Why Colleges Need Curriculum Reform…
I’ve been thinking a great deal about this topic lately, and this news story on Yahoo re-enforces something that’s been bugging me very much lately. I’ve been thinking about it a great deal more vis-a-vis my own field, music, but I’m sure this topic has great inter-disciplinary impact.
I hold three degrees, all in double bass, all in music performance, including a terminal degree. My college experience runs the gamut (music joke…get it? See, this is the sort of thing Frank Zappa warned us about) from very small regional school to conservatory back to large state flagship school. And I can say with some conviction my degrees are a) somewhat useless, and at best, only indirectly useful, b) two of the schools I went had no idea how to prepare their graduates for a career in music, and one actually didn’t think it their job, and c) the one school that did address the topic addressed it thus: practice your ass off, take tons of auditions, win a job, profit.
Too bad there’s only one teeny flaw in that cunning plan (creationists, we’re still talking about point c): A large Conservatory, as this one was/is, will turn out more graduates than there are positions annually…alone Never mind what happens when you add EVERY music school together.
Music schools like to boast that 85% of graduates get a job in music…if you add the pesky paramters of “in thier field, doing what they studied to do”, the number falls to a paltry 5%.
I’m in the 85%…I have a job in music, and no money goes into the bank that music did not directly earn. But I’m doing something that I did not train to do, had zero interest in when I was a student, and had no idea how to go about exploring this field as a career option (No, I wasn’t lucky. I’m editing for time).
Part of this is student perspective: Americans equate what we do, vocationally speaking, with who we are. Yeah, not so much. And I’m not suggesting that students have no accountability here: I did and do know a great deal about how to work in music, but I learned most of it by interrogating poor faculty members in hall ways and in offices, not in class, which is sort of my point.
College was always sold to me growing up as this essential thing that I would need to “make it” or “get ahead”, whatever that means. As it turned out, I could have just taken all the money I spent, lived in Paris and New York for 10 years, and begged Francois Rabbath and Eugene Levinson to teach me everything they could. I’d have no degree and no spiff prefix, but the knowledge would be the same, that is, the answer to the question: how in the hell DOES one play the double bass anyway?
I’m not suggesting I got nothing out of my college experience, and I think if you DO go to college, you should know what you’re getting into, and I think colleges should do a better job of informing students of what that entails. Over the next few days, I may explore this topic in detail. But I can tell you, working in education (no, I’m not a public or private school teacher), answers in education are rarely very simple or direct. If they were, NCLB would sort of work.
December 4, 2008 at 1:44 pm
I have used almost nothing of the actual school learning that I got from college in any of the work I have done since I graduated. Which is not to say it wasn’t all interesting stuff, I just haven’t USED most of it.
The friendships I made and the person I became while I was in college, on the other hand, are worth everything to me.
cheers,
Phil
December 5, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Phil, I agree with just about everything you said (I’ve actually used my skills, just in different ways than I anticipated). My point is this: I had a professor once say, in all seriousness, that “Our job is to teach the art of music. We’re not a vocational school, and it is not our job to see that you get a job”.
I thought and still think that was a revealing, horrible sentiment. And I think it speaks volumes about why the arts have difficulty in the US. So, my question is this: Can it be both? That is, can’t a university preserve the “art” of whatever they teach and still turn out qualified graduates, ready to work in their chosen field? If not, why not? And I also think tuition needs to be addressed, if colleges really feel that the success of their graduates is indeed “not their job”.
December 7, 2008 at 1:35 am
There is something wrong with the college system. When people get a four year degree, they are essentially being prepared for more school; they are being briefly shown what an academic job in that field would be like… unfortunately, very, very few people will actually go into that academic profession, and college professors and students openly admit that the undergraduate degree will very likely not get them a job in that field in the future. So… why go to college? I think its a form of classism. Once you get a degree, you are in the upper middle class club. As far as I can tell, the people who graduate college are (more often than not) only graduating because their parents have enough money to keep sending them to college, for however long it takes, no matter how they screw up, until they get a degree. That’s not true of all people, there are some really motivated people that make it through, and some motivated people that don’t (often because of money). Anyway, getting back to the point. I think what a college degree is selling is really a set of class-oriented values. It says, above all else, “hey, I am willing to do stupid, pointless bullshit to make sure I am in a club. I can do the minimal amount of work to get through something that lasts four years, and if I screw up in the future, its totally cool, because my family is loaded.” There is a lot more I can say, but I’ll stop here…
December 8, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I think class is involved, but also greed, to be frank. It is hard to sell Phil’s very apt and important “life experience” to anyone (especially anyone WE know?:), so we have to resort to something else. I’m not calling for colleges to be graded on how well they get their graduates jobs, because we all see what a bang up job that position did with NCLB.
I just think there is a disconnect with curriculum and reality. And with increasingly unlimited ways to pay for it all, the situation gets worse. I think it no accident that about the time states started paying tuition, diplomas “became impossible to earn in 4 years”.
I could go on, and I will. Nice to see you weighing in; you were the inspiration for this post.