Posted on 11/27/2010 4:37:42 PM PST by JerseyHighlander
I've spent the last year working on an education product and trying to get it into as many classrooms as possible. This has given me a unique perspective into how many areas of universities operate - from the students, to the professors, to the administration. I've also done grad school, and my partner at Top Hat Monocle is a recently minted PhD. I think I've gotten a pretty good feel for the higher-education system (at least in Canada and the US.)
Unfortunately what I've found is that it's really pretty badly broken. I'm certainly not the first person to say this, but I figured I would write down my take on it.
The system is broken in the sense that teaching is at best a low priority, and that universities have essentially become testing centres. Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque. That's about it from the student's perspectives on the academic side of it. There's certainly more than academics to university, but the only interaction schools have with that side of things is just aggregating large groups of smart people - a service done passively, mostly by default and tradition.
Just to illustrate how absurd and out of touch with reality higher education has become think of it this way: the school gets about $12k in tuition from each student per semester (the student may only pay $3-5k of that, and the rest the government will subsidize.) A student will take, say, 5 courses per term. With 36 lectures per course that's about 180 hours of instruction. Throw in some labs, tutorial sessions, office hours etc. Let's say 250 hours (honestly, it's probably much less.) That's about $50 per hour of instruction. Let that sink in for a bit.
It would actually be cheaper to hire a private tutor at $50/hr for every single student for 4 years, than university tuition. That's insane, but let's accept that for a moment. Now, what do students actually get for their money? They get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck. The classroom environment hasn't changed in nearly a century. If you brought someone from 1940 into today's classroom they'd hardly notice a difference, except perhaps for the fancier projector and massively increased class size. This is not due to lack of technology or lack of tools being available.
How did things get this bad? were they always this bad? I don't think so, and there's plenty of documentation to back that. Class sizes have exploded (particularly in state schools) and tuition has grown far faster than inflation, with the quality of education only declining (as measured by test scores and anecdotally reported by professors.) This should be very scandalous, but I think the changes happened so gradually that nobody noticed. If higher education didn't exist in its current form and some politician proposed it they'd be sent to the insane asylum (or if some business did, they wouldn't get a single student enrolment. Not one.)
I think the simple answer to why teaching is in such a sorry state is that the incentives are aligned that way.
Ask a typical professor what they spend most of their time on. For the vast majority it's mainly writing grant applications, mentoring grad students doing research, and as a distant third they will have one or two courses they're forced to teach. From the perspective of the university profs are basically grant proposal writing machines. That's where most of their revenue and notoriety comes from.
When was the last time you saw an article about a great teacher at a university? and how many articles per day do you see about great research being done at a university? Most students chose their school with a simple metric: the most prestigious school they can get into that will look good on a resume - and that rarely has anything to do with the quality of teaching. That, coupled with the fact that students pay only a small fraction of the full cost of tuition (with even that small fraction being subsidized by student loans) gets us into the situation we have today.
Ultimately it's all about incentives. As much lip service as schools pay to the importance of teaching, when it comes down to writing the cheque they will happily spend $300k/year on an an LMS (learning management system) because it reduces their costs and makes administering courses easier, or a few million dollars on a high profile research lab. But the most advanced technology you see in the classroom is $50 plastic remotes called clickers (that the students have to buy, no less.)
Part of the solution to this problem would have to come from decoupling of research and undergraduate education. It doesn't take a great mathematician to teach calculus 1, or a great researcher to teach psych101. It takes a great teacher. There are many phenomenal teachers at universities. We at Top Hat Monocle have had the privilege to work with some of them. They should be treated like rock stars and paid accordingly - they generate literally millions in revenue for the universities and don't get nearly the recognition they deserve. They do their work out of benevolence and dedication to a job they love, mostly in spite of the system they operate in.
Some positive steps are certainly being taken. As I said above I'm not the first person to bitch about higher education. Schools are now hiring tenure track lecturers, who's focus is on teaching rather than research. However, even that is mainly being done in response to the need to wrangle the 1000 student classrooms rather than improve the quality of teaching per se. Schools are also establishing centres for teaching advocacy and at least punishing professors who get sufficiently poor course evaluations (although honestly I've never heard of someone getting fired for bad teaching. Especially if they bring in the grant money.) The rewards for great teaching are practically non-existent (compared to rewards for great research.)
