Have we too many third level students?

To broaden this topic a little; what do posters think the implications of the increasing rate of technological change will have on our current educational system? Put simply what you learn in college/university/ trade school now will be our of date faster than ever before. This is true not just in IT, Finance, Pharma, Bio-Sciences and Engineering but in Medicine, Law, Accountancy and other traditional professions.
Machine learning is the new automation; machines can read MRI's and X-Rays faster and better than any Doctor. Technology will remove the need for conveyancing in house purchasing and many other bread and butter areas of law. Apps and OCR software will enable people to do their own tax returns. The list goes on and on.
Should we move from an education system which places emphasis on what a student knows to one with more emphasis on what and how they think?
 

That was ever the case. The accounting stream in my own 1980s B Comm college course was heavily focused on current cost accounting, which was more or less obsolete even then and totally obsolete by the time I started working. Learning it didn't do me any harm and probably sharpened me up for newer and more relevant things.
 


A lot of talk about automation / AI / machine learning, etc.

But very little of it in practice in Ireland, IMHO.
  • Mortgage application - still loads of paper to and fro
  • remove the need for conveyancing - this will be resisted by vested interests, and also what about liens/searches/etc.
  • health - we still don't have much ICT in health, still paper charts
  • If I go to a Cork GP, can they see my records from a hosp visit in Dublin = NO.
 
Automation and machine learning removes what the Americans call grunt work but in my experience if anything increases the need for expertise in monitoring and interpreting it.
 
T McGibney said:
Automation and machine learning removes what the Americans call grunt work but in my experience if anything increases the need for expertise in monitoring and interpreting it.
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Everything from surgery to actuarial calculations to industrial design to farming will be impacted. I'm not saying that there will be fewer jobs but there will be different jobs and those currently working in those areas will have to adapt.
I trained as a Toolmaker. It was primarily a manual job 25-30 years ago. Now it's primarily a technological job. Many of the same people are here, producing the same sort of parts, but they spend most of their time in front of a computer now. That's my point; we should be teaching people how to learn, how to think, how to understand, not how to remember things.
 
Purple said:
Technology will remove the need for conveyancing in house purchasing
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This is a claim I don't understand, and I've heard it in the context of the many things Blockchain is going to fix as well.
Surely conveyancing is only simplified once a property has gone through conveyancing and transferred into some new platform that the machines can take over? Given that less than 1% of agriculture land changes hands each year in Ireland, I see plenty of work ahead for conveyancing solicitors.

Purple said:
That's my point; we should be teaching people how to learn, how to think, how to understand, not how to remember things.
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Similar to @T McGibney 's point about learning things that are out of date, I think there is too much focus on what specifically people study. Fine, if you want to be a doctor you need to stydy medicine, but in general one of the greatest things you can learn in college is how to think. I used to recruit quite a few graduates into technology roles, and some of the people that have ended up with the best careers had completely unrelated degrees.
 
Purple said:
Everything from surgery to actuarial calculations to industrial design to farming will be impacted.
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Will be impacted? All those sectors have already been impacted, and hugely.


Isn't that my point too? We learn, think and understand by remembering things.
 
Purple said:
Yes, and the rate of change will continue to increase massively, making the old fashioned educational system less and less fit for purpose.

Yes, and the point I made in post 41.
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I don't necessarily buy that.

The current emphasis on what a student knows to one equips them fine for adapting to new technologies and new developments.

Telling people what to think is a solution for nothing.
 
It is currently a very manual and opaque process for the customer. It can be simplified greatly thus reducing the labour and technical skill required and so the cost to the customer and value to the seller.

Industrialisation meant that the up front investment in time, skill and capital was increased so that the process was simplified and de-skilled thus reducing the unit cost of production. AI does the same thing in more areas.

Where I work we have de-skilled the machining process through investment in technology and process development. The next step is collaborative robots which can load and unload the machines. That further reduced the production cost by front loading the technological investment. That means we have to train our people in new skills which increases their labour value and thus their pay levels; the same people produce more and get paid more with the same labour input.
The skills they learned before they started working here are less and less relevant. Training and skills development are less and less tied to training in educational institutes and more and more tied to on the job uncertified training.
 
Yes, totally different from telling them what to think.
I don't know where you are going with this.
 
[QUOTE="Purple, post: 1585006, member: 114"we should be teaching people how to learn, how to think, how to understand, not how to remember things.[/QUOTE]
I think this is very important. I think we should have more puzzles in the LC.

I also think more multiple choice exams might help with the accuracy and turnaround of exam results.
 
Firefly said:
I think we should have more puzzles in the LC.
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Very easy to game these unless you keep inventing an infinite number of new puzzles.

Firefly said:
I also think more multiple choice exams might help with the accuracy and turnaround of exam results.
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Multiple choice questions are ok for pub quizzes and TV game shows but any exam which allocates marks for good guessing is unworthy of the name.
 
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