Elle Woods majored in Fashion Merchandising, but I thought it was a joke.

Meanwhile the Phil majors go on to work writing advertising copy for the clothes made by the Apparel Merchandising people.

Ha! Sewing is easier when one has learnt all the techniques and mastered the machines. The guy's just laaaazzzy...

Brings to mind Venus Williams -- '07 cum laude graduate (associate's degree) in fashion design from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. Also a certified interior designer. Oh yes, championships at four Wimbledons, two U.S. Opens, and two events at the Sydney Olympics.

Hell, she won't be able to play tennis forever. Planning for the future is important!

3: You don't think that having entrenched high scruples about what counts as an acceptable level of workmanship can be a hindrance as well as a help? There comes a point where one is incapable of ever just dashing something off.

6: And speaking of problems with academia...

The largest division at Texas Tech was the School of Restaurant, Hotel, and Institutional Management. The biggest major was Business Information Systems.

There are a lot of important forces working to blur the line between trade schools and higher education. On the one side, the general American disdain for pure knowledge has spread over to administrators and boards of trustees. At Tech there was a member of the Board who was agitating to basically abolish the humanities.

On the other side, most trades are requiring increasingly specialized knowledge. Here at Last Chance Community College the top programs are in phlebotomy and medical scanning technology. These are not trivial skills. Moreover the demand for skilled labor is leading to increasing credentialism. Hospitals now want lab techs who previously only needed to finish high school to now have associate degrees, which require, among other things, a bioethics course.

Every school in America is going to be a trade school in one way or another. There's no avoiding it.

Every school in America is going to be a trade school in one way or another. There's no avoiding it.

This is probably correct. It's depressing ... there is a real problem of resource allocation & education, but by organically `solving' this by letting a bunch of imbedded interests squabble it out, we're heading toward something like a worst-of-all-world solution.

At Tech there was a member of the Board who was agitating to basically abolish the humanities.

Makes sense in theory, at a college called "Texas Tech". At least abolishing humanities majors.

Do you really want to give credence to a "Sartorialist" who couldn't be bothered to drop down to UnfoggeDCon to see what the hottest print reporters in the world were wearing?

Really, the guy is bush league, and not in the hott Brazilian sense either. George W. Bush League.

As an electrical engineering major, I was slightly bummed that so many of my required undergrad courses were theoretical. A little more "trade school" would have been welcome. It didn't dawn on me until grad school that my undergrad school had terrible lab facilities.

So, we're all basically acknowledging that business schools--even when they're only allowed to offer postgraduate degrees--make their universities trade schools. I know someone who was upset by Oxford's decision to create a business school several years ago for just this reason.

I don't think that she was anti-polytechnic; she just felt that they had different purposes. She was probably anti-business. Law was tolerable, since one of her sons was a lawyer, and he father had litigated on behalf of miners suffering from black lung stuff in Wales.

8: Every school in America is going to be a trade school in one way or another. There's no avoiding it.

Such as Harvard College for Adjuncts to Empire.

For a long time I've been in favor of separating job training and humanities education entirely. Of course, the initial result would be the disappearance of the humanities, but at least you wouldn't have all those grumbly PhD baristas and taxi drivers any more. On their own time, even Lit PhDs watch more novels than they read books.

So, we're all basically acknowledging that business schools--even when they're only allowed to offer postgraduate degrees--make their universities trade schools

We all think it's the business schools that do it?

On their own time, even Lit PhDs watch more novels than they read books.

Telenovelas are great, you philistine.

I think this has a great deal to do with American attitudes about education and credentialism (and anti-intellectualism). The disappearance of middle-class jobs that don't require a college degree is an inextricable and related factor. Business schools have a lot of crap to answer for, but blaming them for this is a weird response.

Hmph. Pwned by my own wife.

it's not the business schools, it's much more fundamental than that.

Meanwhile, I get to pwn my sisterwife soupbiscuit.

soap biscuit

Thanks for the link, Ben. I don't know about "more bitter"--I'm one of the "lucky" ones. But I think it's important that there's a huge gap between mainstream media ideas about the faculty (eg, Charlie Gibson during the New Hampshire debates Saturday) and the reality...

Do check out the 5-minute "Faculty on Food Stamps" videos at http://howtheuniversityworks.com
Solidarity, M

So, we're all basically acknowledging that business schools--even when they're only allowed to offer postgraduate degrees--make their universities trade schools. I know someone who was upset by Oxford's decision to create a business school several years ago for just this reason.

I don't think it's business schools that cause this; it's just the difference between a "liberal arts education" and a more practical or technical education. I'm not sure what exactly the changes that are driving the divergence in percieved value are, but it seems reasonable to think that the larger a society becomes, the more opportunities for specialization it offers.

Honestly, what difference does it make if universities function partially as trade schools?

