Screwed up incentives in higher education
tophatmonocle.com
tophatmonocle.com
Spoken like a person who has never actually taught a college course. There's a tremendous amount of work involved, from both students and faculty. Most students go to class, and most professors give lectures that aren't directly taken from the book. So can we please stop elevating the cartoon, straw-man portrayals of the incompetent lecturer and the lazy student? Please?
If this blog post weren't written by the CEO of a company that's trying to sell enhancement software to universities, I'd dismiss it as anti-intellectual trolling. I'm also trying hard not to dismiss it as the griping of a guy who's finding resistance selling his product to a somewhat conservative clientele (university staff), and interpreting their reluctance as the behavior of dinosaurs (rather than a sensible reaction to the generations of educational snake-oil salesmen who have come before).
Instead, I'll give the benefit of the doubt: there are certainly lazy, incompetent professors. There are also lazy students that have no business being in college. But if your only contact with the university system comes from when you're trying to sell or beta-test your products in the classroom...well, you don't have a very representative sample from which to draw conclusions.
So I take it you disagree with the central thesis that tuition is absurdly high for the value that students get?
Edit: from the article "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."
If that was your thesis (it was well-buried), then yes, I disagree with it. And I can fairly conclusively prove my point with your own words: professors spend most of their time raising money to do their research. They don't do that because the school is showering them with cash (in point of fact, the school takes a substantial percentage cut from every grant dollar, too). So where is the tuition going? It sure isn't going to the research programs.
If you're going to make the claim that universities are squandering student tuition/fees (and that IS what you're doing here, even if you're doing it obliquely), you're going to have to defend that claim with more than just hand-waving assertions that students would gain just as much from private tutors. Because that's not a claim that stands up to casual scrutiny.
Honestly, I think you're succumbing to the fallacy of the university as a provider of first-year coursework. Yes, some students could probably learn calculus 101 from private tutors. But most of the people qualified to "tutor" students in anything more complex than first-year coursework are already doing so -- at universities.
I'm open to a frank discussion of inefficiencies in the university system (and I think there are tons -- what's the average student-contact-hour rating of a professor in comparative lit, versus a first-year professor in chemistry or math? How much does that new dorm cost? What about the Taj Mahal gym with the fancy climbing walls?), but it's wrong to suggest that the whole institution is "absurdly" overpriced from the teaching perspective. The numbers just don't bear out that hypothesis.
1. The typical student experience in higher-ed is poor
2. Students pay a lot of money for it
3. The experience is poor because incentives in higher-ed are mostly towards research and not teaching
As for whether students get value for their money, I'm not sure what to say other than I don't believe it should cost $12k to provide 250 hours of instruction, especially when it's done en mass.
I also strongly disagree that it takes anything extraordinary to teach calc 3 or intro real analysis. Everything up to 3rd year is relatively trivial, and I don't find it hard to believe that a bright PhD that loves teaching wouldn't be able to do a decent job at it.
1. This is an assertion. During 11+ years in academia, I saw no evidence that "typical" students were unhappy with quality of the education.
2. Yes, college costs a lot. We disagree on the reasons.
3. I agree that the incentives are biased toward research, but disagree that this leads to a poor student experience.
As for the $12k for 250 hours of instruction: yes, that's $50 an hour, per student. But you're not just paying the instructor of the course (believe me!) -- you're paying for the classroom, the building, the fancy new student center, the campus landscaping, the fountains, the climbing wall, the professors who are teaching dozens of other, very small courses, the laboratory space, the dormitories, the third-party software licenses, the women's softball team, etc.
Universities aren't cheap to run. The guy at the front of the classroom is only the start of the cost structure.
Also, I imagine you didn't go to a state school.
There are many reasons why schools have become more expensive over the years. The cost of health care, alone, is growing much faster than the rate of inflation.
But honestly, most universities went on a building spree over the last twenty years. Fancy dorms and labs and classrooms and athletic facilities really start to add up -- and grants rarely pay for them. As I said before, there are tons of inefficiencies in the university system. I just don't think they're in the classroom.
