What's Wrong With the American University System
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
If the purpose of the college/university system is to conduct research, that would be one thing, but there is at least a wide belief that the purpose of the university is to educate; and my read of the original article, with which I largely agree, is that Hacker wants to raise awareness that our "higher education" system is not well-geared toward actual undergraduate education. At most highly-ranked universities, teaching ability and interest are fairly actively selected against: the retention decision is made almost entirely based on research, and while they would love the professors to be good teachers too, they can't evaluate that and have no incentives to promote it (and PhD students aren't taught anything about it anyway), so it is purely by luck that they manage to retain good teachers.
I guess I'd like to hear from the commenters who disagree with the article about what made their researcher-professors better teachers, particularly at the lower levels where the only things that might be cutting-edge are the teaching techniques. (I'm not that interested in hearing about the professors bringing you in on their research, which is valuable but necessarily not available to every undergraduate student.)
Disclaimer: I am a college professor, I value (and am good at) teaching, and was denied tenure (at a liberal arts college, even) apparently because my publications were in CS education rather than in something more "researchy". Even the liberal arts colleges are not immune to the movement placing research above teaching as retention criterion for their teachers.
When I was at MIT, the best professors in lecture were actually top researchers (to the point of winning the Nobel). The best actual experiences I had were participating in faculty research (as an undergrad, you can actually contribute fairly meaningfully outside the core focus of the research; a CS/Math student can help out with data acquisition in a substantive way in Physics). Plus, undergraduate organizations like SIPB (which has developed KSplice, and which worked on many other interesting projects before)
I don't think most of this would happen at a small liberal arts college.
High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a high school or college educator).
OK, it's good to have a lecturer with real-world expertise in the subject they are teaching. And research does count.
You want a lecturer with the skills needed to publish, but the push towards more research can just result in lecturers spending more time gaming research metrics, which has little impact on teaching quality.
In general, this is a bad idea. It's like saying colleges should only teach for jobs that exist and not for what could be. No one is hiring buggy whip engineers and no one is teaching people to be computers (ie. the human kind in the 40s and 50s). The whole point of a university is to do advanced research and break off a little knowledge on the incoming students.
Also, there is no one true degree or one true job. Engineers ,and everyone else, are at the mercy of the market. You can't get paid if no one is buying your stuff. This applies to the CEO as well as the janitor. Ask aerospace engineers how they felt at the end of the coldwar. There used to be a joke about aerospace engineers being able to only get jobs that involved burgers. Now, Boeing can't hire enough, but that's it. The only place that hire those type of engineers, in quantity, are NASA and Boeing.
I think you're missing the point.
At Johns Hopkins I had a mix of good teachers and bad; most of the professors there did a lot of research, but that didn't have any bearing on whether or not they were any good at teaching.
Personally, I have no problem with professors doing research AND teaching, provided that they do a good job when it comes to teaching.
The problem arises when universities, and this included Johns Hopkins (which is why I refuse to give any money to the alumni fund when they all me), is that it was clear that so long as the professors were doing research and publishing papers, what they did in the classroom was inconsequential.
I had professors who clearly had no idea as to what they were teaching -- they were regurgitating what was in the text book. (It showed on exam questions like "Calculate the rate of this reaction at equilibrium".)
On the flip side of this, I audited a course on parallel computing taught by a professor who had worked with and IIRC helped develop IBM's Scalable Power 2. She was an excellent professor, and I ended up learning a lot from her. In the end, my only disappointment is that it was an audit, and therefore didn't affect my GPA.
Even after throwing away the obviously mental comments, it's bothersome that they've framed the problem of universities doing public research as: a) Wrong - Who else is going to do it? Industry? b) American only - I've been at universities in the UK, US and New Zealand, and it's all the same.
It's not wrong for good scientists to do research, it's reality. Not only that, but America actually has a system that supports teaching colleges: the state and community colleges are almost entirely geared towards teaching. That doesn't exist in the UK and New Zealand, and I'd hazard other places as well.
