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xiphiasWhen we were with Brother Guy in Italy, he asked one of those joking/teasing questions of me that, for some reason, sticks with you and makes you think about it. Y'know, we were just joking around and stuff, and he said something along the lines of "So, how come you don't have a degree if you actually know all this stuff and like it?" I don't remember exactly his wording, but the point of it was the disconnect between me being a college dropout, and me actually having a decent generalized education, enough to follow along, more-or-less, with Guy's explanations of how the optics worked in the Vatican observatory, the electrical system and the history of what was done to the building at what points based on the leading theories of electricity at the time, the history of astronomical data collection, some of the research he was doing on meteorites and what they could tell us about solar system formation, and so forth. I mean, so long as he talked slowly and used little words, I could do okay.
Now, I don't consider my science education to be particularly good. I consider myself to have the minimum science education which one should have after graduating from high school, combined with a normal level of curiosity. If I hadn't really screwed up eighth grade so badly, I could have had a better science education -- I didn't take high school biology, so I am, to this day, shaky on exactly HOW ATP works, for instance, and, because of time constraints, our physics class only handled mechanics, and never really got into electromagnetism, so that's something ELSE I've had to fill in on my own.
Still, if I'd managed to pick up biology and electromagnetism, I'd have felt that I'd have gotten what I needed out of high school science.
And then, of course, I have SOME basic curiosity in the world, so I read layman-level dumbed-down science magazines like "Scientific American" -- the "Reader's Digest" of research. "National Geographic", "Scientific American", "Popular Science" and so forth don't go into anything rigorously, but they do, at least, let you know what some of the interesting things are. And then there's the Internet, and pestering scientists you know to explain what sorts of things THEY'RE working on, and stuff, and you can learn a fair bit about what things are going on where.
Basically, my science education is "high school plus a library card plus curiosity plus a kitchen with a fire extinguisher plus living in a city where I can actually get to know people who are doing interesting stuff plus having relatives who are doing interesting stuff. . . "
It works for me. I don't have really GOOD scientific education, but it's good enough for me to at least follow along with what other people are saying.
So, for me, it seems really weird for someone to be surprised that I don't have a college degree. I have the amount of scientific knowledge that I would expect from an average person without a degree. If you have a degree, that should mean a level of skill in that field that would allow you to do at least some original research in that field. And, for that matter, a degree isn't a prerequisite for having that level of skill -- if it interests you, you can just do stuff with it -- Dad has been playing with some of the math on gravitational anomalies on dark matter for a while, and I've been toying with a model of relativistic time dilation on-and-off -- but I don't have the math to figure out if my conceptualization is useful.
You do science because it's fun. Because it's interesting. If you are interested enough in a specific kind of science long enough, then, sure, you might end up with a degree in something, but you don't do science to get a degree -- you end up with a degree because you do science.
University is one place to learn things. And it can be very useful to have people who have done this stuff giving you direction and suggestions. I would not know anywhere NEAR as much as I do about rhetoric if it wasn't for Professor Katulla at Northeastern.
So why does it cost so much?
The other thing which was bouncing around my head was an article that someone on my friends list linked to about how colleges are starting to notice that students who come out of school carrying a hundred thousand dollars of debt just aren't donating to the alumni fund as much as they'd like.
And that made me wonder: why do people donate to alumni funds in the FIRST place?
See, it seems to me that you'd donate to your school if you felt that they had given you more value than they charged you, and so you felt grateful to them. But universities now seem to be charging as much as the market will bear.
Which, y'know, is fine. It's a capitalist market, and if they want to charge as much as they can, okay. But, if they do that, then the people they are charging certainly have no other responsibility to the school than what they're charged.
Once a university charges as much as they do, the relationship between a university and a student is purely a business one.
And THAT is the reason that students feel they deserve good grades -- not a generalized sense of entitlement, but rather, "I BOUGHT this, this is a TRANSACTION, now, you should give me the thing I paid for." When you're putting yourself into hock for most of your adult life, you feel that they OWE you the stuff you bought.
University is expensive. University is so expensive that you need to put yourself into debt for it. You need to put yourself into debt so far that it means that you will be unable to own a house until later than you otherwise would have. You will need to put off getting married and having children.
