Education

Education is an important topic that I would like to talk about, but I have so much to say that I am not sure one entry will suffice.

Today an article came out in CNN that touches 2 topics: The value of an education and the cost of education. Some of the things mentioned in this article include the fact that people with higher education degrees end up making more money than people with just high school degrees, entire nations have achieved a lot of economic growth in just one generation by promoting higher learning, and the fact that some people believe that universities hinder creativity and innovation.

I have lived in the US for 13 years and experienced education systems of 2 states. I got my high school and undergraduate degree from public schools down in Florida and I am pursuing a doctorate degree at a state-related university in Pennsylvania. I have nothing good to say about the education I got at my high school, but I guess I have to give it the benefit of the doubt because of my unusual circumstances. I came to the US from a foreign speaking country and was enrolled in a huge high school (larges graduating class in the southeast US in 2000) with a graduating class of 1200. My assigned guidance counselor barely looked at my above average grades from back home and decided that, since English was not my first language, the best thing for me would be to take easy classes. I fought this decision as much as I could, but I ended up taking classes such as Algebra I, Algebra II and Geometry after having taken pre-calculus in the 10th grade back at home. I graduated with an exceptionally high GPA, but none of the basics I needed to go into an engineering school. This became painfully obvious when I started taking classes such as calculus and physics and I could see how for the rest of my peers these were refresher courses, while I struggled to keep up. It was a difficult time for me and made me completely hate school until I finally started taking the more advanced classes in my major. By then the gaps were still there, but I was finally at a point where it was easy to take a real interest in my major and decided grad school was the best option for me. The last few years were a lot of hard work and dedication. I had to make up for the fact that my grades in the first few semester were low, after all, despite all my hard work and dedication, there was a limit of how high my GPA would get. I decided to do research at school to strengthen my resume, but being a relatively new and small department, there were very few work opportunities for undergraduate students. I went outside my department and even outside my school for a while, but I made sure to have work experience, good recommendation letters and even my name in a few publications by the time I graduated. I also applied for, and on my second attempt received a research fellowship at the undergraduate level that would for sure look pretty good in my CV. I also got involved in professional societies as a board member not only for my resume, but also to take advantage of the networking opportunities that come with it. Finally I graduated with an OK GPA, high GRE scores and a good resume and I was able to get into a top 10 program in my field.

What is the point of that story? Well, there are several lessons to learn from this story. First of all, I came to my current institution thinking classes were going to be ridiculously hard. I was coming from a small, relatively new and widely unknown department to a top 10 school. What I learned really fast is that calculus and physics and chemistry are still calculus and physics and chemistry no matter where you take them. I think academically speaking I could even say I got a better education at my undergraduate institution. The reason for this would be that most of my professors were not world renowned scientists that have no time for anything, much less teaching. My graduating class was about 15 people; therefore all my higher level classes had about that many people, making education a little bit more personalized. So, what makes a program a better program? I think the answer is in the possibilities it gives its students. Needless to say my current department is enormous having at least 100 affiliated faculty members and collaborations with a number of departments within the same university. Undergraduate students are REQUIRED to intern at one of the labs for at least one of the semester, so they get the research experience that I had to go outside of my undergraduate department and to another university to get. Networking opportunities are tremendous and if the students decide to take advantage of all that is offered to them, they can be guaranteed a pretty successful career. That being said, college is what you decided to make out of it. You can go to a top 10 university, but if you do not recognize that you need to take advantage of that, you will get nowhere.

Going back to the original article and the comment that states that a university education hinders creativity and innovation, I have to say I partly disagree. I may be wrong, but my perspective on it is that if you are in an arts degree this may be truer than in a science and engineering environment. The way I see it, if you want to be a painter, then you need to have a talent for painting. There is only so much you can learn from going to class if you don’t really have a talent for it. In some cases classes may actually restrict artists by making them abide by some objective rules of what is proper art and what is not. I may be wrong about this but that is the way I see it. In the case of science and engineering, I think undergraduate degrees are meant to teach you the basics and provide you with some opportunities to apply them. That being said, I think the education system need a major overhaul. It is mind-blowing that we still tech classes the same way classes were taught centuries ago when lecturers mainly had to relay information to students that they could not obtain anywhere else. Today the information is at our fingertips, yet professors insist on standing out there talking about something that we could easily read in our books or computers. In science classes such as biology and chemistry, what good does it make for us to memorize the name and structure of every essential amino-acid if we do not learn how to apply this information? Furthermore, and this is a generalization that applies better to research institutions, there are few incentives for professors to get more involved in education, while the research aspect is highly rewarded. I understand that the main strength of a research institution is its research, however, a university is still mainly an educational business, where the customers are the students who are paying lots of money to get a good education and they should be entitled to do so.

If we get into the economics of education, there are many things to be said. Tuition expenses keep going up every year and the government keeps making cuts to programs that promote education as well as funding for schools and universities. I constantly struggle between what system would work better: socialism or capitalism. A socialist system typically lacks incentives for people to progress by rewarding everyone equally no matter how much they contribute to society. Capitalism, however, does not provide everyone with the same opportunities. I think education-wise it would be sensible to implement a mixed system where everyone is offered the same opportunities. That involves ensuring high standards of affordable education for everyone as well as support to lower income individuals who normally would have to pass on higher education to financially help out their families. By doing so, you are providing equal opportunity, which does not necessarily mean equal outcome. Florida is a good example of this. When I graduated from high school, graduates who finished a GPA above 3.0 and SAT above 970 are eligible for 75% tuition at any Florida state school. A GPA above 3.5 and SAT scores above 1270 made me eligible for 100% plus a stipend for school supplies. As stated earlier in this post, high school in Florida was a joke and these qualifications where not at all hard to achieve. Furthermore, tuition was around 1500-2000 dollars a semester, which even for students who did not qualify for these scholarships was a lot more affordable than universities elsewhere. Despite all the criticisms that I may have, education in FL was affordable therefore available to pretty much anyone who wants to pursue it. I may have not gotten the same education that someone at other state schools with better education systems, but I looked for opportunities to make up for this and now I am at a pretty good program.

I am not trying to say it is OK to offer a crappy education as long as it is cheap. There are many things that I would try to improve at my Alma mater. The point I am trying to make with this story is that quality education should be available to everyone to level the field; after all, it is not fair for kids to have to pay for the consequences of their parents mistakes. What you decide to do with your education will dictate your future, and I guarantee not everyone will take advantage of the opportunities (I know lots of people in Florida who decided not to go to college even though they could have) and when you don’t succeed in life you will have no one to blame but yourself.