8: Every school in America is going to be a trade school in one way or another. There's no avoiding it.

14:Such as Harvard College for Adjuncts to Empire.

There's an undergrad class at Harvard that teaches all sorts of useful-but-outdated skills. Like how to navigate at sea by the stars. Not sure what department it's in.

I don't get all the hating on trade schools in this thread.

Makes sense in theory, at a college called "Texas Tech". At least abolishing humanities majors.

When they changed the name from "Texas Technical College" to "Texas Tech University" (Note, the "Tech" is no longer short for anything, just as "FedEx" is no longer short for Federal Express) they were trying to get away from the image of a trade school. There were a lot of conflicting impulses floating around.

6 makes more sense to me than 3. A good carpenter can build a serviceable bookshelf faster than a master carpenter can build an heirloom one - even with the same underlying design. When you add in the more refined design likely used by the master, which would be analogous (ahem) to the "hard labor that it takes to make a bespoke suit or couture gown," it's not even close.

24: If they want to be trade schools, then they're bilking a lot of people out of a lot of money claiming to be universities.

25: I'd guess history and philosophy of science.

Honestly, what difference does it make if universities function partially as trade schools?

A fuckload of difference if jobs that once required nothing more than experience and willingness to work now come with a two- or four-year stint at a school one mightn't be particularly successful at. There's nothing wrong with trade school - my uncle, who's a construction worker, did two years at a junior college out of high school before apprenticing, and it's where H.L. Mencken learned how to write copy. (He did it in night school during high school; he couldn't get hired as a reporter today.) But if people feel like they have to have years of training and take on accept ruinous debt in order to become frigging pastry chefs, there's something deeply broken about the American system of vocational training.

Let alone the fun times for teachers trying to teach students about quarks or Marx when they're more interested in studying fashion merchandising.

I am not hating on trade schools. I teach at one. Also, students come to college to get job skills. We have a duty to spend at least some time giving them what they pay for.

I don't get all the hating on trade schools in this thread.

I think it's not hating trade schools, I think it's hating on the blurring between "university" and "trade school." As has been revealed before, there linger here certain romantic notions about the proper role and function of the university.

Also, students come to college to get job skills. We have a duty to spend at least some time giving them what they pay for.

Yes, exactly.

A fuckload of difference if jobs that once required nothing more than experience and willingness to work now come with a two- or four-year stint at a school one mightn't be particularly successful at.

Lack of clarity on my part. Let me rephrase: if universities start serving the functions of trade schools, they're going to have to either forego some of the functions of providing a liberal education, or they're going to fail to serve a number of their students who might be really successful at fashion merchandising but simply don't have the interest or the background to slog through liberal educational requirements.

I think it's hating on the blurring between "university" and "trade school." As has been revealed before, there linger here certain romantic notions about the proper role and function of the university.

Again, yes, exactly. If universities are becoming more like trade schools, maybe that's because people like what trade schools provide enough to expand it to other institutions.

Jesus that blog is depressing, Ben. When I read something like the "As a professor, I qualified for food stamps" post, I think first of the state of the profession, but it's not long after that I wonder wtf that guy is doing not seeking out some other kind of work.

If they want to be trade schools, then they're bilking a lot of people out of a lot of money claiming to be universities.

Perhaps. Law school and med school (and to a lesser extent business school) are "trade schools" and cost a lot more than your typical liberal arts university does. It's not at all clear that they are a worse deal.

if universities start serving the functions of trade schools, they're going to have to either forego some of the functions of providing a liberal education, or they're going to fail to serve a number of their students who might be really successful at fashion merchandising but simply don't have the interest or the background to slog through liberal educational requirements.

Fair enough. The latter option seems pretty clearly problematic, but the former (which seems to be more like what's happening) doesn't sound so bad.

Blume, don't worry. In the right hands, food stamps have a slimming effect.

But if people feel like they have to have years of training and take on accept ruinous debt in order to become frigging pastry chefs, there's something deeply broken about the American system of vocational training.

Not sure I quite follow this. Maybe there should be an

I might add that I see young chefs that both do and do not have school training in fancy positions; a degree from CIA may not be a prerequisite, but it also seems to allow some chefs to catapult themselves into credibility at an age where a lot of chefs-to-be would still be slaving away as sous-chefs for someone else.

Just caught on to the trade-school thread. Hey, schools don't even do a good job at that. Anyone ever check out the 6-year completion rate of bachelors' degrees at major publics, even R1s? At the University of Louisville, where I first got tenure, it was _thirty percent_!

As if that wasn't bad enough, they farm out their students to UPS for incredibly arduous night-shift cheap labor on the promise of bogus "education benefits." These students don't even get near the 30% completion rate of the others.

