From the beginning of the semester, posters from the Office of Academic Affairs were able to be seen all over the campus. The posters encouraged students to participate in a survey regarding the reformation of each major curriculum. It said, “The school has been putting a lot of efforts on making better education system, but students used to be left behind from stating their opinions about what education they pursue. The school authority has a duty to listen and apply students’ suggestions on designing the course curriculum.”
It is such an impressive attempt to hear students’ voices since they are the main subject of education at school. Technically, their thoughts should have been listened to earlier.
However, the school was stressing that the curriculum needs a change because it is not helping students at all with respect to getting employed after they graduate. The poster stated, “The statistics say 67.6 percent of graduate students get jobs, while the rest 30 percent of them is under the condition that cannot live like a human being.”
This sentence implies that the school judges the rightness of a curriculum mostly with the employment rate of students, and the school thinks all students must be employed just because they came to university for higher education. It means the school authority considers itself as a training place for students’ employment. It means the school denies reason for its existence.
Students came to university to learn what they want to learn for their knowledge cultivation. Even in the Oxford Dictionary, “University” is defined, “It is an institution of higher or tertiary education and research which grants academic degrees in various academic disciplines.” Students’ life goals and genuine happiness are not the things that can be counted with the employment rate.
Getting a stable job and earning money is essential for living, of course. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that our university is regarded as something that is no more than a step in that process. The true meaning of academic knowledge cannot be educated to students in a place like this. If the school really wants to educate students with better education, reconsideration of the reason why universities exist is urgent.