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What else should physics undergraduates study?

OCT 09, 2015
Three years ago, universities in Hong Kong switched from three-year, English-style degrees to four-year, US-style degrees.

DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010333

This past Monday I visited Arlington, Virginia, to attend a talk at NSF headquarters entitled “Science and University Development in China: Some Personal Observations.” The speaker was the president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, mathematician Tony Chan.

Half an hour before his talk, Chan sat down in an NSF conference room to chat with three journalists, including me. Anticipating that any question I had about China might be answered in his talk, I asked Chan instead about Hong Kong. In particular, I wanted to know how Hong Kong’s reform of its secondary and tertiary education systems was proceeding.

19176/pt5010333__2015_10_09figure1-72.jpg

The campus of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Kowloon overlooks Clear Water Bay. CREDIT: HKUST public affairs office

I first visited Hong Kong in 2008 to report on its physics scene. Besides talking about their research and teaching, the professors I met there told me that the territory’s government had decided to transition its specialized English-style three-year bachelor’s degrees to US-style four-year degrees—that is, a mix of majors, minors, and general education requirements. That change, already profound, also entailed eliminating the final year of high school and expanding access to higher education.

When I returned to Hong Kong in May 2012 for an international acoustics meeting, the territory’s eight public universities were in the final months of planning to accept the first intake of four-year students alongside the final intake of three-year students. New buildings were going up on all the campuses I visited.

The guidelines issued by Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee were broad enough that each university was free to interpret them in its own way. That freedom, together with the challenges of devising new programs and accommodating more students, struck me as so interesting that I wrote a news story about the transition.

In the NSF conference room, Chan reiterated Hong Kong’s motives for the reform. Hong Kong’s service- and knowledge-based economy needs a workforce that is broadly trained and adaptable. A university education system that produces highly trained specialists is unlikely to meet that need, he said.

The first intake of four-year students has now reached junior year. Although it remains to be seen how they’ll fare in the workplace, their attitude to the new general education requirements has already emerged, and it surprised Chan.

In contrast to the universities’ noble goal of exposing students to a broad range of ideas and disciplines, the students themselves tend to regard the requirements as just that: a set of courses that they endure to graduate. Some, said Chan, postpone taking the courses to focus on their majors.

As someone who went through the English system, I can’t attest to the value of general education requirements. But as a physicist, I can attempt to identify the first principles on which they might be based, especially if the requirements are meant to cultivate the flexibility and creativity that Hong Kong’s government wants in its workforce.

It’s conceivable that the most effective general education courses might be ones that teach understanding rather than knowledge. Learning about, say, the precolonial history of Hong Kong might interest the territory’s undergraduates, but it might be less useful to them than a course on how historians gather, evaluate, and interpret records. That package of skills is both powerful and useful outside academia. Also, understanding tends last longer in the mind than knowledge does, at least in my brain.

Likewise, a course on the themes of 19th-century British novels might not be as useful as one that teaches students how to write well by dissecting the prose of Charles Dickens.

Looking back at my three years studying for a physics degree at Imperial College London, I think I’d have resented being compelled to take courses in subjects other than physics and mathematics. But if the courses were useful and not merely interesting, I’d be all for them.

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