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Comment by thatonechad | Hacker News Reader

Universities need to start focusing on skills instead of general education. Imagine the amount of skills you could learn if you didn't have to take 60 hours of nonsense credits and focus on skills you require.

Programming / Networking / Hardware need a new type of University that is similar to Trade colleges but focus primarily on the skills and nothing more. The first 1-2 years could focus on the foundations while the next 2 years focus around solid design principles and actually developing projects (real or fake).

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I know this is a cliche, but universities (are supposed to) teach you critical thinking as well as social and life skills, not just train you for a specific vocation.

Watering down university education is not necessary. If someone wants to focus just on tech skills, they can go to a boot camp. Expanding boot camps so they become multi-year experiences may be a good idea, but they should not be called universities.

I would agree and my use of the term University is not necessarily meant to be used in that traditional sense. What I believe is that there should be an alternative to Universities that could focus more on that aspect and present you with a 4 year degree.

I guarantee if you created a tech school that focuses strictly on tech related classes for 4 years compared to a University that you would produce higher quality students than you would from schools that spend half of your college teaching you things that are not directly related to your job.

Maybe "higher quality" in the sense that they've spent more time growing their tech skills, but there is more to a person than their skills in a chosen vocation.

Also, what happens if a student wants to switch majors? Or graduates but later wants to change careers? Your proposal doesn't make that feasible.

I would say few universities teach critical thinking or transferable skills in the context you are referring to.

Some programs in universities can be glorified vocational schools. Other programs are excellent, relevant and evolving both for industry, and as innovators.

> ...universities (are supposed to) teach you critical thinking as well as social and life skills...

I disagree. I think they provide services to customers. Customers decide what the services are for. I suppose some students are very interested in laying a foundation in the liberal arts. Most, in my experience, are more worried about getting their careers started out on the right foot (especially considering all the loans that they are taking out). There is also a nontrivial number of students there for unsupervised extensions on their adolescences, though.

> ...they should not be called universities...

Why not? Is that going to be a regulated word now? What purpose does the distinction serve? We don't look at a degree and think, "Oh! University degree! This is a well-rounded person with a good foundation in the liberal arts!" No, we see, B.S. in Communications from Boise State and draw inferences from there.

There's nothing preventing you from naming your institution a "university", but if you want accreditation, there are already certain criteria you have to meet.

> nonsense credits

The assumption here is that education is nonsense. I think the skills are far less valuable: Education teaches you about the world you have to live in, in business, and as a citizen, a parent, a consumer, etc., by exposing you to leading people and ideas from around the world and throughout history. It teaches you to reason, by exposing you to the great thinkers now and in history. Reading blogs on the Internet isn't nearly the same thing.

If we send people home from college only with the vocational skill of building an integrated circuit, they will find that it doesn't begin to address most of the challenges in life, much less their community's and society's.

Integrated circuits aren't what the West needs to move forward at this point, to address poverty, discrimination, war, and all the other issues. In our current society, we do very well with integrated circuits and very poorly with life, social and political issues, perhaps we need to focus on education in the latter, not the former.

You mean making meat robots that can code? Higher education is supposed to be much more than just acquiring technical skills. If you want purely technical skills, there are plenty of intense courses, workshops etc. available.

Univerisities should remain centers of education and the pursuit of knowledge.

Training people for jobs is the responsibility of vocational schools and corporate training .

I am not sure, how "skills" would be helpful in long term. People need to develop a good understanding and ideas on Computer science, not learn a particular software/language or whatever.

As, there is no guarantee that it will even be alive by the time you leave university/your potential employer would be looking for that particular "skill".

Wait what? If you went to school today and learned java i bet in 4 years java is still around. I bet 4 years C# still around. and I bet in 4 year C++ is still around. What kind of world are you living in? You are saying that taking 60 hours of non tech related classes are more beneficial than taking that many hours dedicated to actually putting those skills to work?

Also you realize that learning a programming language can translate into other programming languages right?

Learning a programming language doesn't translate into other language, but the principle of programming in general does.

In another language you may not be using classes, objects heavily, so learning about how to make class factories mean very little. What matters is, through this you might learn about good abstractions and its power, and that's what is important.

And that is what universities should be teaching with the use of any language/tool. I am not sure what you mean "non-tech" class, i am pretty sure there aren't any such things in CS programs. If you dedicate yourself to one particular tool, you will have a very narrow view of software development. Don't need to go to university, you can learn it by yourself and save both time and money.

Name a giant in this industry, that person benefitted from a liberal arts education.

Are we training giants now ?

I'm sure all the gender studies classes has helped the vast majority of tech students become better developers

Given all the stuff that's happening lately with people like Susan Fowler, a whole lot of developers could have benefitted from more of those.

Of course, that's completely ignoring that there is far, far, far more to "liberal arts" than gender studies.

Diversity training doesn't work though and it often makes things worse.

https://hbr.org/2012/03/diversity-training-doesnt-work

You will need more citations to prove that point. Same publication, more recently published, "Two Types of Diversity Training That Really Work".

"For one, a recent meta-analysis of over 40 years of diversity training evaluations showed that diversity training can work, especially when it targets awareness and skill development and occurs over a significant period of time."

https://hbr.org/2017/07/two-types-of-diversity-training-that...

I think it's more the people around them that would have benefitted from it.

That too. Everyone would benefit!

Steve Jobs

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