Universities have always been research-oriented, even Plato's Academy was: "In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others." [1]
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy
EDIT: Because this interview is just filled with little morsels of insanity, I couldn't resist another good one: "It's a third-tier university, but the faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously." Read: the faculty are resigned to the fact they're not going to get hired by anyone else because they didn't make the grade, so they're just going to teach rather than bother getting their papers rejected.
I say this sadly, but Wikipedia's philosophy articles aren't always too great. That Plato's Academy was not pushing its own doctrine is a disputed topic; Aristotle (who would know) says that the Academy promulgated a Pythagoreanism as its esoteric doctrine, and that Plato's dialogues are only exoteric exercises and preliminary to a real understanding is a very old view (you may have seen the recent coverage of possible numerical structure to his dialogues).
Lifespan increases are not due to dragging out the time where one is feeble and sick, but by increasing the healthy part. People in their 50s are 'younger' than they were decades and centuries ago. Thinking that the increases are increases in morbidity has been called the 'Tithonus error' or fallacy.
Here are some links for your perusal:
- http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=compression+of...
- http://www.jstor.org/pss/2664720
- http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?page=1...
- http://www.courant.com/health/sns-200910201351tmspremhnstr--...
National labs?
Research is what professors want to be doing (at least in the sciences -- I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities). Teaching is what they're obliged to do. If you want to get some of the smartest people in the world and pay them a barely-six-figure salary to teach the same damn introductory-level BS to spotty-faced teens every damn year, you'd better be offering some damn good perks, and the number one perk is to be allowed to spend most of your time researching whatever you're interested in.
If you want to be taught by professors who aren't at the top of their fields, you can go to a community college, but your questions will be rubbing up against the edge of their knowledge pretty damn quick.
Huh? Do you have any first hand insight?
Andrew Hacker himself (one of the co-authors of the book under discussion) is a good counter-example. He was a longtime professor at a public college (Queens College). (Full disclosure: I was a student at QC from 1986-1992. I never took a full class with Professor Hacker, but I heard him lecture a few times.) His classes always filled up quickly despite their reputation as challenging, he won numerous teaching awards and he was near-universally regarded as an inspiring lecturer. Nevertheless, he was also a respected scholar who regularly published articles and books that nobody in his field could ignore. It doesn't have to be either/or.
Obviously brilliant researchers who happen to also love to teach (and are good at it) are the ideal professors that every university should want, but merely wanting people good at all parts of being a professor does not make them exist in large quantities.
And you can see this happening, slowly.
In particular I remember one who, when teaching us a brilliant technique, behaved exactly like a kid on Christmas morning. His enthusiasm made us all remember that class.
It would not surprise me if the professors you liked the best were the same ones that enjoyed teaching. However, tenure and such are much harder to come by for doing good teaching than for doing good research.
I would have to say that that guy was smart and knew his stuff.
"Yet if you look at all those powerhouse [college football] programs across the country, only seven or eight actually rake in money."
I've now heard this point made by several individuals and it's simply not true. Purely in terms of revenues versus costs, the majority of division 1A programs in the country make money. For 76 of the 120 div 1A programs, revenues exceeded costs as reported to the government in 2008. In many cases (20+), the profits are significant -- 10's of millions of dollars. Football programs make it possible for other non-revenue generating sports to exist.
The raw data can be found here: http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/
Also, I can anecdotally say that having gone to a school with a decent football team, it has kept me in touch with a number of my friends, provided a rallying point for alumni, and will play a role in my future giving to my alma mater.
Edit: For clarification...
But I'm not very satisfied by those statistics. I looked up one school, Stony Brook University (in NCAA Division I-AA, whatever that is), and looked at its expenses: http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e6974696...
I see listed salaries, recruiting costs, financial aid costs, and operating costs, which yields a net profit of ~$700,000.
I don't see any entries for the $22,000,000 stadium the football team uses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_P._LaValle_Stadium), nor operating costs for the stadium. 22m wipes out an awful lot of 700k years.
And that's the first off-the-books cost that occurs to me, a college sports ignoramus, to look for. So now I know that those statistics are at least incomplete for the purposes of examining the overall picture; but can I even trust the statistics provided? I suspect that further investigation would reveal many more expenses and costs, and few revenues.
Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money).
Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors.
Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following:
$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor
$300 an instructor
$150 by a teaching assistant
$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center
Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system.
Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive.
Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own.
The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice.
The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.
Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.
Be careful about making this comment. I have also worked as tech support for a CS/Maths/Statistics department at a small university. Many of them are very clever, very overworked, and do not have the same love for computers you do. A computer is a tool that is a means to an end for them, and it's not surprising many don't know the ins and outs.
My understanding is that this bundling, as far as the liberal arts/hard division goes, works massively in the favor of the latter, because the liberal arts courses are much cheaper to provide and subsidize the latter. (How much does it cost to run a poetry course? How much for a Cisco networking class?)
If people should be paid for their hard work, then a lot of people are underpaid. People though are paid for their productivity. These professors and grad students who slave away are not productive. They are not producing what our society needs. They are feeding all their work into the machine and what is the output of this "machine" that gets fed all the blood, sweat, tears, and tax payer money?
Good research and teaching?
I neglected to mention the bundling together of research and teaching. Instead of doing one or the other well, both provide excuses for mediocrity. At middle and bottom tier schools effective teaching is possible but faculty use their research as a justification for high salaries. The students learn the material outside of class mostly. There's very little in-class discussion and the only justification teachers have for their salaries is their "research". A good teacher, as far as the students are concerned, is one who gives fair and/or lenient tests and isn't a boring lecturer. The teaching part of their jobs could be replaced by a textbook, some video lectures, perhaps an online homework system, and tests at a testing center. Such a system would make a good business model if the current system wasn't so deeply rooted in our society. As I mentioned before, a college degree is a prerequisite for a lot of state jobs and is a barrier designed to prop up the system.
However, I think you're being a bit melodramatic about the system. Or perhaps the US system just really does suck, because I really enjoyed doing my undergrad degree in Australia, and really felt as though it gave me more than "a piece of paper" for a job (I wasn't really originally going to go into academia, I wanted to do other things, and sort of fell into academia sideways). I also felt as though the teaching was really vital: if not just in content, but in imparting enthusiasm and interest in a particular subject.
Anyway I can't really comment on the credit stuff since I have NFI about the US system.
Sorry you've become so disillusioned by universities and such, because around the world there are still some academics who actually give a shit about quality teaching and research. Perhaps you should broaden your horizons and look outside the US?
Many of them have a 3-2 arrangement with an engineering school. You take the more general science and math courses at the liberal arts school, then 2 years of engineering classes at the engineering school.
Whenever there's an economic downturn, there are inevitably sob stories printed in virtually every major newspaper about how it's difficult for fresh college graduates to get a job and these human interest stories invariably include an anecdote or two about some specific young person just out of college living at home while desperately trying to find a job and having no luck because the jobs just aren't there. How many times have you read this type of story in the newspaper where the sob story is about a kid who majored in chemical engineering or EE or metallurgy? I've yet to see such an article and I anticipate that if I were to see such an article it would be lamenting that the kid couldn't find a job in their specific major, not that they couldn't find gainful employment somewhere doing something. If you're an employer hiring for the kind of jobs for which a liberal arts degree is sufficient preparation, you'd be a fool to turn down an engineering grad if you were lucky enough to have one who was actually interested in working for you. Your requirements for the candidate are: smart and gets things done. If they can survive the rigors of an engineering school, there's little doubt that they can do the job. On the other hand, if you're a technical employer getting resumes from fresh liberal arts graduates, you're probably going to toss them straight into the trash bin.
Then go to a school that focuses on teaching (mine does).
> And they'd like to see graduates worrying less about their careers, even if it means spending a year behind the cash register at Old Navy.
That's not an issue with the schools, it's an issue with society. People expect a high paying job right out of school, they expect a fancy house and nice things. Sadly, it doesn't happen like that.
If students did this, then they would find a passion and become highly motivated. They would then enter a university, where they find that they have to shell out a large sum of money every year. This goes towards ensuring that they're able to live in small, inadequate rooms with loud, obnoxious people with whom they sit in boring, superficial lectures and take tests that assess one's ability to learn by rote. All of this, just so they can earn a piece of paper that says they are allowed to work in a field they liked enough to learn about on their own.
Huh? "They" are ready for you as soon as you're ready for them.