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By Brian A. Gnatt Daily Arts Editor |
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In two months and a week, I am going to drive out of Ann Arbor with my $80,000 diploma buried in a cardboard box in the back of the car. But the question still floating around in my mind after 7 1/2 semesters at the University is whether my Michigan education was worth its hefty price of $80,000. Unfortunately, the answer sounds like an astounding "No."
Right off the bat, I want to make it clear I'm not saying my Michigan experience wasn't enjoyable, but that my four years of classroom education were absurdly overpriced, and frequently worthless. Even more sad is that Michigan isn't much worse than any other university in the country.
As I sit and think about all the classes I have taken at Michigan, it disgusts me to think how much I paid for many of my classes. Take this semester for example: Out-of-state tuition is near $10,000 (Don't worry in-staters, you're still being ripped-off), and with the mass of boring $40 paperbacks and $50 coursepacks, the sum for one semester is pretty close to 10K. Divide that number by four classes and you get $2,500 a pop. Go ahead and ask yourself - are my classes worth it?
The answer for some courses is "Yes." I admit, some, if not many, of the classes I took were worthwhile, and I learned a great deal of interesting or important information from excellent professors. Nevertheless, the number of terrible, worthless classes I have taken at the University is still astoundingly high.
Looking over my transcript, I ask myself - was Comm 103 (Intro to Mass Communication) worth $2,500? The answer is "No." Three times a week, the professor read the most boring and useless notes from the overhead projector in a dry monotone. (For $2,500, I could have bought a new TV, VCR, stereo system, a year of cable TV, subscriptions to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly and a year's supply of beer, popcorn and video rentals. I would still have learned more about the mass media than I did in Comm 103.) But instead, I memorized useless facts the night before the tests and forgot everything the second I handed in my exam.
An even better example was my History of Jazz class - a course that sounded so interesting when I CRISPed, I was willing to take an 8:30 a.m. class twice a week. While interesting at times, ask the $2,500 question once again - was it worth it? For $2,500 I could have purchased the best 200 jazz CDs of all-time (at an average of $10 a disc), and still had $500 to buy reading materials more interesting than those we were assigned in class.
Then there are the classes where the professor lectures directly from the texts, almost going so far as writing the lecture outlines straight from the books' table of contents. I do know how to read, and if that's all I wanted to do, I could have bought the $100 worth of books for the class and saved $2,400.
My list of crappy classes goes on and on, bouncing back and forth from department to department. Pompous professors, poorly designed classes and most frequently, terribly boring and disposable information are my main complaints. I'm simply upset and disappointed at the University for allowing its trend of offering worthless classes to continue.
I think it's safe to say the majority of stuff I learned from college was from outside the classroom - whether from my own studying or with my non-academic experiences. The Michigan Daily and other campus media outlets became the University's school of communication, teaching valuable techniques like writing and, well, communication, as opposed to the department's half-assed attempts at analyzing the mass media in the Frieze Building's classrooms.
If it seems like I'm being bitter about something that happened to me, or that I have a vendetta against Michigan, that's not the case. This is about my disappointment with higher education in general. Ninety percent of what I learned from college came from outside Angell Hall, the MLB and the other lecture halls on campus. I guess that's the way it's supposed to be, but I only wish it hadn't taken me four years and $80,000 to realize most of what I learned in class was bullshit.
- Reach Brian at bgnatt@umich.edu