Trade school vs. university

Many parents today want their children to complete a university education. They see a bachelor’s degree as a necessity in the information economy (or, as it’s also been called, the network economy).

That certainly is true in the sense that a bachelor’s degree is a requirement for most white-collar jobs, including an entry-level job at a news organization. No degree? No interview, and no hire.

So the degree has become a means to an end — getting a job. As a result, the journey toward receipt of the degree has lost some of its importance in the eyes of the travelers, the students. What one learns or experiences in four years or so, on the way toward receipt, is of less concern than that future goal, the day one gets the receipt. Having the bachelor’s degree has come to mean more than the experiences and learning it supposedly represents.

Imagine it this way: You have a purchase from a shop in a box, and a receipt for that purchase. You arrive at home, and you open the box, and you find that the box is empty.

You would return to the shop and explain that there had been a mistake. Your receipt would show that you had completed the transaction. But can the shopkeeper be sure that the box was empty when it left the shop? Or did you dishonestly remove the item at your home, then bring the box back and endeavor to get a second item for free?

It’s not a precise analogy, but some people’s bachelor’s degrees are rather like your receipt and your empty box. If you carried an empty box out of the shop, and you didn’t realize it was empty — why not? How could you fail to realize that the box contained nothing? Didn’t it seem to weigh too little? Didn’t you want to examine it before you took your receipt and left the shop?

A liberal arts education is intended to fill the box with a broad variety of learning and understanding — much of which is unrelated to one’s academic major or subject area. The shift in focus from the journey (the experience) to the receipt (the degree) has affected what ends up being inside the box.

This brings me to trade schools.

I’m going to mention two, neither one of which pretends to teach journalism, but both of which teach technical and conceptual skills that are used in many journalism jobs today.

One is Full Sail, a school near Orlando, Florida, that now offers bachelor’s degrees in subjects such as computer animation (tuition: $68,660) and game development (tuition: $69,775). Its associate’s degree in graphic design carries tuition of $33,275. The Web design and development curriculum (tuition: $67,775) comprises 36 courses, ranging from behavioral science to Flash ActionScript techniques.

At the end of your program, you will have a bachelor’s degree. Judging from the curriculum, you will also have a lot of specific skills that are relevant in today’s job market. You will have also completed courses with titles such as “English Composition” and “Media and Society.”

Will your box contain more, or less, than the box of a person holding a receipt from a traditional university?

Meanwhile, up north … 

The second example is Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts, which I was invited to tour last week. This center, despite its association with BU’s College of Communication, does not offer bachelor’s degrees — or degrees of any kind. Its courses cannot be counted as credits toward a degree at BU. Its two-semester certificate programs carry tuition of about $20,000 per semester, according to executive director Bob Daniels.

Each program sequence ends with a required practicum (e.g., digital filmmaking; graphic and Web design) intended to give the students real-world experience in applying the skills they have acquired.

At the end of a CDIA program, you will have a certificate, not a degree — so your receipt is a bit different. What about the box? What’s inside? By presenting itself clearly and singly as a certificate program, with a non-credit structure of weekly “modules” (each of which requires about 40 hours to complete), the CDIA separates itself from any notion of a complete or “well rounded” liberal arts education. As Daniels told me, a student can get that elsewhere. (He’s right.)

I hear (and read) a lot of complaints about journalism education today. I’m thinking about these different models for delivering education to try to see whether they can offer us, inside the university system, any tools or systems that would help us.

One thing that’s not going to change, however, is the idea of a university degree representing a broad base of ideas and experiences — we’re not going to turn the university into a trade school. (A student can find that elsewhere.)