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Why not both? If I want to learn how to do something, I want to be educated in that. There should be education available for that, but for knowledge workers, t
by RevEng 2y ago
Why not both?
If I want to learn how to do something, I want to be educated in that. There should be education available for that, but for knowledge workers, there largely isn't; instead, university has been hijacked to fill that role. In the trades there are schools dedicated to learning these topics and they work well at helping people learn to work effectively.
Universities should be a place of higher learning and research - those are really important too. The struggle in universities today is that they are expected to be both and those things aren't really compatible. That's why you get research professors begrudgingly teaching undergraduate courses.
We need an alternative to universities for learning the trades that knowledge workers tend to do.
- jltsiren 2y agoSome countries have alternatives. For example, Finland has institutes that call themselves polytechnics, universities of applied sciences, or something similar. ~60% of higher education takes place in them, with the remaining 40% in research universities. However, when similar fields of study are available in both types of institutes, employers almost universally prefer graduates from research universities.
- nradov 2y agoWe have the same thing in the USA. Some schools like Cal Poly or Texas A&M have an explicit focus on learning by doing rather than knowledge for it's own sake.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI don't know, why not both? Companies killed apprenticeship and even training programs, so they took your choice unless you're going blue collar. Even with blue collar, Unions more or less took a lot of potential spots for new blood, so it becomes a schmooz game for something you want to take your time and effort to learn. So yea, surprise that once again it comes down to companies that don't want to pay for the talent they yearn for.