7 ms·

What's Wrong With the American University System

55 points by frossie 16y ago

anigbrowl 16y ago
Upvoted just for being about someone called 'Andrew Hacker'. Also has worthy and relevant subject matter...
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  There's also some interesting supplementary material on the website for the book. http://highereducationquestionmark.com/ http://highereducationquestionmark.com/
telemachos 16y ago
A good readable-sized overview of the book by the authors themselves from the Chronicle of Higher education: http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges-Worth-the-Price/66234/ http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges-Worth-the-Price/66...
hugh3 16y ago
Complaining that professors spend too much time doing research and not enough time teaching is like complaining that basketballers spend too much time playing basketball and not enough time making advertisements for shoes. Research is what professors want to be doing (at least in the sciences -- I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities). Teaching is what they're obliged to do. If you want to get some of the smartest people in the world and pay them a barely-six-figure salary to teach the same damn introductory-level BS to spotty-faced teens every damn year, you'd better be offering some damn good perks, and the number one perk is to be allowed to spend most of your time researching whatever you're interested in. If you want to be taught by professors who aren't at the top of their fields, you can go to a community college, but your questions will be rubbing up against the edge of their knowledge pretty damn quick.
- telemachos 16y ago
  You're presenting a false dichotomy, and nobody with who thinks of students as "spotty-faced teens" should be allowed within miles of a college faculty position. Andrew Hacker himself (one of the co-authors of the book under discussion) is a good counter-example. He was a longtime professor at a public college (Queens College). (Full disclosure: I was a student at QC from 1986-1992. I never took a full class with Professor Hacker, but I heard him lecture a few times.) His classes always filled up quickly despite their reputation as challenging, he won numerous teaching awards and he was near-universally regarded as an inspiring lecturer. Nevertheless, he was also a respected scholar who regularly published articles and books that nobody in his field could ignore. It doesn't have to be either/or.
  - culled 16y ago
    Another example would be Richard Feynman who was apparently a great teacher. He turned down an opportunity to work at the IAS because it didn't include teaching. He also won a Nobel Prize so he wasn't too bad as a researcher either.
  - plorkyeran 16y ago
    Great. Now find enough people like him to teach every single class. Obviously brilliant researchers who happen to also love to teach (and are good at it) are the ideal professors that every university should want, but merely wanting people good at all parts of being a professor does not make them exist in large quantities.
    - ippisl 16y ago
      With today's technology there are enough technologies to scale a great teacher. youtube(especially with it's minute by minute engagment measurement), stackoverflow (for questions and answers), and others. And you can see this happening, slowly.
- thomasz 16y ago
  > I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities Huh? Do you have any first hand insight?
Dilpil 16y ago
The engineering courses I've taken have actually been pretty crucial at my current gig. If I had majored in liberal arts, I'm not sure where I would learn them.
- wmf 16y ago
  Their argument seems to be that you should get a four-year liberal arts degree and then an engineering degree in addition. Sounds great as long as you're not paying for it.
  - starkfist 16y ago
    I went to one of the small liberal arts schools the authors of the book favor. Many of them have a 3-2 arrangement with an engineering school. You take the more general science and math courses at the liberal arts school, then 2 years of engineering classes at the engineering school.
- blahblahblah 16y ago
  The suggestion that students should major in liberal arts instead of engineering made me literally laugh out loud. An engineering degree is the best value to be had in American post-secondary education. Not only do you come out of school with real marketable skills that employers actually want, the solid foundation in general purpose problem solving is damn good preparation for life, wherever it may lead you. The philosophy of the ancient Greeks may be the historical basis for Western thought, but in no way does that mean that it is a more worthy subject of study than, for example, an in-depth examination of the factors that led to the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal or the role that the Haber process played in WWI & WWII. Whenever there's an economic downturn, there are inevitably sob stories printed in virtually every major newspaper about how it's difficult for fresh college graduates to get a job and these human interest stories invariably include an anecdote or two about some specific young person just out of college living at home while desperately trying to find a job and having no luck because the jobs just aren't there. How many times have you read this type of story in the newspaper where the sob story is about a kid who majored in chemical engineering or EE or metallurgy? I've yet to see such an article and I anticipate that if I were to see such an article it would be lamenting that the kid couldn't find a job in their specific major, not that they couldn't find gainful employment somewhere doing something. If you're an employer hiring for the kind of jobs for which a liberal arts degree is sufficient preparation, you'd be a fool to turn down an engineering grad if you were lucky enough to have one who was actually interested in working for you. Your requirements for the candidate are: smart and gets things done. If they can survive the rigors of an engineering school, there's little doubt that they can do the job. On the other hand, if you're a technical employer getting resumes from fresh liberal arts graduates, you're probably going to toss them straight into the trash bin.
Lewisham 16y ago
