This is an edited version of a letter I planned to send to my accounting 201 instructor. It was in response to the suggestion that I write a custom spreadsheet entry for an accounting problem. Now we’re trained to think something like this is reasonable, but it absolutely is not.
Here’s the letter which explains why.
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I have to say, this trend is growing absurd.
I am not going to write a custom spread sheet for each and every problem and hope my spreadsheet skill matches my conceptual understanding. That is simply an unacceptable duplication of effort given that I have a finite life span. I will not effectively learn to churn butter by hand simply to help limit the number of butter manufacturers and protect the profit margin of the butter churning industry.
This argument is applying ever more widely in academic settings and the reasons are clear. The distance between education and actual use is being increased to artificially to suppress the number of graduates simply to perpetuate the value of degrees. (http://nplusonemag.com/bad-education) Value which is dropping partly as a result of technology making problems exponentially easier to solve with available tools. (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html)
I grow very weary of all forms of research and automation being ever more regarded as either classified or plagiarism, (http://motherboard.tv/2011/4/25/lessig-copyright-isn-t-just-hurting-creativity-it-s-killing-science-video–2) thus rendering every question necessarily deceptive.
If the point is simply to buy an entrance card to a given industry and limit the number of graduates to keep the sale price of said entrance card high, then trusting in apprenticeship, internship, and on the job training to provide actual practical understanding, then I’d rather simply be randomly selected and call my tuition fee a lottery ticket. Either that or actually cheat as best I can to offset the massive waste of time since clearly learning the way these things are actually handled is not the point.
In the context of accounting, someone somewhere has written a series of spreadsheets or the like that require little more than accurate starting figures to produce these answers. We as accounting students should be provided these tools, for the same reason culinary students get a stove and a timer instead of being expected to build a fire and a sundial.
This is not a math or a computer course, and yet I am either expected to do all this math in my head or I am expected to write custom software. Given the price I paid for the text and the course itself I think it’s completely reasonable to expect software to come with it, after all, if writing the text was sufficiently complex and difficult to justify the price then why not spend that effort on software instead? Because obviously this presents a problem, if they made such an app they would sell it separately, and not to students, for the reasons summarized above.
Basically if the app were useful only to students you’d have to admit the distance between education and reality, which would cast doubt on the value of education, or if it were useful to both students and professionals then again the value of the course is undermined because good software is intuitive and user friendly, and doesn’t require weeks of training to use, especially on something as mathematically simple as accounting. (It’s not exactly protein folding or weather models.)
Making the software hard to use, prohibitively expensive, or impossible to obtain is obviously a profit protection measure, and thus my obligation to learn to do all this on clay tablets is completely unjustifiable from an educational (as in the conveyance of useful and relevant knowledge, not the industry’s needs) standpoint.
Google is thick with free spreadsheets and software to do actual accounting problems, but it seems none of them are of any use in an academic setting, and that is deeply disturbing. The questions are structured to be outside the scope of the available industry applications, which by definition makes the value of the education in terms of practicality approach zero.
As the net and software get better at answering questions in a useful way, or put another way, better at giving technical answers to plain language questions (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), college questions must grow ever more deceptive and unfair lest everyone with access to the Internet actually pass college.
As society grows more adept at conveying knowledge, as college gets better at educating people, (assuming that’s its true purpose) the value of its product (the degree) will approach zero as educational skill ensures more and more graduates as a result of ever more effective tools for imparting knowledge.
In reality, people have access to the Internet to solve problems. As the Internet grows ever more sophisticated and available (via smart phones for example) the ability for college to trick people will diminish. Either they will arbitrarily deny student access to the tools which will be universally available in the real world, which will come ever closer to forcing college to admit it’s real purpose is not about training or conveying a useful skill but about orchestrating what is in effect a giant ponzi scheme, or they must invent ever more clever ways of complicating the various questions such that the Internet will be unable to answer them.
This trend is actually detectable to me. I remember my first year of college and it is radically different from my current experience. This is not I stress due to scaling of difficulty or a lack of intelligence or work ethic on my part as a result of more advanced subject matter, it is a direct result of the education industry being forced to obfuscate data or risk obsolescence.