So, at the point that you've made a choice to spend your entire adult life paying for this thing, you feel that you are OWED the thing that you have decided to sacrifice for. Is there any wonder that students are going to argue for "A's" that they may not have earned academically? They have pledged three years of their lives to pay for that "A" -- don't the years and years they are going to pay for it count for anything?
Of course they don't -- what counts is the months and months BEFORE that where they were SUPPOSED to have learned the stuff on which they would be graded. But when you put that high a financial price on the class, then it seems like it ought to be a financial transaction.
The class itself is supposed to be a transaction of learning -- but the superimposed financial transaction overwhelms it.
So: university is expensive enough that nobody is going to have warm, fuzzy feelings about their school -- it's a business, from which they are buying a service. People aren't going to donate to the business, because why should they? And people are going to want the product for which they are paying.
In other words, the cost of university has already destroyed everything that a university should be by turning it into a business instead of a place of learning.
So why it is surprising that I don't have a degree? I like education too much to go back to school.
Now, I don't consider my science education to be particularly good. I consider myself to have the minimum science education which one should have after graduating from high school, combined with a normal level of curiosity. If I hadn't really screwed up eighth grade so badly, I could have had a better science education -- I didn't take high school biology, so I am, to this day, shaky on exactly HOW ATP works, for instance, and, because of time constraints, our physics class only handled mechanics, and never really got into electromagnetism, so that's something ELSE I've had to fill in on my own.
Still, if I'd managed to pick up biology and electromagnetism, I'd have felt that I'd have gotten what I needed out of high school science.
And then, of course, I have SOME basic curiosity in the world, so I read layman-level dumbed-down science magazines like "Scientific American" -- the "Reader's Digest" of research. "National Geographic", "Scientific American", "Popular Science" and so forth don't go into anything rigorously, but they do, at least, let you know what some of the interesting things are. And then there's the Internet, and pestering scientists you know to explain what sorts of things THEY'RE working on, and stuff, and you can learn a fair bit about what things are going on where.
Basically, my science education is "high school plus a library card plus curiosity plus a kitchen with a fire extinguisher plus living in a city where I can actually get to know people who are doing interesting stuff plus having relatives who are doing interesting stuff. . . "
It works for me. I don't have really GOOD scientific education, but it's good enough for me to at least follow along with what other people are saying.
So, for me, it seems really weird for someone to be surprised that I don't have a college degree. I have the amount of scientific knowledge that I would expect from an average person without a degree. If you have a degree, that should mean a level of skill in that field that would allow you to do at least some original research in that field. And, for that matter, a degree isn't a prerequisite for having that level of skill -- if it interests you, you can just do stuff with it -- Dad has been playing with some of the math on gravitational anomalies on dark matter for a while, and I've been toying with a model of relativistic time dilation on-and-off -- but I don't have the math to figure out if my conceptualization is useful.
You do science because it's fun. Because it's interesting. If you are interested enough in a specific kind of science long enough, then, sure, you might end up with a degree in something, but you don't do science to get a degree -- you end up with a degree because you do science.
University is one place to learn things. And it can be very useful to have people who have done this stuff giving you direction and suggestions. I would not know anywhere NEAR as much as I do about rhetoric if it wasn't for Professor Katulla at Northeastern.
So why does it cost so much?
The other thing which was bouncing around my head was an article that someone on my friends list linked to about how colleges are starting to notice that students who come out of school carrying a hundred thousand dollars of debt just aren't donating to the alumni fund as much as they'd like.
And that made me wonder: why do people donate to alumni funds in the FIRST place?
See, it seems to me that you'd donate to your school if you felt that they had given you more value than they charged you, and so you felt grateful to them. But universities now seem to be charging as much as the market will bear.
Which, y'know, is fine. It's a capitalist market, and if they want to charge as much as they can, okay. But, if they do that, then the people they are charging certainly have no other responsibility to the school than what they're charged.
Once a university charges as much as they do, the relationship between a university and a student is purely a business one.
And THAT is the reason that students feel they deserve good grades -- not a generalized sense of entitlement, but rather, "I BOUGHT this, this is a TRANSACTION, now, you should give me the thing I paid for." When you're putting yourself into hock for most of your adult life, you feel that they OWE you the stuff you bought.
