My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Anecdata from a professor I know: Students' parents also feel like customers, because they are often the ones paying the tuition. So they call the university and complain if their child gets a sub-par grade, citing the cost of tuition. Bad incentives all round.
MOOCs as they evolve will be part of the answer and probably could replace large lectures in a pre-college period before students get on campus. Maybe college should be shorter (2-3 years) and focus on small-group seminars that build on what students learned on their own via MOOCs. It could help lower costs to more reasonable levels. Of course universities will fight this tooth and nail because loss of revenue.
I'm not quite ready to pronounce the death of MOOCs in the transform college education as opposed to a new form of vocational training yet but IMO we're pretty close. Whatever impact they've had on overachievers who may or may not have had access to traditional higher education, they have failed to broadly change education in any way and the major VC-funded examples haven't succeeded financially.
Administrators want to grow the school budget and increase prestige for themselves and the university. Professors want to do research and make an impact in their field, and to their peers. Students want to be able to get a job and have an interesting experience.
In theory all three groups should have as a primary goal the expansion of the circle of knowledge [1] at some level. Administrators by providing a space for professors and students to do that, professors by partly focusing on students' needs and partly by having separate research periods and Students by expanding their own circles.
Reality is, it's all about money, just like everything else. Each group is trying to get the most of it so they can do what they want individually. Everyone is a customer in this scenario.
tl;dr: Administration, students and professors are under high pressure and reacting accordingly.
If I just wanted a chance to learn, then I could go to the public library. However there are many explainations of the same concept, so in the interest of not wasting my time during the most productive decade of my life, I go see a proffesional to explain things to me.
If teachers cannot be bothered to perform their sole function, then I will take my money elsewhere.
[edit] The attitude of teachers astounds me
> Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately but imply that my low grade was their fault?
Of course it is the teacher's fault. Examine the facts:
1) The student did not understand the material at the beginnng of the term otherwise the student would not be there in the first place
2) The student then sought to correct this defficiency in their education by contracting a proffesional.
3) The teacher fails to significantly improve the student's understanding, despite many weeks of interaction with student (student fails exam)
4) Teacher blames student for failing to grasp their perfect explaination that works perfectly well for themselves.
The cognitive dissonance is astounding. And teachers wonder why society is only willing to pay them so little?
If you go to your teacher (at whatever level) and say "I want to become expert in your field without either working very hard or having a great deal of natural talent" then you are again going to be disappointed no matter how good the teacher is. ("There is no royal road to mathematics.")
If you go to your doctor and she says "I know what's wrong, and you can fix it by taking these drugs and doing these exercises", and you don't take the drugs or do the exercises, it's hardly the doctor's fault if your condition doesn't improve the way you want it to.
If you go to your teacher (at whatever level) and say "I want good grades without actually mastering the ideas and facts" then yet again you will be disappointed.
In your little list of facts, you may notice that step 3 says "The teacher fails to significantly improve the student's understanding". But improving a student's understanding is a two-person job. A student who does nothing beyond turning up to most of the lectures is not likely to do well in their examinations (exception: in some fields, some outstandingly able students may be able to do this, but by definition most students are not outstandingly able). And if that's what the student does, it's not reasonable to say that the teacher is failing at their job.
Then adjust the cost of the course to reflect that reality. If the teacher is admittely doing zero work to help this student, then why does it cost so much. Teachers in this case are QQing all the way to the bank. This is just a smoke screen thrown up to distract from the fact that these students that don't work hard are being defrauded left and right.
Lecturing 30 students for 18 weeks at $9,000 per student would make me fanatically motivated to give them the knowledge that they requested. Give half to overhead, and that is almost half a million per year. That buys a lot of work from a single human.
> “Hey student – all I’m asking for is a little respect, seeing as how much you pay makes no difference to my wages, yet the level of support I am forced to offer you takes up 80% of my time despite the fact that teaching still only equates to 33% of my workload. But I’ll be in the office until 9pm anyway because if I don’t publish two papers by the end of the year, I’ll be fired”.
There are people getting rich off of the university scam, but it isn't the faculty. And the people who are getting rich are clever enough to stay hidden and let the students think they're overpaying the faculty.
If anyone is QQing to the bank it's not your lecturer.
It's already built into the cost. If the teacher could get you to learn, without any further effort on your part, a class would cost way more than $9,000—probably closer to $90,000.