Honestly, these authors sound pretty nuts. Take engineering only after liberal arts because "young people today are going to live to be 90"? Really? So we're all going to work until we're 75 and hope that modern medicine is able to wind back the clock of youth and add useful working years, rather than just prevent our aged bodies actually dying? Who's going to pay for 25 straight years of education? Even after throwing away the obviously mental comments, it's bothersome that they've framed the problem of universities doing public research as: a) Wrong - Who else is going to do it? Industry? b) American only - I've been at universities in the UK, US and New Zealand, and it's all the same. It's not wrong for good scientists to do research, it's reality. Not only that, but America actually has a system that supports teaching colleges: the state and community colleges are almost entirely geared towards teaching. That doesn't exist in the UK and New Zealand, and I'd hazard other places as well. Universities have always been research-oriented, even Plato's Academy was: "In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others." [1] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy EDIT: Because this interview is just filled with little morsels of insanity, I couldn't resist another good one: "It's a third-tier university, but the faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously." Read: the faculty are resigned to the fact they're not going to get hired by anyone else because they didn't make the grade, so they're just going to teach rather than bother getting their papers rejected.
- gwern 16y ago
  > Universities have always been research-oriented, even Plato's Academy was: "In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others." [1] I say this sadly, but Wikipedia's philosophy articles aren't always too great. That Plato's Academy was not pushing its own doctrine is a disputed topic; Aristotle (who would know) says that the Academy promulgated a Pythagoreanism as its esoteric doctrine, and that Plato's dialogues are only exoteric exercises and preliminary to a real understanding is a very old view (you may have seen the recent coverage of possible numerical structure to his dialogues).
adamdecaf 16y ago
> They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts. Then go to a school that focuses on teaching (mine does). > And they'd like to see graduates worrying less about their careers, even if it means spending a year behind the cash register at Old Navy. That's not an issue with the schools, it's an issue with society. People expect a high paying job right out of school, they expect a fancy house and nice things. Sadly, it doesn't happen like that.
aliston 16y ago
I disagree with pretty much every position in this article as a matter of opinion. However, I disagree with this part as a matter of fact: "Yet if you look at all those powerhouse [college football] programs across the country, only seven or eight actually rake in money." I've now heard this point made by several individuals and it's simply not true. Purely in terms of revenues versus costs, the majority of division 1A programs in the country make money. For 76 of the 120 div 1A programs, revenues exceeded costs as reported to the government in 2008. In many cases (20+), the profits are significant -- 10's of millions of dollars. Football programs make it possible for other non-revenue generating sports to exist. The raw data can be found here: http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/ http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/ Also, I can anecdotally say that having gone to a school with a decent football team, it has kept me in touch with a number of my friends, provided a rallying point for alumni, and will play a role in my future giving to my alma mater. Edit: For clarification...
- gwern 16y ago
  His numbers are pretty specific, making me think he is drawing on specific studies which naturally he doesn't cite in a short interview. (Likely the citations are in the book... which doesn't help us.) But I'm not very satisfied by those statistics. I looked up one school, Stony Brook University (in NCAA Division I-AA, whatever that is), and looked at its expenses: http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e697469643d31393630393726796561723d32303038267264743d372f33302f3230313020343a32323a343920414d http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e6974696... I see listed salaries, recruiting costs, financial aid costs, and operating costs, which yields a net profit of ~$700,000. I don't see any entries for the $22,000,000 stadium the football team uses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_P._LaValle_Stadium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_P._LaValle_Stadium), nor operating costs for the stadium. 22m wipes out an awful lot of 700k years. And that's the first off-the-books cost that occurs to me, a college sports ignoramus, to look for. So now I know that those statistics are at least incomplete for the purposes of examining the overall picture; but can I even trust the statistics provided? I suspect that further investigation would reveal many more expenses and costs, and few revenues.
wooster 16y ago
Meanwhile, it's possible to go to a liberal arts college which has a teaching focus and offers engineering and/or science degrees. For example: Pomona College or Harvey Mudd College (I went to Pomona).
- elblanco 16y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, Mudd has a very well regarded engineering school as well.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
jgg 16y ago
In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? Besides, young people today are going to live to be 90. There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do. If students did this, then they would find a passion and become highly motivated. They would then enter a university, where they find that they have to shell out a large sum of money every year. This goes towards ensuring that they're able to live in small, inadequate rooms with loud, obnoxious people with whom they sit in boring, superficial lectures and take tests that assess one's ability to learn by rote. All of this, just so they can earn a piece of paper that says they are allowed to work in a field they liked enough to learn about on their own.