Over the last century university education has gone from an elite privilege that perhaps 5% of the population would have access to, to a commodity that essentially everyone can get. This is a good thing. My personal opinion is that once a society becomes wealthy enough that it becomes feasible for people to spend 4-5 of their formative years in open-ended study, they should take advantage of that luxury. An educated populace can only help us all. However, this change from 5% to 50% means that there has to be a re-focusing of the system. The same mechanisms that worked when 5% of the population would attend are not adequate to handle things when 50% attend. The breakdown of those mechanisms is what we're seeing today.
They are primarily indoctrination centers.
She didn't get it.
I realized later, she didn't know the the sun went down in the west!
So I see how all of these useless studies get done, get a college professor to write for a grant.
I have previously asked aloud whether a good way for a budding young economics professor to NOT get tenure, is to do a cost-benefit analysis of different classes, or majors, at the institution he works at. Compare starting salaries of recent grads, with their course lists, and see whether there is enough data to place an economic value on each course. Probably a lot of the classes will have negative value, those people who take such a course will get a lower salary than someone who doesn’t. I think this will upset enough people on the tenure committee to ensure an unfavorable outcome.
I bet she knows Obama's father marched in Selma.
I think the biggest problem is the drift away from Classical Education to the factory-like method we try to use now where its all about completed Paperwork. If the Universities could just teach people to truly understand ideas by making the Students read the primary sources, and discuss those, we’d get a lot farther.
(compared to rewards for great research.)
I would contend that today’s professors get rewarded for maintaining the socialist status quo.
Global warming was certainly not “great research”, but it was highly rewarded. Grants were easy to get.
In today’s environment you are right about value. In the old days (+40 years ago), college was about learning and not how much money you made. It was also not for everyone. Learning was its own reward was something I was constantly taught. College is simply a glorified trade school and not a very good one at that.
If a student is grousing about the quality of instruction they receive in class - they have no business being in college. Learning is something the student does for themselves. The professor is there to direct them to what they should be studying, and keep them to some sort of schedule through regular testing intervals. Expecting anything else is a kindergarten mentality (which isn’t to say that plenty of people aren’t herded through our higher education system with just such a mindset).
Education racket ping!
Hmm. I wonder if you've ever sat through a chemistry or physics lecture presented by a graduate teaching assistant whose English is frequently unintelligible, mostly because English isn't his or her first language?
Sitting elbow-to-elbow in the equivalent of a basketball arena with 500 of your classmates, straining to understand just enough to take notes, let alone actually learn the material... yeah, students who actually want to learn pay too much money for that level of customer service.
It would actually be cheaper to hire a private tutor at $50/hr for every single student for 4 years, than university tuition.
It always bugged me that you need state certification to teach K-12 but any yutz can teach in college as long as they can get themselves hired. You don’t even need to be able to speak English.
Over the last century university education has gone from an elite privilege that perhaps 5% of the population would have access to, to a commodity that essentially everyone can get.
I disagree, there are way too may people in college and way too many college loans outstanding. Students are herded into classrooms and taught the way you describe because that’s the way the administration makes money. Meanwhile, there is tremendous pressure on instructors to keep the standards low, the grades high and the customers happy. There is not much of value being taught in many of these classes and few of the students are learning much. Far fewer kids should be in college and most of the savings should go towards vocational schools and training. I teach at a mid-size university and I am of the opinion that the place should be mostly defunded. I recommend this book to all - http://www.thefiveyearparty.com/
Graduate assistants are stuck teaching these classes because they are a nightmare to teach. The students are often unprepared, unmotivated and even hostile not only to the instructor but to the notion of being held to any reasonable standard of assessment. If colleges raised their standards then you wouldn’t have so many students in the class and you would have tenured professors willing to go back into the classroom in the lower level sections. But now they avoid doing so like the plague and I don’t blame them.
>> nuclear physics, differential equations, control theory
Differential equations? $15/hr. Point made.
Also, lab and facility costs for the sciences need to be taken into account.
Jerry Pournelle did that study - for high schools. He got his degree, as I recall, on condition that he didn’t publish. It turns out a) many suburban schools go a horrible job preparing students, and b) that virtually all high-minority high schools have low college success, except for a few minority and most non-minority students.
Well, I’m sure it finally dawned on her...;)
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