I thought teachers were supposed to be experts in their field of study that have a desire to pass that knowledge on to those that are interested. Not everyone will have the capacity for learning those things. As an example, I love art but despite years of trying both books and classes, I just cannot bring the images in my mind into the physical world. I'm a responsible enough adult to accept that this is my shortcoming and not the fault of my teachers. I simply don't have the hand-eye coordination necessary to produce the things that I can imagine.
>[edit] The attitude of teachers astounds me
The overly-privileged, entitled attitude of the younger generation astounds me. You have to work for what you get. The world does not owe you a living. You have to understand that you are not a special little flower that is more important that everyone else. That said, neither are you just another cog in the machine unless you choose to be so. It is perfectly possible to be an individual without being a disrespectful, self-important boor. Why is it okay for you to inconvenience your professor, who likely has a life outside of work, but it is unthinkable for them to schedule anything that inconveniences you. What makes you more important than the other 500 students they are teaching this semester?
Somehow in between the "younger generation" and the previous one, it became impossible to get a middle-class job without a college degree. Doesn't really matter what you learned, but it's a basic expectation that you made it through those four years.
And the world does owe people a fair chance at a living. To the extent that that involves a useless college degree because people want the credential, yes, the world owes them that.
Frankly the academics should just admit that their own incentives don't include teaching, give students easy exams, and get on with research. There's no reason for them to do otherwise, and if they try to be better at teaching than they need to and run into conflict, they're the ones who are acting entitled.
Not true, I did fairly well as a software engineer after dropping out of school, and having finished my degree it hasn't made any difference in my day to day (except people think I'm a decade younger than I actually am based on the date on my resume).
> And the world does owe people a fair chance at a living. To the extent that that involves a useless college degree because people want the credential, yes, the world owes them that.
The world owes you exactly nothing.
The fact that you, personally, did so is simply an anecdote.
I'm sorry but your attitude here that the world owes you _anything_ just goes to further prove my point. Life is not fair. It never has been and never will be. You can sit there feeling sorry for yourself because the world treated you unfairly...for which will get you absolutely nothing...or you can go out there and do whatever you need to do in order to make it through this day so you can try for a better day tomorrow. The onus is on you and not the world. You want something better then show the world that you will work for it.
Two things come to mind for me in this:
1. The "younger generation" is going to have to learn to take responsibility for their failures as well as successes. There seems to be a real problem with the former.
2. To use the words my father repeated to me almost daily during my teenage years when we worked together: "If you aren't going to give it 120% in whatever you do, don't even bother getting out of bed."
My partner is the most intelligent woman i've met, and she's very senior at a decent Uni in England - she teaches staff and PHDs how to teach, and gives keynote speeches around the world in this.
Even SHE knows the University system is fucked. For her, it won't be replaced by MOOCs, though they will be part of the mix.
Her Uni have got a (semi-secret) plan to amalgamate professional quals like a Cisco CCNA for example into the credit path for a 'normal' degree. The idea, long term, is to have learning as a lifelong thing, as opposed to something you do when you're young and can't be arsed. Eventually the government would give credits to people in work who've paid their dues so they can do courses relevant to them and universities would be open all hours.
I don't think it'll work out, but we can only dream...
That's not what you're paying for. They're not experts in pedagogy, they're experts in their field of research.
If you don't understand the course materials it's your job as a student to rectify that, either through self-study or seeking help. Clearly the student in question didn't understand the course materials well enough compared to his peers to receive a top-class grade (in the UK 70%+ is a first, the highest grade you can get).
What I am advocating here for is different system that actually allows students to purchase the level of education that they want. Ideally the cost would be based on how much work the teacher has to do to shove the knowledge into your head. If a student is struggling, then they can either choose to pay more to learn it, or drop out. The current system is not a market for knowledge at all. There is no continous supply curve for students to change pricing. There is a huge economic inefficiency here, and I am sure that the surplus is not being captured by the students.
Teaching at universities is virtually never their sole function, and rarely the majority of their function. At UK universities most such staff take the job for research and have to teach as a condition of that job.
It's true that university staff vary in their commitment to teaching and I can remember many who felt that teaching was beneath them and a distraction from what they actually want to do. Unfortunately, this is the nature of academics, unless you have distinct research and teaching roles, this won't change (and that's another endless discussion).
The lecturers and professors you will find at university are not experts in pedagogy, and the vast majority will never have claimed they were. They are experts and leading active researchers in their chosen field. They have devoted their professional life to studying and extending the state of the art of knowledge in their chosen field.
