely they could be making more money in a “real job.” And why, if “professors” are way so much smarter on the business subject than the rest of us, why aren’t they out there making millions? Then as I observed them over the semester I figured it is there “people skills” or personality of a slug that kept them from being able to manage a corporation.
Funny how people who think they are smarter and know so much more than the people they would have to work with aren’t as successful as they would be if they would put the energy wasted on flapping thier lips into the action they boast of knowing so much about. Action speaks louder than words always…
Anyway, from a person who has/is in an “Employers” position I view “qualifications” for a position from a couple angles.
A “certificate” of educational acheivement is helpful if the position is in management, financial, personnel or business organization. The irony here admittedly is that no one at my company except me has come close to having a “certificate” to justify thier postion. Which brings me to the next point…
Experience. On the job training or learning on there own on the job.
The is something to be said for that. However, getting them to adapt to the way you do things first can be challenging because they have to overcome some possible bad habits first. That is what comes from on the job training or learning on your own how to “play or work the system.”
I’m not poo pooing education here. It is an excellent springboard into the field one wants to get into. That piece of paper you worked and spent hard for is worth something to the potential employer. It is thier “security blanket” in a way, that you do know what you are talking about, or they hope you do and that blanket helps them feel better about the chance they are taking in hiring you.
I am contemplating starting my own business. I have two possibles in mind.
One is a retail idea that, when interviewing potential employees, I would weigh heavily thier passion and interest in the subject.
The other business would require some positions to be certified in it because of my affiliation with a supplier who would require it and I would want someone in that position to not only be certified as required by the supplier, but I would also require that that person would have the passion for the position and understanding of my passion as well.
So, as an employer or potential employer, what I would look for is both objective and subjective when weighing the risk I would take in hiring personnel.
A footnote:
Usually when we have had applicants come in for an opening and they talk too much about how “damn good” they are, especially welders, the test is in thier performance on the welding test, and they are more times than not, so “damn bad” at welding. Or they are so damn bad at working as a team/company member.
If the energy they spent on thier mouth was better invested in thier performance, they would do so much better. Certified or not.
Comment by AlphaDad;) — August 13, 2005 @ 06:38
I have always thought that teachers were there primarily to tell you what you should learn. They aren’t there to actually teach you, and if you get one that teaches you, it is bonus. Also, it should be noted that books are a limited medium. Interaction with a teacher can help answer your questions much more quickly than searching the pages of a book and often the information provided in books is limited. So, yes, you can learn all that you can in school from a book, but it’s not like institutions of higher learning have nothing to offer. Of course, I wouldn’t want to pay as much as the most acclaimed institutions charge to learn something that any institution could teach (pretty much anything undergraduate), so I wouldn’t pay to go to school at MIT, Harvard, or Yale as an undergraduate, but I would pay to go to school.
Also, that sheet of paper is valuable to employers. It verifies that you know what you claim to know. Sure, you could know all that a school teaches you, but if I were an employer, I’d like to have that confirmed somehow. That sheet of paper is a great confirmation.
Of course, there are many things that one needs to know in most occupations that cannot be learned at school.
Comment by Dem0critus — August 20, 2005 @ 08:41
Paying for college, you’re not paying for the knowledge, but rather for the people who saw you sit there and sit there and sit there and sit there until they know that you learned, learnedid, AND learnedided it!
Comment by Jay — January 19, 2006 @ 02:54