Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members."

A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.

EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?

All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities.

The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...

State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge.

The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should private research universities focus on education instead of research? (I would give that a resounding no.) (2) Are the private research universities actually producing useful knowledge? (Here, I would be somewhat negative, but probably not for the trite reasons cited by the authors.)

Those are completely different questions, especially since one is empirical and one is normative. And it is a hallmark of poor editorializing to try to address both an empirical question and a normative question in the same small space.

My father is a senior, tenured professor of mechanical engineering. He's won a bunch of prizes and fellowships. He's probably one of the best in his field. I don't ever recall anything about substantial raises. In fact, all I ever hear out of him is that they're cutting staff, restricting bonuses and cutting raises.

This coming from a man who works on research and the related papers/books almost every waking hour of his life. I'm serious too, I grew up around it. Saturday and Sunday, absolutely. Friday night, definitely. Breaks only for PBS News Hour/CNN, meals, and the occasional friendly tennis match (when the rotator cuff isn't giving him trouble).

He teaches only one undergraduate class a semester. Sure, you might consider that a "light teaching load," but that would be insulting to the graduate, doctorate, and post-doc students who fought hard to spend 50+ hour weeks in the lab (those students probably spend more than 80 hour weeks there themselves). If he could, he'd opt out of that class too. Can't blame him either: most of those students aren't even interested in being an engineer, they're just in it for the degree.

His biggest complaint? Administrative overhead. The university and related agencies take sometimes up to half of his grant money. Hard to pay those students at those rates. Which means he has to spend more time there himself. Time that's getting scarcer due to increases in course and paper requirements.

If you ask him, he'll tell you that colleges serve their administration (in the same way that some say government only exists to serve itself). But maybe someone's just holding on to that 58% raise check for him.

Terrible review of the book. Doesn't really get to the meat of what he was trying to say about colleges.

One, the article never mentions that the author wants to get rid of all degrees except liberal arts. He is totally against college as "training".

He's also against the standard complaints of colleges, tenure, sports, ivy leagues, etc. etc.

It's be much more enlightning to go this NPR transcript or his website:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1289333... http://highereducationquestionmark.com/?page_id=52

In my experience, it's the professors who operate on the Richard Feynman model who are the most successful. While there are lots of professors who are of the mind that teaching and researching are antithetical, I had a few who were just PHENOMENAL, passionate lecturers who say teaching and the future of research as going hand in hand. And it's not so much the material they conveyed; it was the passion for the subject. To me, that's where all of the brilliant students go, to the professors who convince them, through their passion and excitement for the next generation, to take up a particular field of study. In that regard, I think the system can on some level work itself out. Programs with little regard for the next generation simply burn out and attract fewer acolytes. When I look back on my education, as well as what I got out of college, it's totally the handful of passionate professors who shaped me and influenced my future.

Oh God yes, I can't agree with this more. My wife worked as an adjunct at Indiana University, killing herself with a 15-hour load for eight thousand bucks while the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus.

This year, she's got a real job (for a year as a visiting professor) for $35K and benefits; it's going to feel like we're rolling in cash. This is after 30 years of education, including a doctorate in theoretical physics.

The American university system may well have jumped the shark.

Isn't the old joke that colleges are the only place where the employees get all of the good parking and the paying customers get the shitty, far away parking.

I go to a state funded college. This is my last semester and was lucky enough to get a great internship. I wanted to start early, however, I live pretty far away. I decided I would just live in the dorms.

I started negotiations and was surprised at how much it would cost me to stay there for 20 days- 1/2 of what it cost me to live there for a whole semester! After some digging- first they told me that it was not allowed(rooming early)- I find out that they do this on purpose to keep kids from bunking early.

Normally I wouldn't have a problem with this but, I am a senior meaning I've spent a ton of money at that school. I have also served on the housing board for the dorms I was going to live in- volunteer work for the school. They were also very rigid and would not really help me- a future alum.

Needless to say I couldn't afford the amount and as a result I start my internship later which makes my schedule even more cramped. I know what I will be doing when they start soliciting money.

The article disparages universities for having a larger and larger percentage of courses taught by lecturers rather than researching profs, but in my experience (ME, Stanford) the lecturers did a much better job teaching me than the Profs did, on average. Probably because they saw it as their primary occupation rather than an annoyance.