If you want to study a subject at university level, it's likely that some of the material that you would learn at university is not yet in published books, because the only people who currently know the material are the researchers at your university who just discovered it, and are trying hard to find the time to write a book on it, around furthering their research, writing papers for journals (which they need to do, and which books do not count towards) and giving however many classes of lectures a week that they've been told to get on with, without a vast amount of training.
In grade school, the material you will learn are basics of subjects that have been understood for a while, and written and refined in books some time ago. The material can be understood by people competent (but not necessarily expert) in the field, and can therefore be passed on, or spoon-fed, by people who are expert professional teachers. This is required in grade school, because students in grade school are not yet adults, and generally don't yet have enough self-discipline and self-awareness to put in the work now for later benefit without being shepherded the whole way.
When you get to university, it is presumed that you are mature enough to have the self-discipline and self-awareness to figure out partly for yourself how to learn from the people who are the most advanced in the world in your chosen field, rather than the best teachers.
That presumption seems to have worked out pretty well for modern universities for the last 500 years.
Maybe university is not actually the place you want to be.
You seem to forget that not every university is Stanford, where there are true leading experts that students can engage with beyond the context of class. There is no global university level. The trope of students conducting cutting edge research as undergrads is based on a few outliers who are widely publisied. The experience for the vast majority of us down in the trenches however is limited to the simplified model of physics that is safe for undergrads. Basing your expectations for a university education on the behavior of the top %0.001 of students is like expeciting your minivan to handle as well as a Grand-Prix racecar.
My question to you is then "Why the hell did society decide to co-opt researches into passing on the information, rather than create a new class of specialists like society has done for every other field of human endevor?"
You had an access to the teachers, who are all supposed to be active, well-connected, bleeding-edge researchers. You had a fair amount of their time allocated for you solely and more of that time for your class.
Now, it was 100% your responsibility to extort all the bleeding edge knowledge from them, to loiter around their laboratories, to get a summer job as a lab assistant, and all that. This is what universities are for.
> like society has done for every other field of human endevor?
What? When did it happen, exactly? The master-apprentice model is still alive and kicking in most of the professions. There are no alternatives to it. Dedicated pedagogues can teach you to read, write and count your fingers (on one hand). The rest must be passed on by the real professionals.
Talking (and not teaching) to 200 ppl over 2 hours is not time allocation to "me". That is something I could watch without the presence of the teacher. There is no added value in this case compared to any MOOC class.
University courses should follow the possibilities what technology has to offer and focus on really teaching. The rest can be watched at home.
> Now, it was 100% your responsibility to extort all the bleeding edge knowledge from them.
Yes, 18 yrs old kids have the power and character to chase and force teachers without a backfire. You might be such character, but not everyone is such persuasive as you, yet they can be a great scientist.
I'm not talking about the lectures (they're useless unless most of the time is spent on Q&A). There is always a certain amount of time teachers must spend with their students individually, upon request. Smart students use that time, the others may not even know they've got a right to harass their teachers occasionally.
Not at my university, or at any university my friends attended. In many cases, you could just simply piss off the teachers asking tough questions or pointing to errors in their thinking.
I'm curious what universities work this way. MIT's CS program very much does not, at the undergraduate level.
I can think of one graduate-level class by Adam Chlipala (the semester he was hired) where there was a bunch of material that was not yet in a published book, but was in an unpublished book freely available on his website. I didn't have time to learn it properly then, but I'll probably go back to the online book now, because it is one of the best places to learn this.
I can't think of any other classes, and certainly not any undergraduate classes, that were like that. All of them taught from well-worn textbooks, or from a curated set of published research papers. Maybe I just went to a poor-quality university?
Just in case you did not notice, this thread was about the universities, not the nurseries.
A university teacher can be a stuttering weirdo and a jerk, and still be very valuable. Actually, many of the best teachers I know were weirdos and jerks, and it took a lot of effort to extort the knowledge from them.
> If I just wanted a chance to learn, then I could go to the public library.
In many cases that's the best option anyway.
But you'd also need facilities, laboratory equipment, and, most importantly, an access to likely minded people who can share their learning experience with you and bully you into learning more.
> then I will take my money elsewhere
Please do. Stop bothering the university lecturers with your nursery expectations.
> Teacher blames student for failing to grasp their perfect explaination that works perfectly well for themselves.