Shameless plug: read "10,000 students and 300 degrees" at http://howtheuniversityworks.com

The latter option [keeping people out of jobs because they aren't interested in non job related humanities courses] seems pretty clearly problematic, but the former [dropping some humanities, (which seems to be more like what's happening)] doesn't sound so bad.

You both forget the third option, which is what is actually happening: Keep liberal arts requirements but dumb the courses down until they are meaningless.

I think that a lot of people just ask "WTF is happening to the humanities?" I think that humanities education (and scholarship) have to be completely rethought and reorganized, but at the moment we're just getting by from one day to the next and grumbling a lot.

If law schools bilked people out of $200,000 and didn't lead to those people getting jobs as lawyers, they would be a worse deal. Same with med school. The trouble with merging universities with trade schools is that there isn't a trade with clearly defined standards, like medicine or the law, waiting at the other end.

I'm not all that worried, JE. I'm not so wedded to The Profession that I would live on food stamps in Tennessee for it.

(That's what I repeat to myself ever more often, anyway, as the job market year approaches.)

24: It's not inherently broken, but it hasn't been thought through well. The result often isn't pretty, There is nothing wrong with a trade school, And there is nothing wrong with a university... but they aren't the same thing and you shouldn't pretend that they are.

quick thoughts: (I dont' really have time at the moment)
The role of the university is being redefined, but not in a particularly well thought out way. We have:

a) professional management takes over universities
b) a whole generation (+, now) brought up with the mantra `go to university, or you won't get a good job'
c) banks figure out how to get into the action via student loans
d) fee inflation via a combination of a & c,
e) tech sector and a few others really do need a lot of educated entry level people.

a) has a fetish for measurement, even if the measurements are inconclusive --- the former is ok, the latter a problem.

d) & c) amount to a wealth transfer from young people without wealth to older people with some, but allows relatively painless reduction in public spending on education

a) + b) drive students to show up looking for job skills, but that's not what a university was designed for, and it can work badly with the other core purpose (research).

- market value of a non-specific undergrad degree drops to near 0. All sorts of low and semi-skilled entry jobs have picked them up as gatekeeper function though, so it's self fulfilling. You need a degree to get job X, not because you actually need the degree, but because everyone else applying will have it.

- On the other hand, there are e.g. engineering programs that have a very clear connection to jobs, and good industry feedback.

management wants all dept. to work the same, and wants cost/student dropped without a solid handle on what that does. So quality of education probably (it's hard to measure) drops with cost (easy to measure) but it probable doesn't matter if your unconcerned with q. of ed., but rather looking to get past a gatekeeping function in retail or whatever.

-depts have contradictory incentives and pitfalls. The result can be a real mess.

You both forget the third option, which is what is actually happening: Keep liberal arts requirements but dumb the courses down until they are meaningless.

I suspect that's mainly a waystation on the road to the second.

Worth noting: the merger of universities and trade schools is often a literal phenomenon. Here in Ohio the state schools have essentially one database for credit for courses taken at any school, so that a course you take at Last Chance Community College can automatically register as credit at The University of Ohio.

Water moccassin: essentially, law school and med school *are* trade schools. They have fundamentally different roles than most degree programs.

They also benefit from a controlled market, which allows the high rents.

Not sure I quite follow this.

The slow creep of the cult of accreditation is a fairly long-time bugaboo of mine, JRoth, so I'll outsource some of my response to SB's 46. Why on earth should a buyer for Macy's require a 4-year degree?

But yeah, seeing people bilked into dropping fifty thousand dollars on culinary academy as though it were a professional school instead of a trade school pushes buttons for not entirely rational reasons, and I got myself riled up on this topic last Friday clicking around some of the more depressing posts on Hire a Hero.

49: Exactly. My point (not clearly made - probably the lack of a solid liberal arts education showing) was that it's not clear or necessarily the case that a trade school pretending to be a university is bilking people out of money.

If universities are becoming more like trade schools, maybe that's because people like what trade schools provide enough to expand it to other institutions.

I strongly doubt that this is the explanation.

What is it that trade schools are doing that people want to expand to other institutions, and how are you differentiating that expansion from transformation of the latter into the former (perhaps while preserving the old name)?

What is it that trade schools are doing that people want to expand to other institutions, and how are you differentiating that expansion from transformation of the latter into the former (perhaps while preserving the old name)?

Providing people with marketable skills, and I'm not.

Culinary institutes are not really trade schools either.

One of the utterly bizarre aspects of post HS education is an almost confusion about who pays for what, who benefits from what, and what exactly the benefits are. Some schools exist purely to milk student of government grants. Some students got to school to leech money out of their parents and party. Some students scrimp, save, and borrow to get basically worthless degrees. There's no bottom to it.

What is it that trade schools are doing that people want to expand to other institutions, and how are you differentiating that expansion from transformation of the latter into the former (perhaps while preserving the old name)?

Teaching skills that other people will pay you to use?