- anamax 16y ago
  > In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. Huh? "They" are ready for you as soon as you're ready for them.
  - dhume 16y ago
    Aye, Hacker seems to miss that the years they want you to have behind you are years spent working in that field, not simply years alive.
jdhopeunique 16y ago
The biggest problem I find is that universities avoid free market forces by bundling everything together. Tenure is only one part of this. Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money). Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors. Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following: $600 for a course taught by a tenured professor $300 an instructor $150 by a teaching assistant $50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system. Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive. Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own. The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice. The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age. Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.
rdl 16y ago
I disagree with his anti-engineering and anti-research points. Attacking pseudo-technical degrees like undergraduate business, sure. Attacking humanities research, sure. When I was at MIT, the best professors in lecture were actually top researchers (to the point of winning the Nobel). The best actual experiences I had were participating in faculty research (as an undergrad, you can actually contribute fairly meaningfully outside the core focus of the research; a CS/Math student can help out with data acquisition in a substantive way in Physics). Plus, undergraduate organizations like SIPB (which has developed KSplice, and which worked on many other interesting projects before) I don't think most of this would happen at a small liberal arts college. High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a high school or college educator).
- wisty 16y ago
  Correlation is not causation. OK, it's good to have a lecturer with real-world expertise in the subject they are teaching. And research does count. You want a lecturer with the skills needed to publish, but the push towards more research can just result in lecturers spending more time gaming research metrics, which has little impact on teaching quality.
- yardie 16y ago
  High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a high school or college educator). In general, this is a bad idea. It's like saying colleges should only teach for jobs that exist and not for what could be. No one is hiring buggy whip engineers and no one is teaching people to be computers (ie. the human kind in the 40s and 50s). The whole point of a university is to do advanced research and break off a little knowledge on the incoming students. Also, there is no one true degree or one true job. Engineers ,and everyone else, are at the mercy of the market. You can't get paid if no one is buying your stuff. This applies to the CEO as well as the janitor. Ask aerospace engineers how they felt at the end of the coldwar. There used to be a joke about aerospace engineers being able to only get jobs that involved burgers. Now, Boeing can't hire enough, but that's it. The only place that hire those type of engineers, in quantity, are NASA and Boeing.
starkfist 16y ago
I found this article interesting, and agree with many of his points, but I disagree with the premise, that there is anything wrong with the american university system. There are so many options and so much variety in higher education that you can get almost any college experience you want in America. And if you think it's all too expensive or nothing is really up your alley, you don't have to go at all. If anything needs to be fixed it is high school, but that's so broken I wouldn't even know where to begin.
dman 16y ago
The University System is one of the things the US gets right in my opinion. Industry - Academia liasion works pretty well, a lot of research is productized and sees the light of the day and overall the university system appears to generate substantial competitive advantage for the country. admittedly biased CS viewpoint
blahedo 16y ago
I'm a little surprised to see the negative reaction to this article. I've asked many people the question "do great researchers make the best teachers?", and the answers form a strong dichotomy: undergrads and people who completed their college education at the bachelor's level universally 100% respond "no." People who went to grad school, and especially those who continued on to be professors, mostly either answer "yes" or waffle, with only a very small number answering "no." If the purpose of the college/university system is to conduct research, that would be one thing, but there is at least a wide belief that the purpose of the university is to educate; and my read of the original article, with which I largely agree, is that Hacker wants to raise awareness that our "higher education" system is not well-geared toward actual undergraduate education. At most highly-ranked universities, teaching ability and interest are fairly actively selected against: the retention decision is made almost entirely based on research, and while they would love the professors to be good teachers too, they can't evaluate that and have no incentives to promote it (and PhD students aren't taught anything about it anyway), so it is purely by luck that they manage to retain good teachers. I guess I'd like to hear from the commenters who disagree with the article about what made their researcher-professors better teachers, particularly at the lower levels where the only things that might be cutting-edge are the teaching techniques. (I'm not that interested in hearing about the professors bringing you in on their research, which is valuable but necessarily not available to every undergraduate student.) Disclaimer: I am a college professor, I value (and am good at) teaching, and was denied tenure (at a liberal arts college, even) apparently because my publications were in CS education rather than in something more "researchy". Even the liberal arts colleges are not immune to the movement placing research above teaching as retention criterion for their teachers.
seis6 16y ago
When you get tenure, you should be free to live. Nothing is so inspiring as a free mind.

