Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

mathattack

I wonder if this death of criticism is misty eyed nastolgia for a future that either never, or rarely existed.

Let's not forget that our so-called great universities:

- For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities.

- Were the providence of only the technocratic elite.

- Did very little research before the 20th century.

And now that the costs escalate out of control, is it any wonder that they have to go more commercial?

Some back of the envelope math: If every student takes 10 classes a year (5 per semester) and every professor teaches 5 classes per year to 20 students each, and gets paid 100K all-in, then the per-student faculty labor cost is 100K10/(205) = 10K per year. That's not too bad for critical learning. Expand the classes to 40 and you can cut the cost in half, or give the faculty a big raise.

View on HN

I wonder if this death of criticism is misty eyed nastolgia for a future that either never, or rarely existed.

Not entirely. Take a look at Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (http://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-lo...). Universities grew enormously from 1945 – 1975. During that time, too, a disproportionately large number of students majored in English in particular, as well as other humanities disciplines. During that 30-year period, universities expanded and especially grad programs expanded—by 900%.

Most of those grad programs are still pumping out PhDs, even though the market for PhDs is weak. ABDs are a huge economic win for universities. So we have a situation in which supply has far outpaced demand for decades.

At the same time, I'd argue that there's a huge amount of bogosity in humanities departments, and that bogosity has mostly gone unaddressed (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-d...).

Shouldn't the overproduction of Phds drive down university costs?

I hear you on the bogosity factor. I wonder why this persists. Perhaps because by the time someone realizes it's all BS, their career it too invested in exposing it?

It's driven down teaching costs, but other costs have increased at a much greater rate.

Shouldn't the overproduction of Phds drive down university costs?

Most cost increases appear to come from technology, ancillary services (gyms are popular punching bags in this regard) and administrative staff (everything from diversity deans to grant writers).

I hear you on the bogosity factor. I wonder why this persists. Perhaps because by the time someone realizes it's all BS, their career it too invested in exposing it?

I think this is precisely the issue: the system selects for people who become very, very invested in the system.

Another important change involves the elimination of mandatory retirement: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/silver_lining/2011/04/ple.... Until the early 1990s, tenure care with an expiration date around age 65. Someone who got tenure would be on the books for 25 – 35 years. Today tenure doesn't have an expiration date—someone can be on the books for 50 years or longer. That makes tenure much more onerous.

I'd like to see universities shift from a tenure-based system to a long-term-contract-based system. This has downsides but its downsides seem better than the current tenure-based downsides.

In theory technology costs should drive others down, no? But that's more true in the corporate world than non-profit or government which the universities resemble.

I agree on tenure costs. It seems like they're really bloating the system in the name of academic freedom. I get it at the large research universities where the professors bring in lots of research money, but is it really worth it elsewhere? People say it's a bulwark against poor administrators making short term decisions, but that's what the rest of the world has to deal with too.

Perhaps just timeboxing the tenure part would work. "The department has X tenured slots. After 65, you can stay on as an untenured professor emeritus at a lower salary."

You're assuming that teaching ability scales without scaling the workforce. Having an instructor provide for more students means each student gets less instructor-time. More instructor-time increases the learning ability of most students. And so class size is an important metric.

For most universities, their biggest product is their own marketing and promotional material. Now that they are corporatizing, they are painting hindsight with rose-colored glasses, as "Brave New 1984" as most corporations are wont to do.

I'm thinking that 'instructor-time' is a myth. A class of 20, say 3 lectures of an hour a week - that's just 9 minutes per student if they spent ALL the time interacting. But they don't; more like a minute per student tops.

No, instructor-time is moot. Maybe instructor training is important; maybe a quality syllabus helps; a good book is key. But the instructor/lecturer can lecture 10 or 100 equally well.

> But the instructor/lecturer can lecture 10 or 100 equally well.

Depends on the class. I once had a colleague say that he'd teach the intro class to 5000 students in the basketball arena. For that class, at that university, it would probably work.

I'm teaching a senior-level econometrics class to 10 students right now. Everyone has a laptop in front of them, typing into RStudio throughout the class. I help students when they can't get things to run properly. We have plenty of other interaction. They each do unique homework sets and their own project. There's no way that class would work with 100 students, or for that matter, more than 15 students.

I thought roughly the same thing until this semester, my fourth in university. I took my first class with under 10 people, a combinatorics class, with an outstanding teacher. The class was demanding, and it is the first time I have attended office hours on a weekly bases. I learned more than I ever have in any single class in my academic career, and I can directly contribute that to the amount of interaction I had with my professor. Now, had he been less adept at explaining concepts, perhaps it wouldn't have made a difference. But having easy access to him directly impacted the amount I learned.

You're leaving out most of what the instructor does:

  -Prepare lessons 
  -Answer student questions (during and) after class
  -Grade homework
  -Prepare, proctor, and grade examinations

And instructors rarely spend their entire instructional period interacting with students; usually, they have a lecture they deliver for the majority, and a small time at the end for questions - about the material, class errata, unrelated questions, or even just to bask in the glow of someone with expertise in the field.

