Sorry I used a hypothetical situation to prove my point when I should obviously only use cold hard facts
Just now, you provided a Google link to malpractice cases and a few anecdotes. I'm not really sure how this proves that a university education is meaningless.
(
Malpractice is obviously not an issue
at all once you get a degree of course).
I'm not sure what point you're making here. That hiring fresh grads is responsible for high instances of malpractice? You do realize that new grads are usually supervised, right? And it's not like there's an alternative; degree programs already provide as much real-world experience as can be reasonably expected. Medical doctorates are already eight-year programs plus a nontrivial amount of time doing some sort of supervised work. If we start heaping on more requirements, we're going to have a higher dropout rate even among the better students; it'll just get too costly, time-wise, money-wise, and effort-wise. You can't expect people to dedicate a quarter of their adult life to training. There'll be a shortage of doctors in no time. I guess that would kind of cut down on malpractice suits. Wouldn't help as much with the whole "people dying" part, though.
Should I instead talk about business majors who have run businesses into the ground?
There are plenty of Fortune 500 companies (if not most) whose status is thanks to one or more MBAs and I'm equally as sure that plenty of would-be companies have floundered due to the helm being operated by someone without adequate business knowledge. Now, I'm sure you can find the occasional exception on either side (the uneducated man making it big because he has good business sense or the Harvard grad whose business went south), but those are exceptions. Generally speaking, business majors do a pretty good job operating the business of their business and this is quite likely a result of a good education. Otherwise, failing corporations would be the norm, not the exception.
Or maybe teachers who simply cannot work with their students and teach them?
They have mandatory courses on how to interact with kids as a requirement of an educational degree that is meant to deal with this very problem. Again, these degree programs are usually designed by people with experience in the field and they're quite aware of the problems involved. This problem is probably even worse among people who haven't gone through the relevant coursework on this problem.
Or maybe all the drafters and designers who have had one of their buildings collapse?
Again, this is pretty obviously not resultant from the fact that they went to a university, especially for something like this where there is supposed to be a review process before green-lighting construction.
Because with what you're saying, in theory, is that once you've been an intern or had a slight bit of real-world application, you're golden.
No, I said that once you've gone to several years of schooling on a topic and had a semester of real-world experience, you're qualified for a supervised, entry-level position in the field you studied. Requiring anything more would lock people out entirely from getting jobs in that field to begin with. In fact, that's kind of the situation in computer science (my field) right now. I graduated from GVSU with a 3.4 in computer science and a semester of experience and still had trouble finding a position because everyone wanted people with 5-6 years of experience in the field and nobody was willing to give it. What, exactly, am I supposed to do, then? Magic myself those five years of experience? Work for free and starve for several years? Perhaps you have a remedy for people who are in the situation I was in several months back (luckily, I was able to get an
internship, because apparently I'm so unqualified that I can't even get an entry-level position... they upgraded me to an entry-level position later, though).
For example, student teachers often sit in on classes and sometimes even teach the class themselves as a substitute, but that doesn't at all guarantee that they'll be a good teacher.
No, it doesn't. That's why you supervise new employees. What a degree does show is that you had the work ethic to get through your program and know at least the basics (and probably the more-than-basics) of your field, which is the bare minimum required to qualify for such a job. Now, that's not to say there aren't other ways you can show qualification, but that's the standard path and it's the only viable option for many people (and it's the
only option in certain fields, like medicine). It's not a green-light to treat them as an all-knowing expert and I never said it should be (and no competent employer will; as I said, it's quite the opposite, in my field, they'll treat you as
incompetent until you have 5+ years).
"I had to try really hard here not to crank the sarcasm up to 11 because what you said is pretty silly.
If something I said was silly, then by all means tell me what didn't make sense.