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Are college courses too focused? Too vocational? Even America’s best college students aren’t really so good at dealing with the hard questions that America’s leaders will face.
So writes Heather Wilson, former congressman from New Mexico (and Rhodes Scholar), in an editorial for the Washington Post:
An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president’s health-care bill but doesn’t really know why. A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn’t really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral. A young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year believes there are things worth dying for but doesn’t seem to have thought much about what is worth killing for. A student who wants to study comparative government doesn’t seem to know much about the important features and limitations of America’s Constitution.
The problem Wilson has found in selecting for the Rhodes Scholarship is that far too many American college students study too little.
They might study one subject in great depth but, as a result of what Wilson calls an “undergraduate specialization that would have been unthinkably narrow just a generation ago,” they don’t appear to know much about anything else.
These are bright students, very bright, and they’ve been very well prepared by studying everything their universities require of them. And yet, they still just don’t seem to be terribly well educated.
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Bob on January 27, 2011 2:17 PM:
I am in workforce development and this is an issue that comes up frequently. Employers are interested in credentials (BS, AS and Certificates) that are very specific to their field. It's often couched as wanting "real world" or "practical" training. Then they complain when applicants cannot write, speak well or employ critical thinking skills. One can have it all - just not quickly or cheaply.
I always thought the Newhouse School at my undergraduate alma mater, Syracuse University, did a pretty good job balancing a strong liberal arts core with the professional courses needed for my particular field of study (advertising). They prepared me well for my first job in advertising and all the non-advertising jobs that came later.
Bob