ICYMI, about a week ago I tweeted the titles of various posts that had been languishing in my drafts, with whatever summary could be crammed into the remaining characters. Surprisingly, it wasn't very hard, which suggests a lot of these ideas didn't need a full-fledged post in the first place. (My thought was to start using my public Tumblr for these, but after that last update....)
However, there's a few that had something approaching an outline, and I'd like to archive those before deleting the posts from my drafts.
Daylight Savings Decentralization
One of my last false starts on a political post before I really began doubting the truth of non-aggression libertarianism. Relevant CGP Grey video.
Twice a year, the inhabitants of a certain nations set their clocks forward or backwards an hour, with the nominal intention of extending the minutes of daylight during the summer months.
Premise: DST not worth itUnbundling Higher Education
States control time zones
No state has incentive to switch stronger than incentive to stay
Failure of decentralization
This post was heavily influenced by my experience at Purdue University, where "research" and "undergraduate" were rarely heard in the same sentence. Everything in undergrad was geared towards training, not stretching the frontiers of what's possible--and the occasional grad student or post-doc had been there so long that it made me want to cry.
At the same time, I was learning a great deal about entrepreneurship, thanks to my attempt to earn their certificate in that field. In fact, one of our assignments was to devise a business model for the university.
What struck me was how much interest there was in money for research despite the fact I was already paying more than I could afford, and getting nothing out of research dollars. My thought was "how can we focus on making college cheaper," not "how can we milk the government research grant machine for all it's worth."
This gave me the idea to unbundle higher education. If college is about getting a degree, it should be about getting a degree. And if it's about discovering new things, it should be about discovering new things. And since those two field didn't overlap for the student, it made no sense for then to overlap for faculty (especially in the midst of a PhD glut).
Turns out Purdue is just crap--though they might be the first school to adopt equity student finance--and most colleges do mix training with research, which can help undergrads get jobs after leaving. I'd already realized this by the time I write the actually text below, but was still hedging. I'm archiving this, in part as a reminded that colleges don't have their business model figured out at all.
In the course of my college education, I've often wondered just why people spent so much time talking about research. As far as I could see, it was a distraction from the real purpose: learning a trade. In retrospect, this is a simplistic view, particularly in my chosen field of engineering. Research, design, and development have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship. Nevertheless, I think there is a case to be made for unbundling higher education.Frontiers and the nature of Morality
Our institutions of higher learning do not focus on a single core competency. That our colleges support athletic teams and offer academic degrees should be clear evidence of this. Just as no college devotes its entire athletic budget to a single sport, so too does the academic sphere split it's attentions. Though the variations are countless, the general divide (that we will consider, at least) is between research and training.
The "research university" was invented to meet two conflicting needs: to impart existing information, and to obtain new knowledge.
Introduction: where did the research university come from?
- Two conflicting needs: impart and obtain knowledge
- Manpower problem--insufficient number of people trained in technical fields
Why this model failed
- "Solution": have researchers teach basic concepts
- Research has become increasingly divorced from implementation
- Undergrads like me don't benefit from PhDs teaching introductory courses
21st Century Solution: separate training and research
- Students going into industry aren't properly prepared for company life
- Private research firms have existed for a long time: it's time for a renaissance
- Graduate schools + research institutes should be more separated from ugrad education
Conclusion: the future of higher education
- We have the manpower, let's focus on core competencies
- More technical world blurring boundaries between amateurs and professionals
- Training is more important than research for many careers
Notes
- Stop depriving both groups of their maximum capacity
- Pre-research ugrad vs training ugrad
- Professional glut
- Internet education options
- Model allows for specialization
- For-profit institutions (advantageous for researchers, who aren't relying on gov't $$$)
Consisted entirely of this quite by Rose Wilder Lane
“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”
