10 ms·

Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

109 points by cwan 16y ago

alexandros 16y ago
"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members." A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever. EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?
- scott_s 16y ago
  I noticed that too, and I wondered if they were even capable of making that judgement. I looked up their backgrounds: the review writer is an English professor at Emory; one of the book authors is a Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Queens College in NY. This continues the tendency I've seen elsewhere, which is to lump science and engineering education and research in with humanities when criticizing higher education.
  - gaius 16y ago
    Yes, but only humanities types do that, quite deliberately in the hope that the hard subjects will reciprocate when defending them.
- zeynel1 16y ago
  just a glance is enough at this table of contents of academic journal - classical and quantum gravity- http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 to wonder how much of this -research- is advancing knowledge and how much is --about advancing the career of the authors--
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    It's a very good question, and hardly a trivial one. Quite a lot of science is nearly worthless, and only published to pad the author's cv. A couple of blog posts on the topic: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/24/all_those_worthless_papers.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/24/all_those_wo... http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/25/what_to_do_with_the_notquiteworthless.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/25/what_to_do_w...
    - api 16y ago
      Lasers were thought to be a laboratory curiosity when they were invented. On the other hand, you have a ton of academics who are convinced that the "semantic web" is the next big thing. Part of the problem with science is that it's an activity where it's very hard to have any useful metric. Even experts in the field have a tough time deciding whether a given research direction is going to be fruitful. They're often wrong. So far the best thing we've figured out for science resembles the Underpants Gnomes' business plan: 1) Fund lots of science. 2) ???? 3) Profit! The ???? part is "pray that some of it is useful and that some of that gets into the hands of people who will use it."
      - gwern 16y ago
        1) Fund lots of science. Why do we need this? By every metric I know of, governments spend orders of magnitude more on science than they did in the 1800s. Are we getting orders more "Profit!"?
        WingForward 16y ago
        Could you clarify your metrics and sources?
        gwern 16y ago
        http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf tells me that non-commercial (government or government-subsidized) R&D represents ~1% of GDP in 2006 for the US. I believe equivalent figures for the 1800s would be closer to 0% R&D inasmuch as there were no Departments of Energy, Health & Human Services, etc., but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Maybe the Gilded Age governments in the US actually spent 2% of GDP on R&D.
- philk 16y ago
  It's a fair point, but he's probably focusing on the arts and soft sciences because those degrees are the most overpriced for the value they deliver. To put it another way, an MIT grad with an engineering degree is going to be much better off career-wise than a Harvard grad who majored in gender studies.
  - harry 16y ago
    The long term studies of technical degrees vs 'soft science' hasn't been looked at in depth on a national scale with relation to earnings and salary. These studies are just beginning. From AACRO: after 10 years the earning potential for an engineering degree drops below someone with an English degree. Technical degrees are way more valuable out of the gate while soft science take time to develop. To put it into other words: where an engineer can make 65k right after graduation an english major will start at 35k. The engineer's salary increases on par with inflation while the english major increases substantially over time and overtakes it on average at the 10 year point. The paraphrased quote from AACROs lobbyist: 'we're seeing through earnings study that technical degrees go stale over the career of an individual, this is shown when comparing the average english major vs the average electrical engineer' There's alot of background nuance (politics) there behind the study but the idea hasn't really been broached before in higher ed. It's really quite interesting to look at on a US scale, but that data hasn't been collected yet. Oh: I'm not contesting that some soft science degrees aren't total wastes of money. Just that there will always be a place for a gender studies Harvard grad. We just don't need 10,000 of them.
    - baddspellar 16y ago
      Do you have a link to back this claim up? I don't believe it. If you look at PayScale.com, for example, you'll see a ranking of undergrad majors, with starting and mid-career salaries, where mid-career is defined as "full-time employees with at least 10 years of experience in their career or field who hold a bachelor's degree and no higher degrees." ref: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp English Majors start at $37,800 and get to $67,500 after 10 years. Electrical Engineering Majors start at $60,800 and get to $104,000 after 10 years. AACRO has an incentive to overstate the benefits of non-technical college degrees, as these are the most common types of degrees, and these are the degrees that are leading more people to question the value of a college education.
- jbooth 16y ago
  It's the WSJ editorial page. Punching hippies is one of their 3 reasons for existence.
  - mapleoin 16y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. What are the other 2?
    - jbooth 16y ago
      Well, the number 3 was arbitrary, but let's say.. 2) Spending 8 years advocating "deficits don't matter", then changing their opinion 180 degrees within 24 hours of a new President being inaugurated. 3) Writing screeds castigating liberals for being coastal elitists and out of touch on an iPad from the back seat of the author's car service, while drinking a latte on the way to yoga class.
      - Aaronontheweb 16y ago
        Why are people voting up this idiot? Is it time for yet-another "this isn't reddit" admonishment?
        crystalis 16y ago
        Yes. This isn't reddit. Please provide some rationale for your namecalling, but preferably please just stay at home.
        jbooth 16y ago
        /me watches the comment thread change over time as those who are more motivated by tribal allegiances start to outweigh those who appreciate a fair joke
        Locke1689 16y ago
        I voted you all up because I thought this exchange was irrelevant but pretty humorous.
- joelmichael 16y ago
  A lot can be discerned in a glance.
- baddspellar 16y ago
  Some years ago, I saw a 60 minutes episode on issues in higher education. The reporter picked a biology journal off a shelf, read its arcane title, and exclaimed "who actually reads this stuff?" to back up her claim about how useless journals are... as if she were somehow qualified to judge the importance of a paper by its title. I couldn't help but imagining what she would have said if she picked up a paper titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" or "On formally undecidable propositions of. Principia Mathematica and related systems".
