I recently met an undergraduate named Samantha who is majoring in Economics at UC Berkeley. She is almost done. I asked her a few questions about her education:
SR: Did UC Berkeley help you figure out what you were good at?
Samantha: No. In UC Berkeley classes you don't get to do any individual searching. You just have to do what they tell you. Because it's all theoretical, none of it is very practical. You don't do any practical projects. The classes don't give you any idea of what you want to do career-wise.
SR: Did UC Berkeley help you figure out what you enjoy doing?
Samantha: No.
SR: Why not?
Samantha: I'm here just for the name. It scares you away from trying new things. Intimidating class sizes, professors that don't seem invested in the students.
After I posted this on my blog, another Berkeley student commented:
Hardly surprising. I've been at Cal for 3 years and can't say the university helped me at all. The only thing they emphasize at orientation is take requirements, buy your textbooks on time, go to office hours, study aimlessly for hours. Not that any of these things are bad, but it's all about learning to conform and it blows. No one tells you who to go to when you make mistakes, so you're pretty much left to fend for yourself when things go downhill. It's hard to feel connected to this place when you feel like you're being treated like disposables.
I replied:
Yeah, there are two kinds of education: education that tries to make everyone the same -- assembly-line education -- and education that doesn't. Practically all discussion of education improvement among Berkeley professors is about how to do a better job of making everyone the same. How to raise lecture attendance, how to raise test performance, how to reduce plagiarism and cheating, etc. I have never heard this goal questioned.