I'd argue that's exactly what they're for.
If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades, it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.
If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades, it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.
The thing university seems to do the most these days is weed out people that don’t have the resources or ability to navigate the game put together which doesn’t have that much to do any more with education. A liberal education was by definition intended to make one free, now university is quite a lot about initiating people into wage slavery by putting them in serious debt and only graduating people who are good enough at following rules in complicated somewhat pointless exercises. It is unclear if this process is shaping or shaped by our economy.
I really don't feel sorry for people who attend Ivy league schools and rack up debt like that. They know exactly what they're getting into.
I didn't complete college and am making more than many of my peers who did and are still paying off debt 20 years later.
If you can't navigate college hand holding, you'll be fucked in the real world.
I believe college is currently serving it's function.
Testing is a distraction from their core values. And a crutch for handling the poor student to teacher ratio.
Except college/testing doesn't rank meritocratically. It reproduces our existing structural hierarchies in the next generation. It would be simpler and more honest to give the kids of rich parents fast track internships.
When undergraduate education goes well, the students will be interested in the material and motivated to learn it, both on their own and through working on collaborative projects with other students. Then testing and grading, while not necessarily eliminated, become less important in the students’ minds and cheating becomes only a minor problem.
Creating an environment conducive to that kind of learning, though, can be very difficult, especially with large classes, heavy teaching loads, and subjects and curricula that are perceived as requiring passive knowledge acquisition rather than active engagement and exploration.
I will retire next year after teaching for seventeen years at a large university in Japan. Cheating has sometimes occurred, both in my own classes and in the classes of a large first-year writing program I used to manage. But because the classes were mostly project-based, with students writing and revising in stages over the course of the semester and sharing their drafts with each other in class, and because the average class size has been only about fifteen, the amount of cheating has been small and manageable. I’ve been lucky.
> Testing is a distraction from their core values.
That's all fine, but nobody cares about your diploma if it was issued by a school that didn't test you.
So either we accept the modern role of the university, and fund them properly so they can do their task (and restrict the number of students), or reject it and go back to the old ways: you studied philosophy, congrats, but your father was a mason, here's your trowel.
I'm not sure what you mean by "old ways". The setup you describe is the one we already have. Family connections and money are key to getting a leg up.