Watering down university education is not necessary. If someone wants to focus just on tech skills, they can go to a boot camp. Expanding boot camps so they become multi-year experiences may be a good idea, but they should not be called universities.
I guarantee if you created a tech school that focuses strictly on tech related classes for 4 years compared to a University that you would produce higher quality students than you would from schools that spend half of your college teaching you things that are not directly related to your job.
Also, what happens if a student wants to switch majors? Or graduates but later wants to change careers? Your proposal doesn't make that feasible.
Some programs in universities can be glorified vocational schools. Other programs are excellent, relevant and evolving both for industry, and as innovators.
I disagree. I think they provide services to customers. Customers decide what the services are for. I suppose some students are very interested in laying a foundation in the liberal arts. Most, in my experience, are more worried about getting their careers started out on the right foot (especially considering all the loans that they are taking out). There is also a nontrivial number of students there for unsupervised extensions on their adolescences, though.
> ...they should not be called universities...
Why not? Is that going to be a regulated word now? What purpose does the distinction serve? We don't look at a degree and think, "Oh! University degree! This is a well-rounded person with a good foundation in the liberal arts!" No, we see, B.S. in Communications from Boise State and draw inferences from there.
The assumption here is that education is nonsense. I think the skills are far less valuable: Education teaches you about the world you have to live in, in business, and as a citizen, a parent, a consumer, etc., by exposing you to leading people and ideas from around the world and throughout history. It teaches you to reason, by exposing you to the great thinkers now and in history. Reading blogs on the Internet isn't nearly the same thing.
If we send people home from college only with the vocational skill of building an integrated circuit, they will find that it doesn't begin to address most of the challenges in life, much less their community's and society's.
Integrated circuits aren't what the West needs to move forward at this point, to address poverty, discrimination, war, and all the other issues. In our current society, we do very well with integrated circuits and very poorly with life, social and political issues, perhaps we need to focus on education in the latter, not the former.
Another thing education teaches you is how to reason effectively, the most important skill of all: Reason is what separates people from animals, the Enlightenment from the Dark Ages, science from superstition, rationality from hokum. And almost the first thing you learn is intellectual humility: I am wrong about so much, and others know so much that I don't and have such different experience, that it's foolish to dismiss them. You learn we are each prisoners of our own narrow perspectives and experiences, and that the more challenging another point of view is, the more likely it is to be worth listening to. So when you say you "laugh" at my ideas, I think you should have spent less time on Java and more on learning.
I believe most people would benefit from learning the skills they need for a job rather than learning about China because rarely will a tech job require your vast knowledge of Chinese history. They want to know whether or not you can push code that the business needs.
I understand your point and I am not saying that these classes are useless. But at the end of the day colleges are there to produce for jobs and my point being is that if you had more time on tech related classes than classes you don't need then you would most certainly be more ready for a job.
When I went to college there were so many classes I really didnt need. Regardless of if they were "good" for me it was a waste of my time because I didn't care nor need that information. I took classes in sociology, macro and micro economics, accounting 1 and accounting 2 and so on and so on.
Did these classes help me in some way? Yes I would say so but what if I took an extra 5 classes honing skills related to the job I was going to seek after college. Can you really sit here and say that those 5 classes are better off? I don't think so.
I know I learned an awful lot about reason in college, and many others I know did too; sorry you missed out! If you read your Facebook feed and I study the great thinkers of history, guided by modern-day experts, I'm very confident I'll be far ahead. Unless you think you can come up with all that on your own - who needs Descartes or Hannah Arendt, apparently; anyone can figure it out? To disparage all that knowledge and learning is easy to say but very hard to support. To say those people knew and said nothing valuable seems like willful ignorance.
> colleges are there to produce for jobs
Says who? I disagree strongly. I know the parent's claim is fashionable now, but that certain hasn't been true for most of history. The liberal arts, which are not vocational, long (always?) have been dominant - that wasn't for job skills.
I'll add that few businesses value actual job skills learned in college or grad school. A new lawyer or engineer right out of school knows nothing, in many ways, and needs to be trained in real-world job skills by their employer.
Training people for jobs is the responsibility of vocational schools and corporate training .
As, there is no guarantee that it will even be alive by the time you leave university/your potential employer would be looking for that particular "skill".
Also you realize that learning a programming language can translate into other programming languages right?
In another language you may not be using classes, objects heavily, so learning about how to make class factories mean very little. What matters is, through this you might learn about good abstractions and its power, and that's what is important.
And that is what universities should be teaching with the use of any language/tool. I am not sure what you mean "non-tech" class, i am pretty sure there aren't any such things in CS programs. If you dedicate yourself to one particular tool, you will have a very narrow view of software development. Don't need to go to university, you can learn it by yourself and save both time and money.
Of course, that's completely ignoring that there is far, far, far more to "liberal arts" than gender studies.
"For one, a recent meta-analysis of over 40 years of diversity training evaluations showed that diversity training can work, especially when it targets awareness and skill development and occurs over a significant period of time."
https://hbr.org/2017/07/two-types-of-diversity-training-that...
Programming / Networking / Hardware need a new type of University that is similar to Trade colleges but focus primarily on the skills and nothing more. The first 1-2 years could focus on the foundations while the next 2 years focus around solid design principles and actually developing projects (real or fake).