HIGHER EDUCATION AND CORPORATE AMERICA

[Higher education and Corporate America]

Higher education and Corporate America

Introduction

Although there have been many ways of referring to work-based learning as a component of higher educational policy, most definitions consider it to be constituted of relatively structured activities occurring in the workplace that equip students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to succeed at work and in society. Students learn by doing real work that is often designed to support and integrate with learning in the classroom and also to promote the acquisition of broad transferable skills. By equipping young adults with work-related skills, work-based learning promotes a high level of work role identification and efficacy, which in turn positively influences their successful transition into the work environment (Ng and Feldman, 2007; Raelin, 2008). Students make sense out of their workplace experiences and construct knowledge through a process of negotiation between these experiences and their own cognitive frameworks (Billett et al., 2005; von Glasersfeld, 2008).

Discussion

The issue of quality emerges as a problem when the results or products obtained at universities and institutions of higher education do not match the expectations of different groups and sectors with interest in the sector, and when the continual frustration of these expectations becomes untenable. In the past, American universities (1) used to be evaluated by students, teachers and governments in terms of democratization on inward and outward, of the politicization of students and teachers, the social prestige of its graduates, and quality of graduates getting jobs in the labor market. None of these issues related directly to the quality of teaching or scientific research conducted within institutions, and in rare cases, the content of teaching and Research University were compared with what was done in other countries and regions. In general, the results of these comparisons were not satisfactory, but had no sectors in society are strong enough to cause the necessary changes.

The most recent questioning of the quality of higher education in America has been three or four main sources, not surprisingly, they bring very different visions of what this quality should actually mean.

Traditional Professions

The first of these sources, in time, they were always the most respected members of the classical liberal professions, especially medicine, law, and in America, engineering. For them, the main function of universities should be the technical training and the initiation of students in the professions. The best teachers, from this point of view, are the professionals themselves, who give their time to teaching. American universities were organized, since the nineteenth century, according to this model. The demands of secondary education or scientific humanistic above, the student selection process at the entrance, formal examinations and disapproval of the least able at the end of each year, the ceremonies of conferring of degrees, all these mechanisms ensure that graduates would not be many more than the existing professionals, that their selection would be made mainly in the higher social classes, and they reproduce quite accurately the professional models of its ...