Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Two questions about American colleges:
What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.
Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?
I'm not American but eh
Uhhh the most obvious one, give students the skills to work in the profession they are getting a degree for? It's like we all just bought the gaslighting of "oh no colleges are actually just for learning how to learn, you will actually learn on the job".. well then change the way colleges work until you learn in college! 4 years and a lot of money should not leave you with "learning how to learn".
Maybe I have a tech bias here, but it is astounding just how useless the average CS graduate is at any software engineering work. Some (most) of them can't even... code ! Similarly for most other professions. I understand no institution can probably impart those skills to most people, and IQ probably isn't the only limiting factor, but they should be honest about this.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
Based on my moral values, the only two things that matter for morality is consent and age of majority, doesn't matter if the man is a 50 year old business mogul billionaire and the girl is a 19 year old heroin junkie living in the streets.
However, that which is moral doesn't tell you that which is optimal or conductive to producing happiness for individuals and society.
Well that's the whole damn problem, isn't it? You want someone who went to school for Computer Science, which tends to be mostly theoretical, to have training in the most practical and tangentially related sub-field. Why should they?
I'd argue job training is a role universities are uniquely not well-suited to fill, given the glacial pace of curriculum change, and other structural handicaps, like tenured hedgehog dens.
Why throw up our Pepe hands and pretend this is an unsolvable problem?
You are telling me no college out there knows that students are enrolling into their CS programs for cushy tech jobs and not to learn about automata theory..... Hell, you are telling me no student or worse, no employer knows this?
The problem goes back to Griggs vs Duke Power and related employment law cases.
Universities are the only ones who can do respected credentialization because any system will inevitably have a racially disparate result and universities are the only institution that judges respect too much to destroy for producing a "racist" result.
Any other system you try to set up is living on borrowed time until the judiciary decides to whack it.
This isn’t true; the military, certain unions, and even many private companies get away with racist results all the time.
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