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Fortunately it's not up to her to decide. That said, it seems that some papers go out of their way to hide what the paper is really about by looking at the title.
    - sprout 16y ago
      Usually you just don't know. I got shamed in front of a prof once by saying that a given paper title was a good way to make people not want to come to your talk, and he responded by explaining why he thought it was an interesting talk. There are plenty of examples of things that might be meaningless to a graph-theory professor that are a core part of the language of a combinatorics specialist. And of course, undergrads and humanities majors best keep their mouths shut.
      - derefr 16y ago
        One of the things taught to undergrads in the humanities—specifically, in communications design—is that you should make the metadata of something interesting-seeming to a wider audience than the data it represents, so that it spreads further—that way, more of the people interested in the data will see it. As an example, one of my friends told me about a very interesting paper called, and I quote, "Three Monkeys something something." He didn't know what it was about, but he said it "sounded like something I'd be interested in." He was quite right—but if it hadn't been for the monkeys, he wouldn't had anything vivid about the paper to recall at all.
  - 16y ago
- pragmatic 16y ago
  See another article currently on the front page: Realtime Linux: academia v. reality http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ "I actually took the time to spend a day at a university where I could gain access to IEEE papers without wasting my private money. I picked out twenty recent realtime related papers and did a quick survey. Twelve of the papers were a rehash of well-known and well-researched topics, and at least half of them were badly written as well. From the remaining eight papers, six were micro improvements based on previous papers where I had a hard time figuring out why the papers had been written at all. One of those was merely describing the effects of converting a constant which influences resource partitioning into a runtime configurable variable. So that left two papers which seemed actually worthwhile to read in detail. Funny enough, I had already read one of those papers as it was publicly accessible in a slightly modified form. That survey really convinced me to stay away from IEEE forever and to consider the university ranking system even more suspicious."
  - api 16y ago
    That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc. 1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world. My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few hits and a long tail. All papers are not the Church-Turing thesis, and all startups are not Google or Apple. A lot of academia-bashing amounts to criticism of academia for having the same sorts of failings that are present in equal measure in all other societal institutions public or private. Things like: elitism, know-nothing overpaid leadership, poor quality control, loss of focus, abusive labor practices, perverse incentives, poor success ratios for new ventures, etc.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      Sturgeon's Law: Applicable Again! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law
    - 16y ago
zeynel1 16y ago
i found this review more informative than the recent post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559480 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559480 about the interview with the authors in the atlantic magazine what the authors are saying is true in general for any -bureaucracy- and education is the oldest and biggest existing bureaucracy even after it divided itself into secular and religious education in the 18th century any bureaucracy must -grow- continually to perpetuate itself - education does this by making education longer and longer
- wake_up_sticky 16y ago
  Actually, I think that the Catholic church is the oldest existing bureaucracy.
  - zeynel1 16y ago
    the same occurred to me as well thats why i qualified by saying that education divided itself into secular and religious education - as i read in this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_school --currently the church operates the worlds largest non-governmental school system-- so it would be very hard to separate catholic church and education
Vivtek 16y ago
Oh God yes, I can't agree with this more. My wife worked as an adjunct at Indiana University, killing herself with a 15-hour load for eight thousand bucks while the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. This year, she's got a real job (for a year as a visiting professor) for $35K and benefits; it's going to feel like we're rolling in cash. This is after 30 years of education, including a doctorate in theoretical physics. The American university system may well have jumped the shark.
- neilc 16y ago
  the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. University presidents may well be overpaid, but it is simply uninformed to claim that they "contribute nothing whatsoever." Besides setting the direction of the entire institution, an effective president will raise far more income for the school via fundraising than the cost of their salary.
  - harry 16y ago
    This is true, the chancellor/president position really does the full time baby kissing for a University. It's hard to say that's not worth a half mil.
    - chadmalik 16y ago
      Actually, there are plenty of competent administrators who would probably work for ~ $150K plus benefits (no free house). Having administration who are paid like landed gentry while professors and grad students are paid peanuts and students have to engage huge amounts of debt relative to their expected future earnings IS THE PROBLEM.
      - harry 16y ago
        This is very true. We don't see too many administrators who are paid outrageously, our athletics department handles all of that. Highest paid state employee for a few years - the ex Coach Mangino.
locopati 16y ago
There have been a lot of articles recently attacking higher education. Maybe there's some merit there, but one might also ask 'who is served by denegrating higher education as an option for the people? who benefits by a less educated public?'
- orangecat 16y ago
  You oppose the war in Iraq? Why do you hate the troops and support terrorists?
- jwhitlark 16y ago
  I don't think most of the articles are against higher education per say, but against modern universities offering inferior education at higher cost.
- jargon 16y ago
  1) The students who are currently being misled into believing $125k in debt and a piece of paper are a sure ticket to financial freedom. 2) Startups who want students to eschew school for lower salaries at the startups because they don't have the credentials to get into the Fortune 500. 3) Bitter students who are now $125k in debt with no chance of bankruptcy to alleviate that debt and no job to pay it off, but want an outlet for their frustration and evidence of a community with a common predicament. 4) Community colleges that are cheaper and often provide a better more focused education with smaller class sizes, less elitist student populations, and shorter times to degrees. 5) Students who are well served by attending colleges that aren't filled to the rafters by rich kids who need 4 more years of baby sitting or who go, because well, you are supposed to, meh. 6) A society that is better served by a real focus on the quality of education provided for its citizens who benefit from the products of a well educated work force which is increasingly diverging from useful and practical skills into a grade inflated joy ride through 4 years of drunken debauchery.
