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> These things aren't the fault of students, professors or any one group, it's just how the complex system that is college education in the US has evolved.

You say that, but in the rest of your entire post, you're putting the blame squarely on the professors.

I was a professor, and I put a crazy amount of time and effort into my students. Copious office hours, refining and reworking every single class I taught every time I taught it, rewriting every test and assignment, doing extracurricular homework reviews and test prep, etc, etc. All this to say, I was very interested in being a good teacher, and this

> The professors who are actually interested in being good teachers don't seem to have a problem with under-performing students (or at least you never hear them complaining).

is bullshit.

It's not that it's wrong. It's disingenuous. The under-performing students are not the issue. They've never been the issue. Even students admitted based on academic merit have weaknesses and struggle in certain areas. That's part of being human. Good students, regardless of performance, will work to overcome these weaknesses and deserve attention and work on the part of the professor in return.

The problem is the non-performing students. The ones who tell you that their daddy paid good money for them to pass your class, and they've never once turned in a homework assignment or passed a quiz. Those students leach time and effort and attention that rightfully belongs to the under-performing students. Those students will offer you money and sex before they do a lick of work, and I have been offered both, multiple times. They do not belong in universities.

From the article:

> Exhibit A from the recent admissions corruption scandal is “social media celebrity” Olivia Jade Gianulli, whose parents bought her a place at the University of Southern California, and who announced last August to her huge YouTube following that “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend. But I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying … I don’t really care about school.”

I think you have greatly misunderstood the problem and fail to grasp the realities of the situation. Yes, there exist professors that don't give a crap about teaching, but your post is a slap in the face to those of us who care deeply and spend (or used to spend) 60 - 80 hours a week doing it.

> They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them)

To be clear, it's not just less important to the professors, it's less important to the school as well. Just look at the tenure guidelines to see this: Publications and grants are by and large the biggest part of your tenure portfolio. At a good school, you can get tenure while being a mediocre lecturer, but you will never get tenure being a mediocre researcher. So can we really blame professors for reacting to the incentives they are given?

No, not really. Can we blame the incentives?

That's because tenure is a tool for research, it exists to ensure a certain level of freedom of research. For every n researchers who use tenure for slacking off or pursuing a crackpot idea (those two are indistinguishable from the outside) there will be one who makes a valuable contribution that would have been impossible without the freedom granted by tenure.

Granting tenure has many downsides, but there is also possible upside which is why tenure exist. But that upside is exclusive to research, it simply does not exist in teaching. Don't get me wrong, it's great when tenured positions are held by people who are also good teachers and many are, but it would be wasteful to base selection on teaching. If you want to improve teaching, create better teaching positions outside of tenure.

I'm confused by your expert tradesman analogy. Surely the first step to hand-carving a beautiful wooden chess set is to throw away parts that have knots and cracks and won't carve well?

Even if they prefer working with nice material the people who are the best in their craft can still build pretty nice stuff out of crap material if that's what's in front of them.

But you can't force a piece of knobbly wood into a straight line. You work with what you've got. If the wood is twisted and knotty you have to play with that, you can't say "I make little identical figurines and I can do it with any wood" no matter how skilled you are.

That's the point, you work with what is in front of you. That doesn't mean you'll have an identical outcome.

Nobody is expected to do their best work every day in any conditions with any inputs. You're expected have a "good enough" outcome the overwhelming majority of the time which is also the goal when it comes to teaching.

With a good teacher all but maybe the bottom few percent should at least be learning enough to be regarded as passing and most should be passing comfortably. A not so good teacher will go through the same basic motions using the same inputs but without that hard to quantify expert touch that comes from skill compounded with experience they will not produce the same result and they may not understand why because you don't know what you don't know. This generalizes to other skilled professions.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect every college professor to be a great teacher. But the ones that aren't and don't want to be shouldn't be complaining that teaching is a chore and that some students are harder than others. That chore is what keeps the lights on.

They can also tell you when it is simply not possible to make a wonderful thing out of that material alone.

The most beautiful art comes from being limited.

Given infinite resources and any tool I want, even you or I could create a life size stone sculpture. Software and software run stone cutting machines make it easy.

But let's see what kind of a sculpture we can make with nothing but an 8 foot block of limestone and some chisels.

Universities are places of higher learning, not higher teaching. Professors are there to do smart things, teaching is not an important part of their job.

No matter how good or enthusiastic the teacher is, under-performing students simply require more time. Time is a precious commodity, and if the class size is large and professors have other (non-teaching) responsibilities then something has to give.

Unless you're advocating that "good professors will just put in the 90 hours a week to make it happen"?