What determines the success of an individual? Wealth? Happiness? Fame?
One blogger mentioned Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, interesting because he notes that neither have university degrees yet are both “the most famous and successful billionaires”. One would think that individuals like Jobs and Gates are the boogiemen that keep University Presidents awake at night.
Why?
Because they undermine, with their very existence, what every single University (colleges and private secondary schools too I’m sure!) promises to deliver: future success with the completion of their program. Gates and Jobs are successful (or at least filthy rich) despite completing a degree program.
So are Jobs and Gates living proof that University degree are useless? NO!
University degrees are the great socio-economic discriminator of our time; this is ESPECIALLY true for degrees that land you a job. Unfortunately applied degrees such as finance, accounting, engineering, or anything in the medical field will give you the greatest probability of securing a job even though they are usually degrees that foster the least creativity. (Believe me, a creative surgeon is the last thing I would want to have.)
If you don’t believe me I’d like for you to personally ask ten of the above majors if they are employed (with what salary) a year after graduation. Now compare this to ten inherently creative majors such as music, marketing, fine arts, etc. majors. The difference should be astounding. (but really this all goes back to what you consider “the success of an individual” i.e. happiness)
Now to be perfectly clear, I am not bashing these majors nor do I believe Prof. Farhoomand is suggesting that we all be music majors. I am simply trying to make the point that much of the companies and corporations in the world could in theory benefit from a more creative workforce, but will do fine (and have done fine) hiring people that just get the job done.
Will an IT consulting company hire a US educated IT majoring student for $75,000 USD a year over a student over in India who is only asking for 400,000 rupees ($8,223.63 USD) a year because the US student is more CREATIVE? If this be the case, one wouldn’t have to worry about outsourcing.
(Source of Indian IT salary: http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Information_Technology_(IT)_Consultant/Salary )
In all honesty I don’t believe we need (all) accountants (number crunching), financial analysts (financial model crunching), or demolition engineers (concrete crunching) to be creative. All that is required of them is to do what has worked in the past and to do it right.
This isn’t to say none of them should be creative. In fact it’s the creative and personable individuals that will probably advance further in their career, but can this creativity and personality be taught in a classroom setting? And how on earth would you grade these individuals?
I have a friend majoring in fine arts here at HKU. He/ She tells me that all her teachers love her back at her home university and she get’s 4.0s on her paintings in her studio classes. I asked her how she felt about that, she responded, “If you're getting good grades it’s like you're following their model of what is right and wrong”. What is art but your own perspective of the world? No matter how many rules it breaks art is art.
I wonder how Picaso would have fared in a classroom setting?
Despite all that I have just said, and all of whom I have just offended. I do believe that a cross disciplinary approach in Universities (especially in Hong Kong) would be beneficial, but only to those that will be able to take advantage of it. Some people just are not creative and don’t really care enough to try. It’s hard work working long, boring hours in a work week, BUT it’s even HARDER work coming up with creative ideas that serve to get things done in a more efficient world-changing manner.
You need creative individuals to come up with the ideas, but more likely than not you also need the typical University educated individuals to make the vision become reality.
Oh and to support the final point I would like all my fellow bloggers to look at the educational background of Tim Cook (runs all of the operations of Apple, basically without this guy, you’d hear about the how the iPhone came out today but actually be able to buy one 10 years later) and Kevin Turner of Microsoft.
Oh what the hey, here you go:
No comments:
Post a Comment