The issues behind the policy aside I thought this was pretty funny:
The Government’s plan to link tertiary education funding to students getting jobs has sparked fears that the move could spell the end for popular degrees such as philosophy.
And an organisation representing universities is concerned the institutions will become more like employment agencies.
Dan Weijers, who is doing a PhD in philosophy at Victoria University, says the plan is a disaster and it will force students away from philosophy degrees because universities would target courses that produce more jobs options to get more funding.
“I would hate to think that would happen because philosophy is so important. It’s a very structured way of thinking. It teaches people to think logically and clearly, which are attributes many employers hold in high regard. If the Government goes ahead with the plan, it will be a real problem.”
Yeah, he didn’t put his case very logically (ha), but if you DON’T put the policy being discussed to one side, its a fucking disgrace. Encourage people to go into ‘job’ oriented qualifications where we’re already overcatered (Law, Architecture, Marketing, Management), and run down core university subjects. Universities are NOT vocational training organisations.
Comment by Eddie C — July 16, 2010 @ 8:23 am
Our man Dan is logical enough to recognise that politicians (and the rest of us) react emotionally and don’t usually think things through. So he is being logically illogical, having his cake and eating it too.
Comment by Neil — July 16, 2010 @ 8:24 am
Outstanding.
Comment by Gooner — July 16, 2010 @ 8:29 am
[...] The tertiary education minister is saying the government should link funding to performance measures – including work placement. The philosophy guy that was asked disagreed, as they will get less funding (which is weird, as he goes on to say how employers value the skills from philosophy – so this is sort of a contradiction right – Dim Post was on this wave length as well). [...]
Pingback by TVHE » Tertiary funding: What is the rationale? — July 16, 2010 @ 8:31 am
What really irks me is that I have a couple of mates on the dole. Their net income from this is $185 per week. They do not have to pay this back.
Meanwhile, I have a younger acquaintance studying business at Polytech. His net income is $150 per week from a student allowance, which he doesn’t have to pay back, but he’s got a $5,000 non-interest-accruing student loan which he does have to pay back.
While you are young and on the dole, your case manager will sooner or later put you onto a course, like Adventure Conservation at the YMCA or something like that where most of the other attendees spend most of their time smoking dope, and this is all Government-funded despite being ridiculously silly and non-productive. So why is it that the Government doesn’t come to the party wholly when it comes to proper tertiary education?
Also people often go into WINZ and tell their case manager that they want to go on a course to become a Bar Manager or a Security Guard or something respectable like that and funding is denied to them, then a few weeks later they are put onto a dead-end course that is all Government-funded. Adds insult to injury really, doesn’t it?
Scrap the dole, organise a system whereby those that are out of work have to take up tertiary education (paid for entirely by the Government for a maximum of five years), and you will start to see sparks of ambitions in many of the people who would otherwise be couch potatos on the dole.
Comment by Troy — July 16, 2010 @ 8:47 am
Listening to Joyce he appears to be saying there should be more info provided to students re the liklihood of them getting employed and the sort of money they would make. Market signals etc.
I think there’s two types of student. The fisrt are highly focused from the start and would already be aware of how their choice will pan out employment wise. The second flounder round for a while and don’t pay much attention to those sorts of things anyway.
Who doen’t know that lawyers can earn a lot more money than art historians?
Comment by NeilM — July 16, 2010 @ 8:48 am
The second flounder round for a while and don’t pay much attention to those sorts of things anyway.
Guilty, ‘take something you’re interested in’. Every degree comes with various combinations of skills and knowledge, the damn hard part is figuring out what to do with them if you aren’t qualified in a vocation like law or architecture.
Comment by Stephen — July 16, 2010 @ 8:57 am
and you will start to see sparks of ambitions in many of the people who would otherwise be couch potatos on the dole.
And/or more idiots who shouldn’t be at uni than there already are.
Comment by Stephen — July 16, 2010 @ 8:58 am
Not illogical, just poorly expressed. Philosophy teaches skills that employers value. However, few employers are aware of this, so philosophy grads aren’t in demand – employers who benefit from those philosophy skills are doing so mostly through happy accident. Therefore, targeting funding on the basis of demand for grads is bad news for philosophy as a discipline and, indirectly, for employers, who’ll encounter fewer of those happy accidents. It does follow.
