North Carolina State University - Agromeck Yearbook (Raleigh, NC)

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Higher education. It simultaneously draws avid praise and acid criticism. What is it? What should it be? Where is it taking us? All are valid, seemingly perpetual, and certainly difficult questions. And all prompt a plethora of widely diverse answers. Much of the self-examination of higher education from within, and criticism of it from both within and without, stems from the fact that the old adage of past years, if you want to get a good job, you ' ve got to go to college, simply is not as much a truism as it once was. Not nearly as much. And it is not only the liberal arts graduates, traditionally a group for whom teaching their major is the only option, for whom a degree does not guarantee employers-in-waiting from which to choose. No, today even those who attain degrees in natural sciences—ask someone who graduated in biology or geology last year how many job offers he or she had —or even the traditionally job-solid areas such as civil and chemical engineering do not breeze into the fat contract with the big company. Indeed, increasing numbers of these marketable graduates are finding themselves with no job offer of any sort in their field, leaving them the alternative of hustling for work in the blue collar job market, or perhaps going on to graduate school. Obviously, many graduates who find themselves in this position, regardless of what their degree is in, wonder why they spent the time, effort and money to gain a diploma. What, some bitterly ask, is the value of a framed piece of paper? Why not frame a paper towel? What would the difference be? It is impossible to blame those who feel this way. They were told all of their lives that if they wanted to get ahead, if they wanted to get a good job, if they wanted to attain success, they would have to study hard and get that college degree. It comes, you know, complete with two cars, a big house, flashy clothes, good Scotch and a weekend retreat in the country. And therein lies the problem. Over a period of years, people have actually come to believe that college is a rainbow and a degree its pot of gold. More significantly, many feel that the purpose of a college education—the only purpose—is as a conduit for attainment of financial security. Such is a perversion of the purpose a university once did, and should always, serve. If one ' s only interest in education is the financial rewards it theoretically will offer, then that individual should

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enroll in a trade school or technical institute. The purpose of insti tutions of that nature is not to educate, per se, but to train in a specific field, exclusive of anything unrelated to that specialized area of study. And that is not to frown upon technical institutes, for they perform a valuable service in producing skilled people who may consequently support themselves and their families through honest, meaningful labor. So what is the purpose of a university if not to serve as a sort of hybrid trade school? Simply stated, the purpose of a university is to educate human beings, and here it is important to differentiate between the terms education and training. Training is described in prior paragraphs. Education defies definition in any but a partial fashion. But the difference in concept can be grasped. In the lengthy interviews John Caldwell granted the Technician for a special issue marking his retirement, this subject of broad education versus narrow training came up, and the former chancellor offered food for thought on the matter; excerpts from that conversation follow: There are some things I feel about higher education in general that are applicable here and I wish from time to time that I felt more adequate to deal with them. I wish I could make more impact on it. We ' ve made some move in that direction in the Division of University Studies. It is a creature of some of these feelings that I have. I think university graduates, regardless of the field of interest they ' graduate in, should have much more understanding of the world, the society, than they do and ought to care a little bit more. People bring their own lives to a campus. They have career interests or things they are interested in and we don ' t really . . . there ' s no way in the world to make people be interested in something that they are not interested in. You can put a little salt there, like in the old saying you can feed a horse salt and make him want to drink. Well I am not quite sure how a big diverse campus that offers over 2,000 different courses, has over 75 bachelor ' s degrees and 50 some odd masters degrees and 40 PhD programs and varying degrees of specialization and so forth . . . I never have known how we could achieve this business of having a university graduate coming out of here with a bachelor ' s degree and really having some sort of a feeling about the Far East, the world food problem, really compre- hending a little bit more of the energy problem and not taking a short sighted view of it . . . Feeling some real responsibility for making the democratic process work, being concerned. Well this is a kind of frustration I feel about higher education. I just think that maybe we still have too much specialization . . . no, we don ' t have too much specialization, I believe in specialization, but I believe that right along side that specialization there ought to be more impact of the other fields of knowledge. And I apply this both ways; I think the student of English literature can be as narrow as a student in Nuclear Physics. And I think the ignorance of the typical liberal arts person about science and technology is sometimes more dangerous then the general ignorance, if you want to call it that, or lack of exposure, of so many of the scientists and technologists to the humanistic and social science side. I think we ' re always talking about the liberally educated person as if we wanted to make every engineer a liberally educated person and we talk about that so much that we forget that we have a lot of so called liberal arts graduates who are just unrealistic and far too ignorant of the world of science and technology. They either expect too much of it and sometimes they fear it and sometimes they misjudge it completely far more than the people