All of the higher-ed newspapers are talking about Academically Adrift
Related: http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2010/04/11/value-of-a-u-s-college-degree-in-engineering-or-science-for-understanding-the-real-world/ and http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth
Couldn’t that have been because they were so good to begin with?
And no, I’m not going to spend $70 to find out.
It’s only to be expected. Just think about the incentives for a normal college student. They need the diploma for their future career. They don’t inherently need to learn anything. Your typical student, being reasonably intelligent, simply decides to learn as little as necessary to get that diploma, leaving as much time as possible for fun.
I have found prices for the book ranging from $10 to $20 in amazon (paper).
I think it is the same book.
Had a similar point to Colin’s. Students who majored in communications were probably the ones who already enjoyed writing, and were thus probably at a higher base-line.
I wonder if he looks at the question of confidence. A person who majors in communications is probably overly confident in their writing skills. Just as a person who graduated from an elite technical American university is likely to be over confident in their technical abilities.
BTW, Phil, if you get an estimate I’d like to figure out how much to set aside for higher education. I have two young children, and I’m really torn about paying for the whole thing.
Mark: Given that TIPS return almost nothing and that, due to their lack of innovation and lack of need (since they get heavy federal subsidies), colleges are raising tuition and fees at a faster rate than inflation, I think the best estimate is that you need to put away today whatever it costs a kid to go to college today ($200,000?). So you would need to have $400,000 invested right now.
[In case you think that stocks will return more than TIPS, my friend who is a professional money manager says “there is no risk premium” and to expect the same return from a broad range of investments. If he is right, every U.S. state will be insolvent pretty soon due to pension obligations because they are relying on an 8% annual return.]
Mark: Of course it would depend on the college. For example, it’s costing me $30,000 per year to send my daughter to UC Santa Barbara in California. Half of that cost is housing, since we live in Los Angeles. That price also includes a semester studying abroad in Bologna, Italy.
In a year, she transfers down to UCLA to get her masters. The tuition costs even more but she can commute from home, saving the housing fees…but increasing gas and car bills.
Once again, depending on the school, Phil’s $400,000 estimate is probably pretty close to being accurate.
Scary, isn’t it?
I did CS at NIU and it was easy to tell if a student was learning or not. If you couldn’t program COBOL after taking the COBOL class, you flunked. If you couldn’t program 370 Assembler after taking the 370 Assembler class, you flunked. Etc. Students came in without these skills and left with them. Pretty easy to measure the improvement.
I actually graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara. Communications had the reputation of being a major for people that weren’t really interested in anything. I’m sure there are exceptions, but the stereotypical communications major was not very bright, usually female, often attractive, and maybe interested in being an on-air news (or sports) personality or part of a corporate PR or Human Resources apparatus. The only prominent professor I can recall from the Comm. department was a woman that would get on the news from time to time because she catalogued things like how many people got shot on various T.V. shows. If you look at the various blurbs for the professors now, it looks as if they study the internet more now, but it’s basically Sociology with a focus on mass media. That really tells you most of what you need to know about the academic rigor required. Four years of fairly easy classes with nearly zero math or science and a bunch of jargoned-up papers about the “impact” of this or that will get you a communications degree. People serious about language gravitate towards English, History, or Political Science.
On the flip side, the hard sciences and engineering (even the art) programs at UCSB are really very good.
Things may have changed since I went there, but I rather doubt it.
Folks: http://commstudies.ucla.edu/major outlines what a Communications major studies and where he or she hopes to end up. The word “writing” appears once on the http://commstudies.ucla.edu/courses page. The good news is that they offer ” “Psychology of Language and Gender” where students learn about
So the graduates can have the same writing skill level that they had in high school, but in both “women’s” and “men’s” language. Had David Mamet taken this course he probably could have expanded his market quite a bit and be writing shows for the Lifetime channel instead of the gender-biased material in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/quotes
[I once worked with a guy who would holler out “coffee’s for closers” any time anyone went to pour himself a cup. He could recite the entire Alec Baldwin scene from memory, but his favorite part was
Mamet probably doesn’t realize that a woman might have said this differently.]
The School of Public Communicatons at the university I went to trained students in many disciplines: television, radio, filmmaking and others, not just writing and print journalism.
Supposedly the University trained all students in writing skills, not just Communications students. Even music students like me had to either take Freshman English or place out of it.
Now if students who majored in music showed less-than-average improvement, I would be surprised, especially given that engineering students were not required to take Freshman Piano.
What saddens me is that the School of Public Communications had a wonderful student-run FM radio station. The radio station is still there, still broadcasting, but it is less than wonderful and they don’t let students anywhere near it.