Comment by Psycho Milt — July 16, 2010 @ 8:58 am
@Psycho Milt
Hmmm. So you’re saying that employers need Philosophy graduates, but they just don’t know they need Philosophy graduates?
Comment by Neil — July 16, 2010 @ 9:16 am
When I was interviewing prospective employees a lot it wasn’t the precise degree that interested me.. it was more that a degree showed an ability to research and hang in there to get a job done. You could always train a good guy in the specifics and send him on courses to fill in the gaps.
JC
Comment by JC — July 16, 2010 @ 9:22 am
Philosophy teaches skills that employers value.
I’m not sure about this premise either. My office just moved into a new lab building. During the process we employed architects, engineers, plumbers, builders, chemists, physicists, ICT experts, design consultants . . . you name it. At no point in the exercise did we need a guy who had read Wittgenstein’s Tracto.
Comment by danylmc — July 16, 2010 @ 9:56 am
The logical thing for Unis to do in this kind of environment is to take the data they already have on student characteristics, check the data they will be getting on student outcomes, run some probit models, and then start excluding from admission students with characteristics that correlate with low probability of good employment outcomes.
Comment by Eric Crampton — July 16, 2010 @ 10:27 am
“It teaches people to think logically and clearly…”
So (logically) the course is designed for people who can’t think logically and clearly.
People who can already think logically and clearly, probably become plumbers or electricians. And then make money, buy houses, have children and pay taxes.
Comment by Pat — July 16, 2010 @ 10:43 am
“…I’m not sure about this premise either. My office just moved into a new lab building. During the process we employed architects, engineers, plumbers, builders, chemists, physicists, ICT experts, design consultants . . . you name it. At no point in the exercise did we need a guy who had read Wittgenstein’s Tracto…”
Peter Throckmorton (the father of underwater archaeology) once said it was easier to teach an archaeologist to dive than it was to teach a diver to be an archaeologist. I would have thought an expert on Wittgenstien would find the humdrum task of being an ICT expert would extend to little more than reading the manuals and getting some hands on experience. Mind you, New Zealand employers seem to prefer the low productivity of drones to self learning individuals.
I suppose it comes back to first principles – what are the universities for? Right wingers never “get” education. The philistine Gordon Gekkoes like Steve Joyce see education as simply the process of acquiring sufficient expert knowledge to guarantee a meal ticket. The traditional role of universities – the noble aim of seeking knowledge for it’s own sake – has never made sense to men who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. For them, it is business schools and MBAs which make sense, only fools and losers study the Roman Empire or the teachings of long dead Greek philosophers.
Are universities then to be just for training? Are they now just to be funded as over-mighty polytechs?
To be fair, the humanities departments hardly do their own case any good. When society cries out for media savvy philosophers (a Magnus Pike type figure, perhaps) to put the case for popular philosophy they are notable by their complete absence. Historians spend their lives on public money exploring, say, the Flemish wool trade without explaining why that might be a good thing to do. But the book burning Barbarians are not longer just at the gate – they are inside the temple, they are the prime minister, the minister of education, and the minister of finance and they have no understanding of the meaning of knowledge or why learning is important for its own sake.
Comment by Sanctuary — July 16, 2010 @ 10:44 am
So you’re saying that employers need Philosophy graduates, but they just don’t know they need Philosophy graduates?
Not that they need philosophy grads, in the sense that such grads have specialised and essential skills otherwise unobtainable, but that such grads have training in logic, critical thinking, identifying underlying assumptions etc that are useful things to have in your staff. However, few employers identify those characteristics with the study of philosophy.
At no point in the exercise did we need a guy who had read Wittgenstein’s Tracto.
I doubt you needed any librarians either, yet we exist nonetheless and are employed. The world of work is larger than the construction industry.
Comment by Psycho Milt — July 16, 2010 @ 10:45 am
see education as simply the process of acquiring sufficient expert knowledge to guarantee a meal ticket.
But isn’t that how students think too? I was in humanities and students took what they liked in the hope that they’d be able to get paid to work in that interesting field, or failing that, that it would enable them to get paid full stop.
