Re: [tlug] [OT] A Question About Degrees

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:30:52 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> Attila Kinali writes:
> 
>  > Today, with the Bologna Reform, the whole unversity system in europe
>  > is in a turmoil. Students were on strike not long ago because of the
>  > whole reform made the problems worse it tried to solve. Not to speak
>  > of a general decline in education quality, because everything has to
>  > be measurable now in ECTS points (which has exactly the same effects
>  > as exact accounting of everything in the comercial world has).
> 
> You mean, people actually do jobs that paying customers want done? :-)
> Seems rather unlikely in *any* country's academia. :-) :-)

:-)
 
> Seriously, the real problem that European students face is that there
> is no such thing as cheap labor in Europe, labor in the ex-Western
> Europe is inordinately expensive, and it's a lifetime commitment to a
> major drain on profits on the part of the employer.  Nice work for
> those who can get work, and the rest are, well, fucked.  I don't think
> any purely educational reform (or lack of it) is going to help much.

The goal of the Bologna Reform was mostly to make education within
Europe comparable. Ie, that if you got someone from France with
degree X, you could tell how much more "education" he had than
a student from Spain with degree Y. Additionally, they wanted to make
it easier for the students to move between universities thus also
standardizing the start dates of universities.

The outcome is now, that the starting dates differ more than before.
Although we have know only two types of degrees (BSc and MSc), those
are even less comparable among universities, because nobody knows how
they mapped their diploma degrees to those (no, it is not even uniform
within a country). Not to talk about that lots of mandatory internship
and other kind of practica dropped out of the ciricula, because it isnt
measureble in ECTS. Heck, i've heard medical students complain that
their ciricula made it impossible for them to get enough practical
experience.

About the shift of labor within europe. Yes it is true that the
type of work that is still done in Europe is climbing on the
educational ladder. Especially doese kinds of work that lead
to exported products.
On the other hand, the educational level in europe is climbing too.
Much faster than i've seen it in other countries. Although, the
goverments are struggling visibly with the many changes the have
to make to accomodate for the demands of the ever changing society.

But i disagree with you, that there is no cheap labor in Europe anymore.
It is just that even cheap labor is shifting from what it used to be
(produce as much as possible with the least cost), to a new form that
is mostly support for the "higher educated jobs". E.g. production in
electronics movded from high volume, consumer product production that
had to be cheap (and thus moved to the east), to low volume, but short
lead times and high grade production. These kind of products have by
itself a lower part of the GDP than the high volume productions, but together
with the services (engineering and such) that are needed to design those
products, they are comparable to high volume productions in terms of GDP.

Hence i dont think that those who cannot atain a higher education are
fucked. Rather that they wont be clump together into a few job
types, but become more diverse. What is a challange though is, that
it becomes necessary to be more flexible in the work being done, even
for the cheap labor. Ie if you start today on an assembly line, you might
end up doing one-of-a-kind assembly in a few years. And i don't know
whether everyone will be able to keep up with that pressure, especially
knowing that even people with a PhD have troubles to keep up with changes
in their job enviroment.

Hmm.. somehow this sounds a lot like the issues that rise from the
Digital Natives / Digital Immigrants gap (see [1]). 

		Attila Kinali


[1] http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp

-- 
If you want to walk fast, walk alone.
If you want to walk far, walk together.
		-- African proverb