This is where your argument falls apart. It might be something wrong with the teaching if all of the class is failing, but usually the most vocal complainers are exactly the slackers who are behind the rest of the class, who do not really deserve to be there at all, no matter how much they're paying for it.
Example situations where the low grade is absolutely the student's fault:
- The student doesn't go to class - The student falls asleep in class or otherwise doesn't pay attention - The student doesn't understand a part of the course and doesn't do anything to clear up their understanding (you can't honestly expect a single explanation to give all (often) 150+ students 100% clarity) by emailing or speaking to staff - The student disrupts the rest of the class and is removed from it - The student doesn't turn in papers for avoidable reasons
It's similar to a doctor. If you go to a doctor and don't follow instructions or give them correct information, they can't do their job and fix you. It's not their fault if you don't take the drugs they prescribe you.
Moreover, if it were the case that less hand-holding helped produce a more market-valuable graduate, then you would rightly expect this.
A lot of incentives in education are woefully misaligned, in my opinion. And I can't really see any simple obvious fixes, but entitlement to knowledge in the form of understanding on the part of students is not one of them.
As Euclid is to have said, "there is no royal road to geometry".
That being said, from the article, a student expecting a professor to meet with her at 8 PM is ludicrous. Office hours are office hours. If they are "inconvenient" (which, best case means she had class those two hours, or more likely she didn't want to wake up early enough to be there at 9), make an appointment and ask the professor when another reasonable time to meet would be.
And calculating that the professor "owes you" $160 in education is a great way to be told to either show up to office hours or figure it out on your own.
I certainly never thought about it that way in either undergrad or grad school, but I am struggling to actually come up with a good role based counter. The best I can come up with is that learning, generally, is the result of an individual's capabilities and motivations not the teacher or material. So the implications of your approach are a generation of people who feel as though the effort that they put in for learning must be less than that of the teacher and that seems to me to be a disaster waiting to happen.
Now I support fee schedules based on how much work the teacher has to do the shove the knowledge into the head. If it will cost $X for a fast student, I don't have any problem with the market pricing that same knowledge to a slow student at $X,XXX. Teachers should be compensated for their expertise. However setting the market price is up to the participant, and a contract to deliver the good should be binding. If teachers were bound to deliver the information, then I see average prices being higher becuase of the lemon effect, but that is an entirely different problem than what we have now.
I had the same thought, but what practically is the distinction? The only thing I can come up with is scope, but even then, there are plenty of tutors that teach a fairly wide range of a topic like a teacher would. I have seen plenty of Calculus II tutors but never a integration by parts tutor.
The faster that university professors admit that degrees are not a product of the professors, they're a product of the administrators and accreditors and the social system that expects people to have degrees, the faster they'll get out of the way of blame.
Where I've been studying, they removed the teachers, the classes and the grades (kind of). Learning is stimulated by peers and projects; correction and 'exams' are done by a computer (no negotiations with "unjust" grades, you failed == you failed); classes are optional and you usually don't need them to succeed on the projects. In results, you get interested people in classes when you explain something, and if you do your job well, they won't come to bother you after that. And from the students' side, you get motivated teammates that won't complain and try to help each others when you are crashing on a crazy deadline on a Sunday night at 11:42pm.
Damn that was great. I wish it could be easily done with other fields and not only in software engineering.
Having been a student myself, I could recount the time when a professor chose to replace her all twelve of her lectures with student presentations, then tested us on entirely untaught content; or perhaps the other time when submitted assignments and tests were not marked or discussed, at all, so that the only feedback was a numerical result at the end of the semester.
I could choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt.
Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers.
What did the writer teach? I hope it is not statistics.
edit: that's some fast negative karma there. Those of you that downvoted, I would love to hear your thoughts.
> I could choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt.
> Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers.
Which is to say, you just did do all those things; you were just passive-agressive about it.
Someone can disagree with you without having to get into an extended debate. That's why the voting buttons exist.
When someone suggested we "go ask the students" the Profs and Lecturers shot it down saying "they'd only lie". I did go ask some of the undergrads and the reasons almost universally that the prof who taught it in first year was a harsh marker, bad lecturer, and that it wasn't worth losing the credit points in years two onward when they could get a better grade elsewhere and come out with a better degree at the end of it.
The staff don't trust the students and the students want to make sure they get their money's worth; even if it means missing on some important stuff.