zabuni 16y ago
Terrible review of the book. Doesn't really get to the meat of what he was trying to say about colleges. One, the article never mentions that the author wants to get rid of all degrees except liberal arts. He is totally against college as "training". He's also against the standard complaints of colleges, tenure, sports, ivy leagues, etc. etc. It's be much more enlightning to go this NPR transcript or his website: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128933357&ps=cprs http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1289333... http://highereducationquestionmark.com/?page_id=52 http://highereducationquestionmark.com/?page_id=52
siglesias 16y ago
In my experience, it's the professors who operate on the Richard Feynman model who are the most successful. While there are lots of professors who are of the mind that teaching and researching are antithetical, I had a few who were just PHENOMENAL, passionate lecturers who say teaching and the future of research as going hand in hand. And it's not so much the material they conveyed; it was the passion for the subject. To me, that's where all of the brilliant students go, to the professors who convince them, through their passion and excitement for the next generation, to take up a particular field of study. In that regard, I think the system can on some level work itself out. Programs with little regard for the next generation simply burn out and attract fewer acolytes. When I look back on my education, as well as what I got out of college, it's totally the handful of passionate professors who shaped me and influenced my future.
balding_n_tired 16y ago
"For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended." Not in my experience.
RK 16y ago
Isn't the old joke that colleges are the only place where the employees get all of the good parking and the paying customers get the shitty, far away parking.
- harry 16y ago
  Man, if only that was the truth here at KU. Everyone has shit parking here unless you carry a massive title or tenure. maybe 100 cars total don't have to hike up a hill.
  - forsaken 16y ago
    Cool that you're at KU. I'm living in lawrence -- working at the Journal World on Django stuff :)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
vondur 16y ago
I don' think that this is news to anyone that works in higher ed. I work at a University and its repeated all throughout the campus. Basically administrators want to set up their own little empires on the campus and make themselves seem indispensable. I'm pretty sure things like this happen at most large organizations in some form.
- wmil 16y ago
  Organizations don't even have to be large for this to happen. If you're ambitious there's no place for you to move up finding a new job isn't the only option. People often try to redefine or expand their current job. When it gets out of control it's a sure sign of a management problem.
robobenjie 16y ago
The article disparages universities for having a larger and larger percentage of courses taught by lecturers rather than researching profs, but in my experience (ME, Stanford) the lecturers did a much better job teaching me than the Profs did, on average. Probably because they saw it as their primary occupation rather than an annoyance.
tome 16y ago
I would like to know how much of this applies to universities in the UK. Here there is a lot of public funding, but we're moving towards paying more funding as time goes on.
woodall 16y ago
I go to a state funded college. This is my last semester and was lucky enough to get a great internship. I wanted to start early, however, I live pretty far away. I decided I would just live in the dorms. I started negotiations and was surprised at how much it would cost me to stay there for 20 days- 1/2 of what it cost me to live there for a whole semester! After some digging- first they told me that it was not allowed(rooming early)- I find out that they do this on purpose to keep kids from bunking early. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with this but, I am a senior meaning I've spent a ton of money at that school. I have also served on the housing board for the dorms I was going to live in- volunteer work for the school. They were also very rigid and would not really help me- a future alum. Needless to say I couldn't afford the amount and as a result I start my internship later which makes my schedule even more cramped. I know what I will be doing when they start soliciting money.
NathanKP 16y ago
The title suggests that all colleges are effected, but the facts in the article primarily criticize the major "elitist" colleges. I go to a local community college, and do not see this problem personally.
justinph 16y ago
As someone who has gone to college and worked in a college, I couldn't agree more. It was great to work there as a staff member (IT), but as an adjunct professor, the pay was laughably low and not even close to worth it. Having a large amount of debt now is a burden, but bearable because I went into a good field. However, if I was a student today, just a decade later, I'd be taking on twice the amount of detb, and I'm not sure that'd be worth it.
jessriedel 16y ago
All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities. The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/the-purpose-of-harvard-is-not-to-educate-people/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/... State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge. The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should private research universities focus on education instead of research? (I would give that a resounding no.) (2) Are the private research universities actually producing useful knowledge? (Here, I would be somewhat negative, but probably not for the trite reasons cited by the authors.) Those are completely different questions, especially since one is empirical and one is normative. And it is a hallmark of poor editorializing to try to address both an empirical question and a normative question in the same small space.
- josh33 16y ago
  Um, really ignorant question here, but what book on reasoning can I read to be able to see through arguments and debates like you just did? I want to learn about empirical and normative questions, etc.
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    Boy, it's hard to answer such a flattering comment without letting it get to your head and sounding like a pompous jerk! I'll give the same advice I give as a teaching grad student to undergrads who think us grad students are incredibly smart: it only takes a tiny amount of knowledge or training for someone to have that you don't for them to seem so much smarter. Don't be fooled. As a grad student enslaved by a university, I have become quite familiar with all the arguments about the purpose and place of research vs. teaching. Anyways, this confusion between normative and empirical claims is extremely common; once you become aware of the difference, you see it everywhere. The easiest way to familiarize yourself with this and related ideas is to take a introductory course on moral philosophy or read an introductory textbook. Unfortunately, even if I thought the book I used in college was all that great (it was OK), I forgot the name of it. The material is fairly universal at the introductory level, though, so any decent book would do.