I'd estimate that 1/4 to 1/2 of students will stay after for question time, or show up to office hours. Those few minutes are wildly different for a class of 10 vs a class of 100.

If you have a 50-minute class, and you choose to have a 45-minute lecture and 5 minutes of question time, you can spend 1 minute each with the 1/2 of your 10 students. With a class of 100, you can have a crowd of 50 where maybe 10% of them can get your attention.

Additionally, many lecturers have office hours - time specifically allotted to meet with students. If you kept 2 hours a week, you could give an additional 12 minutes to each of your 10 students a week. With a class of 100, you can hope that only 1/4 of your students show up.

Furthermore, in a lecture of 10, it's very easy to ask an incidental question and go onto a short educational tangent. In classes exceeding 25, it's very difficult to retain control of such a large body of people, and so the instructors work very hard to ignore such tangents and keep everyone on track.

Not to mention the order of magnitude difference in grading 100 assignments vs grading 10.

I'm less-convinced that instructor-time is a myth. But maybe I'm biased by experience.

It depends on the instructor and the way the university is set up. I had classes as an undergrad which the professor had literally been teaching for decades - these guys hadn't spent time on a lesson plan since before the Beatles broke up. And they had grad students to grade papers and tests, plus teaching assistants the students were expected to see first before bothering the professor.

The test questions were just mixtures of questions from previous years.

So three hours of class, plus two (mandated) office hours. I'm assuming there was some time spent coordinating the grad students, but still... that doesn't seem like much work.

You had one professor who had a system worked out. How did the rest of your professors handle their workload? I too had a few professors that had it all figured out, a lot that were hard-working professionals, and a few that struggled to be on time to class.

Much like anywhere in life.

Not one professor. Most of them for the first two years. The exceptions were younger guys who hadn't taught the class before, and there weren't many.

Indeed, as the author lamented about how much the deck is stacked against the humanities, I found myself wondering: are there actually fewer students today studying the humanities than at some point in the past?

Is the number of people with degrees in medieval literature actually decreasing, or just not increasing as much as the number of engineers?

Seems more likely that there are just a lot more students who can attend university now, and the sustainable way for this to happen is for most of them to be encouraged to go into particularly employable fields. This would fit with the observation that there's currently a huge oversupply of humanities Ph.D.'s with no academic positions waiting for them.

Flaws (lack of inclusiveness) don't mean it was no good. Unless you believe exclusiveness was core to the value proposition of a University, we can strive to make it inclusive without destroying the positive aspects.

We can still be nostalgic for the loss of things that weren't yet perfect.

Let's also not forget that what was so amazing about post-war education is that it went exactly opposite to the points you stated: it became subsidised, democratized, inclusive to lower socioeconomic classes in general and to minorities and women, and started to do more genuine research.

There's little misty-eyed nostalgia for 18th century universities, there is for the 1970s.

The issue for me isn't that 10k tuition fees is so bad (once you add non-teaching staff, or teaching-supporting staff, rent for facilities, administration, equipment, licensing access to libraries etc it'll be at least 15k). It's the fact that studying is supposed to be a full-time occupation. We don't ask of 12 year olds to work a 40 hour week, but we do of 20 year olds despite the fact they have as many classes but a higher study load outside of class.

Now if we consider that studying ought to be a full-time occupation, there's obviously an opportunity cost to studying or lack thereof. It's not just having to pay 15k per year for tuition, it's also forgoing the opportunity to work a job and make money to pay every expense a non-studying adult human normally needs to pay, rent, food, insurance etc. Another $15k per year is on the low-end.

So you end up with 30k over 4 years, at an average of 5% interest rates you easily graduate with 150k debt.

This is unworkable. So we require of students to work extra jobs next to their studies, knowing juggling a 70h work week for years on end while still living under crappy circumstances negatively affects studies, health etc. We require students to choose jobs that are most financially rewarding (knowing all too well that pursuing remuneration over everything else leads not to happiness, and that at the higher end the correlation between salary and benefit to society is weak). We see students accessing higher education with funds from family, something reserved for the (upper) middle class, and even for these kids it's very normal to have to not view studying as a full-time occupation despite being enrolled in a full-time program, and even so average debt in many countries sits around 30-50k.

Meanwhile, a country like Germany is offering free tuition, without having invented a magic money machine.

Yes, the message is a bit ironic, coming from a country promulgating persistent class hierarchy. Just keep giving us a cut of an endowment and 16th century trust, and let the peasants get back to tilling the fields.

The "commoners" of today want to learn engineering and practical things so they can improve their standard of living, which is unfortunate for the overall percentage of educators in social sciences.

>- For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities.

And now, instead, they exclude Asians. Progress!

nastolgia

brilliant wordplay! nostalgia for a worst, nastier time: nastolgia, i love it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com