What is it that you want me to learn, exactly?

The more I think and reflect against my studies so far, the more I start getting a feeling that I do not entirely grasp what it is that our education system in Finland is trying to achieve. Ever since the 90ies, the amount of starting positions in universities have increased, the ammattikorkeakoulu system has been established, and in general everything has gone to hell. Let me elaborate...

Looking at merely TKK, I can't help but think that it is ridiculously easy to get into TKK. Just write your name on a piece of paper and that's about it. I've been led to understand that in the history this hasn't been so. But regardless, these days it seems that just about anybody can get into the school, and this often also happens. This naturally decreases the quality of the student material, which is very much visible in day-to-day schoolwork.

Take an example of a recent essay we were tasked to write for school in a small group. The essay wasn't that long, but would have required a bit of understanding on the topic and preferrably some type of analysis and a synthesis of a situation based on the former. The amount of literature (articles, studies, books, etc.) is vast and finding material is trivial. What happens? The typical student appears to approach the problem at a shallow and superficial level: instead of doing an analysis over a period of time we get a snapshot of the current moment, instead of objective and quantifiable material we get the view from corporate websites, instead of any type of structured framework, we get a list of bullet points. And then my favorite: Wikipedia references. And all of this in a course which is aimed at Masters students, who should be now be fairly familiar with how to proceed with academic work and write academic papers. Sufficient to say, the situation is not looking too bright for our essay.

Maybe this is underestimating the intelligence of your average student, but the other alternative isn't that appealing either: are our students just intellectually lazy and uninterested in putting in the effort to understand the exercises? Maybe this is the point: when you try to educate everyone at a high level, you are bound to get unmotivated people to join the crowd, just for the sake of getting a paper and in this way dilute the value of the degree. And ultimately, what is the point of educating everyone at a very high level despite the fact that a fair portion of these people will then continue on to perform mechanical tasks that do not require the ability to utilize the skills that the universities are supposed to teach.

Mind you, I'm being slightly provocative here and venting my frustration at the system, since I do feel that the things we are taught are to an extent valuable and good, but I am annoyed to see this intellectual lazyness and mediocricity in a portion of the students. That said, I fortunately do know some people from school who I actually do know and trust to do a good job, so maybe all is not lost. But in practice I would still advocate restricting the number of entrants to universities, attempting to shift the ratio of faculty to students into a more favorable direction, and overall demanding more from the students (e.g. if you return a bad paper, the course staff should be keener to just flunk people as opposed to letting them barely pass).