rnfein 16y ago
I have not read the book the article references. However, in reference to what Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus call the "immorality" of using adjunct professors, the article's author does not address the fact that there are potentially very good reasons why the use of adjuncts is increasing. In engineering, for example, adjunct professors may come from industry and provide students with perspective and experience full-time professors may not provide. Adjunct professors may choose to teach as adjuncts because they have a passion and a talent for teaching they want to pursue without the pressures of publication. Many full-time professors may readily admit that the pressures of producing academic work causes the quality of their teaching to decrease. Perhaps this is one reason Yale offers its professors time so that both the quality of teaching and research remains high. Some departments opt to hire adjunct professors because its set of full-time professors does not have the expertise to offer a course in a particular area of the field. While this may seem more applicable to technical fields, any department that opts to do this can provide students with more diversity and variety in course offerings over an academic year and over a student's academic career.
- abalashov 16y ago
  Adjunct professors != adjunct instructors. VERY important distinction.
nphase 16y ago
My father is a senior, tenured professor of mechanical engineering. He's won a bunch of prizes and fellowships. He's probably one of the best in his field. I don't ever recall anything about substantial raises. In fact, all I ever hear out of him is that they're cutting staff, restricting bonuses and cutting raises. This coming from a man who works on research and the related papers/books almost every waking hour of his life. I'm serious too, I grew up around it. Saturday and Sunday, absolutely. Friday night, definitely. Breaks only for PBS News Hour/CNN, meals, and the occasional friendly tennis match (when the rotator cuff isn't giving him trouble). He teaches only one undergraduate class a semester. Sure, you might consider that a "light teaching load," but that would be insulting to the graduate, doctorate, and post-doc students who fought hard to spend 50+ hour weeks in the lab (those students probably spend more than 80 hour weeks there themselves). If he could, he'd opt out of that class too. Can't blame him either: most of those students aren't even interested in being an engineer, they're just in it for the degree. His biggest complaint? Administrative overhead. The university and related agencies take sometimes up to half of his grant money. Hard to pay those students at those rates. Which means he has to spend more time there himself. Time that's getting scarcer due to increases in course and paper requirements. If you ask him, he'll tell you that colleges serve their administration (in the same way that some say government only exists to serve itself). But maybe someone's just holding on to that 58% raise check for him.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  Why would he tell you of salary raises. You're his son, or is it daughter. Maybe you should ask him first?
- mkramlich 16y ago
  It's been observed that once any organization reaches a certain size or age it acquires so many institutional rules and traditions, and has so many layers of staff, that it effectively lives more to serve itself than to serve the outside world. It also acts increasingly not to fight the problem it was meant to be a solution for, but to actually preserve and continue that problem, thereby maximizing the chance for future job security for the institution itself. It will increasingly not want to cure the problem, but to temporarily alleviate it -- alleviate it for only as long as the institution's services are purchased. Once that happens, the organization has become a bureaucracy.
anamax 16y ago
Of course colleges serve the people who work there. All organizations head that direction. The only thing that stops that progression is when the folks paying the bills take their money elsewhere.
nkassis 16y ago
I found the title of this article quite ironic because that's exactly what happened to me in college. I was employed by the school and benefited more than the regular students. I was able to get a job on campus as a Sys admin and that's where most of my education came from. I really wish the opportunity I had was offered to more students on campus. Working 40hrs and going to school more than half time (9 hours or so) was a hard but the experience really put me ahead when I was applying for work. I already had 5 years of experience when I graduated and got the first job I applied for when I decided to leave the school. I guess my point is, if you go to a school try to find a decent job on campus (not something useless like working as a library clerk if you want to be a programmer). Most universities will pay for your school if you work for them full time. I still ended up racking some student debt ( I didn't work full time for the first 2 years which got expensive) but hopefully I'll have that gone soon. Not so lucky for my wife, she's earning a masters in library science right now and we are looking at over 50K total for her education. I'll probably have to get a new job when she graduates to cover the increased expense. 50K is ridiculous, and they won't give you 30 years to pay that off anymore.
aliston 16y ago
It's ironic the article mentions Stanford, then describes university presidents as not having "done anything memorable, apart perhaps from firing a popular athletic coach." The president of Stanford is John Hennessy, a founder of MIPS and a board member of Google and Cisco among others.
Roydanroy 16y ago
This article is rubbish.
- gwern 16y ago
  Your mom is rubbish. (Did you see what I did there? I responded to a worthless comment with an equally worthless one.)
elai 16y ago
To be honest I'm glad that professors are doing more research and instructors are more pure instructors. The typical professor has 4 jobs: Researcher, Fundraiser, Teacher and Evaluator. They all have a conflict of interest with each other in some way and they'll all steal your shower focus. If they were all separated, universities could provide much better services in each job category. I remember Knuth saying something along the lines of "I retired so I can actually focus on research and attend less meetings". Students won't have to deal with the scheduling nightmare that is final exams because professors are too valuable to provide flexible (scheduling wise) examination services. Things like back to back finals or having them 3 days after the 'get all of your large projects in' end of classes rush don't have to happen anymore! People who want to interact with professors can come on as undergrad research assistants/apprentices and actually learn some research vs. some extension of high school. Professors wouldn't have to deal with something alot of them aren't that good at and most dread and actually get the grants they need!
stretchwithme 16y ago
when people pay for their own choices, they carefully weigh the costs and benefits involved. And the market is disciplined by this. But when people are able to shift the costs to others or borrow money from those who lend to anybody, many aren't careful at all. And the market responds to take advantage of this.