Now, I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition. If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money. I read somewhere that e. g. the MIT has a grades for their professors by the students and the professors get into trouble if their grades are bad.
So from my viewpoint, students have the right to demand good teaching if they pay money. But this doesn't give you a free ticket for a degree (if you just can pay money to get a degree, the degree is not worth anything). A degree comes with after you have a certain knowledge in a field (not fully accurate, but that's about it). Professors should have to care of their students. It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it. If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken. This is imho the cases for many universities (I'm especially talking about all the research paper print factories which call themselves universities).
The article with the posters of the students is a typical example of getting problems wrong (by going to extremes).
> I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition.
Some people pay a shitload of tuition, yes. It's somewhat like buying a car (in the US). Nobody pays sticker price. There is a lot of very cheap money floating around (gov't loans, grants, scholarships), which is keeping the price artificially high.
The sticker price of my school was about $35k/yr, or $140,000 for a degree. I left in 2008 with about $22k in loans. The rest was grants and scholarships. I did well in HS but not so well that you would immediately think people would throw $120k at me for school. The important thing here is that the school actually received the $140k. They've got zero incentive to control costs.
> If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money.
This is true to an extent, but I had no instructional interaction with the professors prior to my first day of classes. I spoke to a few as a visiting HS senior, but even the professors were in sales mode at that point.
> It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it.
It's misaligned incentives (mentioned in greater detail elsewhere in the comments here). The professors do not get any more money if all of their students understand the subject perfectly and go on to become professors themselves compared to if half the class fails. The only mitigating factor to this is some universities place promotion/review weight to student evaluations, but even then it's only an issue until one receives tenure.
My college was primarily a teaching college, and approximately 2/3 of the professor workload was teaching, grading, and related. Some of the larger survey classes would have a few TAs that would do reviews for smaller groups, but a TA leading a class was unheard of. There was no graduate school (they've since added a few Master's programs), so the TA's were just other undergrads who had gotten A's in the course in previous semesters.
> If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken.
I don't think anyone will disagree with you here :)
Lectures are attended by dozens of students, so they cannot be a personalized tutorial service. That's what office hours are for. My best students don't usually need office hours as they are pretty much self-taught, but the next tier down show up regularly and we sit down together and go through exactly the material they want to focus on in the detail they need.
I tailor my pedagogy to these engaged students, not to the ones who expect to be handed an A for a minimum amount of effort. If you don't work, you'll deservedly do very poorly, and I'm not willing to waste my limited resources on you. And, no, I'm not going to curve your grade up either, because that's not fair on the good students.
Unsurprisingly, poor students don't show up to office hours, don't take advantage of our free tutoring service, turn in material late, and regularly miss lectures. All these failings are entirely their own responsibility, not mine.
The problem I have is that your system does not serve 2/3rds of the customers. Your best students are pretty much self-taught, so why do you charge them for all of the your time. The poor students do not show up either, so why are you charging them for your time as well?
I am not critizing your specific method of teaching, just your fee schedule. You admit that your services are basically useless to 2/3rds of the sutdents, yet you charge twice that of a personal tutor service for each and every one of your students. That is where the anger is coming from.
My best students are pretty much self-taught within the academic environment, which offers them a lot more than any series of MOOCs could.
Maybe around 1/4 of my freshman students shouldn't be in university, and most of these leave during their first year. I'd be happy if admissions standards were increased, as it would be better for all concerned if individuals lacking the necessary ability and motivation didn't waste everyone's time as well as their own money.
Once again, it is the responsibility of each potential student to determine whether they should accept a place at a university, not mine. As long as they're here, I'll give every student as much assistance as I can, but some of them can't or won't be helped.
It's not surprising that students want to get a second opinion on grading.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03bqlht
> More than 90,000 GCSE and A-level results were changed after challenges to grades awarded this summer - the highest on record.
> The figures represent an increase of 17% compared with last year.
> Results have a significant impact on both students and institutions, affecting whether or not pupils gain a university place and where schools appear in league tables.
(GCSE exams are taken in school by 16 year olds. A level exams are taken in schools or colleges by 18 year olds, and are what is used to get entry to university.)
EDIT: In 2013 there were 850,752 GCSE exams taken. So 90,000 incorrect grades is more than 10% - and these are just the exams that asked for a re-grade. When students have seen a serious error in their grades, or the grades of a friend, it's not surprising that they realise that just asking for a regrade could increase their marks.
