A Fast 101 on taking University Degrees
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the difference between types of education, particularly about university degrees, so I thought it might be worth explaining. This might tell you if you want to pursue a degree but it’s more likely to tell you which degree you want to pursue.
University isn’t just TAFE but Harder
One misconception to people who haven’t gone the university route is that it’s TAFE (Technical and Further Education) College but harder. It’s an understandable misconception because we can only comprehend education within the context of our existing experience.
TAFE is about gaining competency. You would do a TAFE Diploma in Network Engineering to be competent to go and get a job as a Network Engineer. That makes perfect sense. TAFE is less academic in the sense that you’ll get more hands-on practical experience at doing what a Network Engineer does for a living.
One flaw in the TAFE system is that quite often competency is a low bar and nothing differentiates a barely competant Network Engineering diploma and an awesome give-me-a-job-today Network Engineering diploma.
University Comes in Different Flavours
University is about qualification. At undergraduate level university is about gaining the generic attributes of a graduating student – the ability to learn, to research, to write structured reports and to understand enough about a contemporary area of education in relation to a given occupation. Your Diploma of Network engineering is worth the first year of a Bachelor of Computing, for example. The cruft year.
Different schools within the university system – Business, Computing, Arts, Chemistry, Law – have their own bar of excellence. In that sense university isn’t just university. The pursuit of a Bachelor of Fine Art is not the same as a Bachelor of Computing in the area of industry it focuses on. However, and this is important to understand, it should to a large degree cover the generic attributes of a student.
An undergraduate degree doesn’t teach you to do a job as a competency… it teaches you to be able to learn. That’s why it’s the foundation of a career instead of a basic one-off walk-away competency. Most graduates from university do not work in the field of their qualification.
Post Graduate Studies come in Two Streams
Another misunderstanding about university is the value of post-graduate studies… not all university study is academic.
The post-graduate stream most people think about is the progression from an undergraduate degree to an honours year to a research masters and then a PhD.
However, if you have a bachelor degree in any field you can directly apply to any Masters by Coursework program in any of the university’s schools. If you don’t have a degree but have 7+ years working in a field you can apply for Masters by Coursework in that field and skip the undergraduate degree entirely – you already have the proven ability to learn about your field.
The MBA program is a classic example of a coursework program… while it’s got an academic component there is a focus on doing… it’s not just a research paper about some obscure aspect of business (like a Research Masters) but a training ground for middle managers and entrepreneurs and consultants.
The progression for an MBA would be to move to a Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) or to a PhD. However, to move into the PhD, which is the academic theory stream, an MBA graduate would need to begin a Research Masters in Business and then transition after one year into the PhD.
A Doctorate is about doing things that apply to the real world (improve your organisation) and the PhD is about pushing the theory bubble to the extreme and discovering something previously unknown to researchers. They have an entirely different focus – but now you know that Doctorates and PhDs aren’t the same creature… your reward for reading this far is a gem of university trivia.
So to Recap about University not being University
People often talk about university like it’s one generic product. It’s not. So before you choose degrees, or even whether you need one, do some research into different schools and levels of qualification. It’s a big commitment so don’t just say “That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”
In a large part going to university is about gaining an education in the formal sense. Unfortunately the Dunning-Kruger Effect applies… if you don’t have an education you may not see the need for one. It’s about exposure to ideas and a larger world of experience.