University is expensive. University is so expensive that you need to put yourself into debt for it. You need to put yourself into debt so far that it means that you will be unable to own a house until later than you otherwise would have. You will need to put off getting married and having children.
So, at the point that you've made a choice to spend your entire adult life paying for this thing, you feel that you are OWED the thing that you have decided to sacrifice for. Is there any wonder that students are going to argue for "A's" that they may not have earned academically? They have pledged three years of their lives to pay for that "A" -- don't the years and years they are going to pay for it count for anything?
Of course they don't -- what counts is the months and months BEFORE that where they were SUPPOSED to have learned the stuff on which they would be graded. But when you put that high a financial price on the class, then it seems like it ought to be a financial transaction.
The class itself is supposed to be a transaction of learning -- but the superimposed financial transaction overwhelms it.
So: university is expensive enough that nobody is going to have warm, fuzzy feelings about their school -- it's a business, from which they are buying a service. People aren't going to donate to the business, because why should they? And people are going to want the product for which they are paying.
In other words, the cost of university has already destroyed everything that a university should be by turning it into a business instead of a place of learning.
So why it is surprising that I don't have a degree? I like education too much to go back to school.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 12:23 pm (UTC)Re:Grade Inflation
Date: 2007-07-11 09:39 pm (UTC)It's a lot of pressure on a professor that the difference between a B- and a C+ could affect whether a student ends up in a war zone.
That's no longer an issue, but there is a lot of student aid that depends on a certain baseline GPA. So, again, professors have the pressure that giving a student a low grade could mean the kid will be forced to drop out of school -- a harsh penalty which may outweigh the actual performance in that class.
So those kids (or at least, the ones who beg/plead/pressure the prof) get marked up, and then the people who actually earned that grade get marked accordingly higher to differentiate them from the lower-earning ones, and so up the scale.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 12:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 12:49 pm (UTC)Wow. Do you happen to remember any of the publication details? Thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 01:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 01:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 01:43 pm (UTC)I went to an elite private university and graduated with only $17,000 debt. Why? Financial aid and blind admissions. Plus I went to a university that pledged that if you got in, they would do everything to make sure you could go. Loans, scholarships, etc. My schooling cost about $30,000 per year. $4250 of that was loans. Another $5000 was paid for out of pocket. The rest was scholarships.
My graduate schooling IS costing me an arm and a leg - but it was either go into debt and be able to work in my chosen field and be licensed in a span of 5 years, or NOT go into debt and either never work in my field, or only be eligible for a license after a dozen years of extremely low wages and scut work. If I could get that. My preliminary findings of trying to get a job in my field without an education in it specifically netted me nothing but the kind suggestion I go to school for it.
YMMV, naturally.
N.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 02:15 pm (UTC)And at THOSE schools, people graduate without debt, and go there for the EDUCATION, rather than for the PAPER (because the schools can be selective enough to choose those students), and their gradutates DO tend to give donations afterward, because they actually are grateful, because the university DID actually give them more value than what they paid.
For the rest of us who can't get into those schools, however. . .
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 04:57 pm (UTC)FYI
Date: 2007-07-11 05:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 11:18 pm (UTC)I think you mean, "at THOSE schools, a few lucky bastards graduate without debt." I graduated with quite a bit of debt.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-12 12:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 02:04 pm (UTC)I'm not saying I advocate this behavior, mind you.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 02:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 02:06 pm (UTC)What steams me is what the money has been spent on. It hasn't gone much to increasing faculty salaries. A good deal has gone into IT, which is a worthwhile investment IMHO. But a lot has gone into building New Impressive Buildings and luxurious student facilities. And the market has responded by asking for more; the "experience" becomes as important as the education.
I went to Reed College and it definitely was worth it. I have donated to the college every year in the 20 years since I graduated, anywhere from $25 to $500. But I graduated with a manageable amount of debt, and in many years of grad school picked up only a few thousand more, thanks to fellowships and a little help from my parents, mostly with health care expenses. These days I do not donate to the college's general fund, because too much of it is going for Spiffy Facilities, because Reed has to compete with a lot of other Very Pretty elite liberal arts colleges. My donations go into the scholarship fund.