Article: Universities shouldn’t force students to attend classes

Article: Universities shouldn’t force students to attend classes

April 05, 2017   Academic writing, In English, students, university,

The quality of education and, as a consequence, students’ knowledge and understanding of university level subjects dramatically diminish throughout the time. This causes educational institutions as well as federal departments of education to think about how they can improve the quality of students’ knowledge. One of the first questions which comes to everybody’s mind is whether students should be forced to attend lectures or not. Japan and USA are the examples of those countries where attending classes is mandatory for all students. In my opinion, this requirement is very straightforward and should be seriously reconsidered. 

First of all, every person ought to know that university is not a school or a kindergarten and that it takes a lot of time and effort to successfully receive a degree. Students choose to attend university themselves, so they must know how to manage enough time for studying as well as understand what type of studying is appropriate for them. Otherwise, if students aren’t able to do it, they are not yet ready for the university education or they probably don’t need it. These people must be expelled from a university so they will not distract other students. This behavior doesn’t differ from the one that is necessary at most of the jobs: most of the time, the employee has a task to fulfill and the employer doesn’t give him the list of instructions of how to manage this problem, but expect his employee to solve the problem no matter what. If the person doesn’t fulfill his duties, he will be dismissed. Students are considered to be adults, so they have to follow the same rules. It relates not only to the education in general but also to exams, finals, and projects in particular. If the person has not shown up, then the only solution is either to rate his work as F or, if the education system allows, to mark him as absent.

Second, even if the mentioned requirement works fine for lazy students, it may demotivate those students who are very productive and goal oriented, but who have their own pace. Moreover, the fact that a university lets students decide whether they want to visit classes or not shows that administration trusts its students, treat them as adults and expect them to behave appropriately.

Finally, so much attention to the student’s attendance may seem like a university is concentrated on the vision of hard work more than on actual education. This fact can make good students think about other universities.

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Presentation: Capitalism

Presentation: Capitalism

April 05, 2017   Capitalism, Global Business, In English, Presentation,

This article and the presentation, which you can find at the end of the article, are the results of the home assignment of three students for the Global Business class at EF New York 2016-2017.

Merchant Capitalism

The underlying theme of capitalism is the use of wealth to create more wealth. Capitalistic ideas appeared in the Middle Ages as a merchant capitalism (16th to 18th centuries). The simplest form of this is lending money at interest. At a more sophisticated level capitalism involves investing money in a project in return for a share of the profit. It began to develop into its modern form during the Early Modern period in the Protestant countries of North-Western Europe. Traders in Amsterdam and London created the first chartered joint-stock companies driving up commerce and trade, and the first stock exchanges and banking and insurance institutions were established.

Industrial Capitalism

In the mid-18th century, a new group of economic theorists, led by David Hume and Adam Smith, challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines such as the belief that the world's wealth remained constant and that a state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state. During the Industrial Revolution, industrialists replaced merchants as a dominant factor in the capitalist system. Also during this period, the surplus generated by the rise of commercial agriculture encouraged increased mechanization of agriculture. Industrial capitalism marked the development of the factory system of manufacturing, characterized by a complex division of labor between and within work process and the routine of work tasks; and finally established the global domination of the capitalist mode of production. In the 19th century, Richard Cobden and John Bright, who based their beliefs on the Manchester School, initiated a movement to lower tariffs. In the 1840s, Britain adopted a less protectionist policy, with the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts. Britain reduced tariffs and quotas, in line with David Ricardo's advocacy for free trade.

(In economics, protectionism is the economic policy of restraining trade between states (countries) through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, restrictive quotas, and a variety of other government regulations.)

Modern Capitalism

In the 20th century, capitalism overcame a challenge by centrally-planned economies and is now the encompassing system worldwide, with the mixed economy being its dominant form in the industrialized Western world. In this period, the global financial system was mainly tied to the gold standard. The United Kingdom first formally adopted this standard in 1821. Soon to follow were Canada in 1853, Newfoundland in 1865, the United States and Germany (de jure) in 1873. New technologies, such as the telegraph, the transatlantic cable, the radiotelephone, the steamship, and railway allowed goods and information to move around the world to an unprecedented degree. In the period following the global depression of the 1930s, the state played an increasingly prominent role in the capitalistic system throughout much of the world. The postwar boom ended in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the situation was worsened by the rise of stagflation. Monetarism, a modification of Keynesianism that is more compatible with laissez-faire, gained increasing prominence in the capitalist world, especially under the leadership of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s. Public and political interest began shifting away from the so-called collectivist concerns of Keynes's managed capitalism to a focus on individual choice, called "re-marketized capitalism".

Presentation link: google slides

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