If you want a school where the professor's highest priority is the classroom experience go to a small liberal arts school. But frankly, there's no reason a great professor can't do both so you may as well go somewhere with the resources to conduct interesting research.
About five paragraphs in, by my count:
"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."
You're calling out the system for being outdated and broken. Just because you don't explicitly say that "most professors are lazy and incompetent (except for the ones I like)" doesn't mean that you can fling these sorts of casual, rhetorical stones without having to embrace the conclusion.
The system can be broken without attaching any blame to the workers in the system.
The real problem is of course the high-up administrators and board. The purpose of a university is not education. The purpose is to funnel money via inflated salaries and unneeded construction jobs to those that are politically well-connected.
Frankly, few people have the balls or sociopathic instincts to stand in front of dozens of people every day and tolerate looking like an incompetent, lazy ass.
In it, inflation adjusted prices of dental services are plotted against time, along with the price of higher education. Amazingly, they track each other extremely well, which would suggest that the price of services in general are increasing at a rate higher than inflation....It would be interesting to see the price for other services plotted on the same graph. If the curve is "universal", then it might be an indicator that we should look to causes in the broader economy...
I spent about 5 years teaching college, and I have a hard time disagreeing. Teaching is a lot of work the first couple of times, but it gets easy very quickly. Calc 1 is no different the 10'th time you teach than the first, and at that point all you need to do is show up and repeat. Teaching is not a difficult job [1].
As for the students, they are mostly just there for the grade. Some of them may need to do a bit more than just cram for 2 weeks, and many attend class out of a sense of social obligation, but they are just there for the grade.
[1] Research is far more difficult, and I'll agree that most research professors are very hardworking. But teaching is just a minor task research profs are saddled with.
That's true if all you do is teach Calc 101, but most departments don't let professors do that (they do let staff instructors specialize in one course, however). Smaller courses are the preponderance of the teaching load for a professor, and those courses take a lot of effort. The first-year courses have huge staff infrastructures in place to handle the load, and they don't change quickly because of sheer institutional inertia.
The unstated myth here is that first-year courses are representative of the college experience. They're not. Even at big state schools, the bulk of the instructional effort goes into the higher-level courses, where class sizes are smaller, the students are more engaged, and the curriculum changes more frequently.
This is not true of anyplace I'm aware of. Every place that I've been to, unless you went out of your way to request it, you taught Calc 1-4, "Math for Non-Math Majors", or perhaps Linear Algebra/Complex Analysis for EE. If you want to teach primarily advanced courses, you need to make special arrangements and you probably need leverage.
Further, even the advanced courses don't change much. My first semester in grad school, I took Real/Complex/Functional Analysis and Algebra. Functional Analysis was the most modern topic - some of the material was developed in the 80's.
I really have no idea where you are getting your information from, but I don't think your college experience was typical.
If this wasn't your college experience then I think you're in the minority. If you look at a list of the top 10 most popular college majors, I'd be willing to be that the majority of classes in these majors are taught almost directly from McGraw Hill textbooks or whatever. It's not until you get into subjects that are both obscure and also in areas where the professors are likely to be intellectually curious that you start seeing more people creating their own lectures, e.g. a course on methodologies in religious studies or whatever.
"Now, what do students get for their money? they[sic] 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."
This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the university was required to take. Above the sophomore level, all classes were, at an absolute maximum, 35 people. Even the large lecture classes were closer to half what the author states.
"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."
Anyone doing this has little reason to be in school. Admittedly, some classes are easy and sufficiently unrelated to your career goals that they can be safely ignored. Once you get past those courses, though, if you can still cram and come out with a respectable grade, you've made a terrible choice for you degree program and university. Cramming just doesn't cut it when you're in a senior level math course and supposed to derive the heat and wave equation on an exam by justifying the simplifications necessary to get a clean mathematical model. You won't even get that far if you crammed in your Calculus 3 course and have no idea how to deal with multivariable derivatives and integrals. Nor will you have any idea about how such an equation is supposed to work if you failed to learn anything in your differential equations course.
