Opinion

Student on the street: Higher education

Students offer opinions on how their higher educational experience can be improved.

Students gave their opinion on how to improve the quality of the "higher educational” experience in order to have a more influential outcome.

“I think that higher education can be improved if there was a lot more hands-on things involved because I am a nursing major and I feel like a lot of the hands-on stuff that we do has really helped increase my knowledge in helping me retain stuff and remember what things are," Amy Horton, junior, nursing.

"I think one of the things that can improve higher education in terms of expectations of students going in would be standardized testing procedures within the same university for same subjects. In other words, say that if it's Calculus I, regardless of who the professor is, the same sort of testing standards should be resold whether I got Professor Smith or Professor Brown or whoever. So that way there's not an unfair advantage for say if I had an easier version of an exam. If I am in Professor Brown's course versus someone who is in Professor Smith's course, especially when it comes to competition for honors, because as you know, when it comes to GPA there is a competition for upper division levels when it comes to honors, so I think that will help," Charles Thornton, sophomore, business administration.

"I believe one of the best ways to improve higher education at the moment, especially in public universities, decrease wasteful spending because a lot of money that government gives to public institutions is supposed to be used for improving student experience and basically giving back to the students who obviously pay their tuition. A lot of that money goes into construction. If you look around Tennessee Tech, we have a lot of construction. And a lot of it is going to buildings that we probably don't need. I am not saying all construction is wasteful spending, not at all, especially if you're improving buildings that already exist, but a lot of it goes into buildings that students are never going to use. And a lot of that money that is supposed to be for helping students i.e. decreasing tuition isn't doing that. And you wonder why tuition just keeps getting raised and raised and raised because they are spending all that money on the university, not on the students," Christian Collins, senior, history.

"I personally think if students were doing more interaction with their classes like projects or little assignments here and there especially in large lecture halls that they would pay more attention and retain information more," Stephen Wainright, junior, interdisciplinary studies.

"I would say to better… to give a better experience would be to have a better learning community and just like open the relationship and communication between professors and students in like it's a 24-hour thing and not just a limited…like set time to education," Elizabeth Wilmore, junior, accounting.

" I think we can improve higher education by having more interpersonal… like connections with each other. Teachers taking more time out of theirdays for like… little sessions or you know after-school things. Stuff like that," Chelsea Fortner, junior, education.