9 ms·

Screwed up incentives in higher education

51 points by amackera 16y ago

goalieca 16y ago
So the article talks about undergrads getting screwed out of a good education. What about grad students. Whereas undergrads are coached to write tests we're coached to publish. Am I learning yet?
- axiom 16y ago
  Yeah, but the point of grad school is to do research. I understand why grad school tuition may go towards paying for research labs and publishing papers. Also, grad students have funding - so tuition is more like an overhead fee on the funding provided by grants and private research partners. Grad courses are also typically seminars, with no more than 10-15 students per course where you get to work one-on-one with the professor. Not to mention that profs tend to actually like teaching grad courses. Grad school makes sense to me, conceptually at least. Undergrad tuition and the whole system is just insane. It's all basically diploma mills.
  - wnoise 16y ago
    > Also, grad students have funding In the hard sciences, yes. Much less so in other fields.
    - thebooktocome 16y ago
      Tell me about it. My boyfriend is in hospitality management, I'm in mathematics. Whereas I pull in enough to live comfortably in a single bedroom apartment downtown, he's on financial aid and living with two roommates on the outskirts. It blew my mind when I found out.
      - blasdel 16y ago
        What use would the government have funding market research for hotels? It's blatantly vocational, with even fewer pretenses to academics than MBA programs. At least english majors don't have a profit motive!
        thebooktocome 16y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_management_studies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_management_studies Without getting into specifics, my bf's research deals with epidemiology and things related to improving public health in the hospitality/tourism industry. Sure, at the undergrad level it's mostly vocational, but it's not like there's no public benefit to full-fledged academic research in this area. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that his work will probably have a greater positive net effect on society than mine will. But since math is a "real science", I make the "big bucks" (relative to graduate students, i.e., two steps above ramen-profitable).
        blasdel 16y ago
        What's keeping him from working primarily in Public Health and getting NSF grants? Does he need access to industry for his research?
- TheEzEzz 16y ago
  What I've learned in grad school is that being knowledgeable and being a good researcher are surprisingly orthogonal. I'm a little bummed that I don't get to spend more time learning, but what it comes down to is that learning is a personal pursuit to be pursued on a person's own time. Academia is about producing original work.
- Untitled 16y ago
  > Whereas undergrads are coached to write tests we're coached to publish. That is the big problem. The problem is that the sole method of employee evaluation for University professors (and postdocs - anyone in an academic career) is publications. This encourages bad publications, a focus on research (or more accurately, publication milling) rather than teaching and a focus on many publications - instead of good research. At least 99% of conference articles are worthless and 85% of journal articles are crap. I wonder if the world would not be better served if professors were encouraged to study deeper and target the high-hanging fruits, instead of producing (mostly) worthless research.
  - ylem 16y ago
    What are you basing your conclusion on? How do you evaluate the effectiveness of a researcher? Especially in an era where there are often ~200 job applicants for a given position? At one point people simply tried number of publications. But, as you say, many of those publications could be lousy. Thus, the h-index was born (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) in which not just the number of publications is counted, but also their impact (citations/yr). It's an imperfect system, but it does put more emphasis on higher impact (more cited) publications rather than simple quantity of papers.....
    - Untitled 16y ago
      > which not just the number of publications is counted, but also their impact (citations/yr). But that is completely flawed! Some research areas (which is inconsequential but easy to do) produces a lot of citations. And what also happens is that people start building research groups which cross-cite each other.
      - ylem 16y ago
        How do you judge that? If you write a paper and no one cites it, is it important (a tree falls in a forest...)? This is a serious question--I agree that h-index is vulnerable to fads, but if one adds aging (the effect of citations decays with time, so if people stop citing the paper when the fad passes, then the h-index decays--for researchers who are post tenure and intend to stay in the field, they can think long-term) then it's hard to think of a better way. There are so many papers produced (the number of researchers is huge) that I don't see a feasible way of judging research outside of using "crowds"--aka citations....I suppose that one could try to look at page-rank (based on citations as links) as a proxy for citations (I think this has been done) and use it to remove the academic equivalent of link farms--but there are legitimate uses of cross-citing. For example, imagine that you have group 1 with technique A and group 2 with technique B that work in a similar problem space. It might be very natural for them to cite each other if they disagree or agree with each other. This may happen several times--it's not malicious, just economics at work (even if both groups could afford both sets of techniques and one of the groups was really good at both techniques, it would make sense for them to only pursue one--comparative advantage).... What is your solution?
wyclif 16y ago
