From: exukjb@exu.ericsson.se (ken bell)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.bush,alt.politics.marrou,talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.elections,talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Jobs
Date: 5 Sep 92 22:57:28 GMT
Organization: Ericsson Network Systems, Inc.

In article <1992Sep4.052830.12554@midway.uchicago.edu> wag5@quads.uchicago.edu (john peter wagner) writes:
>From: wag5@quads.uchicago.edu (john peter wagner)
>Subject: Jobs
>Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 05:28:30 GMT


>        Hello. I have a question for you people employed in the private
>sector out there, or those who have been employed therein.
>        When you got your degree, assuming you got your degree, and assuming
>that degree was intended to prepare you for the job you are now in,
>would you say that that degree has fulfilled or been necessary in your
>ability to function properly, i.e., to do your work?  From my few
>experiences most of the people who go into the 'Real World' find that
>from what they learned in post-secondary education, only a very
>small amount or none is used.  In many cases the knowledge which is
>actually relevent to their work was never mentioned in college.
>        Obviously if your job is purely technical or research oriented
>the school experiences would give you at least the facilities to
>communicate with your co-workers to some degree.  However, businesses
>survive and grow by improvising, by finding niches and new solutions.
>Textbooks which are even months old can be lightyears behind current
>industrial goals.  The knowledge which one learns in college can thus
>very quickly render one obsolete, and thus dangerously unemployable,
>or at least the advantage of a degree lessens.
>        What if everyone were to go to college, and get degrees? Business
>would standardize its level of technical ability at the level of the
>graduating students; successful businesses would go further.  Through
>competition, schools would have to remain on the cutting edge of business
>methods.  And what if, like the formation of an ox-bow lake, that business
>'s market suddenly dries up?  Does the student's highly technical and
>involving degree suddenly mean nothing?  If everyone gets a degree,
>then it certainly seems like it would.
>        Clinton wants everyone to be able to go to college.  But this doesn't
>seem to  me like it would help the college graduate so much as hurt them,
>by dropping the value of having a degree.  And the advantages of a college
>education in business is truly dubious at best.  After all, the booming
>pre-depression and post-WW2 periods were created by people with even
>less governmentally sponsored education than is available today.  It
>was even conceivable for someone to go through a nice lifestyle
>without a high-school diploma.

>                                J. Wagner

Precisely, which is why it has often been claimed that what people need to 
enter the 'Real World', aside from some limited technical school training, 
is a liberal education [general skills in reading, writing, research, etc 
and knowledge of history, economics, and culture, etc] which enable 
them to perform and function well in many different situations in the 
workaday world. I have found that most employers prefer the more general 
education to the more narrow technical training, though both are needed in 
some jobs. Businesses can train people for limited technical or special 
jobs; they cannot train them to thinking independently and coherently, to 
write with skill, to do extensive and creative research, to communicate 
effectively and pursuasively, to read.
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Kenny Bell                          *        Welcome to Mind Wars
Ericsson Network Systems, Inc       *        ANTHEM BBS 386-7907
P.O. Box 833875                     *        Severity with oneself is heroism.
Richardson, TX 75083-3875           *        --A.G.Sertillanges (France, 1943)
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