I think this thread needs to distinguish trade schools, which are just about the skill, from professional schools which also demand people internalize certain ethics and acquire certain skills of citizenship.

One reason kinds of education are being blurred is that many trades want to become professions, and there established methods for changing what was a trade into a profession. (See the history of medicine and engineering.)

So, is it the case that people imagine some sort of golden age of liberal arts education? Because I haven't seen much evidence for that. Sure, there was a time when a bright, working-class kid could go to a well-regarded university on grants and scholarships alone, maybe picking up a few hours at the burger joint in town for extra cash. But that was also a time when there were huge class, gender and race inequalities in the academy (I mean, like, even worse than now and shit), such that a lot of people who could have taken advantage of that deal didn't feel they would be welcome if they did. And significant sections of the job market back then did require a BA as a prerequisite to applying, with a lot of very solid glass ceilings in place to make sure that people without a university background didn't presume to emulate their betters.

I'm dubious about the academy anyway. Most of the best revolutionaries this country has produced had minimal formal education.

Anyhow, when I win the lottery and establish my new Black Mountain/Highlander Folk School hybrid, I will give you all tenured positions.

To further the point.

Law school, med school, and engineering schools are not trade schools, they are professional schools.

A culinary institute is a trade school that is trying to be a professional school.

A business school is a professional skill that only acculturates people into a profession, without actually giving them any meaningful skills.

Pwned by teo.

Culinary schools do seem to be a really bad deal as far as trade schools go. I sometimes wonder if the Art Institute / Academy of Art places are similar, but they seem like a good way to have fun, learn something interesting, and get laid a lot. That's worth paying for.

So, is it the case that people imagine some sort of golden age of liberal arts education?

From the passage of the G.I. bill to the early 1970s.

50: Oh, I've been down with being down on the cult of accreditation for almost 15 years (bad old GF was doing, as an undergrad, more or less the job she wanted, but wouldn't be able to continue w/o a degree; she got the degree, but not only is she not doing that job anymore, she's AFAIK a stay-at-home mom now). I was specifically confused by what you were saying about culinary academies.

If they really cost $25k/yr, then they're a lot more outrageous. I always assumed they were closer to 4 figures, at which point it's a reasonable tradeoff vs. 10+ years of min. wage peony in kitchens.

"peonage"

Law school in the U.S. is a trade school, although there are certain courses that are required, because it's thought that an educated lawyer ought to know those subjects. Everyone has to take Constitutional Law even though very few people will practice it. It's sort of like requiring engineers to study Shakespeare; we just think it's good for them.

I'm told that in parts of Europe, where law is an undergraduate field, it is not always seen as a trade. Reading law at Cambridge as an undergraduate is a bit different from taking the one year transitional course after university. JM can correct me, but I think that French students may study law at the undergraduate level with no intention of actually practicing law.

If they really cost $25k/yr, then they're a lot more outrageous.

There has been a huge increase in the costs of culinary academies. The one I am most familiar with costs over $30k/year all told. It's a racket.

"peonage"

No John, those flowers really get treated badly in those jobs.

If law schools bilked people out of $200,000 and didn't lead to those people getting jobs as lawyers, they would be a worse deal.

Third-tier law schools do exactly this.

Teaching skills that other people will pay you to use?

Sure, great. So why not go to a trade (or professional) school? Why, if there are trade (or professional) schools, should Indiana University also do that?

Law school, med school, and engineering schools are not trade schools, they are professional schools.

I'm not clear on the difference here. Lawyers, doctors, and engineers make a lot more money than cooks and carpenters and echocardiogram technicians, but that doesn't seem like a qualitative difference. The Apparel Merchandising program at IU doesn't seem hugely different in kind from what I had to do as a CS undergrad, which I think of as more like a trade school than a traditional university education.

Yeah, OK, the CIA in NY (pretty reputable) is $21k/yr; less reputable, local one is $17k/yr. That is a pretty bad deal, at least for typical, never-going-to-be-exec-chef types.

And Jesus, Art Institute is a full $25k. A fair number of those kids get marketable skills otherwise unavailable, but shit that's a lot. My CMU degree looks like a really good deal right now....

Teaching skills that other people will pay you to use?

Which is a very different goal than educating them, in some ways.

Sure, great. So why not go to a trade (or professional) school? Why, if there are trade (or professional) schools, should Indiana University also do that?

Because then many fewer people would want to go there, and there would be even fewer jobs for professors than there are now.

helpy-chalk actually made my point when he distinguished between professional schools and trade schools.

I still think that there are areas of legal study which are not strictly about preparation for a profession. This is probably more true in Europe than here.

r. h-c. is right of course, and I glossed over the differences between trade & professional schools. However, they are far closer together than they are to a classic `liberal education', in both intent and approach.

71: It's really not that simple. Or more likely, that's thinking about it backwards. Universities haven't so much appropriated the role as had it thrust upon them.

