Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

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> Professors command high salaries

I guess it depends on what you mean by "high". At most institutions, faculty will make $50K-$60K starting, max out at $100K, and often do not have access to a pension. In many states, you're really better off, financially, as a high school teacher or police officer.

Which, I mean, high school teachers are highly paid by some standards. But saying professors command high salaries on a tech forum where even new grads are probably making more than the average full professor is probably misleading.

> but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors... better than professor-taught classes

1. It really depends on the course; undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster.

2. On that note, there's an important confounding factor: undergraduate-lead courses are often "topics" courses outside of the core curriculum, which naturally attract better feedback than "broccoli and spinach" courses regardless of the instructor. E.g., in CS, a course on game design or crypto will always attract higher ratings than "core" courses like Data Structures or especially Intro Programing.

3. Good faculty do a lot more than teach. And I don't even mean research. Industry relations and job placement are huge value adds of a good faculty member.

There's an important split between courses that need careful pedagogy and courses that really just need engagement. For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops. Sometimes an undergrad will pass through who could totally teach the course, but that tends to be an exceptional student.

Once you have a bunch of juniors/seniors who know how to program, and assuming you're teaching a course that's primarily about applied programming (eg, not a proof-based CS Theory or Algo course), engagement becomes more important than pedagogy.

Student-lead courses can be great, and ARE often way better than prof-lead courses especially for "applied programming" type courses, but it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state.

> undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster

My university (Olin College) was undergraduate-only, but your general point about good teaching being a rare skill is definitely valid. Our student body was definitely pretty high caliber both technically and in terms of explaining-things skills.

> it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state

This seems to be mostly false, in the sense that many schools run huge class sizes for many core courses (cough couch Berkely) and in practice non-TA instruction in those courses could be pretty easily replaced with videos. It's not ideal, but seems to work OK.

> For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops.

This is certainly true if you just hire some students and tell them to do their best, but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process. For example, it's reasonable to provide instruction for the instructors on how to be effective, and invest more in quality video or written content to explain technical details that a student might not be able to articulate well. In my experience, being taught by student instructors definitely also helps prepare students to teach as student instructors, in a virtuous cycle.

Many of the tools for doing this well don't exist in a cohesive form today, but to the extent that people are working to make education cheaper, this seems like a promising direction to investigate.

> This seems to be mostly false, in the sense that many schools run huge class sizes for many core courses (cough couch Berkely) and in practice non-TA instruction

Berkeley is not a good counter-example.

There are usually several teaching professors doing a full time job behind the scenes -- handling a myriad of student crises, handling a huge quantity of special accommodations, plagiarism and other academic misconduct, behavior issues (on the part of both students and staff!!!), constant question bank maintenance, constant schedule tweaking, interfacing with faculty demands from down-stream courses, and so on. Those are all trivial, though. Most important -- by far -- is training and managing a large course staff most of whom have never taught a recitation or graded a homework assignment!

Scaling up from a class of 1 instructor and 40 students (at Olin 20 or 15 I'd guess?) in one class to class with 40 staff members and 1000+ students and several lecturers is its own skillset. Those instructors are not teachers. They are mid-level managers. It's a different job, and not one that most undergraduates are prepared to take on.

And the face that it's a machine matters. Teaching a few recitations or lab sections and grading homework is not even remotely the same as instructing a course.

It's a bit like saying that you don't need experienced management at a logistics company because, after all, everyone learns how to do the warehouse job within a week. True, but keeping that machine running requires institutional memory and is itself a full time job. And just because you can train cogs quickly doesn't mean many of those cogs would do a particularly good job at designing and operating the underlying machine. Or even a miniature version of that machine.

> but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process.

Having spent time both inside and outside the elite academic institutions, folks who use places like Olin or Berkeley as barometers for "normal" are wildly out of touch with 90+% of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the USA.

Students at places like Olin or Berkeley are already the cream of the cream of the crop. At Olin or Berkeley you have a handful of good student-educators every year. At normal places the acceptance rate is closer to Olin's reject rate, and the applicant pool is way lower quality. At normal places an above average Olin kid comes around once a decade or less, and the annual cream of the crop at Olin or Berkeley simply never pass through.

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