Impact of Internet on Universities and the decline of Society
I’m taking some time off doing my IS101 Individual Project to write this.
-
A recent phenomenon that isn’t just restricted to Singapore.
More and more bright kids are choosing their career paths to go into business and management for promise of fat paychecks and perhaps sometimes due to the flock effect. But I ask, is this the way things should be?
A University is a place of learning. A place of acquiring useful prestigious knowledge that would otherwise be un-understandable by those who fail to qualify to be in one. Our society had almost always worked in the same way, with those with more knowledge and intelligence servicing those with lesser knowledge and intelligence. With this society progresses and technology improves.
Yet, with the birth of the internet, the knowledge ground is leveled. Anyone could acquire any knowledge and Universities are no longer the sole gatekeepers to knowledge. Any Tom, Dick or Harry could easily acquire knowledge from the internet and learn as much as, say, a NTU Engineering Graduate. Also, because of the advancement of communications and information technology, and also the intellect of our generation of engineers, researchers, and scientists, knowledge has an expiry date that is within an individual’s life-span. What one learns in the first year of University would probably be outdated by the time one graduates. Only internet, with its unpreceded flexibility and versatility could stand the test of time.
Thus, being an University Graduate no longer had the implication it once had in the pre-internet era. A University Graduate is now no longer in the position of power. A University Certificate would only formally confirm that an individual had these knowledge, but anyone could also have this knowledge as well.
At the same time, as more and more countries progress from being developing countries to being developed countries, the generation of parents who lived and endured hardship while earning minimal wages had seen for themselves what appears to be the comfortable life that that managers and businessmen had. They need not “get their hands dirty” and do any actual work; all they had was just to make people work for them. Thus the wisdom was passed to the next generation, the current generation, that it is better to be a boss than to get one’s hand dirty doing any actual work. Government leaders of different nation, in other to boast their country’s economy, encourage capitalism. Everyone wants wealth through a comfortable career. Everyone wants to be their own boss.
Universities, of course, saw this as their raison d’être, their reason for existence. Business and management schools start spring up to meet this new generation of intelligent businessmen/management wannabes.
But what would become of society? Managers and businesses would only exist because there are actual engineers, researchers and scientists doing proper work for the betterment of mankind. Otherwise intelligent people, who could have become the next nobel prize winner or who could have benefited humanity in one way or other if they had become scientists, engineers and researchers, all ended up choosing the career path of becoming managers and businessmen.
That also lead to another problem. With lesser and lesser bright people doing things that really matter, what is there to manage? The demand for managers and businessmen who inevitable fall.
What would that become of society? Lack of technological progress? Lesser and lesser new things get invented every year. Lesser new knowledge. Look at your toilet bowl. The basic design of a toilet bowl had undergone many changes in the past. The design is now stagnant. Who on earth would want to work on toilet bowls since it definitely would not pay as well as being a manager of some firm selling toilet bowls?
Meanwhile, Business and Management Universities would make rolling big bucks as they charge a premium for their education due to high demand, not realizing that they are also eroding away their only raison d’être.
Finally, are all these business/management wannabes cut out for it at all? Treating management and running a business like a textbook subject with examinations and endless memorization, is that supposed to be meaningful or useful? Knowing business is different from running business. If you look at all the successful business founders of our time. How many of them were actually business graduates? There was also the issue of ego. Saying that “I am reading Business Law” certainly sounds better than “I am reading Electronics Engineering”. But the main question was, who would be doing a more meaningful work that would contribute to society?
Management/Business Graduates seek to contribute to their own personal wealth, while other Graduates seek to contribute to society.
What would become of a society when everyone wants to manage and no one wants to work and change the world?
Was it all due to greed?
From young we had heard of so many stories where greed could ultimately lead to losing everything. But why is humanity as a whole pursuing this greed?
Still all hopes were not lost, as humanity always seem to have a way to fix itself. Lets wait and see.
—
Time to get back to doing IS101 Individual Project 
5 comments
HI weikiat, nice blog.