68: A profession is an actual class of career, involving some or all of the following: accreditation/licensure, professional standards of ethics that are enforceable, legal responsibility/liability for work completed, mastery of legal standards in the field. A chef can't be fired for pairing steak with white zinfandel; an architect can be fired/sued for specifying the wrong door, even if no one gets hurt.

Because then many fewer people would want to go there, and there would be even fewer jobs for professors than there are now.

Ding! Change of subject! That's a reason (about whose quality one could debate for a good long time) for the institutions to want to make the change, not a reason for anyone outside the institution to want to trade/prof schools to spread to universities.

"peonage"

Geez. I couldn't figure out why it looked so wrong. But I knew that peons were the people at the bottom of the totem pole, so up it went.

I assume that a large part of the spread is an attempt to have some symbolic assurance that one is part of the middle-class order (got a BA and everything!) even as everything else is eroded. Presumably in some cases blame can be laid on pride/amour propre, as in the transformation of a lawyer's degree from a bachelor's to a doctor's.

60: From the passage of the G.I. bill to the early 1970s.

Yeah, I kinda figured that's what people were presenting as an alternative. I dunno, maybe things were better back then. For my folx, who both went to selective small liberal arts colleges, the general tone of intellectual endeavor seems to have been superior, however, all of that in loco parentis stuff really seemed to rile people up in those days. On the other hand, my aunt, who went to a couple of different Big State campuses, felt her education was terrible, plagued as it was by ginormous class sizes, inept advising and unrealistic expectations about future employment. Having gone to Big State myself recently, it seems like things have improved dramatically since then.

69: Yeah, OK, the CIA in NY (pretty reputable)....

Stop right there. Valery Plame or no Valery Plame, that's a disreputable institution.

A business school is a professional skill that only acculturates people into a profession, without actually giving them any meaningful skills.

I can't really say all that much about b-schools, and maybe this is typical for all but 4 schools in the country (I think this came up in the D^2 trollfest last month), but I know that, for instance, my dad's MBA included studying game theory under the people who invented it, including a Nobel winner, in addition to other, less rarified skills. It wasn't just 2 years of networking.

That's a reason (about whose quality one could debate for a good long time) for the institutions to want to make the change, not a reason for anyone outside the institution to want to trade/prof schools to spread to universities.

You asked why IU should also teach marketable skills, not why I want them to. As to why they should do that, if the social-order-enforcing role of a liberal arts education is being devalued, IU may as well offer marketable skills as a loss leader to induce people to take classes in Sociology and Economics and what have you.

A profession is an actual class of career, involving some or all of the following: accreditation/licensure, professional standards of ethics that are enforceable, legal responsibility/liability for work completed, mastery of legal standards in the field.

Hmm. By that standard, I think the CMU CS undergraduate program gets classified as a trade school, as do all the undergraduate engineering programs.

Engineering can be a profession, too (in that you have to pass a certain exam in order to be qualified to sign off on projects.)

In the old days, a liberal arts education was a mark of class and wealth, and to a degree a road to class and wealth. But in those days only 5%-10% of the populace got BA or BS degrees.

Then the sciences became roads to class and wealth because of their technical-engineering aspects, and at roughly the same time a higher proportion of the populace got degrees.

But the non-science humanities part of the liberal arts really didn't teach a technical skill. In part a BA degree was used to select very bright verbally-skilled people for jobs, but to a high degree humanities education was more a mark of wealth and class than a road to wealth and class -- it served to distinguish a certain kind of superiority, but when the BA degree reached more and more people the sorting function became less meaningful though still there.

And then more and more colleges grew up so that more or more people could be distinguished from the mass, but that's self-contradictory, since all kids can't be above average.

And eventually a lot of old train-on-the-job jobs became schooled tech jobs, mostly probably just to save industry training and screening costs.

And then finally, the tech schooling started to merge with liberal arts schooling at the lower end, so that you had fewer BAs working at McDonalds. The exact historical sequence of this I'm not sure about.

81: Oh I'm sure people get taught real knowledge. I just doubt it is relevant to what they actually do. If I were to go into full blown troll mode, I would say that success in the business world is dependent almost entirely on luck and involves few skills, none of which can be taught.

But I can't troll right now, because I have to go home.

81: It wasn't just 2 years of networking.

I had a mini-epiphany while washing dishes just now: As I've said before here, I work with a bunch of recent CSOM (that is, b-school) grads, and they're not quite as stupid as you might think. The problem, however, is that they apply the same "I-don't-have-to-care-about-this-stuff-it's-just-a-credentialing-exercise" attitude that they bring to their Literature of American Minorities class to the few classes that would actually help them succeed in business. Almost none of them can, for instance, write a coherent business-related email, even though I'm pretty sure they have to take some kind of Business Communications class, as well as attend seminars that recycle the same information, in order to graduate. That's why the economy is so lousy!

