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February 24, 2006

Ethics and Education

I went in to talk to the graduate business school about the Architectural Management Track program this week, and the short summary is that I left the meeting deeply dissatisfied with the answers I got to my very specific questions about the level of actual architectural content in the program.

But that's not what I have been thinking about from that conversation. Instead, I keep thinking about a comment the associate dean made to me about "double counting": he alleges that credits received for one degree should not be used to count for credit for another. That doing so is, in fact, unethical. I think he's wrong, and I think the way that he is wrong is what is wrong with business education today.

Technorati Tags: school, teaching

A university basically has two goals in giving you a degree: to ensure that you are equipped with a well-rounded, generalist education in matters that will be important to you in unforeseen ways after you graduate, and to give you an in-depth technical education in your major and/or minor.

Society has a third, less noble goal in asking for college degrees: they want to see that you can sit in a seat and obey orders for long enough to get the credit necessary to graduate. That you are willing to go through the motions and give in to the rituals to get the paper. There is a value to this. I have seen it as a manager and coworker.

So if we take an example of a student who has gotten a bachelor's degree from one institution and applies for a second bachelor's at another, it is entirely in keeping with the goals of the second education institution to review the generalist education received at the first institution and decide that that goal has already been met. Similarly, it is often possible to get college credit for experience, by demonstrating competence in the field.

The associate dean suggested that those students should be required to take the same number of credits to get the second degree as the students who started as freshmen at the second institution. But does that really serve any of the goals mentioned here? If I had to take as many credits as other students, what purpose does that serve? I've already demonstrated my knowledge in generalist subjects to the satisfaction of the university. I've shown society that I am willing to sit in a seat and get my degree once, at a much more challenging academic institution, in fact.

For the second bachelors, I have to take at least 50 credits in residence. In order to keep from going insane, I need to take at least 16 credits a quarter, so I'm taking a lot more than that. Instead of taking random general education classes on new subjects (he was generous enough to suggest that second bachelors students could take general education classes in other subjects), I'm doing two minors, giving me a more technical education this time around, but then again, a technical education is what I'm here for. If I wanted to, I could go part-time and not do the two minors, and it would still take me as long to graduate because the studio program is lockstepped, anyway. If I were in a more flexible program, I could graduate faster, with the same basic requirements as first-bachelors students have met when they graduate. I think that serves the needs of the institution better than a random second general education.

Some business schools, the diploma mills places that just churn out MBAs regardless of the quality of the education they confer with the degree, think that doing the time gets you the paper. They don't look at the larger picture and the goals of the organization or or society as a whole. They just set up a bunch of arbitrary rules and make you go through them in order to get the degree. So the people they attract are inflexible and rules-oriented, and turn into pointy-haired bosses who crush all the creativity out of their employees. They basically only look at the butt-in-seat-time goal, which is one that shouldn't even be primary for them, and lose sight of the other goals of an educational instutition. That kind of education is worse than none at all, in my mind.

Then you have the good business schools. They look at a student's experience and try to build on it. They are able to tailor their program to expand on knowledge and give some in-depth knowledge in areas where the student can use it. They provide the generalist classes, they provide the in-depth knowledge, and they also give a certain amount of butt-in-seat time. All the goals are met, and the student gets a really high-quality education that doesn't teach them to be inflexible: it shows them that being goal-oriented gets good results.

At any rate, after my conversation with the associate dean, I decided Cal Poly's business school doesn't seem to have much to offer me. They're more interested in spitting students out as fast as possible than in giving in-depth education or interesting electives, and the main benefit the associate dean could come up with for me was that his program is cheaper than most. I don't think making the argument that a program is cheap to somebody who has a degree from Smith makes much sense, but in California they don't know what Smith is so I'll cut him some slack. I'd rather go to a school that has shown serious interest in developing my skills into something really great, and pay more. So hey, when I graduate in December next year, I will be done, and can go home!

Posted by ayse on 02/24/06 at 1:36 PM