In response to the point about information readily available and thus making unis less valuable, I’ve found in SMU that they don’t actually provide us with the info that we can google for, not really. Instead they facilitate the learning such that we google for specific things and read facts and commentary about them. How can the prof be an expert in every area of the subject with knowledge constantly evolving? And the net also manages to offer multiple viewpoints and engages critical analysis. Much of my learning does take place during research on class topics and project topics. This is the way to go(other unis take note). This allows us to make good use of all that is out there and teaches us to learn on our own. After all, “information” will become outdated every few years these days, whilst skills will be our selling points, which SMU has quite a focus on. Has your experience been alike? I’m an SIS freshie just like you so it probably has been
And about brightest talent coming to finance/management, I completely agree! I’ve been discussing this with BGS group mates, and also my finance-geek dad. They should keep the smart guys far away from this industry where you self-serve to create wealth for the self. Since there aren’t actually tangible good and in a sense services created, they are taking money from others in putting them into their pockets. These guys made banking so complicated and allowed transparency to be lost and malpractices to occur which led to the crisis. The top guys at many financial institutions are trained as engineers. If these minds were in science and engin they would be out there inventing and innovating for man’s betterment, and not financial products to expand just their own pockets. Scientists are usually quite passionate about their research as well, it’s not as much monetarily motivated. A guy I know wants to be a theoretical physicist, which is like winning the lottery, except you don’t get money, out of a fierce passion for physics(!). He is swayed towards highly lucrative fields where his peers of half his grades get internships, and maybe if he weren’t so lazy who would have taken one up in his summer break from uni. He’ll probably stick to research even after his 6-year research bond for a certain local agency, but I imagine many of his peers won’t. I know a chem engin NUS grad with a pretty cushy analyst job in a bank. She can’t find a biochem-engin job today(life sciences is her dream), but a bank snapped her up six months before graduation. Now she’s doing a CFA certification to climb the ranks within banking. The money will get better, but I don’t see her directly improving many people’s lives the way she could have researching on life sciences.
Great post, I loved this:
What would become of a society when everyone wants to manage and no one wants to work and change the world?
Indeed. I can “manage” well, but in my career I want to look into innovating new products and providing services for improvement of business processes or just quality of life of the consumer. Americans need to go back to producing stuff instead of their current “fantasy economy”, not leave it to China!
Gosh, sorry for the novel! Gotta be more succinct…
Hi Niki,
thank you for commenting on my juvenile blog post.
I just want to point out that the internet as a replacement for knowledge point is for traditional universities, not business/management universities like SMU.
hey man, dropped by quite by accident. surprised to see such long articles, although i think i did read some lengthy things you wrote just like this the last time i dropped by…
what i gather from your post here is that you feel that we should be diverting more people into more “fruitful” labour. there is a point in that statement. however, i disagree in the amount of weight that carries.
the truth is that people want money. what’s the best way to do that? get a degree in management? are you sure? i know gettting an MBA is supplementary to most jobs, because of the sheer versatility of being a management specialist. however, if what you are saying is a drastic effect, shouldn’t chem engineering require poorer grades than say a bizad degree? that’s hardly the case now.
on the point that you make that the best and brightest minds flock towards the “money”, i’d like to add that it seems logical, but at the same time is probably untrue.
you assume that these people are motivated largely by money, but most of the time, these are passionate people. they can earn money anywhere they go, and they know this. it’s highly likely that they would only dabble in business and management, the industries you have mentioned, because they are curious, or need something to bide their time in a research lull of sorts.
i do not dispute that there is a need for engineers etc., and it is true that those who score well may be “poached” by money. however, the poachers aren’t necessarily using them solely for management. in fact, i’d be surprised if they did.
the point that biz/mgmt people seek personal monetary gain while others do not is clearly flawed. i think you probably left this open to spark debate, so i’ll comment a bit on this.
we are motivated by our needs. our needs require money. we are all motivated by money. the reason why biz/mgmt people appear more motivated by money is because there is a high demand for such specialists, which hence gives them higher pay. working in large team projects will prove how many things you need to do to operate effectively. it also requires specialities in not just management.
also, people who go into biz/mgmt are largely people who don’t really know what they want to do, and hence want to keep their options open. in so doing, they are likely to have what i’d like to call “flexible passion”, and hence tend to gravitate towards whatever can satiate their needs best, as opposed to any particular passion.
i think your point will be better brought across if you try to target our education system. some food for thought there.
don’t work too hard! =D take care. msn me if u’ve got such things to discuss, i’m always interested
hi yx, that’s a very honest response
I guess that applies to you and those you have met. My experience has been rather different. Even passionate engin grads gravitate towards management work for monetary gains. Many students join finance for the money. This is a genuine issue, it has been reported by big media outlets as a recent trend. I’m glad you’re here for passion though! Obv there are both types of people, but we want to keep the engineers in engineering jobs!
wei kiat, how do you mean traditional unis unlike SMU? As in comprehensive unis like NUS or literally unis that haven’t incorporated an SMU-like pedagogy, where google is part of the learning equation? tx.