109 points by cwan 16y ago

"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members." A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever. EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?

scott_s 16y ago
I noticed that too, and I wondered if they were even capable of making that judgement. I looked up their backgrounds: the review writer is an English professor at Emory; one of the book authors is a Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Queens College in NY. This continues the tendency I've seen elsewhere, which is to lump science and engineering education and research in with humanities when criticizing higher education.
- gaius 16y ago
  Yes, but only humanities types do that, quite deliberately in the hope that the hard subjects will reciprocate when defending them.
zeynel1 16y ago
just a glance is enough at this table of contents of academic journal - classical and quantum gravity- http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 to wonder how much of this -research- is advancing knowledge and how much is --about advancing the career of the authors--
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  It's a very good question, and hardly a trivial one. Quite a lot of science is nearly worthless, and only published to pad the author's cv. A couple of blog posts on the topic: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/24/all_those_worthless_papers.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/24/all_those_wo... http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/25/what_to_do_with_the_notquiteworthless.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/25/what_to_do_w...
  - api 16y ago
    Lasers were thought to be a laboratory curiosity when they were invented. On the other hand, you have a ton of academics who are convinced that the "semantic web" is the next big thing. Part of the problem with science is that it's an activity where it's very hard to have any useful metric. Even experts in the field have a tough time deciding whether a given research direction is going to be fruitful. They're often wrong. So far the best thing we've figured out for science resembles the Underpants Gnomes' business plan: 1) Fund lots of science. 2) ???? 3) Profit! The ???? part is "pray that some of it is useful and that some of that gets into the hands of people who will use it."
    - gwern 16y ago
      1) Fund lots of science. Why do we need this? By every metric I know of, governments spend orders of magnitude more on science than they did in the 1800s. Are we getting orders more "Profit!"?
      - WingForward 16y ago
        Could you clarify your metrics and sources?
        gwern 16y ago
        http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf tells me that non-commercial (government or government-subsidized) R&D represents ~1% of GDP in 2006 for the US. I believe equivalent figures for the 1800s would be closer to 0% R&D inasmuch as there were no Departments of Energy, Health & Human Services, etc., but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Maybe the Gilded Age governments in the US actually spent 2% of GDP on R&D.
philk 16y ago
It's a fair point, but he's probably focusing on the arts and soft sciences because those degrees are the most overpriced for the value they deliver. To put it another way, an MIT grad with an engineering degree is going to be much better off career-wise than a Harvard grad who majored in gender studies.
- harry 16y ago
  The long term studies of technical degrees vs 'soft science' hasn't been looked at in depth on a national scale with relation to earnings and salary. These studies are just beginning. From AACRO: after 10 years the earning potential for an engineering degree drops below someone with an English degree. Technical degrees are way more valuable out of the gate while soft science take time to develop. To put it into other words: where an engineer can make 65k right after graduation an english major will start at 35k. The engineer's salary increases on par with inflation while the english major increases substantially over time and overtakes it on average at the 10 year point. The paraphrased quote from AACROs lobbyist: 'we're seeing through earnings study that technical degrees go stale over the career of an individual, this is shown when comparing the average english major vs the average electrical engineer' There's alot of background nuance (politics) there behind the study but the idea hasn't really been broached before in higher ed. It's really quite interesting to look at on a US scale, but that data hasn't been collected yet. Oh: I'm not contesting that some soft science degrees aren't total wastes of money. Just that there will always be a place for a gender studies Harvard grad. We just don't need 10,000 of them.
  - baddspellar 16y ago
    Do you have a link to back this claim up? I don't believe it. If you look at PayScale.com, for example, you'll see a ranking of undergrad majors, with starting and mid-career salaries, where mid-career is defined as "full-time employees with at least 10 years of experience in their career or field who hold a bachelor's degree and no higher degrees." ref: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp English Majors start at $37,800 and get to $67,500 after 10 years. Electrical Engineering Majors start at $60,800 and get to $104,000 after 10 years. AACRO has an incentive to overstate the benefits of non-technical college degrees, as these are the most common types of degrees, and these are the degrees that are leading more people to question the value of a college education.
jbooth 16y ago
It's the WSJ editorial page. Punching hippies is one of their 3 reasons for existence.
- mapleoin 16y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. What are the other 2?
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Well, the number 3 was arbitrary, but let's say.. 2) Spending 8 years advocating "deficits don't matter", then changing their opinion 180 degrees within 24 hours of a new President being inaugurated. 3) Writing screeds castigating liberals for being coastal elitists and out of touch on an iPad from the back seat of the author's car service, while drinking a latte on the way to yoga class.
    - Aaronontheweb 16y ago
      Why are people voting up this idiot? Is it time for yet-another "this isn't reddit" admonishment?
      - crystalis 16y ago
        Yes. This isn't reddit. Please provide some rationale for your namecalling, but preferably please just stay at home.
        jbooth 16y ago
        /me watches the comment thread change over time as those who are more motivated by tribal allegiances start to outweigh those who appreciate a fair joke
        Locke1689 16y ago
        I voted you all up because I thought this exchange was irrelevant but pretty humorous.
joelmichael 16y ago
A lot can be discerned in a glance.
baddspellar 16y ago
Some years ago, I saw a 60 minutes episode on issues in higher education. The reporter picked a biology journal off a shelf, read its arcane title, and exclaimed "who actually reads this stuff?" to back up her claim about how useless journals are... as if she were somehow qualified to judge the importance of a paper by its title. I couldn't help but imagining what she would have said if she picked up a paper titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" or "On formally undecidable propositions of. Principia Mathematica and related systems".
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Fortunately it's not up to her to decide. That said, it seems that some papers go out of their way to hide what the paper is really about by looking at the title.
  - sprout 16y ago
    Usually you just don't know. I got shamed in front of a prof once by saying that a given paper title was a good way to make people not want to come to your talk, and he responded by explaining why he thought it was an interesting talk. There are plenty of examples of things that might be meaningless to a graph-theory professor that are a core part of the language of a combinatorics specialist. And of course, undergrads and humanities majors best keep their mouths shut.
    - derefr 16y ago
      One of the things taught to undergrads in the humanities—specifically, in communications design—is that you should make the metadata of something interesting-seeming to a wider audience than the data it represents, so that it spreads further—that way, more of the people interested in the data will see it. As an example, one of my friends told me about a very interesting paper called, and I quote, "Three Monkeys something something." He didn't know what it was about, but he said it "sounded like something I'd be interested in." He was quite right—but if it hadn't been for the monkeys, he wouldn't had anything vivid about the paper to recall at all.
- 16y ago
pragmatic 16y ago
See another article currently on the front page: Realtime Linux: academia v. reality http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/ "I actually took the time to spend a day at a university where I could gain access to IEEE papers without wasting my private money. I picked out twenty recent realtime related papers and did a quick survey. Twelve of the papers were a rehash of well-known and well-researched topics, and at least half of them were badly written as well. From the remaining eight papers, six were micro improvements based on previous papers where I had a hard time figuring out why the papers had been written at all. One of those was merely describing the effects of converting a constant which influences resource partitioning into a runtime configurable variable. So that left two papers which seemed actually worthwhile to read in detail. Funny enough, I had already read one of those papers as it was publicly accessible in a slightly modified form. That survey really convinced me to stay away from IEEE forever and to consider the university ranking system even more suspicious."
- api 16y ago
  That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc. 1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world. My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few hits and a long tail. All papers are not the Church-Turing thesis, and all startups are not Google or Apple. A lot of academia-bashing amounts to criticism of academia for having the same sorts of failings that are present in equal measure in all other societal institutions public or private. Things like: elitism, know-nothing overpaid leadership, poor quality control, loss of focus, abusive labor practices, perverse incentives, poor success ratios for new ventures, etc.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Sturgeon's Law: Applicable Again! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law
  - 16y ago