55 points by frossie 16y ago

anigbrowl 16y ago

Upvoted just for being about someone called 'Andrew Hacker'. Also has worthy and relevant subject matter...

anigbrowl 16y ago
There's also some interesting supplementary material on the website for the book. http://highereducationquestionmark.com/ http://highereducationquestionmark.com/

telemachos 16y ago

A good readable-sized overview of the book by the authors themselves from the Chronicle of Higher education: http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges-Worth-the-Price/66234/ http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges-Worth-the-Price/66...

hugh3 16y ago

Complaining that professors spend too much time doing research and not enough time teaching is like complaining that basketballers spend too much time playing basketball and not enough time making advertisements for shoes. Research is what professors want to be doing (at least in the sciences -- I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities). Teaching is what they're obliged to do. If you want to get some of the smartest people in the world and pay them a barely-six-figure salary to teach the same damn introductory-level BS to spotty-faced teens every damn year, you'd better be offering some damn good perks, and the number one perk is to be allowed to spend most of your time researching whatever you're interested in. If you want to be taught by professors who aren't at the top of their fields, you can go to a community college, but your questions will be rubbing up against the edge of their knowledge pretty damn quick.

telemachos 16y ago
You're presenting a false dichotomy, and nobody with who thinks of students as "spotty-faced teens" should be allowed within miles of a college faculty position. Andrew Hacker himself (one of the co-authors of the book under discussion) is a good counter-example. He was a longtime professor at a public college (Queens College). (Full disclosure: I was a student at QC from 1986-1992. I never took a full class with Professor Hacker, but I heard him lecture a few times.) His classes always filled up quickly despite their reputation as challenging, he won numerous teaching awards and he was near-universally regarded as an inspiring lecturer. Nevertheless, he was also a respected scholar who regularly published articles and books that nobody in his field could ignore. It doesn't have to be either/or.
- culled 16y ago
  Another example would be Richard Feynman who was apparently a great teacher. He turned down an opportunity to work at the IAS because it didn't include teaching. He also won a Nobel Prize so he wasn't too bad as a researcher either.
- plorkyeran 16y ago
  Great. Now find enough people like him to teach every single class. Obviously brilliant researchers who happen to also love to teach (and are good at it) are the ideal professors that every university should want, but merely wanting people good at all parts of being a professor does not make them exist in large quantities.
  - ippisl 16y ago
    With today's technology there are enough technologies to scale a great teacher. youtube(especially with it's minute by minute engagment measurement), stackoverflow (for questions and answers), and others. And you can see this happening, slowly.
thomasz 16y ago
> I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities Huh? Do you have any first hand insight?

