SITREP: The different degrees of college degrees
Cornelle D. Carney, Blogger
8 August 10
I just could not help myself when a person’s life achievements where predetermined by his unwillingness to finish school at Tulane University, one of the nation’s top post-secondary institutions. I want to weigh in on this dilemma.
I first want to say that I have been a student at many different colleges and universities. They include, in order: Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO), Tulane University of Louisiana, Loyola University of New Orleans, Kaplan University and now Grand Canyon University. I know that you are probably asking why so many changes. The straight-forward answer is I had to find and education program that was right for me and my pockets. Another answer is I had to become a distant (online) learner due to my deployment to Iraq.
Having said that, a person I know decided that Tulane University was not the supportive college atmosphere that he was looking for and started school at a different campus: Our Lady of Holy Cross College. Was this a lifetime failure? Or, was this simply finding the education program that fit him? After having conversation with him about this I learned that Tulane was way too expensive for him and the field that he wanted to go into was not fully supported by Tulane—that field was education. There is some ad hoc program that prepares teacher candidates for certification.
To the contrary, another person I know saw this as a lifetime failure. He is also a student at Tulane and has been through a lot of different situations involving Tulane also. He was accused of plagiarism, the school’s police department sent to him jail for apparently “disturbing the peace,” and he almost flunked out of his first or second semester there as a student. It is only my opinion, but I say Tulane is not supportive of him as well. Do not get me wrong, Tulane can be a great school for the student’s that it supports.
But back to the issue at hand, I believe that it does not matter if you earn your degree from Harvard University or Southern University, although Harvard University’s degree will make you look a little better in the job market, the real benefit is how much the school, not the degree, plays in developing you.
One female friend I have who was once a Tulane student but then transferred over to the University of New Orleans, which is supposedly as less rigorous university than Tulane, explained to me how she had a more difficult time in her classes at UNO than at TU. This goes to show you that a university’s prestige is about the population it attracts and not the results it produces.
Thanks for reading!
Cornelle D. Carney
Students should be taught how to cooperate rather than compete.—Ernest Boyer
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Hello Cornell,
ReplyDeleteThis may be off the topic a bit, but I also found some schools were less 'worthy' of my tuition than others. The real issue is education itself. Some universities offer a young person a place to discover who he/she is and where one is going in life or what one wants to be: Small classes, lots of discussion, a chance to contemplate meanings and values. Other institutions are just processing people like a factory processes turkeys for thanksgiving dinner: A published professor stands at the front of the room droning on and on while hundreds of students take notes.
Those that fall into the category of the latter, I simply don't want to pay my money to for their version of teaching. The goal of teaching (of education) should be to help develop majestic personalities. The type of self-confidence that helps students participate in the world with their God given potential - their talents, special abilities, and passions - and to be seen as who they really are becoming, is the sort of confidence one should be gaining from schooling.
No school can teach you everything you need to know to function as a useful citizen in life. But it should teach you how to learn. The schools that just give you a reason to feel arrogant, i.e. a prestigious diploma, sometimes are not the ones where you get that self-confidence and self-respect, based on real ethics, morals, and the sense that you can do anything you want to do, can become anything you set your mind to become, and merit is based on performance and is hard won, based on hard work, not just regurgitating data.
We should be asking ourselves questions about who and what we want to become in the world, and what type of legacy we wish to leave behind, rather than which institutions are the most convenient and offer the easiest way through. We are all "unique in eternity and irreplaceable in infinity" so we matter! We have to use those special gifts, and follow the path to our destiny, or else we won't be living up to our potential. The world has a great number of crises all happening at once on so many different fronts, so it needs oodles of problem solvers to get it back on the right track. The world needs proactive problem solvers, not people who can just memorize data and spew it back at exam time. Each one of us has something to offer that no one else can offer. It is our duty to pursue that path through the woods which only WE can see.
I want an education that is suitable for my special gifts to be nurtured and to help me recognize what my purpose is not just a place where I am a number in the education factory. How can education keep up with the pace of change that we now face in modern civilization; where one generation can no longer teach the next the art of living? My answer to that is that instead of teaching us data we must look for the type of school where we can be taught how to learn and given the tools and the impetus to discover that which we need to learn on our own. Great mentors are not those who tell us what to do, but who give us the encouragement to find out who we are.