zeynel1 16y ago

i found this review more informative than the recent post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559480 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559480 about the interview with the authors in the atlantic magazine what the authors are saying is true in general for any -bureaucracy- and education is the oldest and biggest existing bureaucracy even after it divided itself into secular and religious education in the 18th century any bureaucracy must -grow- continually to perpetuate itself - education does this by making education longer and longer

wake_up_sticky 16y ago
Actually, I think that the Catholic church is the oldest existing bureaucracy.
- zeynel1 16y ago
  the same occurred to me as well thats why i qualified by saying that education divided itself into secular and religious education - as i read in this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_school --currently the church operates the worlds largest non-governmental school system-- so it would be very hard to separate catholic church and education

Vivtek 16y ago

Oh God yes, I can't agree with this more. My wife worked as an adjunct at Indiana University, killing herself with a 15-hour load for eight thousand bucks while the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. This year, she's got a real job (for a year as a visiting professor) for $35K and benefits; it's going to feel like we're rolling in cash. This is after 30 years of education, including a doctorate in theoretical physics. The American university system may well have jumped the shark.

neilc 16y ago
the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus. University presidents may well be overpaid, but it is simply uninformed to claim that they "contribute nothing whatsoever." Besides setting the direction of the entire institution, an effective president will raise far more income for the school via fundraising than the cost of their salary.
- harry 16y ago
  This is true, the chancellor/president position really does the full time baby kissing for a University. It's hard to say that's not worth a half mil.
  - chadmalik 16y ago
    Actually, there are plenty of competent administrators who would probably work for ~ $150K plus benefits (no free house). Having administration who are paid like landed gentry while professors and grad students are paid peanuts and students have to engage huge amounts of debt relative to their expected future earnings IS THE PROBLEM.
    - harry 16y ago
      This is very true. We don't see too many administrators who are paid outrageously, our athletics department handles all of that. Highest paid state employee for a few years - the ex Coach Mangino.

locopati 16y ago

There have been a lot of articles recently attacking higher education. Maybe there's some merit there, but one might also ask 'who is served by denegrating higher education as an option for the people? who benefits by a less educated public?'

orangecat 16y ago
You oppose the war in Iraq? Why do you hate the troops and support terrorists?
jwhitlark 16y ago
I don't think most of the articles are against higher education per say, but against modern universities offering inferior education at higher cost.
jargon 16y ago
1) The students who are currently being misled into believing $125k in debt and a piece of paper are a sure ticket to financial freedom. 2) Startups who want students to eschew school for lower salaries at the startups because they don't have the credentials to get into the Fortune 500. 3) Bitter students who are now $125k in debt with no chance of bankruptcy to alleviate that debt and no job to pay it off, but want an outlet for their frustration and evidence of a community with a common predicament. 4) Community colleges that are cheaper and often provide a better more focused education with smaller class sizes, less elitist student populations, and shorter times to degrees. 5) Students who are well served by attending colleges that aren't filled to the rafters by rich kids who need 4 more years of baby sitting or who go, because well, you are supposed to, meh. 6) A society that is better served by a real focus on the quality of education provided for its citizens who benefit from the products of a well educated work force which is increasingly diverging from useful and practical skills into a grade inflated joy ride through 4 years of drunken debauchery.

