A follow-up on the role of universities

I thought I'd follow-up on a previous post on university before moving on to other topics.

There have been a few recent articles about the value of education. Paul Krugman wrote an article claiming that there is increasing danger of outsourcing even jobs requiring education if they can be easily done by computer or for cheaper overseas. A recent podcast on Onpoint , also started to question the wisdom of "College for all". Here one of the commenters suggested that in fact the difference between the stable jobs and those that face bleaker prospects, was the degree to which the job was "offshorable".

It's something I've thought about as well in terms of the push within the culture towards getting higher and higher levels of university education.

The data on this is interesting, as the "gap" that Canada faces is in getting people to pursue Phds, and also in business education. There is some data that compares business managers in Canada to those in the U.S and shows that they are less educated in general and much less likely to have an MBA. This is the empirical basis for the Canadian government's decision to focus expanded funding on business education in a recent budget.

The other interesting thing revealed in the data is that the Quebec system of Cegeps makes data comparison difficult. Cegeps count as post secondary education which they may or may not be, but pump Canada's statistics , and making it difficult to evaluate the claim that Canada has the highest level of post-secondary education in the world.

There is a deeper issue around university education. It comes down to the role of the University and there are competing understanding of it. To some extent people view it as an elitist activity, and this is driving concerns about bringing that kind of education to the masses. You won't hear many explicitly make this argument but it is hidden underneath concerns about quality and about the dumbing down of the university.

An additional concern is whether the role of the University is to train people for jobs or whether it is to educate and create citizens. These are completely opposing views and proponents offer very different perspectives. On the training side, they push the current model of supporting extensive (and expensive) business schools, engineering schools and focusing on research. On the other side, you have those who want to focus on the humanities, basic science research and a focus on teaching. It isn't clear how to reconcile these two models. Perhaps there is no need to reconcile them, but perhaps change the balance.

I think the answer is to reinforce technical training outside the university while maintaining the role of universities in more of the humanities / basic science areas. This would allow technical colleges to be more entrepreneurial and attract private funds and work with industry while avoiding some of the dangers that corporate influence could have in a more academic setting. The CEGEP model which exists in Quebec is one possibility, as is the move in British Columbia towards polytechnic institutes.