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University education has a great impact on students’ lives. Here is my perspective on some areas where university education might be improved:

Projects: The emphasis on projects in my university is currently immense, especially in the engineering faculty where I study. At its core is a useful ideal: emphasis on hands-on work accelerates the learning process.

In my university, however, group meetings are emphasised unduly more than a group’s actual progress. The current structure of assessment pushes students to ‘prove’ that they are working by organizing arbitrary meetings (for example in certain group-work intensive subjects, where weekly meetings are often mandatory). The meetings sometimes seem pointless, the sharing superficial, done more to impress each other rather than to share solutions. Arriving at solutions is not a periodic process – it takes its own time, and the system needs to recognize this.

The other problematic emphasis is on project outcomes, rather than the process of coming up with solutions. This makes students aim lower, attempting trivial, smaller projects, when they could instead achieve a much steeper learning curve by attempting something harder and more significant. There needs to be a way to control the importance of a project’s result. For example, emphasis on the quality and development of ideas is better than an emphasis on getting everything to work. For college subjects, result-mania ends up making students limit their ambitions; students learn much less.

Guiding Principle: This follows from the previous point – what is the purpose of university education? Why does project-based learning seem ‘ideal’? What does doing a project teach you that is the key?

It is the ability of a project to teach us how to learn. I would suggest that this is what university education is for. We hardly ever use the actual formulae that we learn in college once we join the workforce. This does not mean that knowledge is unimportant. However, each job in our specialized world requires us to acquire the specific skills. This means that success today is based more on our ability to learn than on knowledge alone.

If this guiding principle is accepted, many features of university can be re-assessed. For example, we may question the usefulness of lectures for large classes. The lecturer stands at some distance and delivers his material to us, without us using any muscles apart from the arduous walk to the lecture hall. A smaller set-up, with a more interactive, you-find-the-answer approach to learning may be more effective.

Similarly, what purpose do ‘lecture notes’ serve? Because the immensity of a subject is narrowed by structured lecture notes, we are sending the wrong message to students: instead of saying that the field of study is huge and they should explore it, we are saying ‘here is the formula, learn it’. A more fluid approach, using textbooks and online resources – which are conveniently available, yet painfully underused in my university – would be excellent.

I am sure that if there were to be an exchange with students on this topic, further pointers would arise. This is a great time for universities to tap on students’ thoughts and bring changes – especially when new residential colleges are promising to alter the landscape of many universities, including mine.