Dilpil 16y ago

The engineering courses I've taken have actually been pretty crucial at my current gig. If I had majored in liberal arts, I'm not sure where I would learn them.

wmf 16y ago
Their argument seems to be that you should get a four-year liberal arts degree and then an engineering degree in addition. Sounds great as long as you're not paying for it.
- starkfist 16y ago
  I went to one of the small liberal arts schools the authors of the book favor. Many of them have a 3-2 arrangement with an engineering school. You take the more general science and math courses at the liberal arts school, then 2 years of engineering classes at the engineering school.
blahblahblah 16y ago
The suggestion that students should major in liberal arts instead of engineering made me literally laugh out loud. An engineering degree is the best value to be had in American post-secondary education. Not only do you come out of school with real marketable skills that employers actually want, the solid foundation in general purpose problem solving is damn good preparation for life, wherever it may lead you. The philosophy of the ancient Greeks may be the historical basis for Western thought, but in no way does that mean that it is a more worthy subject of study than, for example, an in-depth examination of the factors that led to the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal or the role that the Haber process played in WWI & WWII. Whenever there's an economic downturn, there are inevitably sob stories printed in virtually every major newspaper about how it's difficult for fresh college graduates to get a job and these human interest stories invariably include an anecdote or two about some specific young person just out of college living at home while desperately trying to find a job and having no luck because the jobs just aren't there. How many times have you read this type of story in the newspaper where the sob story is about a kid who majored in chemical engineering or EE or metallurgy? I've yet to see such an article and I anticipate that if I were to see such an article it would be lamenting that the kid couldn't find a job in their specific major, not that they couldn't find gainful employment somewhere doing something. If you're an employer hiring for the kind of jobs for which a liberal arts degree is sufficient preparation, you'd be a fool to turn down an engineering grad if you were lucky enough to have one who was actually interested in working for you. Your requirements for the candidate are: smart and gets things done. If they can survive the rigors of an engineering school, there's little doubt that they can do the job. On the other hand, if you're a technical employer getting resumes from fresh liberal arts graduates, you're probably going to toss them straight into the trash bin.

Lewisham 16y ago

Honestly, these authors sound pretty nuts. Take engineering only after liberal arts because "young people today are going to live to be 90"? Really? So we're all going to work until we're 75 and hope that modern medicine is able to wind back the clock of youth and add useful working years, rather than just prevent our aged bodies actually dying? Who's going to pay for 25 straight years of education? Even after throwing away the obviously mental comments, it's bothersome that they've framed the problem of universities doing public research as: a) Wrong - Who else is going to do it? Industry? b) American only - I've been at universities in the UK, US and New Zealand, and it's all the same. It's not wrong for good scientists to do research, it's reality. Not only that, but America actually has a system that supports teaching colleges: the state and community colleges are almost entirely geared towards teaching. That doesn't exist in the UK and New Zealand, and I'd hazard other places as well. Universities have always been research-oriented, even Plato's Academy was: "In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others." [1] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy EDIT: Because this interview is just filled with little morsels of insanity, I couldn't resist another good one: "It's a third-tier university, but the faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously." Read: the faculty are resigned to the fact they're not going to get hired by anyone else because they didn't make the grade, so they're just going to teach rather than bother getting their papers rejected.

