IELTS Writing Practice from IELTS 7

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Some people think that universities should provide graduates with the knowledge and skills needed in the workplace. Others think that the true function of a university should be to give access to knowledge for its own sake, regardless of whether the course is useful to an employer. What, in your opinion, should be the main function of a university?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

  

Complete Essay 1

The notion that universities must choose between providing students with skills relevant to an employer or teaching them knowledge for its own sake relies on a false dichotomy. In fact, teaching students knowledge for its own sake develops key skills that many employers are wise enough to value highly.

Universities have traditionally been places where students are taught to think and reason in general, as opposed to community colleges or vocational schools, which teach specific skills and trades. It is foolish to say, however, that this means that universities do not teach skills valuable to an employer. On the contrary, knowing how to track down information, evaluate sources, think critically, and approach problems innovatively are all highly valuable workplace skills.

They are in fact the skills necessary for high level jobs in just about any business. Manual workers, even highly skilled manual workers, may not need to be good thinkers, but anyone who aspires to one day enter the world of management does. They need to have a decent understanding of human psychology, of philosophy (ethics at the very least), and of sociology. It helps too to be able to construct and deconstruct narratives, which is the art at the center of the study of literature, and to be able to draw on the moral lessons found in the study of history and mythology. In short, it pays to have a liberal arts education, a university education that has encouraged the pursuit of education for its own sake.

Creative and critical thinking are also prerequisites for many other careers. For instance, a person with a degree in English Literature can reasonably hope to break into journalism, even though it is possible to take degrees that train one specifically for that job. Likewise, someone with proven writing skills may be more valuable to a computer company than one trained in programming. A person who has good language skills can usually pick up a computer programming language fairly quickly, and has the added benefit of being able to explain the program to clients unfamiliar with technical jargon.

Thus, it is clear that universities, in teaching people to be good thinkers in general, prepare people to work a wider range of jobs than any more focused program ever could.

Complete Essay 2

Universities should of course teach skills that will be generally useful in the workplace, but they should not necessarily be focused purely on training people to be employees. Students are going to grow up to be more than just workers. They will also be citizens, relatives, and friends. These are important roles, and the skills taught at university in what might be termed a “classical liberal arts” education prepare people to fulfill them.

Consider, for instance, that in a democracy every person has a responsibility to help choose the government of the nation. To make an informed choice when voting, it is necessary to be able to do research, to figure out what candidates have said, and to find the facts necessary to evaluate the reasonableness of their claims. It is necessary too to be able to think critically, and to identify questionable premises and logical fallacies in the arguments one reads. These skills might not be necessary to ring up sales at a cash register, or to synthesize a new bacteria in a lab, or to do any one of a host of jobs lying in between in the spectrum of complexity. However, they are clearly useful to everyone as citizens.

In the same way, humans are social animals. As such, we are constantly dealing with others, both at work and in our personal lives. How should we react when others hurt us? How can we resolve ethical conflicts? For that matter, how do we even identify such conflicts when we encounter them? These sorts of question may not occur on the job, or at any rate not occur specifically and predictably as part of a given job, but people need to know how to answer them nonetheless.

Universities should be places that educate people in such a way as to prepare them to handle adult life. This naturally includes providing skills that will be useful to employers, but that is but a small subset of the skills people need. It is also the least important. Businesses will train new employees in specific skills if those skills are really vital to the job. No other institution or organization will train young adults to be good people or citizens. That, then, is left wholly to universities, and must be considered its proper charge.