Basically technology is making everything easier, and technology is growing ever more available, and thus school is forced to make things harder or deny access to technology. Thing is, technology is growing faster than college’s ability to defeat it at the student level, and the justifications for denial are growing ever more openly ridiculous and thus unusable.
Example: As a child I was instructed to use multiplication tables because calculators may not be at hand. How absurd was that argument after taking a look at today’s world? There are 4 of them within 3 feet of me right now.
As a result I am growing excessively frustrated at being repeatedly thwarted in some kind of perverse effort to trick me into failure merely to protect the industry’s profit margin and convince me in the doing that it’s somehow a personal flaw of mine for having been the victim of this scam. I fear this will be my last college course if this trend continues.
When I did my half year in the accounting field I didn’t once have to do anything even approaching what I’m being taught in the course.
There is a massive conflict of interest when expressing this to faculty and staff since it is their job, and as agents of the education industry I expect massive bias, or if they are primarily a professional who teaches on the side I would expect bias on the front that obfuscation and keeping the number of similar professionals low, or engaging in a public relations effort to make their jobs appear more difficult, directly and indirectly benefits all existing members. So I don’t expect them to agree with me, and if they did I wouldn’t expect them to admit it, thus I am not interested in a debate with them on these subjects (though I am not afraid to have it), because it’s not part of their job, it’s not personally their fault for the most part, and they individually lack the power to change it (which I learned during my time as body president, watching board members including myself slowly lose idealism in the face of academic, political, and fiscal reality).
After all, my dad works in education, I know for a fact many of them are great people.
When these issues were shared with my economics instructor, he responded with a glib dismissal implying that that if education didn’t ensure a high percentage of failures, by any means necessary, society would collapse for want of menial laborers. The question was why does every degree require math credits and why are those courses designed to prevent the use of technology. Well the answer in this context is obvious. Math’s unique subject matter is by definition extremely difficult to obfuscate as it is an abstraction expressly designed to simplify an understanding of reality, and it is also easy to automate, so the conflicts explained above press most firmly on the math instruction field. Math class is a window into the the future of college in the face of exponential technology growth.
That should terrify everyone.
As mentioned above, in a rare moment of cynical candor my instructor said of course the point is to make a certain percentage fail, because and I quote “society needs janitors.” He also borderline cheats via creative application of context to artificially inflate his perceived educational skill, and he is rewarded overtly and regualrly for this effort.
How this cheat is done involves measuring student improvement via two identical tests one given at the beginning of the course and one given at the end. The difference in score presumably measures the skill of the educator. He was always winning awards for exceptionally high averages.
But of course those people didn’t see how this was accomplished. What he would do is give the first test at the end of the first day, and say that the test did not count for a grade and you could leave when you’re done. Naturally people blew through it disregarding a total fail. The second one he gave as extra credit prior to and on the day of the final. Forcing people to concentrate and spend a fixed amount of time on it. By weighting the ends in this way he always got a huge difference without technically cheating.
I share that simply to express the kind of mind that fails to see a problem with these facts(and the kind of behavior that is rewarded in academic circles).
I’m starting to remember why I declined to run for a second term (one of my senators ran unopposed after me, my reelection would have been a forgone conclusion) and why I feel disgust every time I walk past my school.
It’s 2011. The 21st century. We manufacture synthetic life forms, patent genetic codes, build computers that beat the very best humans at jeopardy and chess, exponentially expand virtually every aspect of our knowledge of the universe, and yet, from education’s perspective I’m apparently supposed to live and train like the Amish/Taliban/Ted Kaczynski, doing everything from memory by candle light and abacus.
Screw that.
I’d rather fail if the price of success is my integrity or my intelligence.
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” ~Frank Zappa
Update: http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/college-education-2011-5/
To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam—college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”
And…
In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy—hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.
And…
On the one hand, a college education will likely saddle them with crippling debt and consign them to four underwhelming years in classrooms with fluorescent lighting and drop-tile ceilings. On the other hand, opting out will likely consign them to a lifetime of unsatisfying, low-wage employment. What’s an average kid to do?
As an answer I share a quote that should serve as warning to the 1% bent on wrecking the lives of those average children.
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ~H.L. Mencken