Degree lengths

Continuing on the theme of education, unfortunately it seems that the politicians are also very much clueless in regards to education. A big problem that is often cited as the reason for stricter control over students is that the time it takes the average student to graduate from university has been apparently growing. So obviously the logic goes that this must be bad because if students are in school longer they must cost society more directly and also if they are in school, that must mean that they are not working and hence are also causing losses for the society in terms of lost tax income. That may be slightly simplified, but my understanding is that that's the crux of it.

But, if you actually think about it, coming from an IT background we've often been criticized for taking jobs during our studying and then forgetting to graduate. For some reason it seems that competent software people tend to be dragged out of school very quickly after they enter school. So if you think about the case where a student de facto drops out of school to get full-time employment writing software, you in fact have a situation where the student isn't causing costs for the school (s/he's not taking up the time of the teaching staff, no need for expending material resources, no subsidies, ...). And most likely ending up in software means that the person will be making a decent living, at least in the region of the median income in the country. So a productive part of society. Of course one could argue that the lack of degree may come back to kick the person in the ass later down the line because for some odd reason having a piece of paper makes you a better person. But again the world has changed so that in technology, for instance, the time horizons have shortened to such an extent that because I dropped off the bleeding edge of web development in about 2005-2006, I'm already an ancient dinosaur, degree or no degree.

One angle to think about this might be the per student costs. The current academic system relies still too heavily on mass lectures, which cost a fixed amount to produce regardless of the number of attendants. So if people drop out of school and aren't replaced with new students, the average cost of producing the lecture for a smaller amount of students goes up, despite the cost remaining constant in absolute terms. But again this can be tackled either by shifting away from mass lectures (which I never liked anyway) or then opening up the application process and enabling more students to enroll thus mitigating the effect of the disappearing students.

However, this still does not really explain why everyone is so grumpy about students taking long to graduate. One of the most central reasons, I believe, is that there is a constant game of resource allocation going on. The government runs the universities in Finland and despite recent attempts to change the system to set up universities as foundations and attract funding from the industry and other sources the raw truth is that to a great extent universities get funded based on the amount of graduates they are able to produce. So there we go, there may not be any concrete benefit for anyone in getting students to graduate quicker, but there is a very clear link to resource allocation. So if the resource allocation mechanism would be changed, I think schools would also change their attitudes and not care too much about the invisible and costless students hanging around as an entry in a student database.

Now, looking at the situation from the other perspective, there might actually be very many benefits for students and the universities to keep a link between each other for as long as possible. Reflecting on my own career and studies so far, it's quite clear that taking a job at a multinational was quite possibly one of the best decisions I've made during my studies. It gave a fairly solid and concrete link to the otherwise somewhat disconnected subjects from school. How do you expect a person to truly understand about strategy based on lectures and articles without actually providing the individual with an opportunity to be a part of a strategy process and see for themselves what these things are about. And on the other hand being in a company but also hanging around on campus enables the student-employee to actually go to professors to discuss about potential problems that the student is working on in his career and actually brings potential work to the university and may help in applied research.

This subject could of course be discussed at greater lengths and deepened a lot, but even at a fairly shallow level it's quite clear that the whole perceived problem of students not graduating fast enough is just silly.