I have had my share of teachers who proved that "those who cannot do, teach". I read that in Sweden, you have to be in the top 5 percentile if you want to qualify as a teacher. Plus a lot of teachers are so disconnected from the professional world that the student are confused when I come to work which I have experienced myself and seem over again as an "intern-trainer" at my work as a Software Developer.
Education has been so commercialized that some universities look more like a mall than a university. Cannot blame the students for expecting a degree after all the money they have paid. In a lot of collages, the entrance exam is just a scam.
This state is specially true in India where we are taught to respect in the order of "Mother, Father, Teacher, God". Even God deserves less respect than teacher. But there also, if you cannot find any job. Then the next option is teaching.
College has become a barrier to entry to the job market, and when a system is set up where someone's performance on (sometimes quite arbitrary) classes impacts their ability to get a job, those people aren't going to behave like model students, they're going to optimize for a high grade. I'm frankly quite surprised that this academician author can't understand this.
Also, the high achievers know how to go out and figure out and do things on their own.
And why should anybody care at all about this disgusting and lowly category? They wanted to game the system, they got what they deserved.
> and many times taking on dangerous levels of debt
Student loans are quite a peculiar form of a debt. They can be largely ignored quite for a while (or ignored at all).
> College has become a barrier to entry to the job market,
In most of the areas this is not true. In the other areas this is great, let's keep it this way as long as possible. I do not want to be butchered by a doctor who bypassed an assessment on their "performance on (sometimes quite arbitrary) classes" by simply paying more.
If anything, this performance assessment must become more and more rigorous and tough. We need a grade deflation, not a grade inflation.
EDIT: since the article is UK-specific, I am talking about the UK only. Student loans here would not cripple anyone financially.
Because that "disgusting and lowly category" is the dominant demographic of users; get off your high horse.
> Student loans are quite a peculiar form of a debt. They can be largely ignored quite for a while (or ignored at all).
Student loan debt is some of the hardest to escape debt in the world, and if you don't get a solid job when you get out of college you can be absolutely crippled by it.
> In most of the areas this is not true.
In software development this is not true, but that's about it. In pretty much every basic job they expect to see a college degree or you're not getting a callback.
Your physician example is also a poor one, as most of what is learned in pre-med has nothing to do with practicing medicine and is just an arbitrary barrier to entry to a professional school.
If so, this world is doomed, and within a generation will be ruled by hordes of ignorant retards. I can only hope you're exaggerating (well, I know you're exaggerating, the universities that matter still do vet their intake relatively rigorously).
> Student loan debt is some of the hardest to escape debt in the world,
I'm talking about the UK here.
> In pretty much every basic job they expect to see a college degree or you're not getting a callback.
Incorrect. For 9 out of 10 professions it is not true at all.
> most of what is learned in pre-med has nothing to do with practicing medicine
It is a filter. Doctors must conform to quite harsh endurance and resourcefulness requirements, and the more such filters applied - the better. This is not a profession for everyone (just like most other professions, really).
By very definition most people go to universities or institutions that "don't matter" in your eyes. You can't rule out the majority of the population in a discussion about the nature of higher education just because it doesn't fit your narrative about what college should be.
Moreover, to assume that everyone at top tier institutions is there or is trying hard because they are deeply passionate about learning is absolutely ridiculous. I am at a lab at MIT currently and interact with undergrads here all the time. The community has a HUGE problem with self-imposed stress over grades and course load to the point where individuals are committing suicide because they falsely believe that if they are not successful in college it will prevent them from being successful in the work place. Why do many people put themselves through this pressure? Because they know having the words MIT on their resume will get them a great job.
> Incorrect. For 9 out of 10 professions it is not true at all.
I don't know how they do things in the UK, but in the US employers want to see proof that you can do what you say you can do or that you are a serious worker when applying for a job. For a lot of industries, it's really hard to demonstrate this when applying for a first job because you have no relevant work experience. A relevant college degree (rightly or wrongly) serves as validation for employers. They feel safer taking a chance on employing you. Even having ANY college degree shows that someone has (theoretically) validated that you can work intelligently.
The problem with not having a degree is that it's very difficult to gain demonstrable domain expertise in most fields without being employed (as you lack access to resources), and most people won't employ you until you can demonstrate some competence, leading to a situation where it's very difficult to get your foot in the door. That's why it's important to have a degree; it gets your foot in the door so you can gain experience. Most people in the US who do not have college degrees or technical certifications are working poorly paid jobs. Most people go to college so that they do not have to do that, not so that they can seek enlightenment.
