Recently in College Category

I spent my undergraduate days studying philosophy, linguistics, and psychology and, as I've told many close friends (and anyone else who wants to listen), Philosophy provides an excellent academic and pragmatic (yes I mean practical) foundation for countless careers and professions.  One profession that is closely associated with studying philosophy as an undergrad is Law.  Philosophy provides excellent training for prospective attorneys given rigorous course work in logic, notoriously difficult text, and training in constructing and presenting cohesive arguments.  However, the necessary training in order to practice law (viz., law school) is not for everyone. 

Paid Ad - Law school (at the top tier academic intuitions) is intense and not for every student (certainly not for the student who can't decide between learning how to be a social worker, for example, and questioning how to continue making a decent living, and thus figures becoming a lawyer sounds like a good idea). There are of course many factors in such a decision, and evaluating the effort and costs involved is a weighty process - End Paid Ad.  Earning a law degree is certainly not for the student who can't think of anything else to do with his or her life and figures becoming a lawyer sounds like a good idea.

What follows below is the best advice I've read on whether one should go to law school.  Specifically, the advice comes from Professor Nick Smith at the University of New Hampshire.  Nick holds a J.D. and before becoming a full time Philosophy Professor he worked as an attorney at a prestigious Manhattan law firm.  Nick's advice is brutally honest and a must read for any Junior or Senior undergrad considering law school.

- You will need plenty of self discipline to distil the real gold nuggets from a philosophy major; viz, critical thinking skills and ability to clearly write and communicate. 

- No one is going to hand you a job after you graduate with your degree and you will need to work extra hard to turn the skills you learned as a Philosophy major into practical, applicable, knowledge that translates well within the marketplace (sorry, this is just a reality).

- You may need a professional degree if you can't apply skills learned as an undergraduate into a job category that is in demand.  That is to say, you may need to quickly aquire an MBA, JD, or other professional degree to get a job.  I graduated from University in the late 1990's and the .com boom was underway and many jobs were available (this is currently not the case in the US) and I had a practical skill set thanks to work-study position I held for a number of years.

A college professor once told me that most adults finish all serious reading by the time they reach the age of 23.  He went on to say that most professions, even ones that require a four year degree, do not require the worker to engage in prolonged or critical reading.  And while I'm sure there are exceptions to the statement, I agree wholeheartedly with the professor's conclusion.  Ask yourself, for example, what was the last serious novel you read or the last time you read The Economist from cover to cover (that's Immanuel Kant on the left, by the way; he wrote a Critique of Pure Reason and should be on your reading list)?

Thanks to my cousin Mike for pointing out this article/commencement speech by the late writer David Foster Wallace.  Wallace hits on a few themes in the article, but he's mostly focused on biological preservation via putting one self first, worship (not just the religious or spiritual kind), and awareness/consciousness.  In sum, though, I think Wallace is making a simple point: it's tough being human.  Here's an excerpt:

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Coincidently, I must admit to owning Infinite Jest (bought it used about 5 years ago) but never got through the first couple of pages.  I did read through a collection of essays which I thought were quite good, but the aforementioned commencement speech/article in the Wall Street Journal was particularly well done.

Here's a nice interview with Wallace on Charlie Rose in 1997, I think:

Charles Murray has written a brilliant essay (Are Too Many People Going to College) on the value of a BA and the dark side of encouraging every 17 year old to strive for an undergraduate education.

In my view, every high school guidance counselor and parent should be required to read Murray's essay.  Here's Murray on becoming a top electrician versus an average office drone with a BA:

We return to our high-school graduate trying to decide between going to college and becoming an electrician. He knows that he enjoys working with his hands and likes the idea of not being stuck in the same place all day, but he also likes the idea of being a manager sitting behind a desk in a big office, telling people what to do and getting the status that goes with it.

However, he should face facts that he is unlikely to know on his own, but that a guidance counselor could help him face. His chances of getting the big office and the status are slim. He is more likely to remain in a cubicle, under the thumb of the boss in the big office. He is unlikely to have a job in which he produces something tangible during the course of the day.

There has never been a time in history when people with skills not taught in college have been in so much demand at such high pay as today.

If he becomes a top electrician instead, he will have an expertise that he exercises at a high level. At the end of a workday, he will often be able to see that his work made a difference in the lives of people whose problems he has solved. He will not be confined to a cubicle and, after his apprenticeship, will be his own supervisor in the field. Top electricians often become independent contractors who have no boss at all.

The intrinsic rewards of being a top manager can be just as great as those of a top electrician (though I would not claim they are greater), but the intrinsic rewards of being a mediocre manager are not. Even as people in white-collar jobs lament the soullessness of their work, the intrinsic rewards of exercising technical skills remain undiminished.

Finally, there is an overarching consideration so important it is hard to express adequately: the satisfaction of being good at what one does for a living (and knowing it), compared to the melancholy of being mediocre at what one does for a living (and knowing it). This is another truth about living a human life that a 17-year-old might not yet understand on his own, but that a guidance counselor can bring to his attention. Guidance counselors and parents who automatically encourage young people to go to college straight out of high school regardless of their skills and interests are being thoughtless about the best interests of young people in their charge.

Full essay here

If I were a high school guidance counselor I'd tell each one of my students (well at least the ones who displayed some intellectual curiosity) to go and pursue studies in any one of the cognitive sciences: neuroscience, cognitive psychology, neurobiology, etc. 

Our knowledge about how the brain works is just starting to develop and I predict a sort of "brain revolution" over the next 25-50 years.  So, "be all you can be" and sign up today to be a brain professional.  If you're not ready, then take a look at the current literature and catch up on your knowledge on the mind/body problem, parietal lobe physiology, and language acquisition from the New York Review of Books.

The American Scholar recently ran an article on why a Harvard or Yale education may not be the best decision for most high school or post graduate students. 

The article is very compelling and argues that the Ivies are creating careers and not minds - an important distinction in higher education.

There's lots of talk about how traditional classroom learning is dead, see:

However, and I don't know about you, but I really enjoy the small lecture type experience (ask questions, get a response back kind of thing).  And I think deep learning is not about text messages, Facebook, or web enabled distance learning (they're not bad instructional tools), but a liberal education is about classroom debate, idea formation, writing and re-writing, 1:1 instruction, etc.  So, yes technology and educational theories change, but basic human cognition and learning stay the same (unless someone is predicting a big paradigm shift in human biology).  My advice: get out your copy of Plato's Republic and start reading.