I still maintain that most of them would be better off with 2 years of secretarial school and an extra two years of business experience to knock the corners off.

JRoth--Business school doesn't have to be useless, but--though it's usually classed with the professional schools--it doesn't train you for a profesion. Business is, well, a business and not a trade. There may be ethical considerations, but you can open up a business without taking special exams or getting a special license.

83: Actually no, computer science is not a "profession." I'm not sure why that bothers you - words have meanings, and the specialized meaning of "profession" doesn't include CS. That doesn't make CS a trade school - I certainly never claimed that there are only 2 categories - professional school or trade school. Biologist isn't a "profession," either, but I don't call the Mellon College of Science a trade school.

I have no problem with the idea that universities include a number of components, some of which are more liberal arts-oriented, some of which are more professionally-oriented, some of which are more research-oriented. Some skillsets are best learned in such a broad environment. Others - like, say, cooking - are not. CS - with its research component - wouldn't work in a trade school environment.

One reason for my taking the position that I am in this argument is that my alma mater has (and has always had) a very significant trade-school component, despite being one of the most prestigious schools in the country. For instance, it has a major pretty much identical to the one at IU that was the starting point for this discussion.

Oh wait, I teach clear writing, so I can't say that business skills can't be taught. Darn.

Also, fuck a bunch of adjuncting in Tennessee. If it comes to that, I'm done with the academy and will do something else in my life, like making a bunch of money, buying their damn university from them, and firing all the administrators. For a start.

88 - I agree that "business" isn't a profession. I was just objecting to the characterization of b-schools as little more than 2 year networking conferences, which is how I read 58.

I'll add that often a profession has, or claims to have, an element of public service: law, medicine, clergy, academics.

I expect Goneril to weigh in on the sociology of professionalization of everyone.

the sociology of professionalization of everyone.

Yeah, I should probably note that, while Senmut was worshipped as a god in Egypt 5,000 years ago, architects only became professionals about 130 years ago. Before then, you had a few academically-trained architects who did a lot of public works-type stuff, but mostly it was the old-fashioned Master Builder concept.

There are various [sociological] theories about what led to the change, but some of it was clearly related to the increasing technical requirements of buildings (Chartres is more like an adobe hut than it is like the Met Life Building).

Oh I'm sure people get taught real knowledge. I just doubt it is relevant to what they actually do.

I'm pretty open to this argument. Although a lot of that high-finance shit is utterly opaque to me - they must learn it somewhere (WTF is a "tranch?").

OK, despite my lack of culinary training, it's off to make dinner....

89: The trade/professional/research aspect of the CS undergraduate education doesn't bother me. It just didn't seem wildly different from the IU Apparel Merchandising program that drew w-lfs-n's scorn in the post. Some gen-ed requirements, some courses that are a mix of practical skills and their theoretical underpinnings, a few classes from other departments that line up well with the major in question.

Why shouldn't that be taught at a university? Unless one's theory of a university is that it should only teach humanities courses that are of no direct value.

Also, what Emerson said in 85 is exactly right.

as do all the undergraduate engineering programs.

For what it's worth, plenty of people don't consider you to actually be an engineer because you have an undergrad engineering degree, you need a P.Eng for that; and in some places there is a legal distinction.

This is by no means universal, and related to the argument that someone is or isn't considered a biologist, for example, because they have an undergraduate degree in biology.

And eventually a lot of old train-on-the-job jobs became schooled tech jobs, mostly probably just to save industry training and screening costs.

This can backfire: In the pac. north west, there was a problem in the 80s/90s with heavy duty mechanics. Training had moved to technical colleges, and people did apprenticeships there, rather than in the field. There are a number of financial benefits of this to both industry and the tech colleges. So you had lots of people learning how to fix loaders and tractors etc., all in a nice big shop in the city.

However, maybe 25% or less (that's generous) of the people who do this sort of work actually do it in a nice big shop in the city. Mostly, you do heavy duty mechanics in the field. In the pac. north west, that means in the rain and mud half way up a godforsaken logging road, much of the time.

For a while they couldn't figure out why they had such a large percentage of papered mechanics who weren't actually working as mechanics, despite industry demand ....

96 and 97 made me laugh because "tranche" is French for "slice". Surely you would know that word if you had some culinary training.

I found this London Review of Books article to be an almost unbelievably good explanation of these matters. I don't think it explains "tranche" though.

I think the idea behind that is that when you bundle up all these securities together, you divide them into highest, medium and lowest risk. With the risk determined by you yourself, in that the ones that collapse first all end up in the highest-risk/highest-reward/junk bond tranche, and then if all those collapsed, you start assigning the next collapses to the medium-risk tranche, and so on. With the lowest risk only losing anything at all if something like 80% of the underlying loans fall apart.

