The Education Crisis: When universities become a waste of time!

Controversy was sparked earlier this month when the University of Florida (UF) allegedly considered a proposal to eliminate the computer science department. While the UF officials maintained that this was not their plan and that they were only trying to make necessary cuts, others argued that the proposal was nothing short of an attempt to systematically close down the computer science program.

Whether the UF was actually planning to close the computer science program or not is really not what I am interested in. What really interests me is the fact that educational institutions - and especially technical programs - have increasingly become a topic of discussion as far as financial cuts are concerned. And whether we like to admit it or not, this is a strong signal that the overall sentiment towards universities is not that positive. At the end of the day, this is an economic debate, and it all boils down to the economic value of universities as perceived by governments and legislators. So it is only appropriate to ask: Are universities doing a good job from an economic point of view? More specifically: Are universities producing job-ready students who are able to contribute to the economy?

(1)

It is often argued that it is not the university’s job to prepare individuals for a job, but rather to give them the necessary soft skills to do well in their future jobs. Advocates of this school of thought promote the idea that universities are mainly there to teach students how to learn, how to do research, and how to work and communicate with others. On the opposite side of this debate, some argue that universities should provide students with relevant and practical knowledge that will allow them – once they graduate – to hunt a job quickly and excel in it. Universities, they continue, should be able to teach the students the things they will experience and have to deal with in a real job.

Universities themselves seem to be confused as to why they really exist. If they exist to give you practical knowledge, then they are definitely not doing a good job. Pick any university graduate and examine their readiness to take on a real job and you will be shocked. Ask an electrical engineering graduate who spent four or five years learning "electrical engineering" concepts to design an electric circuit for a small house and be darn sure not to come close to it - because chances are it would be a safety hazard. Unfortunately, graduates from other engineering disciplines as well as computer science and information systems are not any better. 

On the other hand, if universities are supposed to teach you how to gain knowledge – or to put it in fancier terms, universities do not give you fish but they teach you how to catch fish – then, once again, that is obviously not what they are doing. You can do a simple experiment by looking at the exams students have to pass to be able to graduate with a degree in something. You will notice that passing most exams is highly correlated with the ability of the students to recall the knowledge we have provided in class – and not their ability to research or/and gain new knowledge.

I argue that universities can do both but I am not delusional enough to believe that they already do.

Something is fundamentally wrong when we keep students for four to six years in a university program, and then tell them – with no regrets – that what they will see in a real work environment is nothing like what they have learnt or practiced at university. What a waste of time! Maybe then we should not be surprised when we know that new high school graduates are willingly opting for technical institutes or community colleges. There, you spend two years learning something that is actually useful in real life, and your chances are higher at landing a job once you are done. At a technical institute, they don’t waste the first few weeks of the semester telling you about the history of organic chemistry. They don’t teach you four different methods to do something, and then tell you that none of them is actually used in today’s practices. They teach you things that matter, things that are still relevant in this day and time, things that you will actually use once you graduate and start your job.

(2)

I fully understand and appreciate the difficulty of taking a hands-on approach to education while maintaining a level of abstraction to prepare students to become thinkers and self-learners. But I also think that putting students in a bubble of abstractions and non-relevance for four years – if at all they make it to the fourth year – is the main reason students are usually not ready to take on a real job once this bubble has burst.

We need an intervention.

And we need to start off by trying to overcome the denial problem we have. As educators and administrators of educational institutes, we need to acknowledge that there is a serious problem in the system and it better be fixed before it is too late. We need to admit that universities are not generally able to achieve the goals we hope they would. We have to ask why – in a considerable number of institutes in Canada – it is taking six years to graduate only 1 of every 3 students who enroll fulltime. Student dropout rates from technical programs are also skyrocketing at many universities. We need to submit that the problem may well not be the students themselves, but the system in which these students feel irrelevant, unachieved, or overwhelmed. We also need to realize that our universities may not be coping well with the ever changing demands of the job market, and that by itself is enough reason for not taking the university route. 

The other thing we need to do is study the curricula of colleges and technical institutes and learn – yes learn – how they manage to graduate students in two years who may land a job even before they go on stage to get their degree. It is truly mindboggling – and very embarrassing – when you hear stories of people (smart people) who actually had to do a one- or two-year program at a local institute after they had graduated from university so that they may be ready to compete for jobs in highly competitive markets!!
 

The third step is to revisit our hiring approach. We need to handpick educators who understand the value of giving relevant knowledge, who share the vision of job-ready students, and who know how to make it happen in the classroom. We need to put more effort into making the classroom more interesting, more hands-on, and intellectually rewarding. At the same time, we need to set standards for our educators. We need to live in peace with the fact that not every academic is a good instructor. We should throw the ‘a-good-researcher-can-also-teach’ philosophy out the window, and instead open the door for creativity in the classroom and reward it. Instructors should be in the classroom because they want to be there, not because the university forces them to be there (Footnote: most universities require that all professors teach a certain load of courses per year).

(3)

A few years back, I watched a video of a professor at MIT who installed a pendulum in the classroom and actually rode the ball at the end of the string. And while the string was swinging back and forth, you could see the instructor going back and forth with it. The scene was hysterical. The students were laughing in disbelief as the instructor was swinging back and forth and his stopwatch was counting the seconds. The instructor proved to the students that the time he spent on the swing was the same time calculated by the formula written on the blackboard, and then he concluded his act with a very proud statement: “Physics works. I’m telling you.” At that point I envied those students. I so wanted to be in that classroom sharing the hype and enjoying the science. The science I can understand and relate to. The science that sticks with me forever, not the science I can only store in my brain for a few months until I have the opportunity to throw it up on an exam paper. Having watched this amazing lecture, I asked myself: if we had a similar learning environment at all universities, would we have any student in the classroom that would be yawning, or facebooking, or youtubing or impatiently staring at their watch? Would any student leave the lecture not fully understanding physics? Would any of our students not be so eager to attend a second and a third and a fourth lecture – willingly if I may add?

We would not be exaggerating if we described the current situation of our universities as an education crisis. A crisis that is very expensive because - as cliché as it may sound- it touches the very essence of what makes civilizations flourish and advance – the young minds, the builders of the future. But I also believe that we are able to get past this stage. And we can, with enough societal and governmental momentum, steer our educational system in the right direction. A better education system means a readier workforce. And a readier workforce means less post-graduate training and less waste of time and money. A better education system is our ticket to a healthier economy and a more promising future. Maybe only then, a proposal to eliminate a computer science program will sound completely outrageous and not even make it to the round table.