Bachelor’s Degrees
In the united states, i discovered, you can get a 2nd bachelor’s degree, after your first, in just a year or two. They dont’ make you take a real full degree. You just have to take a couple new courses, and you can use all your old courses, which you graduated with, AGAIN. Why not just give someone 5 bachelor’s degrees the first time around if you’re giving them away without any work the 2nd time? The point of a bachelor’s degree is to spend 4 years working. Not to get a couple courses that teach you about german history, but to LAST for 4 years. a 2nd degree in under 4 years is cheating.
But what bothers me most in general right now about bachelor’s degrees is the fact that any useful bachelor’s degree is useless, and vice versa. Say you take diverse majors and minors. A major in ancient history, a minor in physics. You have diverse disciplines to draw from solving any problem you might face. Broad general knowledge to support you througout life. Why then can you not get an internship, at say, an archive. A library. If you dont’ spend 4 years, narrowly focused on Library Studies, you can’t get an internship at a big archive somewhere. Why not? The intern at an archive spends most of their time literally filing things, and labelling things. You learn the arvhive’s system during this internship, which then qualifies you to be employed there, or at another archive. Your degree doesnt’ qualify you, th einternship does. And the degree doesn’t qualify you to do the internship. It’s necessray to get it, but it doesn’t give you the skills. Those you learn on the job.
Take an internship at say, MTV. You need a 4 year degree in how to be a radio DJ or sell a tv pilot, from Ryerson, to stand in front of a crowd and tell them “when the applause sign goes on, you clap! let me hear you toronto!!!” Not only do the things you learn at ryerson not relate to this internship, but, they don’t apply to the career path that you might follow after the internship. The internship teaches you skills ON THE JOB, and you learn from what other people are doing, and get experience. You aren’t qualified to do shit in TV before this internship, and you’re not really qualified afterwards, but its a step towards the step towards the step that actualy teaches you how to do things.
Why do you need to spend 4 years sitting in a student radio station to get the internship, which requires no qualification to perform.
Why has society decided that you need to narrowly focus your education, thus making you a worse person, worse at your job, crippling your problem solving by obscuring your general knowledge and interdisciplinary bag of tricks, in order to do a job that is meant to lead to a job where a better education will help you. How does taking 4 years of Audio editing in any way qualify you more than taking 4 years of earth sciences?
When our parents were our age, they could walk in somewhere with a resume, which only proved that they could hold a job, and work hard at it, and get an entry level position. If they showed ability, they got promoted into junior positions, where they learned from senior people how to do the job. Not given much responsibility, but eventually, taking on the full job. This worked. The myth that life got so complicated that we needed to ensure that all people entering the job world had specific training is nonsense. Today an accountant goes to university for 4 years, then, when they graduate? they get an internship. They call it articling. Its an internship. They get an easy, low qualification, basic skills, junior position. They learn from the senior people, on the job, with little responsibility, gradually accumulating skills, and then finding a senior position somewhere. And this is one of the most highly technical jobs in our society. The 4 years of school are relevant in this case. Doctors, the same. Lawyers the same. But audience coordinators?
We need to return to the concept that a hardworking, motivated person, can learn ANY job. Can do ANY task. Provided some experience on the job. We now require the stunting of aperson’s general abilities and diversity, in order for them to get a menial job that our parents would hav ebeen able to get out of highschool, and probably do better at than we could.
One response so far
Here here. Agreed.