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I'm a former college professor. When hired, I was told that my job is to prepare the students to work in a cubicle. This is reflected in the curriculum - for

I'm a former college professor. When hired, I was told that my job is to prepare the students to work in a cubicle. This is reflected in the curriculum - for example, proprietary software is taught (even where open source tools excel), because they are more likely to be found in the large corporation they are being prepared for. If you think of cubicle training as the main job of the university, it follows that large corporations would look for degrees.

chrisseaton 11y ago
This is desperately cynical and I'm struggling to picture an academic being told that. What did you teach, what was the university and what field were you in?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 11y ago
  I've seen the same (from the student perspective). This philosophy applies to a lot of mid-tier public schools whose major selling point to students is "job marketability". For certain departments an amount of prestige is owed not just to the research you put out, but how many students you successfully place in jobs in the field. I studied geography at a mid tier public school and this school of thought was pretty prevalent. The professors used open source software in their research but when I learned statistics it was IBM SPSS and GIS was all ESRI and MapInfo. The department even hand curates a list of alumni and their current employers for marketability to future students.
dilemma 11y ago
> If you think of cubicle training as the main job of the university, it follows that large corporations would look for degrees. If you read The History of Education (1920)[0] which outlines how the American and the Preussian system of education it is based on was created and on what basis, you'll see that this is exactly true. Education has never, ever been about exploration, or knowledge for its own sake. It has always been about increasing productivity for businesses, and tax revenue for government. [0] https://archive.org/stream/briefhistoryofed00cubbuoft/briefhistoryofed00cubbuoft_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/briefhistoryofed00cubbuoft/briefh...

chrisseaton 11y ago

This is desperately cynical and I'm struggling to picture an academic being told that. What did you teach, what was the university and what field were you in?

SOLAR_FIELDS 11y ago
I've seen the same (from the student perspective). This philosophy applies to a lot of mid-tier public schools whose major selling point to students is "job marketability". For certain departments an amount of prestige is owed not just to the research you put out, but how many students you successfully place in jobs in the field. I studied geography at a mid tier public school and this school of thought was pretty prevalent. The professors used open source software in their research but when I learned statistics it was IBM SPSS and GIS was all ESRI and MapInfo. The department even hand curates a list of alumni and their current employers for marketability to future students.

dilemma 11y ago

> If you think of cubicle training as the main job of the university, it follows that large corporations would look for degrees. If you read The History of Education (1920)[0] which outlines how the American and the Preussian system of education it is based on was created and on what basis, you'll see that this is exactly true. Education has never, ever been about exploration, or knowledge for its own sake. It has always been about increasing productivity for businesses, and tax revenue for government. [0] https://archive.org/stream/briefhistoryofed00cubbuoft/briefhistoryofed00cubbuoft_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/briefhistoryofed00cubbuoft/briefh...