There are various [sociological] theories about what led to the change, but some of it was clearly related to the increasing technical requirements of buildings (Chartres is more like an adobe hut than it is like the Met Life Building).

I was reading a Witold Rybczynski book and it got me fascinated in the brief period during which apparently there were safe passenger elevators, enabling us to make buildings with more levels than people would enjoy walking upstairs, but there wasn't the technology for tall buildings made of steel yet. There was some reference to a 16-story building in Chicago with 6-foot-thick masonry walls at the bottom. I'm sure there are dozens of books about the dawn of skyscrapers, but what's a good one?

I don't know specifically, but whatever it is has to be a biography of Louis Sullivan, right?

This page has a list of some biographies of Sullivan at the bottom.

It's unfortunate that we've moved on to discussions of tranches and skyscrapers, because there was a crucial point in the post which was elided in our discussion. Namely: and making tutus for the IU Music School ballets. So you see, if IU didn't have a Costume Construction minor, the IU School of Music ballerinas would be disporting themselves in the altogether. And we certainly wouldn't want that, would we?

101: There are also tranches of soonest-to-latest repayment, aren't there?

There are business school accreditation systems: Certified Public Accountant, Certified Financial Analyst, etc.

You can tranche it however you want. I've read about loan modifications causing class warfare among security holders based on the way early repayments by the borrower affect different tranches.

I was on a group ski trip that had to be split into tranches, and let us not forget the world-famous Eurofighter Tranche 2.

I went to see Witold Rybczynski speak at Elliot Bay once. When he started defending malls as public space, I left noisily. Jackass.

Also, fuck a bunch of adjuncting in Tennessee. If it comes to that, I'm done with the academy and will do something else in my life, like making a bunch of money, buying their damn university from them, and firing all the administrators.

I heartily endorse your plan B, and especially the part about firing all the administrators. Actually, I wouldn't fire them, exactly. I'd put them on part-time short-term contracts, and then not rehire them for the next semester.

But I have to say, I think the Tennessee part makes it too easy. Fact is, a lot of people don't say "fuck a bunch of adjuncting in [insert city and/or state of your choice, something that sounds more attractive than Tennessee]". Or they don't say it until they've already done a bunch of adjuncting...To put the onus on people to not do what they thought they were being trained to do, because they find themselves doing it under conditions very different from what they thought they had been preparing for...doesn't really address the issue of why so many teaching jobs should be part-time and crappy, you know?

It just didn't seem wildly different from the IU Apparel Merchandising program that drew w-lfs-n's scorn in the post.

It specifically didn't draw my scorn. I just don't see why IU is the right place for it.

110: Oh, I just picked Tennessee because that was the subject in the post where many faculty were on food stamps. The real line for me is adjuncting. And it doesn't address the issue of why the teaching jobs are part-time and crappy, but it is the part that I have control over (at least until I buy their university, BURN SHIT DOWN, and force them not to be dickheads about hiring.)

I'm sure there are dozens of books about the dawn of skyscrapers, but what's a good one?

Why Buildings Stand Up isn't precisely what you're looking for, but it covers some of the subject.

Its companion work, Why Buildings Fall Down is entertaining too. The description of the series of events that led to a building explosion in NYC cracks me up.

102: Monadnock (Easy to remember, just think of "Ma nah ma nah"), 17 stories . Gorgeous building, half masonry and half steel, and funnily similar to the Reliance Building, built of steel 4 years later.

The Elia Louis Sullivan bio is pretty good, but very Sullivan-centric. I feel like I should know of a good early-skyscraper book, but I don't. I'll ask the wife.

Most of my friends actually thought Why Bldgs Fall Down was far more interesting, for the same basic reason that Satan is the best character in Paradise Lost.

Devil in the White City says little about skyscrapers per se, but is a fascinating history of the World's Columbian Exhibition (famous for snuffing out the Chicago School in favor of City Beautiful and Beaux-Arts) as well as of a little-known serial killer who took advantage of it.

The real line for me is adjuncting

The thing is, though, there are lots of disciplines in which people with very healthy tenure-track careers first spent a year or two treading water in a contingent faculty job.

Contingent faculty, that comes with a salary & healthcare & a contract is not making $1300 per credit.

re: 114

That's a nice building the load bearing lower walls give it a very attractive shape.

Late 19th and early 20th century architecture is great. Glasgow has quite a lot of it -- it used to be one of my favourite things to look out for when walking round the city.

A business school is a professional skill that only acculturates people into a profession, without actually giving them any meaningful skills.

currrently calling "bbbbbuuuuulllllshittttt!" on ...

