[OnTheIce]

jeff744 wrote:

I'd much rather have it go back to that 10% or so, instead of the constantly increasing rates that will eventually make it impossible for anyone to actually afford it.

Well, that's not going to happen. Tuition costs have risen massively yet enrollment continues to increase as well.

[jeff744]

OnTheIce wrote:

jeff744 wrote:

I'd much rather have it go back to that 10% or so, instead of the constantly increasing rates that will eventually make it impossible for anyone to actually afford it.

Well, that's not going to happen. Tuition costs have risen massively yet enrollment continues to increase as well.

That generally happens when you basically require a degree to get a job.

[scarecrowe]

Educational levels have risen to a point of being ridiculous (e.g. needing a certificate to be a bouncer!). Today's Bachelor's degree is yesterday's high school diploma and the cost of this system is not sustainable. The adage of "life long learning" will soon turn to one of "go to school until you die" which will result in having a generation living without having ever paid a tax dollar back to society through employment (not because people do not want to be employed but employers and those in the educational system want graduates to have extreme qualifications for simple tasks - a benefit to both the employer and educator but not the graduate). I am an advocate of simplifying the educational system for the sake of expediency to the student. Teach what is necessary to have one support oneself and cut the "fluff" out that is currently supported by the public purse.

[BeaverFever]

Well, the lifelong learning will be done through night school, part-time study, employer-sponsored education, etc.

I agree that employers over-emphasize post-secodary education for alot of basic and entry-level jobs. I've seen employers use the requirement simply as a screening tool to eliminate "riff-raff". After all, if someone has univeristy education, or is "in school" (increasingly common nowadays) they're probably not a dead-beat criminal with zero work ethic who is barely literate. Believe it or not, recruiters have a hard time determining who is a qualified candidate for basic jobs if High School is the minimum formal requirement -- people have others write their resume for them, and may be able to fake their way through an interview. On the other hand, there are plenty of dummies who can graduate from university, espeicially those who graduate from academic programs whose content is heavily job-related, which are increasingly the norm.

I'm not a fan of eliminating what you call "fluff" and turning our univeristies into white-collar trade schools, however. Long before universities became the requirement for a basic standard of living, they were institutes of higher learning that really teach young people, who have little real life experience of their own, how to understand the broader world, respect the arguments of others, and value ideas that they would not otherwise encounter or formulate on their own. The "fluff" courses in particular teach critical thinking, creative thinking, logic, etc which are highly coveted by employers and believe it or not, still not such an easy commodity to find. A very large number of university graduates today don't even end up working in the field of study because the "fluff" courses gave them enough flexibility to find work in a different field. By narrowing down programs and making them more job-specific, you are making a univesity education less portable in the job market and reducing entrepreneurialsm since the curriculum would be more employer-task oriented and have less emphasis on academic theory.

People tend to assume that these are in-born traits but they are actually most often learned abilities. Even outside of the workplace, these 'fluff' courses help create a more thoughtful, intelligent society that can better understand current events and form opinions on them. There will always be idiots out there, and we're all idiots by one measure or another at least some of the time, but this definitely helps.

Also, there are many good jobs for which there are not university programs. Get into the administrative guts of any company and you will find people with titles like "Director of Change Management" where the job description is really based on your cognitive and creative thinking skills, rather than memorizing facts from some textbook you read 10 years ago.

Finally, it would serve to discourage first-and-second year students from exploring their academic options. "Fluff" courses often end up being more interesting to the student than their original program choice and these students often end up changing their major as a result, becoming the next generation's journalists, authors, historians, etc. despite having originally attended university to study marketing, business admin, etc.

[ShepherdsDog]

I guess i must have been one of the lucky ones. I saved every penny for three years, while serving in the military, worked part time(30 hours a week) during the school year at a pretty good job and went overseas during my summers where I made really good coin. As a result, of good planning, good management and some good luck, I never had to take out a student loan. A few weeks after graduating I had secured a full time teaching job(mind you in a place not too many would want to go).
On the other hand a good friend of mine was trying to get into City Planning and did the Co op program at UVic. For his work terms he was making really good money. He worked for Forestry, View Royal and a few other municipal governments. He even worked on the development of the Gallopng Goose Trail. It took him a couple extra years to graduate but he figured with the experience he gained he would have no trouble landing a job in his field....it took him years.