zabuni 16y ago

Terrible review of the book. Doesn't really get to the meat of what he was trying to say about colleges. One, the article never mentions that the author wants to get rid of all degrees except liberal arts. He is totally against college as "training". He's also against the standard complaints of colleges, tenure, sports, ivy leagues, etc. etc. It's be much more enlightning to go this NPR transcript or his website: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128933357&ps=cprs http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1289333... http://highereducationquestionmark.com/?page_id=52 http://highereducationquestionmark.com/?page_id=52

siglesias 16y ago

In my experience, it's the professors who operate on the Richard Feynman model who are the most successful. While there are lots of professors who are of the mind that teaching and researching are antithetical, I had a few who were just PHENOMENAL, passionate lecturers who say teaching and the future of research as going hand in hand. And it's not so much the material they conveyed; it was the passion for the subject. To me, that's where all of the brilliant students go, to the professors who convince them, through their passion and excitement for the next generation, to take up a particular field of study. In that regard, I think the system can on some level work itself out. Programs with little regard for the next generation simply burn out and attract fewer acolytes. When I look back on my education, as well as what I got out of college, it's totally the handful of passionate professors who shaped me and influenced my future.

balding_n_tired 16y ago

"For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended." Not in my experience.

RK 16y ago

Isn't the old joke that colleges are the only place where the employees get all of the good parking and the paying customers get the shitty, far away parking.

harry 16y ago
Man, if only that was the truth here at KU. Everyone has shit parking here unless you carry a massive title or tenure. maybe 100 cars total don't have to hike up a hill.
- forsaken 16y ago
  Cool that you're at KU. I'm living in lawrence -- working at the Journal World on Django stuff :)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

vondur 16y ago

I don' think that this is news to anyone that works in higher ed. I work at a University and its repeated all throughout the campus. Basically administrators want to set up their own little empires on the campus and make themselves seem indispensable. I'm pretty sure things like this happen at most large organizations in some form.

wmil 16y ago
Organizations don't even have to be large for this to happen. If you're ambitious there's no place for you to move up finding a new job isn't the only option. People often try to redefine or expand their current job. When it gets out of control it's a sure sign of a management problem.

robobenjie 16y ago

The article disparages universities for having a larger and larger percentage of courses taught by lecturers rather than researching profs, but in my experience (ME, Stanford) the lecturers did a much better job teaching me than the Profs did, on average. Probably because they saw it as their primary occupation rather than an annoyance.

tome 16y ago

I would like to know how much of this applies to universities in the UK. Here there is a lot of public funding, but we're moving towards paying more funding as time goes on.

woodall 16y ago

I go to a state funded college. This is my last semester and was lucky enough to get a great internship. I wanted to start early, however, I live pretty far away. I decided I would just live in the dorms. I started negotiations and was surprised at how much it would cost me to stay there for 20 days- 1/2 of what it cost me to live there for a whole semester! After some digging- first they told me that it was not allowed(rooming early)- I find out that they do this on purpose to keep kids from bunking early. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with this but, I am a senior meaning I've spent a ton of money at that school. I have also served on the housing board for the dorms I was going to live in- volunteer work for the school. They were also very rigid and would not really help me- a future alum. Needless to say I couldn't afford the amount and as a result I start my internship later which makes my schedule even more cramped. I know what I will be doing when they start soliciting money.

NathanKP 16y ago

The title suggests that all colleges are effected, but the facts in the article primarily criticize the major "elitist" colleges. I go to a local community college, and do not see this problem personally.

justinph 16y ago

As someone who has gone to college and worked in a college, I couldn't agree more. It was great to work there as a staff member (IT), but as an adjunct professor, the pay was laughably low and not even close to worth it. Having a large amount of debt now is a burden, but bearable because I went into a good field. However, if I was a student today, just a decade later, I'd be taking on twice the amount of detb, and I'm not sure that'd be worth it.

jessriedel 16y ago

All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities. The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/the-purpose-of-harvard-is-not-to-educate-people/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/... State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge. The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should private research universities focus on education instead of research? (I would give that a resounding no.) (2) Are the private research universities actually producing useful knowledge? (Here, I would be somewhat negative, but probably not for the trite reasons cited by the authors.) Those are completely different questions, especially since one is empirical and one is normative. And it is a hallmark of poor editorializing to try to address both an empirical question and a normative question in the same small space.

josh33 16y ago
Um, really ignorant question here, but what book on reasoning can I read to be able to see through arguments and debates like you just did? I want to learn about empirical and normative questions, etc.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  Boy, it's hard to answer such a flattering comment without letting it get to your head and sounding like a pompous jerk! I'll give the same advice I give as a teaching grad student to undergrads who think us grad students are incredibly smart: it only takes a tiny amount of knowledge or training for someone to have that you don't for them to seem so much smarter. Don't be fooled. As a grad student enslaved by a university, I have become quite familiar with all the arguments about the purpose and place of research vs. teaching. Anyways, this confusion between normative and empirical claims is extremely common; once you become aware of the difference, you see it everywhere. The easiest way to familiarize yourself with this and related ideas is to take a introductory course on moral philosophy or read an introductory textbook. Unfortunately, even if I thought the book I used in college was all that great (it was OK), I forgot the name of it. The material is fairly universal at the introductory level, though, so any decent book would do.