gwern 16y ago
> Universities have always been research-oriented, even Plato's Academy was: "In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others." [1] I say this sadly, but Wikipedia's philosophy articles aren't always too great. That Plato's Academy was not pushing its own doctrine is a disputed topic; Aristotle (who would know) says that the Academy promulgated a Pythagoreanism as its esoteric doctrine, and that Plato's dialogues are only exoteric exercises and preliminary to a real understanding is a very old view (you may have seen the recent coverage of possible numerical structure to his dialogues).

adamdecaf 16y ago

> They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts. Then go to a school that focuses on teaching (mine does). > And they'd like to see graduates worrying less about their careers, even if it means spending a year behind the cash register at Old Navy. That's not an issue with the schools, it's an issue with society. People expect a high paying job right out of school, they expect a fancy house and nice things. Sadly, it doesn't happen like that.

aliston 16y ago

I disagree with pretty much every position in this article as a matter of opinion. However, I disagree with this part as a matter of fact: "Yet if you look at all those powerhouse [college football] programs across the country, only seven or eight actually rake in money." I've now heard this point made by several individuals and it's simply not true. Purely in terms of revenues versus costs, the majority of division 1A programs in the country make money. For 76 of the 120 div 1A programs, revenues exceeded costs as reported to the government in 2008. In many cases (20+), the profits are significant -- 10's of millions of dollars. Football programs make it possible for other non-revenue generating sports to exist. The raw data can be found here: http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/ http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/ Also, I can anecdotally say that having gone to a school with a decent football team, it has kept me in touch with a number of my friends, provided a rallying point for alumni, and will play a role in my future giving to my alma mater. Edit: For clarification...

gwern 16y ago
His numbers are pretty specific, making me think he is drawing on specific studies which naturally he doesn't cite in a short interview. (Likely the citations are in the book... which doesn't help us.) But I'm not very satisfied by those statistics. I looked up one school, Stony Brook University (in NCAA Division I-AA, whatever that is), and looked at its expenses: http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e697469643d31393630393726796561723d32303038267264743d372f33302f3230313020343a32323a343920414d http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e6974696... I see listed salaries, recruiting costs, financial aid costs, and operating costs, which yields a net profit of ~$700,000. I don't see any entries for the $22,000,000 stadium the football team uses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_P._LaValle_Stadium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_P._LaValle_Stadium), nor operating costs for the stadium. 22m wipes out an awful lot of 700k years. And that's the first off-the-books cost that occurs to me, a college sports ignoramus, to look for. So now I know that those statistics are at least incomplete for the purposes of examining the overall picture; but can I even trust the statistics provided? I suspect that further investigation would reveal many more expenses and costs, and few revenues.

wooster 16y ago

Meanwhile, it's possible to go to a liberal arts college which has a teaching focus and offers engineering and/or science degrees. For example: Pomona College or Harvey Mudd College (I went to Pomona).

elblanco 16y ago
If I'm not mistaken, Mudd has a very well regarded engineering school as well.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

jgg 16y ago

In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? Besides, young people today are going to live to be 90. There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do. If students did this, then they would find a passion and become highly motivated. They would then enter a university, where they find that they have to shell out a large sum of money every year. This goes towards ensuring that they're able to live in small, inadequate rooms with loud, obnoxious people with whom they sit in boring, superficial lectures and take tests that assess one's ability to learn by rote. All of this, just so they can earn a piece of paper that says they are allowed to work in a field they liked enough to learn about on their own.

anamax 16y ago
> In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. Huh? "They" are ready for you as soon as you're ready for them.
- dhume 16y ago
  Aye, Hacker seems to miss that the years they want you to have behind you are years spent working in that field, not simply years alive.

jdhopeunique 16y ago

The biggest problem I find is that universities avoid free market forces by bundling everything together. Tenure is only one part of this. Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money). Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors. Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following: $600 for a course taught by a tenured professor $300 an instructor $150 by a teaching assistant $50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system. Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive. Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own. The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice. The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age. Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.