The picture of the university described in the article is flawed for all but the lowest performing students. If people want to actually learn something, they can. If they don't, that's unfortunate; they probably won't and can, instead, attempt to game the system (i.e. cram for tests) to maintain their GPA. Giving these people better teachers won't help them because they don't care about learning.
The real issue seems to be that too many people are going to college for the wrong reasons. If you have no aspirations of learning what a college attempts to teach, then don't go. There should be no expectation that merely attending college will cause you to learn something.
Why does this change the conclusion?
One could argue that students new to a topic need more one-on-one instruction.
"Its" not "it's." If you want academics to read your writing, it had better not have grammar or punctuation errors. This is not rocket surgery.
P.S. I've got the karma to burn.
Look at European universities. For students, they are free. Or ridiculously cheap (like $500 per semester). Actually, last year, students in Germany were fed up with the bad quality if teaching. Guess what they did? They went on strike! They blocked rooms and prevented courses from happening. Without students, universities can't exist. So, professors and management had to act. And teaching improved.
I think you will agree that something like this is completely and utterly impossible in the US. If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the money he had put in that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against bad teaching. If students pay huge amounts of money for each course and semester, they will try to get cheap education at a big-name place. I guess in the choice between cheap, big-name and good, you can pick any two. Hence, there is little incentive to get good education.
Furthermore, if courses are free, students can freely choose which courses to take. Hence they try to get the best teaching they can get. If that means they take a few extra semesters, so be it. If that means that they actually change universities or even curriculums, no problem. You see, by not paying (much) for universities, students optimize for quality.
Too true.
There's a pretty big strike movement growing in the California school system. Strikes aren't continuous, but there has been a few rather large actions.
It doesn't seem to be working - tuition has increased at UCs 42.56% over the last year alone. (Last ~Nov, a 32% increase in tuition was approved by the UC Regents; this year, another 8% this month.) Despite the massive tuition increases, classes and professors - and in some cases entire departments - continue to face the chopping block.
Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a plurality of student support - most students I've talked with are against the protests.
Perverse incentives? Absolutely. But thats what government does best. It perverts incentives. It hides the costs and makes a big show of benefits, even ones that don't truly matter.
Top-hat monocle is a web-based quiz/online tutorial system. You can put flash based demos, and random quizzes on it, and students can answer on their laptops, or text in the answers from their phones.
We got use to top-hat monocle for one of our courses last term. It was a joke (took forever for the demos to load... flash...). Beyond the usual 'a tool can only make a poor user screw up even with ever greater speed', we had to pay to get our license... to what was then beta software. They admitted to us that 'they weren't done testing' and that we were going to be the last group to 'get to try' the system before it went into wide release.
I won't argue about the effectiveness of the system (it is a tool, whose effectiveness depends on its user), but paying to be part of the final set of testers definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.
Were you in the UW System Design course last term? We had a couple of courses that had issues with monocleCAT, and we learnt a lot from them.
One of the biggest issues that caught us by surprise was the effect a room full of connected students can have on a lower-quality access point. We learnt from that, and totally rewrote our synchronization code to be much more robust and efficient with bandwidth (something I'd love to write a post about some time in the future).
We used to be hosted on Google App Engine, and we suffered greatly from dowtime issues that plagued every App Engine site all throughout the term. We learned from that and switched to Amazon EC2, where we've built a backend that automatically scales up to thousands of simulatanous connections.
We discovered that while most users have laptops or netbooks, few users like lugging them to every class. We learned from that and introduced iPhone and Android applications, as well as enhancing our SMS submission system to send back confirmation messages (with an easy opt-out process) for students on legacy phones.
We discovered that some professors had teaching styles that didn't take advantage of our software, so we've started being more agressive in our professor approval process, as well as introduced training sessions to help professors get a feel for how to incorproate the system in their lectures.