I found the title of this article quite ironic because that's exactly what happened to me in college. I was employed by the school and benefited more than the regular students. I was able to get a job on campus as a Sys admin and that's where most of my education came from. I really wish the opportunity I had was offered to more students on campus. Working 40hrs and going to school more than half time (9 hours or so) was a hard but the experience really put me ahead when I was applying for work. I already had 5 years of experience when I graduated and got the first job I applied for when I decided to leave the school.

I guess my point is, if you go to a school try to find a decent job on campus (not something useless like working as a library clerk if you want to be a programmer). Most universities will pay for your school if you work for them full time.

I still ended up racking some student debt ( I didn't work full time for the first 2 years which got expensive) but hopefully I'll have that gone soon. Not so lucky for my wife, she's earning a masters in library science right now and we are looking at over 50K total for her education. I'll probably have to get a new job when she graduates to cover the increased expense. 50K is ridiculous, and they won't give you 30 years to pay that off anymore.

I have not read the book the article references. However, in reference to what Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus call the "immorality" of using adjunct professors, the article's author does not address the fact that there are potentially very good reasons why the use of adjuncts is increasing.

In engineering, for example, adjunct professors may come from industry and provide students with perspective and experience full-time professors may not provide.

Adjunct professors may choose to teach as adjuncts because they have a passion and a talent for teaching they want to pursue without the pressures of publication. Many full-time professors may readily admit that the pressures of producing academic work causes the quality of their teaching to decrease. Perhaps this is one reason Yale offers its professors time so that both the quality of teaching and research remains high.

Some departments opt to hire adjunct professors because its set of full-time professors does not have the expertise to offer a course in a particular area of the field. While this may seem more applicable to technical fields, any department that opts to do this can provide students with more diversity and variety in course offerings over an academic year and over a student's academic career.

As someone who has gone to college and worked in a college, I couldn't agree more. It was great to work there as a staff member (IT), but as an adjunct professor, the pay was laughably low and not even close to worth it. Having a large amount of debt now is a burden, but bearable because I went into a good field. However, if I was a student today, just a decade later, I'd be taking on twice the amount of detb, and I'm not sure that'd be worth it.

To be honest I'm glad that professors are doing more research and instructors are more pure instructors. The typical professor has 4 jobs: Researcher, Fundraiser, Teacher and Evaluator. They all have a conflict of interest with each other in some way and they'll all steal your shower focus. If they were all separated, universities could provide much better services in each job category. I remember Knuth saying something along the lines of "I retired so I can actually focus on research and attend less meetings". Students won't have to deal with the scheduling nightmare that is final exams because professors are too valuable to provide flexible (scheduling wise) examination services. Things like back to back finals or having them 3 days after the 'get all of your large projects in' end of classes rush don't have to happen anymore! People who want to interact with professors can come on as undergrad research assistants/apprentices and actually learn some research vs. some extension of high school. Professors wouldn't have to deal with something alot of them aren't that good at and most dread and actually get the grants they need!

The title suggests that all colleges are effected, but the facts in the article primarily criticize the major "elitist" colleges. I go to a local community college, and do not see this problem personally.

There have been a lot of articles recently attacking higher education. Maybe there's some merit there, but one might also ask 'who is served by denegrating higher education as an option for the people? who benefits by a less educated public?'

Of course colleges serve the people who work there. All organizations head that direction. The only thing that stops that progression is when the folks paying the bills take their money elsewhere.

I don' think that this is news to anyone that works in higher ed. I work at a University and its repeated all throughout the campus. Basically administrators want to set up their own little empires on the campus and make themselves seem indispensable. I'm pretty sure things like this happen at most large organizations in some form.

It's ironic the article mentions Stanford, then describes university presidents as not having "done anything memorable, apart perhaps from firing a popular athletic coach." The president of Stanford is John Hennessy, a founder of MIPS and a board member of Google and Cisco among others.

"For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended."

Not in my experience.

I would like to know how much of this applies to universities in the UK. Here there is a lot of public funding, but we're moving towards paying more funding as time goes on.

when people pay for their own choices, they carefully weigh the costs and benefits involved. And the market is disciplined by this.

But when people are able to shift the costs to others or borrow money from those who lend to anybody, many aren't careful at all. And the market responds to take advantage of this.

This article is rubbish.

i found this review more informative than the recent post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559480 about the interview with the authors in the atlantic magazine

what the authors are saying is true in general for any -bureaucracy- and education is the oldest and biggest existing bureaucracy even after it divided itself into secular and religious education in the 18th century

any bureaucracy must -grow- continually to perpetuate itself - education does this by making education longer and longer