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Doug's avatar

Great essay Paul, thanks for your insights.

The sad part is those folks with two left feet graduate and, occasionally, join the work force. Having managed and been managed by some of their finest, I’ve detected a common denominator: avoidance. Not just your ordinary garden variety avoidances: social interaction, work, accountability, planning, etc. They avoid (perhaps unaware of) critical thinking. The only “outside the box” they know is the area around their Amazon shipment. AI-based edtech won’t be the panacea; more than likely, it will deepen the chasm between the Fred Astaires and the Alfred E. Newmans.

Bechem Ayuk recently observed on his Substack column, The Value Junction, “Creativity is not a destination, but an ongoing mindset.” The entire article is titled, “Taking Einstein for a Walk.” He is based in Cameroon and exemplifies what the post-secondary machine should produce.

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Harry's avatar

Back in 1969, when I first went to University as an undergraduate, the main reasons for going seemed to be to get laid and smoke dope. Just saying. And that was before they had all the fake “Studies” programs. Back then, folks would finish a 3 yr degree in Soc. & Phil. or something, and go, “OMG, what’ll I do now, drive a cab?” (Barista not having been invented yet as a career choice), and then decide one more year at OCE, and presto, without having any particular interest in or vocation for it, they were now teachers, with summers off, good pensions and union protection. Which helps explain why when your kids today go to Uni, they have to take remedial math and reading classes. In 1979, I went back to university to get an mba, which, at the time, was basically a2yr cram course in a lot of basic business topics. You took accounting, but nothing like someone in a B. Commerce program. You took economics, but nothing like in an economics major. Some industrial optimization and project management, but orders of magnitude below what a first year industrial engineering student would take. Roughly half the class were people who had just graduated with that 3 yr Soc & Phil or French Lit degree and instead of teacher’s college, thought, without having any particular interest in or affinity for business, I’ll just get an mba and will be my ticket to the corporate fast track and a Beemer in the driveway. I think a lot of them became DIE counsellors.

Nowadays, they teach a lot of DIE crap in B school, and charge about ten times more in tuition.

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