What's Wrong With University

Jeff Rybak

Description

Students invest a lot of time and money in a university education but all too often don't get what they came for. This book addresses the most pressing concerns for undergraduate students and helps them cope with the university system. The author illustrates that a university has five distinct functions, which are often in conflict with eachother. This guide explains how a university really works and provides advice on how all students can get what they most want from the university experience.

Sujets

• Education

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554902323
• Langue: English

Extrait

What's Wrong With University

What's WrongWith University
and how to make it work for you anyway
Jeff Rybak

Imprint
Copyright � Jeff Rybak, 2007
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process--electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise-- without the prior written permission of Jeff Rybak and ecw press.
Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rybak, Jeff
What's wrong with university: and how to make it work for you anyway / Jeff Rybak.
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn-13: 978-1-55022-776-5
isbn-10: 1-55022-776-9
1. College student orientation--Canada. 2. Education, Higher--Aims and
objectives--Canada. 3. Universities and colleges--Canada. i. Title.
lb2343.3.r92 2007 378.1'980971 c2006-906800-3
Interior and back cover illustrations: Evan Munday
Cover photo: A. Huber/U. Starke/Corbis
Author photo: Kevin Wong
Editor: Emily Schultz
Development and typesetting: David Caron
This book is set in Sabon, designed by Jan Tschichold in 1964. The chapter headings are in Sackers Gothic, created by the Monotype Design Studio. The sub-headings are in Franklin Gothic, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1902, and redrawn by Victor Caruso in 1980.
The publication of What's Wrong With University has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
distribution
United States: IPG, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610
First printing, 2007

INTRODUCTION
When I entered university in 2002, one of the first things I noticed was that a whole lot of students were disappointed. This may seem like an obvious observation, but I think it's one of the most significant facts about university today. Ask the average undergraduate if the experience is living up to his or her expectations. I'm sure some students out there are satisfied but I'm also willing to wager the great majority of them are not.
At first, I spent a lot of time ranting about various things that annoyed me and seemed absurd, or inadequate, or disappointing about university. Many students agreed with me and had frustrations and complaints of their own. But any time we tried to nail the problems down to concrete issues, we always found the discussion coming to an impasse simply because it was too vast. No matter what the initial subject happened to be -- whether skyrocketing tuition, ballooning class size or the dumbing down of course content -- if followed far enough the discussion would tend into abstract points and vague assertions about things that none of us really knew anything about. And so eventually, as with most issues that seem too vast or too complicated to grapple with, the discussions would always end with the defeated feeling that "that's just the way things are."
Let's say a student is upset by larger and larger class sizes that seem to have a negative effect on the quality of education. She might see reduced government funding as one cause. Then there's rising enrollment as more and more students continue to post-secondary education. Behind rising enrollment is the modern job market that seems to demand post-secondary degrees for even entry-level white-collar jobs. Along with rising enrollment comes the fact that universities are serving a "client base" unlike that which they served in the past. Behind government funding is a question of social spending priorities. And, well, by now our hypothetical student is probably sick of the question since there seem to be no clear answers. Her classes may be huge and over-enrolled but that's just the way it is. So she goes to class and makes the best of it, but not without a certain sense of frustration and a feeling of having been wronged in some indefinite way, of being cheated.
This book is intended to help undergraduate students in Canada, or those about to become undergraduate students, to cope with and get the most out of university. This book might also be of interest to those who care about students and prospective students, such as parents and educators, and also employers, and the government and ... well, let's face it, education is an important force in our society and it affects just about everyone. Quality education is still possible -- and probably possible under the worst of circumstances -- it's just a question of how hard you have to work to get it. My goal is to help students identify what they want out of university and then show them how they can best meet those objectives.
There are institutional problems with university today -- problems that can't be entirely overcome simply through positive thinking or good advice. But the feelings of frustration that students experience, and the sense of being cheated, are problems by themselves. I'll talk quite a bit about the macro-level problems because I want to identify and explain them. It's hard to get the most out of university if you are constantly feeling let down by it. Even understanding things a little better can be a kind of solution. But this isn't a book about institutional reform. Change is needed and may come, in time, but it isn't going to happen overnight. Every September, a new class of students enters university and has to cope with the current reality, not the long-term vision. This book is for them.
When I set out to explain the problems at university, I ran into a serious roadblock. Even the students who are most unhappy don't agree with one another. Many feel that university education should be about exploring areas of interest, personal growth, and intellectual inquiry. Others feel that education should be about job skills and training. So already there's one major split among students over the question of practicality. Both groups of students are frequently unhappy, but for entirely different reasons. I can't claim, and be fair to everyone's feelings, that university education is either too practical or not practical enough. And I don't want to make either claim anyway. What I want is to get at the root cause of why both groups are unhappy.
What is the source of this growing dissatisfaction with the university experience as a whole? To answer this question, I need to get at some root cause that embraces both the frustration felt by the student who wants to learn a profession and wishes for a more practical education, and the unhappiness felt by the student in the same class who wants a more generalist, abstract education. I must address the needs of the student who just wants time to figure things out without going broke in the process, and the next student at the same institution who knows exactly what kind of education he requires and is willing to pay whatever it takes to get it. For a time, this seemed to be an irresolvable contradiction, but in hindsight the answer is obvious, even self-evident. After all, how can we agree in one breath that we don't want the same things yet we all expect to get what we want from the same institution? That does seem a little strange, doesn't it?
University means so many different things to so many people that we sometimes imagine we are all talking about the same thing when we aren't. It isn't just a matter of the buildings or the instructors or the students all gathered together in the same place. What is the purpose of this thing called university? What's it doing? When we say we aren't happy with our experiences at university, that's another way of saying we think the institution isn't performing its function very well on our behalf. But did we even agree in the first place on what that function is or should be?
So the first order of business, in Chapter One, is an overview of everything I believe university does. There are two ways to divide university into smaller components so we can talk about them separately. One way is to discuss university in terms of the functions it performs. The institution does a surprising number of things that quickly seem, when isolated, to be not very complementary to one another. The other way is to think of university in terms of the people who participate in it, and group them according to their goals and reasons for being there. These two systems interact freely because if university performs a variety of functions, and if people participate in university for a variety of reasons, most reasons can be aligned with one or more of the functions.
One more quick example. University provides accreditation, which is to say it provides degrees that certify what a particular graduate is presumed to have learned. It also provides education, which is to say it imparts knowledge. These two things are absolutely not the same. It must be obvious that a person can get a degree without learning much and can learn without getting a degree. So these are two broad things that university does. And many students who attend university immediately relate to one function or the other. Some students are there quite clearly to get their degrees (and some want the degree regardless of whether or not it represents any real education), while others are there simply to learn. Both these ways of thinking about university are useful and should help us come to grips with a topic that is otherwise so vast it seems impossible to even talk about.
It's entirely possible that one group of students who attend university looking for one thing will find themselves at cross purposes with another group of students