Comment by Stephen — July 16, 2010 @ 10:59 am
I doubt you needed any librarians either, yet we exist nonetheless and are employed. The world of work is larger than the construction industry
Yes perhaps a bit myopic from Danyl there. Incidentally I was assured that ‘all sorts’ were hired by the Ministry for Economic Development – they even had a philosophy grad or two on board. MED wasn’t really me though.
Comment by Stephen — July 16, 2010 @ 11:00 am
I think we need to be a bit careful here. I suspect most Dimpost readers, when they hear the words “tertiary education”, immediately assume that it’s Universities that primarily are being discussed – because (I suspect) most Dimpost readers have a University background. But the sector is much bigger than Universities – we’re talking not just Polytechs as well, but all sorts of small training establishments (dive schools, tourism academies, etc). So when Steven Joyce says:
“Ultimately, I want to see funding linked to employment outcomes, not just internal benchmarks. This will send a strong signal to students about which qualifications and which institutions offer the best career prospects – and that’s what tertiary education has got to be about.”
I don’t necessarily see him as saying “we’re going to starve philosophy of funds to make everyone study law or engineering instead”. I instead see him as saying “we’re going to ensure that students know before taking out a loan to become a diving instructor/hotel manager what likelihood there is that the investment actually will lead to a job – and where it doesn’t do so, we’re going to reduce the amount of money those providers receive so as to force a rationalisation in the provision of those courses.”
Comment by Andrew Geddis — July 16, 2010 @ 11:18 am
might be useful to read the report in the following link:
the issue is employability after education, not employability in the subject area of your education.
http://tinyurl.com/2u35n3w
there’s quite a bit of work going on to quantify employment outcomes (says he with a philosophy degree).
Comment by che tibby — July 16, 2010 @ 11:37 am
As someone with a couple of philosophy degrees, unless you work in academia, your degree is no more or less useful in any part of the world of work than any other BA/MA. Everyone I did my postgrad work is either working in IT, publishing, or some part of the civil service.
Also: do employers really care about your degree once you’ve been in the workplace more than a year? I mean, seriously? When I screen CVs to interview people, unless they’ve just left Uni, I’ll only treat their degree as a minor point of interest. Recent and relevant work experience is the kicker in my experience.
Comment by jack — July 16, 2010 @ 11:55 am
@jack:
^^^ this
Comment by SHG — July 16, 2010 @ 12:03 pm
yup. when i’ve done interviewing the degree is just a point of conversation. a bit like, “oh, you’re from Crimechurch, thug-capital of NZL?”
Comment by che tibby — July 16, 2010 @ 12:09 pm
educational achievement and employability?
this milton friedman rampant.
when will the national party grow up?
Comment by peterlepaysan — July 16, 2010 @ 10:47 pm
It is possible to take a second possibly more employable major or degree in addition to studying philosophy.
Comment by JD — July 16, 2010 @ 10:59 pm
Philosophy is a major for either a BA or BSc, which is a GENERAL DEGREE, teaching a broad range of skills in research and interpretation and thinking and writing and presenting your research, which enable graduates to perform a range of different jobs. It is distinct from a PROFESSIONAL DEGREE such as an LLB or BE which trains the student for a specific job.
It’s arguable which graduates are more employable – it really depends on the state of the job market at the time. If the govt arbitrarily decides that general degrees are less useful than professional degrees, all BA and BSc students are in trouble, not just Philosophy majors.
Comment by Grace — July 18, 2010 @ 12:02 am
Philosophy is a major for either a BA or BSc, which is a GENERAL DEGREE
I would be alarmed to learn you can get a BSc by majoring in philosophy.
It’s arguable which graduates are more employable
Not really. Professional graduates are way more employable and they earn a lot more.
Comment by danylmc — July 18, 2010 @ 6:56 am
I would be alarmed to learn you can get a BSc by majoring in philosophy.
You can get a Doctor of Philosophy in science, it seems only fair to turn this around…
Comment by Graeme Edgeler — July 18, 2010 @ 11:28 am
You can get a BSc major in logic at the University of Auckland taking arts subjects exclusively (philosophy and linguistics). I wouldn’t be surprised to find this elsewhere, either.
When I was at Vic, you could major in chemistry or physics for a BA (and you can still major in Maths for a BA).
Comment by Graeme Edgeler — July 18, 2010 @ 4:28 pm