> It is a filter. Doctors must conform to quite harsh endurance and resourcefulness requirements, and the more such filters applied - the better. This is not a profession for everyone (just like most other professions, really)
Putting someone through a 4 year arbitrary filter is a ridiculous practice which should stop. Unqualified students would wash out during the first year of medical school anyway; that should serve as the filter. Making someone rack up 80-120K in additional student debt just to go through a filtering process is absurd. A friend of mine is currently a resident and has 320K dollars of student loan debt. How is that justifiable?
Most of the so called "universities" are nothing but a cargo cult education. They're only damaging their students. This insanity must stop.
> You can't rule out the majority of the population in a discussion about the nature of higher education just because it doesn't fit your narrative about what college should be.
I can. If the majority is a counterfeit product it can be simply ignored. Only the genuine education matters.
> trying hard because they are deeply passionate about learning is absolutely ridiculous
They're 20 years old. Of course only a minority is passionate about learning. But at least there is a majority who consciously understand the reason they're doing it (and no, the reason is not a degree).
> but in the US employers want to see proof
I thought we're not discussing Mordor in this thread. Mordor experience is irrelevant.
> Putting someone through a 4 year arbitrary filter is a ridiculous practice which should stop
Invent a better filter then.
> Making someone rack up 80-120K in additional student debt
Once again, we're not discussing Mordor here.
Because (at least for me (and everyone I've spoken to)) university is completely useless. I haven't learnt anything in uni I hadn't already taught myself. I am 100% paying for the letters after my name.
In the US, "ignoring" them results in a large build-up of interest while you defer payments, and the debt is one of the very few things that can't usually be discharged in bankruptcy.
Schools should be free, but seeing how they're not, I see nothing wrong with students demanding their money's worth, and some slack if they fall behind on classwork.
People should read Freakonomics.
On the other side the career of many professors depends more on the papers they produce than the students they help. The interests of professors and students are in conflict so a clash of this kind is inevitable.
They are indeed.
> If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money.
No. This is a blatant consumerism. It does not matter even a tiny bit how much do you pay - 1/2 of your income, 100x your income, whatever.
> Schools should be free,
Of course, in an ideal world. But we have to deal with what we have and to make sure it's not destroyed beyond any hope.
Do you expect "some damn good service" when you buy a lottery ticket or when you bet all your money on a horse? Will you harass the jokey for not winning that round?
Tuition fees are paid for an access to an infrastructure. That's it. Not for a degree, not for the better grades, not for a "humane" treatment. Just for a chance to learn and nothing else.
What we are really seeing here is market forces that make the current university structure -- with its emphasis on research over quality of teaching -- a terrible product, just like a lottery ticket is a terrible product. Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets.
At the moment, the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college is propping up these institutions. But that's going to go away someday.
And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls. There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own. (And most of the time I did learn that way, better than from lectures.) But I wouldn't have been able to put "MIT graduate" on my resume and I wouldn't have gotten the connections out of it. So that's why I went.
"Who Dares Wins"
Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you're paying for a lunch in a caffe it's sort of guaranteed that you'll get your calories.
When you're paying for tuition you're only getting a chance to learn something, and now it's entirely up to you to use this chance (and still fail even by trying as hard as you can).
> Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets.
Exactly. Smart consumers will first exhaust all the other options, and, most importantly, will gauge their chance to succeed in this race first before joining it.
> the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college
This is a myth. Stop spreading it.
> And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls.
Use it first. Go to the university only when all the other routes are exhausted. Otherwise universities are full of random people who do not really belong there.
> There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own.
It means that you failed miserably. Congratulations. You had a priceless opportunity to extort the knowledge from some of the best, most bleeding-edge researchers, who had hours of their precious time allocated for you alone.
But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures - exactly the most stupid kind of stuff to do in any university, not just MIT.
Btw., I failed too, far too often I'm reading an obituary for a top scientist and realising that years ago I lost a unique opportunity to interrogate him thoroughly.
Yes, but there's such a thing as better odds and worse odds. These students aren't paying for a guaranteed education, but they are paying for an honest effort.
> But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures
Wow! I didn't know I did that! Some of my professors would be truly surprised to hear that.
That's exactly why I said that it worth assessing your abilities first before going there.