rnfein 16y ago

I have not read the book the article references. However, in reference to what Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus call the "immorality" of using adjunct professors, the article's author does not address the fact that there are potentially very good reasons why the use of adjuncts is increasing. In engineering, for example, adjunct professors may come from industry and provide students with perspective and experience full-time professors may not provide. Adjunct professors may choose to teach as adjuncts because they have a passion and a talent for teaching they want to pursue without the pressures of publication. Many full-time professors may readily admit that the pressures of producing academic work causes the quality of their teaching to decrease. Perhaps this is one reason Yale offers its professors time so that both the quality of teaching and research remains high. Some departments opt to hire adjunct professors because its set of full-time professors does not have the expertise to offer a course in a particular area of the field. While this may seem more applicable to technical fields, any department that opts to do this can provide students with more diversity and variety in course offerings over an academic year and over a student's academic career.

abalashov 16y ago
Adjunct professors != adjunct instructors. VERY important distinction.

nphase 16y ago

My father is a senior, tenured professor of mechanical engineering. He's won a bunch of prizes and fellowships. He's probably one of the best in his field. I don't ever recall anything about substantial raises. In fact, all I ever hear out of him is that they're cutting staff, restricting bonuses and cutting raises. This coming from a man who works on research and the related papers/books almost every waking hour of his life. I'm serious too, I grew up around it. Saturday and Sunday, absolutely. Friday night, definitely. Breaks only for PBS News Hour/CNN, meals, and the occasional friendly tennis match (when the rotator cuff isn't giving him trouble). He teaches only one undergraduate class a semester. Sure, you might consider that a "light teaching load," but that would be insulting to the graduate, doctorate, and post-doc students who fought hard to spend 50+ hour weeks in the lab (those students probably spend more than 80 hour weeks there themselves). If he could, he'd opt out of that class too. Can't blame him either: most of those students aren't even interested in being an engineer, they're just in it for the degree. His biggest complaint? Administrative overhead. The university and related agencies take sometimes up to half of his grant money. Hard to pay those students at those rates. Which means he has to spend more time there himself. Time that's getting scarcer due to increases in course and paper requirements. If you ask him, he'll tell you that colleges serve their administration (in the same way that some say government only exists to serve itself). But maybe someone's just holding on to that 58% raise check for him.

Ardit20 16y ago
Why would he tell you of salary raises. You're his son, or is it daughter. Maybe you should ask him first?
mkramlich 16y ago
It's been observed that once any organization reaches a certain size or age it acquires so many institutional rules and traditions, and has so many layers of staff, that it effectively lives more to serve itself than to serve the outside world. It also acts increasingly not to fight the problem it was meant to be a solution for, but to actually preserve and continue that problem, thereby maximizing the chance for future job security for the institution itself. It will increasingly not want to cure the problem, but to temporarily alleviate it -- alleviate it for only as long as the institution's services are purchased. Once that happens, the organization has become a bureaucracy.

anamax 16y ago

Of course colleges serve the people who work there. All organizations head that direction. The only thing that stops that progression is when the folks paying the bills take their money elsewhere.

nkassis 16y ago

I found the title of this article quite ironic because that's exactly what happened to me in college. I was employed by the school and benefited more than the regular students. I was able to get a job on campus as a Sys admin and that's where most of my education came from. I really wish the opportunity I had was offered to more students on campus. Working 40hrs and going to school more than half time (9 hours or so) was a hard but the experience really put me ahead when I was applying for work. I already had 5 years of experience when I graduated and got the first job I applied for when I decided to leave the school. I guess my point is, if you go to a school try to find a decent job on campus (not something useless like working as a library clerk if you want to be a programmer). Most universities will pay for your school if you work for them full time. I still ended up racking some student debt ( I didn't work full time for the first 2 years which got expensive) but hopefully I'll have that gone soon. Not so lucky for my wife, she's earning a masters in library science right now and we are looking at over 50K total for her education. I'll probably have to get a new job when she graduates to cover the increased expense. 50K is ridiculous, and they won't give you 30 years to pay that off anymore.

aliston 16y ago

It's ironic the article mentions Stanford, then describes university presidents as not having "done anything memorable, apart perhaps from firing a popular athletic coach." The president of Stanford is John Hennessy, a founder of MIPS and a board member of Google and Cisco among others.

Roydanroy 16y ago

This article is rubbish.

gwern 16y ago
Your mom is rubbish. (Did you see what I did there? I responded to a worthless comment with an equally worthless one.)

elai 16y ago

To be honest I'm glad that professors are doing more research and instructors are more pure instructors. The typical professor has 4 jobs: Researcher, Fundraiser, Teacher and Evaluator. They all have a conflict of interest with each other in some way and they'll all steal your shower focus. If they were all separated, universities could provide much better services in each job category. I remember Knuth saying something along the lines of "I retired so I can actually focus on research and attend less meetings". Students won't have to deal with the scheduling nightmare that is final exams because professors are too valuable to provide flexible (scheduling wise) examination services. Things like back to back finals or having them 3 days after the 'get all of your large projects in' end of classes rush don't have to happen anymore! People who want to interact with professors can come on as undergrad research assistants/apprentices and actually learn some research vs. some extension of high school. Professors wouldn't have to deal with something alot of them aren't that good at and most dread and actually get the grants they need!

stretchwithme 16y ago

when people pay for their own choices, they carefully weigh the costs and benefits involved. And the market is disciplined by this. But when people are able to shift the costs to others or borrow money from those who lend to anybody, many aren't careful at all. And the market responds to take advantage of this.