Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daub | Hacker News Reader

I believe that German education is more pragmatic than (for example) British. The Germans invented the polytechnic, designed to teach practical skills. The British converted most of their polytechnics to universities, to their detriment. They now have a bunch of low functioning universities and have lost all their trade schools.

View on HN

That used to be the idea. University used to be much more broad with students often being encouraged to join courses in other disciplines to broaden their knowledge. Then came the Bachelor/Master system and suddenly you had to take exams at the end of lectures, participation was tracked and you'd be failed with no recourse for missing more than twice, everything had to fit into the narrowly defined "modules" you had to pick from (if there was any choice at all) and it all just started feeling like a continuation from school rather than a genuine gateway to scientific expert knowledge. I hope things have improved but the university system is a lot more school-like compared to the free-for-all it was twenty years ago.

Meanwhile because of degree inflation trades for a long time had such a bad reputation they can't find any apprentices but also can't afford the lucrative wages and perks promised by international megacorps.

There's also a very strong cultural and class divide between the three tracks of "highschool", especially Gymnasium (the highest tier -- doesn't have anything to do with sports) and the other two as only the former allows you to graduate with an Abitur which allows you to study at a university (unless you want to take night school classes to earn the same qualification with more time and effort). It's kinda like public vs private schools, except less explicitly about wealth and heritage.

> I hope things have improved but the university system is a lot more school-like compared to the free-for-all it was twenty years ago.

I agree with this point, but all of the specific things you mention were already well in place twenty years ago (e.g. modular courses).

I formally enrolled in 2005/2006 and at the time these things were definitely not in place in the fields I studied. There were some mandatory introductory courses but even with those you usually had a wide range of options and one of the requirements for moving on was literally just N "weekly hours for a semester" in total of courses (primarily lectures) with no further restrictions. If it said 20 you could spend 20 hours by attending 10 lectures for a semester or spread it out over multiple semesters or you could take courses including courses from other faculties if they didn't have any restrictions on them (you'd only need to demonstrate attendance which was often not recorded for lectures so the only evidence necessary was having enrolled in it - until the BA/MA switch happened and lectures would only be considered if you had written an essay or passed and exam at the end of it, which nobody did).

I ended up dropping out for many reasons including the move to focus on self-employment but part of it was that I passed the deadline for graduating under the old system and that the switch meant a lot of my effort had been for naught as I would have had to write dozens of essays about lectures I attended over the years and the combination of courses I picked didn't neatly fit into the required modules.

I was also active in the department's student group so I got to see how they adapted to the new system and a lot of it was literally just rearranging the existing courses into modules based more on meeting formal structural requirements than actually developing a coherent lesson plan. I acknowledge that this is likely more of a quirk of the Magister studies than Diplom or Lehramt (for teaching professions) which always were more structured even before the transition.

I did a BA in the UK from 2003-2006 and it was modular, as was every other university I looked at judging by prospectuses.

I personally prefer the modular system. In the traditional system (in the UK at least) you were assessed by final exams with more or less fixed content, so you actually had less flexibility to study what you were interested in.

> the university system is a lot more school-like compared to the free-for-all it was twenty years ago.

Agreed… it is. This is a loss and a gain.

In the 1980s, as a foundation (19 yo) student of a certain London art school, I was taken to Hyde Park for ‘drawing lessons’ and given drug-laced cake by my lecturer, without my knowing. Student-staff sexual relationships were common and it was not unusual for lecturers to be absent the entire semester yet still be paid. Staff rollover was practically non-existent: a job was Ipso-facto a job for life, regardless of your performance. Pertinently, the program was pass/fail.

As a university lecturer, I now work in a credit-based system. Everything is accountable and the layers of administration have quadrupled.

Neither system is perfect. In the end, I believe that it is the faith and energy of those who deliver the system to be the deciding factor.

Ha! I went to a British polytechnic. There wasn’t a lot of very practical degrees ( there were some though), but there was a lot of hands on computer work in my Computer and Communications degree

It is strange on a resume listing a university I never technically went to, but now only Wikipedia remembers! And I was there before Thor destroyed it in a movie

Reply on news.ycombinator.com