[scarecrowe]

BeaverFever wrote:

The "fluff" courses in particular teach critical thinking, creative thinking, logic, etc

If you think that the core curriculum does not encompass all of those attributes then you are absolutely wrong. Attributing a worth to the fluff is similar to those who claim to see a "big picture" with them knowing full well that the details escape them and thus have no other choice to protect their feeble self esteem. Worse yet are all of those whose full education is all fluff where they will not even be able to work as a fluff manager at a pet store but continually ask for a lifetime of handouts (e.g. Margie Gillis). Fluff education is great for the beggars' economy.

[ShepherdsDog]

Hey we need graduates with degrees in Gender Issues. Who else is going to staff Tim Hortons and 7-11? Fluff courses were GPA boosters and that's all they were

[bootlegga]

OnTheIce wrote:

jeff744 wrote:

OnTheIce wrote:

Is the problem that school isn't subsidized enough or that the kids of this generation are increasingly irresponsible, taking loans out just to have that extra cash to spend at the club and then bitch about the debt when they're done?

We pay for I believe 40% of the education costs whereas our parents payed for about 10%. We also have to deal with rising costs of living, our generation is just as responsible about how we spend it, we are just trying to pay off more costs than we can possibly afford.

My approximate income for working what is considered a high paying summer job: ~$8000

Tuition: ~$6700 (UoS Arts and Science)
Books: ~$1000
Rent: ~$4800
Food: ~$1400
Total: ~$13900

I am still short about $6000 despite working a high paying job, saving my money, not squandering, etc. If my parents had no savings I would have about $30000 in debt by the time I graduated.

So what do you propose, a free education?

Is all student debt bad?

Jeff is correct - until the mid-90s, governments paid the lion's share of post-secondary education costs. They got slashed along with everything else in the 90s by governments trying to eliminate deficits.

However, unlike most everything else (health care, defence, social programs, etc), funding for post-secondary education has NOT been substantially increased and we're on the verge of having a generation saddled with huge amounts of debt. As the article notes;

Quote:

“Student loan debt has become a macroeconomic factor; it affects the economy,” said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the financial aid website http://www.finaid.org. “Students who graduate with excessive debt are more likely to delay buying a car, buying a house, getting married, having children, saving for their retirement….They're spending less because they first have to tackle their student loan debt.”

Tackling that debt, at a projected monthly rate of .5 to 1.0 percent of the overall amount due, means that an estimated $5 to $10 billion is being sucked out of the economy each month.

Those are US figures, but I'm sure the numbers are similar here too.

So right when we need the next generation to step up and contribute more (a large portion of taxes collected in Canada come from sales taxes), they'll be unable to, simply because these high debt levels that no previous generation ever had to deal with.

The student loan payment plan should be like the UK's - if you earn less than X, than you don't have to pay back the loans - and interest doesn't keep accruing when you're not paying it back. That would be a far more humane way of dealing with this issue IMHO.

[Dragon-Dancer]

scarecrowe wrote:

BeaverFever wrote:

The "fluff" courses in particular teach critical thinking, creative thinking, logic, etc

If you think that the core curriculum does not encompass all of those attributes then you are absolutely wrong. Attributing a worth to the fluff is similar to those who claim to see a "big picture" with them knowing full well that the details escape them and thus have no other choice to protect their feeble self esteem. Worse yet are all of those whose full education is all fluff where they will not even be able to work as a fluff manager at a pet store but continually ask for a lifetime of handouts (e.g. Margie Gillis). Fluff education is great for the beggars' economy.

Core curriculum rarely covers any of those things, except maybe logic if it's applicable to the curriculum (As it was with programming when I took it). Core curriculum usually barely has time to cover the subject matter, it rarely has time to try and teach students to think outside the box. So called 'fluff' course help students to expand their thought processes outside the basics of what is required to do the job they are training for. Not everyone thinks or makes connections the same way, so a variety of such courses helps people find something to their tastes.

I also fail to see how a professional dancer and choreographer, seemingly a very successful one has anything to do with this discussion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margie_Gillis

[scarecrowe]

Dragon-Dancer wrote:

=

I also fail to see how a professional dancer and choreographer, seemingly a very successful one has anything to do with this discussion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margie_Gillis

Easy: a profession learned with government funding that requires continual government funding after graduation in order to survive adds not only to student debt but life long indebtedness to society (a.k.a. the taxpayer).

