Posts Tagged ‘university’
What was your uni like?
Parties with casual yet dictatorial professors?
Most of us go to university and college and find something that looks like a lawless, unruly form of school where the lecturers and professors are the biggest outlaws. And so we go out into the world thinking of universities as schools with no business-imperative and no business-sense.
The business of universities
Nothing could be further from the truth. Universities are businesses, or enterprises; but with a business model that is so opaque, few people understand it, unless they have worked in one for quite a while. If you do business with universities, if you are in a knowledge business, if you have to hire graduates to get work done, you might like to read this brilliant description of university business models.
As greedy as bacteria
“As organisms in a system, universities evolve. They eat up smaller institutions to dominate a niche, or split of side campuses to enter new spaces. They relentlessly share their DNA, as Universities heads look over their shoulders and shamelessly copy the innovations of others. Universities fight for resources, funding, students among themselves, where a Society usually co-opts all of the resources in it’s zone of control and operates without competitive challenge.”
As disregarding as dinosaurs
As mutative as viruses
- Image by joolney via Flickr
Will your degree really take you where you want to be?
I’ve just read story in the TimesOnline about a mature student who returned to university and read psychology, very successfully, only to find that there are insufficient places for students to complete their professional qualifications.
I am sorry to hear this story. There is a breach-of-confidence here that shames us all. When students go to university, they accept in good faith our implied promises of progression within their degree and access to their chosen profession.
Very sadly, these promises are often made lightly. And quite often universities deliberately conceal the facts, if not by commission, then by omission. They quite consciously don’t collect information on student destinations, and they just as consciously don’t make these facts available. It is certainly time for regulators to insist that these facts are published on University websites and kept up-to-date!
Not only do I think publishing student pass rates and destinations should be mandatory. I think universities should loan fees to students and recover the loans themselves!
Caveat emptor
Until the day that regulations are tightened up, then I afraid it is a matter of caveat emptor, buyer beware. Students need to be wary of making large investments in services that have no warranty! Should they discover that the university’s promises are inflated, they will be able to recover neither their money nor, more importantly, their time.
Craft a life plan that is far bigger than uni and the professions
So what can students do to avoid this trap?
The advice from contemporary positive psychologists is this. Don’t plan your university studies around a specific job and employment route! Neither is guaranteed. Indeed, we have seen from the banking crisis that nothing in this world is guaranteed.
Rather, see your university education as a supplement to your life plan. Let me give you this example.
Young Nick Cochiarella from my village of Olney has already launched his first social network, SpeakLife while he is at college. He’s a hardworking guy and he also has a job at the local Coop. He is taking a slightly circuituous route doing technical training before he goes to university. But he is not waiting for anyone. It is true that his hard work still guarantees him nothing. But he is not deferring his dreams, and his university training supports, rather than defines, his life’s purpose.
But I need a job now!
It can be tough to start living our dreams. We often get into an enormous tangle.
The biggest distractor is the desperate belief that we will somehow be safe when we follow a road carved out by others. But it is not safe, as we have seen.
And even if it were safe, why do we think that other people’s dreams will be enough for us?
Wouldn’t it be better to have our own dreams and to work with others to find where we can temporarily work together to make the path easier and broader for both of us?
A plan big enough to include now
Ned Lawrence has been challenging me to refocus this site on the needs of the ordinary person – the person who lives these dilemmas.
What do you think?
Is it possible to make a plan that is big enough to include now?
Do you believe that the education system is better or worse than when you were at school?
Micheal Porter recently published a strategic plan for the recovery of the US economy. It applies equally to the UK economy. A key requirement is that our education system must get very much more rigorous and competitive.
We all like to criticize the educational system and claim that it is not what it once was. I think, in business subjects at least, our education system is BETTER than it was when we went through university. This is what we can expect of graduates
- Strategy. They will know who Micheal Porter is and rattle off his work on 5 competitive forces, define the supply-chain, and appreciate how international competitiveness rests on hyper-competitiveness at home.
- Management science. They will have done some management science and be able do some basic process modelling with diagrams and excel spreadsheets.
- Social media. They are likely to be able to set up, with relative ease, basic social media facilties like networks and blog and work effectively in companies like Best Buy who use internet-mediated collaboration extensively.
- Social constructionism. They are used to giving their opinions and are well schooled to accept there are many points-of-view to a single issue.
- Positive organizational scholarship. They are increasingly exposed to the idea that ideas emerge from the group or situation and are not dependent on an all-powerful, all-knowing “boss”.
Is this enough though?
While I believe that our education system has got better, is it enough? There are three areas that worry me about what our students learn.
- General knowledge including knowledge of science. Students, reasonably in my opinion, are most interested in material that seem relevant to what they want to do in life. Adolescents and young adults, won’t settle until we recognise their unique identity. Nonetheless, how can any student in an educational system in 2008 not know of the CERN accelerator, the Obama election and the credit crunch? That is the modern day equivalent of switching off the radio as Armstrong landed on the moon, when Martin Luther King spoke and or Sam Miller sold Trademe for 200 million pounds (you didn’t know that one!) We need to be able pick up events of the day and bring them into our courses and to do that, teachers need time to follow events and time to redesign their classes.
- Time spent on cutting edge ideas. In seeming contradiction of the first point, students have a limited number of hours in their day and our textbooks are often old. It is bizzare to be teaching them procedures that are no longer used. Having said that, why don’t we have an interactive museum that teaches them the history of work and business? Is it not reasonable that any examing authority, including every university, review its curriculum annually and account for what is taken out and put in? I believe these curricula should be public and available for any one to inspect and comment on the internet.
- Quantitative skills. When we were students we studied statistics but only a small percentage of students can actually use the skills they were taught. Workers on the Toyota assembly line use means, standard deviations and t-tests as part of their daily work. Herein lies the call for more rigour in our education system. We must use the skills we teach and if we think it is beyond us, we need to convey deep respect for those who do.
So those are my three issues, none of which are so difficult to implement. They require no capital and no retraining – just leadership.
My optimistic view of the future
As we move towards networked organizations such as we see at Boeing and Best Buy, our graduates will be mapping out complex supply networks, resolving performance problems at source using sophisticated analyses, and proposing solutions to diverse audiences all of whom are experts in their own right. Students do get this experience working on non-educational projects on the internet. It is time for us to bring this activity into the classroom too.
I am generally optimistic. My expectation is that within a year or so, graduates will be routinely presenting a portfolio of work on the internet. Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, London based interaction designer is an example. Daryl Tay, young Singaporean social media evangelist, is another. Students might also show off wikis and multimedia project via links or pages.
I think the young people of today are up to it and it is they who might drive the development of more rigorous education!
So what is your view? Do you believe that our education system is better than in your day, and what are the key issues that need to be addressed to “allow our workers to compete with workers anywhere in the world”?
flowing motion 
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