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Arnold Kling's avatar

I think that UATX looks too much like "revenge of the canceled" as opposed to an attempt to build an exemplary educational experience. We need to try new ideas and discover which ones work best. You have some promising ideas. I have some promising ideas. Others have promising ideas. I agree that UATX is missing the opportunity to be a bold experiment and instead seems to be building something adjacent to what already exists.

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Kelly Harbeson's avatar

I am comfortably retired, and have never spent much time thinking about how my life would be different if my choices had been different. Would you even WANT to change the past without KNOWING how that change would affect your present? But that said, my brief college experience convinced me that the "university track" was not for me. I needed money! And quickly, much quicker than any four year program provided. I have taken several trades vocational training courses over the years, learned numerous skills that I could immediately make coin from and did so, but more than anything else taught me without indoctrinating me. There simply is no time to indoctrinate nor teach a student "how to think, how to learn". Which for someone like me was a welcome relief from the indoctrination and socialization of elementary-high schools. I have become a big fan of Mike Rowe and his push to get more students into vocational training. Academe is not the most comfortable place for many of us, and it's a shame that vocational training is considered to be training for those too dumb to take a college curriculum. So the question is "Do you want to spend years in a university program to get your dream job? Or would you rather have a good, steady income so that you can live out your dreams in your leisure?".

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