rdl 16y ago

I disagree with his anti-engineering and anti-research points. Attacking pseudo-technical degrees like undergraduate business, sure. Attacking humanities research, sure. When I was at MIT, the best professors in lecture were actually top researchers (to the point of winning the Nobel). The best actual experiences I had were participating in faculty research (as an undergrad, you can actually contribute fairly meaningfully outside the core focus of the research; a CS/Math student can help out with data acquisition in a substantive way in Physics). Plus, undergraduate organizations like SIPB (which has developed KSplice, and which worked on many other interesting projects before) I don't think most of this would happen at a small liberal arts college. High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a high school or college educator).

wisty 16y ago
Correlation is not causation. OK, it's good to have a lecturer with real-world expertise in the subject they are teaching. And research does count. You want a lecturer with the skills needed to publish, but the push towards more research can just result in lecturers spending more time gaming research metrics, which has little impact on teaching quality.
yardie 16y ago
High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a high school or college educator). In general, this is a bad idea. It's like saying colleges should only teach for jobs that exist and not for what could be. No one is hiring buggy whip engineers and no one is teaching people to be computers (ie. the human kind in the 40s and 50s). The whole point of a university is to do advanced research and break off a little knowledge on the incoming students. Also, there is no one true degree or one true job. Engineers ,and everyone else, are at the mercy of the market. You can't get paid if no one is buying your stuff. This applies to the CEO as well as the janitor. Ask aerospace engineers how they felt at the end of the coldwar. There used to be a joke about aerospace engineers being able to only get jobs that involved burgers. Now, Boeing can't hire enough, but that's it. The only place that hire those type of engineers, in quantity, are NASA and Boeing.

starkfist 16y ago

I found this article interesting, and agree with many of his points, but I disagree with the premise, that there is anything wrong with the american university system. There are so many options and so much variety in higher education that you can get almost any college experience you want in America. And if you think it's all too expensive or nothing is really up your alley, you don't have to go at all. If anything needs to be fixed it is high school, but that's so broken I wouldn't even know where to begin.

dman 16y ago

The University System is one of the things the US gets right in my opinion. Industry - Academia liasion works pretty well, a lot of research is productized and sees the light of the day and overall the university system appears to generate substantial competitive advantage for the country. admittedly biased CS viewpoint

blahedo 16y ago

I'm a little surprised to see the negative reaction to this article. I've asked many people the question "do great researchers make the best teachers?", and the answers form a strong dichotomy: undergrads and people who completed their college education at the bachelor's level universally 100% respond "no." People who went to grad school, and especially those who continued on to be professors, mostly either answer "yes" or waffle, with only a very small number answering "no." If the purpose of the college/university system is to conduct research, that would be one thing, but there is at least a wide belief that the purpose of the university is to educate; and my read of the original article, with which I largely agree, is that Hacker wants to raise awareness that our "higher education" system is not well-geared toward actual undergraduate education. At most highly-ranked universities, teaching ability and interest are fairly actively selected against: the retention decision is made almost entirely based on research, and while they would love the professors to be good teachers too, they can't evaluate that and have no incentives to promote it (and PhD students aren't taught anything about it anyway), so it is purely by luck that they manage to retain good teachers. I guess I'd like to hear from the commenters who disagree with the article about what made their researcher-professors better teachers, particularly at the lower levels where the only things that might be cutting-edge are the teaching techniques. (I'm not that interested in hearing about the professors bringing you in on their research, which is valuable but necessarily not available to every undergraduate student.) Disclaimer: I am a college professor, I value (and am good at) teaching, and was denied tenure (at a liberal arts college, even) apparently because my publications were in CS education rather than in something more "researchy". Even the liberal arts colleges are not immune to the movement placing research above teaching as retention criterion for their teachers.

seis6 16y ago

When you get tenure, you should be free to live. Nothing is so inspiring as a free mind.