Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to "I would suggest... shifting business courses to a vocational school..."

Call me elitist, but...
ER — (archived)

Law and medicine have a tradition of university training since medieval times, they deal with the science of bodily health and the arts of maintaining our freedom and public order: the law. Both of these disciplines involve accumulated principles and a continuous history going back for centuries.

If business needs accountants and other such specialists let them set up their own schools to train them, or allow entrepreneurs to set up private academies and compete in the market place by sellling their pedagogical services to those who wish to pay for them. This certainly makes sense in the case of accountants, who must be certified as knowledgable in the peculiar accounting practices and regulations of where they plan to work.

But there is no place in the university for nonsense like degrees in marketing, finanace, or business management. These activities are not trivial or evil, they are just not part of the accumulated and preserved knowledge of mankind the university is meant to propagate. They are technical specialties, not sciences or arts.

This is not something I've just made up. Up until about a century ago, and even today in many countries of the world, commercial training is carried out in separate business schools, just as artists are trained in art schools, musicians in conservatories and engineers in polytechnic institutes. Times change and there's no need to be dogmatic about this, especially in the case of engineers where the curriculum is now so science-intensive. But when universities start passing out graduate degrees in lunatic disciplines like real estate investment counseling and motel management, it is pretty clear that the university degree is rapidly becoming little more than just a resume item to give a career head start to people of, at best, questionable skills; and to give them the legitimacy and prestige a university degree implies. In my own field, they are now actually awarding MS degrees in Geographic Information Systems. That's not a science, that's a bloody software package. They should be able to read the manual and pick it up.

What's going to be next; carpenters, electricians? Joe Da Plumber U.?

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