Peter Vander WallFounder driving creative community growth

The issue with college

Name: The issue with college
Uploaded: 2024-08-24T13:00:48+00:00
Duration: 53 s
Channel: Peter Vander Wall
Description: Speaker argues that a common complaint about college—that professors lack real-world practitioner experience—matters unevenly across disciplines. For…

24 Aug 2024 · 1 min

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Speaker argues that a common complaint about college—that professors lack real-world practitioner experience—matters unevenly across disciplines. For liberal-arts subjects (math, English, history) the speaker downplays the issue, but claims it becomes important for money-related fields (economics, business, marketing, accounting) because those areas change rapidly and benefit from instructors who have practiced investing or entrepreneurship. The speaker asserts an "almost perfect inverse correlation" between who teaches money subjects in college and those who have been successful practitioners, and notes there are too few practitioner-teachers in college classrooms.

Chapters

People say the problem with college is that the professors are not practitioners. They're dusty intellectuals who are just kind of like teaching the thing. They got their nose in a book. They've never actually done the thing they're teaching. But I actually kind of think that this isn't a real problem for a lot of fields. Like, who cares if your math professor has ever a math job? Like, I don't even know what even is a math job. Same for English and history and kind of the liberal arts. Right. It's when you get into fields related to money that it really starts to matter whether they've had practice doing the thing they're teaching. Money is constantly changing. Right. And there's actually an almost perfect inverse correlation between people who teach money stuff in college, like economics and business and marketing and accounting and stuff like that, and people who have actually done great things as investors or as entrepreneurs. That is where you need a practitioner who's actually done what they're teaching. And sadly, we have far too few of those teaching in college classrooms.