It's exam time at universities all over North America. Worried students are cramming so that they can replay what they have been taught this semester. Most hope to get a good mark but does this really mean much? Are most students wasting their time? Are they wasting their investment in themselves and are we as a nation, who subsidise them, wasting our larger investment?
Tom Friedman asked this provocative question in today's Times -
Ask yourself this: If the Iraq war had not dominated our politics, what would our last election have been about? It would have been about this question: Why should any employer anywhere in the world pay Americans to do highly skilled work — if other people, just as well educated, are available in less developed countries for half our wages?
If we can’t answer this question, in an age when more and more routine work can be digitized, automated or offshored, including white-collar work, “it is hard to see how, over time, we are going to be able to maintain our standard of living,” says Marc Tucker, who heads the National Center on Education and the Economy.
There is only one right answer to that question: In a globally integrated economy, our workers will get paid a premium only if they or their firms offer a uniquely innovative product or service, which demands a skilled and creative labor force to conceive, design, market and manufacture — and a labor force that is constantly able to keep learning. We can’t go on lagging other major economies in every math/science/reading test and every ranking of Internet penetration and think that we’re going to field a work force able to command premium wages. Freedom, without rigor and competence, will take us only so far.
China and India each graduate more than 2 million a year - what is your BA going to get you? This is your question as a student or a parent. Merely getting a degree as we currently deliver them will not get you or your country a return on your investment.
What is the essence of an education that will prepare you for the world that is really unfolding when compared to the stable world that was? It surely cannot be the superficial regurgitation of your current course work.