Although the notion of minimizing fluff in education to assist the economy seems as a right wing type of ideology, many left leaning societies use such an approach (e.g. Sweden). In Sweden, mandated military service is used to help repay "society" for the gift of one's education. Try to pull that one off in this enlightened society. Fat chance.

Education should used to help the able to become independent (i.e. support oneself without being on the dole (as in government funding)).

Why is it that in Canadian curricula, there is mandatory fluff however there are no mandatory hard skill courses for the totally fluff programs (e.g. fine art education programs have no mandated courses in welding, plumbing, finance, etc. whereas the aspiring plumber is subjected to the teachings of classical music, wine tasting, life on other planets, etc.). Why are people not required to graduate knowing at least something that may allow them to support themselves instead of begging for their economic well being?

[BeaverFever]

scarecrowe wrote:

If you think that the core curriculum does not encompass all of those attributes then you are absolutely wrong. Attributing a worth to the fluff is similar to those who claim to see a "big picture" with them knowing full well that the details escape them and thus have no other choice to protect their feeble self esteem. Worse yet are all of those whose full education is all fluff where they will not even be able to work as a fluff manager at a pet store but continually ask for a lifetime of handouts (e.g. Margie Gillis). Fluff education is great for the beggars' economy.

I think there are many programs with core curriculums that do not do a good job at that. Many programs in the science and technology field, for example. And I think that subject-matter expertise, while crucial to any operation, is not the end-all and be all. I guarantee you that the details of company's IT project completely escape the CEO and senior executives (the "big picture" people), who only want a 15-minute high-level briefing on the subject in order to make their decision.

That's why companies tend to have more HR issues with people-managers (and wanna-be managers) in the IT and Finance departmnets. These are fields that require a detailed level of subject-matter expertise, and so this expertise tends to be valued above all else. You have people demanding to be made managers and senior managers and directors based solely on their expert knowledge. However, after a certain point, the higher up the ranks you go in any department, the more you require "big picutre" skills as the people under you will deal with the minutia while you assume more responsibility for things like budget, people management, etc. People-managers also need "soft" skills in order to understand and motivate their employees, but the IT/FIN crowd has a general reputation of not doing as well in this area as other areas of the business world, in part because these types of skills tend to be undervalued in this group.

As a final comment on expertise, I can say that I've personally been part of a project team that was organized to clean up the mess of a previous project team, that had too many experts and not enough generalists and "big picture" people. The experts were all very good at what they did, but they did not have enough knowledge (or interest) about other functions in the company so their project ended up causing all kinds of disasters for other departments. There was no "big picture" generalist project manager to oversee the activities of the different experts tinkering away in their respective fields and ensure that their actions were: a)coordianted with the initiatives of other projects; and b)not affect other business functions.

Although I am not in any way in touch with the arts, I can say that many of the great works of art in human history, from the Sphynx to the Washington Monument, were sponsored by the ruling powers of the day. I guess the argument is that if arts and culture are important elements of civlization, then government has some responsiblity in sponsoring it.

I think you'd be surprised in the number career paths open to people in gender studies, particularly in the non-profit sector. These people often work in places like rape crisis centres, battered women shelters, etc. and also in the education system as experts on the differences between learning and behaviour habits of male and female students. Many also work in the corporate world on things like family leave and discrimination policy, etc. In fariness, a lot of people who study in the field go on to a post-graduate degree in something else, however to broaden their skill set.

[BeaverFever]

scarecrowe wrote:

Why is it that in Canadian curricula, there is mandatory fluff however there are no mandatory hard skill courses for the totally fluff programs (e.g. fine art education programs have no mandated courses in welding, plumbing, finance, etc. whereas the aspiring plumber is subjected to the teachings of classical music, wine tasting, life on other planets, etc.). Why are people not required to graduate knowing at least something that may allow them to support themselves instead of begging for their economic well being?

I don't think the aspiring plumber is in university to begin with; he/she is in a trade school or taking employer- or union-sponsered private courses. That is the big dif between university and trade schools. As far as I know, Arts students are still required to take "professionally related" electives.