FFS people. Management can be done worse or better. Doing it better is, in fact, a skill that can be taught. Some organisational forms are better suited to particular tasks than others, and matching problems to solutions is a skill that can be taught ...

oh fuck it, I can't be bothered. No, you're all right, I'm wrong, the "Dilbert" cartoon is literally true. "MBAs" are just silly people who have unaccountably been given responsibility for large sums of real money because of their hair. The economic growth of the last fifty years is all attributable to "engineers", who have magically organised themselves on large projects, with nothing but hindrance from "marketing". Scientific management is simply irrelevant, people at "the coalface" all have an inherent understanding of all the priorities and constraints of every organisation, and thus business school must just be an empty exercise in credentialism and networking.

George W Bush went to one of the best MBA school in the country, and not coincidentally he has been one of the most dynamic Presidents this nation has ever known. (Cheney, by contrast, is a mere political scientist.
And Rove is a college dropout. )

There are a lot of important forces working to blur the line between trade schools and higher education.

Good. Germany has had a very good system of technical/vocational colleges that also do more advanced stuff and lead on to the technical universities, and unlike the UK (...or apparently the US) they don't stigmatise them. And this has stood their economy in very good stead for the last donkey's years.

re: 119

I suspect a lot of IT 'engineers' gain their experience from medium sized IT projects. Which are, in my experience, often woefully run. I worked in the internet industry for a while in the mid 90s and pretty much every project was characterized by management over-promising [sometimes absurdly so], marketing people talking out their arse, and usually low-end and low-paid 'technical' people being left to carry the shit [which didn't mean actually solving the problems, it just meant working absurdly long hours fire-fighting just to keep things from total collapse].

Hence the 'Dilbertian' skepticism about management. None of which has fuck all to do with how useful MBAs are or how well management works in general, since those kinds of IT projects are/were pretty sui generis.

119: No, you're all right, I'm wrong, the "Dilbert" cartoon is literally true.

I'd have more sympathy for your outrage, but the company I work for has been living in a hellish meta-"Dilbert" cartoon for the past 3 years. The marketing guys from the big software company came in and sold the executives a fancy line of bullshit about how beautiful and perfect and efficient their new accounting system (plus all its lovely peripherals) was. Then, before the ink was dry on the contract, the project managers from the big software company came in and started saying "no" to every request to modify their precious system to comply with regulatory and business requirements. Not only that, but their ideas about deadlines and QA and all that were at variance with consensus reality. And most of the ancillary applications they sold us don't even work with their own system. Sorry dsquared, but sometimes the conventional wisdom really is wise.

re: 123

Yeah, software projects again. Which are often characterized by near-criminal [or actually criminal] negligence.

However, I suspect dsquared is talking about other sorts of management -- i.e. in finance companies or in businesses that make stuff.

Yeah, no MBA, no Enron. No tranches. No LTCM.

re: 125

I'm not 'pro-management' by any means -- and my own personal experiences in that area have been decidedly mixed, with more incompetents than competents -- but there is a fair bit of variation across industries and in working practice.

This is at a finance company. The buyers are just as guilty as the sellers in this instance.

Why Buildings Stand Up isn't precisely what you're looking for, but it covers some of the subject.

More tangentially to the original request, Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction is also highly informative, with amazing pen-and-ink drawings.

I think that Minneapolitan and others were talking about generic MBAs they'd met, and management they'd known (often from weak schools), whereas Dsquared was defending the idea that management, at best, actually does something and that good management is better than bad.

At this point I have no idea what Dsquare's politics are, except that like B, he expresses vividly.

IME you can't make a managerial silk purse out of a sow's ear. A good manager with an MBA may be a better one, because the training extends their skill set and increases their confidence. A bad manager with an MBA tends to be even worse, since they think it reinforces their tendencies to prescriptivism and inclines them to look for answers in a rule book rather than think about shit.

Unfortunately, there are many more bad managers than good (although probably not in dsquared's exalted circles). This is because a. there are too many managers, and b. contributing to this, many companies promote people into management regardless of aptitude because they can't think of any other way to reward them for being good at selling or coding or QA or whatever they're actually cut out for.

Weird, I remember Bousquet from CUNY. Though I thought he had red hair. Always disliked how the valid critique of the university seemed to bleed into heavy-handed consciousness-raising in the classroom ... Pedogogy of the Oppressed and all that.

Hey look, I trolled D^2!

Let me try to make my claim in a less trollish way with an analogy to teaching. There are some things that you can say about teaching in general, rather than teaching this or that subject. Nevertheless the most important thing a teacher needs is knowledge of the particular subject they are teaching and how that particular subject relates to students. Ideas about teaching in general, without regard to subject are a distant second.

Same for management. The most important thing for a manager to know is their industry. Domain general management skills, like domain general teaching skills, are generally nebulous and hard to quantify. MBA programs are thus like the Masters in Education a lot of secondary school teachers in the US wind up getting. Useful, but not nearly as useful as other kinds of training.

Yeah, 132 makes a fair bit of sense.