The biggest lesson we've learned is to find early adopters that are willing to work with you to improve your product, and to build strong relationships with them. Our product has improved monumentally in the last few months thanks to their support.
We've signed on a number of new professors in the Engineering department at the University of Waterloo, so it's quite likely you'll be using monocleCAT again next term. In recognition of the issues some students experienced last term, we'll be giving vouchers for a free term to students in the courses that had serious issues (you'll probably be seeing yours in the mail in a few weeks).
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EDIT: when I say we had a couple bad courses... the System Design course was the one that really had issues (hence my guess).
I understand the the need for early adopters and feedback. I have nothing against your project in principle, and I wish you the best. And I appreciate all the effort you've put into improving the product.
Honestly, I would have no problem with putting up with many of the problems we ran into, just that we paid for it. Part of the problem was that it wasn't explicitly made clear that it was 'beta' software until most of the class had purchased their licenses. Seriously, it completely coloured the way we saw any short comings in Top Hat. A lot of us felt that we were tricked/cheated out and generated a lot of unnecessary ill will. You probably heard through the grapevines some of the rumblings from the class regarding possible financial transactions between your company and our professor.
It wasn't pretty.
On the side, one of the implementation problems that we ran into a lot in tutorials when we ran quizzes was that since we all had laptops, we all had msn open. Which meant that for ~60% of the class, it was just a matter of getting added to an msn convo, and grabbing the answer. I don't really believe there's much of a technical solution that you can implement. In fact, for my class, more than half of the class who actually showed up to tutorial had their laptops there (part of this had to do with our class schedules).
I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place.
And much appreciation for the voucher. After reading this, I'll definitely try to look at Top Hat with fresh eyes (and enjoying demos that load on time!). Thanks!
That's a good point. I occasionally get texts that my GF sent eight to twelve hours earlier... literally enough time to have come from Voyager 2. Confirmation messages are absolutely mandatory in any text-messaging application that matters.
Also, grad students have funding - so tuition is more like an overhead fee on the funding provided by grants and private research partners. Grad courses are also typically seminars, with no more than 10-15 students per course where you get to work one-on-one with the professor. Not to mention that profs tend to actually like teaching grad courses.
Grad school makes sense to me, conceptually at least. Undergrad tuition and the whole system is just insane. It's all basically diploma mills.
In the hard sciences, yes. Much less so in other fields.
It blew my mind when I found out.
At least english majors don't have a profit motive!
Without getting into specifics, my bf's research deals with epidemiology and things related to improving public health in the hospitality/tourism industry. Sure, at the undergrad level it's mostly vocational, but it's not like there's no public benefit to full-fledged academic research in this area.
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that his work will probably have a greater positive net effect on society than mine will. But since math is a "real science", I make the "big bucks" (relative to graduate students, i.e., two steps above ramen-profitable).
That is the big problem. The problem is that the sole method of employee evaluation for University professors (and postdocs - anyone in an academic career) is publications.
This encourages bad publications, a focus on research (or more accurately, publication milling) rather than teaching and a focus on many publications - instead of good research.
At least 99% of conference articles are worthless and 85% of journal articles are crap.
I wonder if the world would not be better served if professors were encouraged to study deeper and target the high-hanging fruits, instead of producing (mostly) worthless research.
But that is completely flawed! Some research areas (which is inconsequential but easy to do) produces a lot of citations. And what also happens is that people start building research groups which cross-cite each other.
What is your solution?
How does leasing them tools to herd more efficiently do anything but amplify the screwed up incentives further?
You could aspire to be the Temple Grandin of higher ed reform, but that doesn't do anything to fix the underlying problem — it only makes it easier to ignore.
Has there really been an increase in large classes as the author states?
I'm fairly certain you don't spend 1000+ hours in lectures out of the ~2880 hours in four months.
300/180*500/20*24000/10000 = 100x