Universities right now are trying to do too much and too little at the same time. The school says “we don’t have sufficient staff to interact with students doing projects” but at the same time does not use the Internet to (1) outsource grading to a neutral third party, and (2) bring in alumni to assist.

I believe MIT started as a very practical-oriented institution, with students spending most of their time learning by doing in the labs. Over time, however, the lecture system became more appealing.

The Olin school of engineering does have a good model. It’d be good to see a larger university adopt it too.

Regardless what you hope, most women devote a large part of their energy to raising children. So universities are spending most of their money and effort educating people who will not fully use their education in their work. I am NOT opposed to women attending universities but the universities are not educating men. And as you mention in your essay, the level of education has a major effect on the country.

So any discussion of universities and education has to address this problem.

I suppose the question is, how do we get there from here? The fact that Neumont exists is hopeful, and perhaps means that the market will take care of this in time. When the graduates from your programme and the re-engineered schools get into the position of making hiring decisions, things should start to change.

An employee gets paid every month. A student “gets paid” with a degree, and this happens only after completing several years of education. Therefore employee can terminate his job ar any time, but student is totally at the discretion of the university for several years. More precisely, at the discretion of the professors.

To fire an employee, something must go really wrong and there should real evidence to employee’s misperformance. However, nothing prevents a university professor for course A to set much higher passing standards for his course than other professors, and to fail as many students as he likes during exams.

If there is a bizarrely unfair/counterproductive person in a company, he will usually get fired sooner or later. However, a bizarre/unproductive professor may spend many happy a semester in the university.

One thing is the choice of courses. In the Eastern Europe where I’m from, we don’t have any much choice. I remember when I studied CS, half of the study program was math subjects, like “equations of mathematical physics”, for instance.

As another commenter aptly put it, most professors think that they are “preparing students for life”, not for a job. Therefore they decide what you “need to know”, and a lot of obscure but “necessary” knowledge is getting taught. This gets especially cumbersome if you are getting a second education. Here, if you want a secong education, you have to enter undergraduate school again from the start. And professors start preparing you “for life” once more.

An important theme to me is relationship between memory and knowledge, as understood by university system, and actual skills and proficiency. I myself am a quick learner, but I forget things just as quickly. Therefore I usually get good marks on exams. But maybe a better measure of my profiency would be to ask those same exam questions after a year or two, without chance of prior preparation? I know as well that there are many people who are slow learners but with a better long-term memory. They have hard times passing the exams and are not favoured by university system. But later you discover that they are the ones that actually remember something of that material after several years. What you learn in university is the ability to absorb a lot of information superficially during a couple of days before the exam, and throw it out of your head afterwards. And rightfully so, because I never needed “mathematical physics equations” in my work, neither did 100% of my coursemates, I guess.

I don’t quite agree with distant learning. The direct lecture has some behefits, it is again memory – we may remember something better if this memory is anchored to some feeling, to the tone of the professors speech or to his personality. After some years, I may remember some things from my courses just because I remember the way professor said them. This never happens with Wikipedia.

I totally agree on the idea to make office-like environment for students to collaborate, university as a workplace. Right now, my education is crippled – I only sit passively through lectures in the university, and do all my work at home, alone and without feedback. Then deliver the work at the university and get grades, university acts as a grading machine.

I have two personal experiences on the matter. In junior high, my teachers believed in group work, so we were split in groups to do whatever task assigned and got a mark for it. Groups always worked on the lines of lazier students piggybacking on more motivated ones (I would just say from the start I’d do 100% of the work — my mates would get my exact mark — on condition that they got out of the way and let me work without having to explain stuff to them). Not the best way of getting weaker students to catch up.

At Uni (Bologna, btw) we would often study in groups, and that was very beneficial because everyone pulled their weight as much as they could — but we got no marks from that effort and we were all individually examined at the end of the year. Just a thought.

It may be sad to say, but most “professional organizations” I’ve been around ignore these rules. Or to be more precise, the manager doesn’t know such “rules” exist in the first place. (Maybe that’s why software projects have such a high failure rate?) There’s never enough time to write, much less discuss a spec. To these guys, if a programmer isn’t typing code into an IDE, she’s not working!

That said, your plan is definitely on the right path. Let’s just hope that when your graduates start working, they don’t have manager asking why they’re wasting time getting precise requirements…