> but they are paying for an honest effort
And they're getting it. Slacking the marking because they're now paying more is not an "honest effort", not even close. Honest effort is keeping the bar high enough and pushing them harder and harder.
> Wow! I didn't know I did that!
You (supposedly) did enough of this crap to get your degree. Which is, again, not even close to a point of going to a university.
Just because you pay money for something does not mean you can invoke the specter of consumerism and then proceed to shame it. You need water, no doubt about it. Is it evil when you pay for clean water?
> They are indeed.
This is blatant ignorance.
Learning can only happen with active studying. Nobody can push the knowledge into your brain. All you are offered is the chance to learn, and no guarantees of graduating if you turn out to be incompetent at it.
Actually, the functionality of medical care does depend on the actions of the patient to do what the medical system instructs them to do. When a person doesn't follow doctor's orders, there is a high possibility that the person in need of medical care doesn't actually get the results they expect.
> All you are offered is the chance to learn, and no guarantees of graduating if you turn out to be incompetent at it.
While I agree with your sentiment and the principle of what you're suggesting, most universities aren't packaging it like this. When you see the ads and you read their propaganda... er, I mean their pretty glossy brochures, they are selling it as exactly that: "Come to XU, get a degree in Y, our graduates have a 100% career placement success." "Get a degree in X, the best value in the country, no other University offers our graduation statistics." They might as well be a play by play from the consumer manipulation handbook. So I can't blame students for playing it both ways. I don't think students are stupid at all, I'm sure many of them know that they're not actually buying the degree, but they're all too well versed in how the media is being used to manipulate things to their own ends, and the student playing dumb to that manipulation and using it to their own ends is a classic example of using the University's own tactics against them.
This is exactly how it works. It's called a "postcode lottery" here.
> Education is as necessary as a public utility
Of course it must be free. But when it's not, you're not paying for a product, you're only paying for a chance to learn.
> actually knowing things about the world
It's 100% a students responsibility to learn. Schools can only provide with an access to an infrastructure (and this is what tuition fees are for) and a little, non-intrusive guidance.
Nobody can force the students to learn anything. Nobody can forcefully stuff the knowledge into them. It just does not work this way, and it does not matter how much you do not like it. It's a direct consequence of the human nature.
And most definitely, a degree is not a "product". It's a luxury to be earned, not something "guaranteed".
More students means more money.
So it's not just students who feel entitled. There's been a trend for years now of bullshit fill-up-the-hall "academic" courses with limited job prospects which only exist to part students from their cash.
Of course the real picture is more complicated. On the minus side there are expenses, but on the plus side many departments hoover up astonishing sums in national and sometimes corporate research funding.
The bottom line is that universities sweat students and lecturers and researchers for cash, and could afford to be more generous with everyone.
On the other hand, I disagree with the sentiment that students feel like they are buying a degree. At least from my perspective, the degree itself is largely meaningless. It's the education piece I'm after. I am buying education via access to a pre-vetted, qualified and educated mentor that I can go to with all questions I have regarding my understandings and misunderstandings. I can do the learning piece myself, but I can't ask YouTube and online course material questions if I don't understand it, or to clarify my understanding of it... and I expect that as long as I meet my obligation to work hard to understand the material you are presenting me with and submit the coursework required for the course, I am indirectly buying that degree - and that withstanding, I expect to get the degree that I not only shed blood, sweat and tears for, but also paid £9,000 for.
As a person, I also demand respect, not because I think the world owes me that, certainly not because I feel like I'm naturally entitled to it, but because I understand just as you do that we all have lives outside of the situation in which we interface. Sometimes those lives get in the way of our best intentions, some days trying to juggle those lives and get to work on time is all but impossible, and just as we are expected to afford respect to those around us, I expect the same affordance, no more, no less. So if my circumstances have prevented me from handing an assignment in on time, I expect some consideration for those circumstances, just as I am expected to afford the professor consideration for not attending class today because their real life prevented them from doing that, and you know what, given that I paid £9,000 to be in that classroom, I do feel like some respect should be given to that.
As a lifelong student, watching the exponential increase in tuition fees and the attitudes of students towards educational systems and vice versa, I find it hard to blame the student. The education system is broken, tuition fees keep going up, the quality of education remains mediocre at best, through no fault of the professors who work hard and get pittance compared to what the university makes off the students. The media constantly bangs the drum of entitlement and consumerism into everyone from an early age; and the media is really just a product of the society that we began building in the 1950's... Guess what? Consequences.