If higher education didn't exist in it's current form... "Its" not "it's." If you want academics to read your writing, it had better not have grammar or punctuation errors. This is not rocket surgery.
- wyclif 16y ago
  Also, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between "too" and "to." I like his thesis, but the grammar needs work. P.S. I've got the karma to burn.
jules 16y ago
250 hours of education in 500 person classrooms? I get 1000+ hours of lectures in 10-20 person classrooms.
- nano81 16y ago
  That's 250 hours per term (4 months). I'm fairly certain you don't spend 1000+ hours in lectures out of the ~2880 hours in four months.
  - jules 16y ago
    Oh, right I thought per year. I checked and I have about 300 hours of lectures per term, in 10-20 (say 20) person classes. This costs the government and me combined about €10000 per year. That's about 300/180*500/20*24000/10000 = 100x better value for money than what he's sketching in his blog post.
icegreentea 16y ago
Haha, oh top-hat. Going off topic here a bit (the points in the post itself are more or less sound). Top-hat monocle is a web-based quiz/online tutorial system. You can put flash based demos, and random quizzes on it, and students can answer on their laptops, or text in the answers from their phones. We got use to top-hat monocle for one of our courses last term. It was a joke (took forever for the demos to load... flash...). Beyond the usual 'a tool can only make a poor user screw up even with ever greater speed', we had to pay to get our license... to what was then beta software. They admitted to us that 'they weren't done testing' and that we were going to be the last group to 'get to try' the system before it went into wide release. I won't argue about the effectiveness of the system (it is a tool, whose effectiveness depends on its user), but paying to be part of the final set of testers definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.
- axiom 16y ago
  Oy vey. That first beta class is going to haunt us forever isn't it.
- jskopek 16y ago
  I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle. Were you in the UW System Design course last term? We had a couple of courses that had issues with monocleCAT, and we learnt a lot from them. One of the biggest issues that caught us by surprise was the effect a room full of connected students can have on a lower-quality access point. We learnt from that, and totally rewrote our synchronization code to be much more robust and efficient with bandwidth (something I'd love to write a post about some time in the future). We used to be hosted on Google App Engine, and we suffered greatly from dowtime issues that plagued every App Engine site all throughout the term. We learned from that and switched to Amazon EC2, where we've built a backend that automatically scales up to thousands of simulatanous connections. We discovered that while most users have laptops or netbooks, few users like lugging them to every class. We learned from that and introduced iPhone and Android applications, as well as enhancing our SMS submission system to send back confirmation messages (with an easy opt-out process) for students on legacy phones. We discovered that some professors had teaching styles that didn't take advantage of our software, so we've started being more agressive in our professor approval process, as well as introduced training sessions to help professors get a feel for how to incorproate the system in their lectures. The biggest lesson we've learned is to find early adopters that are willing to work with you to improve your product, and to build strong relationships with them. Our product has improved monumentally in the last few months thanks to their support. We've signed on a number of new professors in the Engineering department at the University of Waterloo, so it's quite likely you'll be using monocleCAT again next term. In recognition of the issues some students experienced last term, we'll be giving vouchers for a free term to students in the courses that had serious issues (you'll probably be seeing yours in the mail in a few weeks). ------------- EDIT: when I say we had a couple bad courses... the System Design course was the one that really had issues (hence my guess).
wnoise 16y ago
The article suggested decoupling research and teaching. That might be worth doing, but it's already done. There are plenty of schools that don't do research, and don't have graduate programs. I think the more radical and effective thing to do would be to decouple teaching from certification.
nocipher 16y ago
As someone who recently graduated with a bachelor's at a large state university, I find that this article exaggerates most of its points. "Now, what do students get for their money? they[sic] get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck." This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the university was required to take. Above the sophomore level, all classes were, at an absolute maximum, 35 people. Even the large lecture classes were closer to half what the author states. "Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque." Anyone doing this has little reason to be in school. Admittedly, some classes are easy and sufficiently unrelated to your career goals that they can be safely ignored. Once you get past those courses, though, if you can still cram and come out with a respectable grade, you've made a terrible choice for you degree program and university. Cramming just doesn't cut it when you're in a senior level math course and supposed to derive the heat and wave equation on an exam by justifying the simplifications necessary to get a clean mathematical model. You won't even get that far if you crammed in your Calculus 3 course and have no idea how to deal with multivariable derivatives and integrals. Nor will you have any idea about how such an equation is supposed to work if you failed to learn anything in your differential equations course. The picture of the university described in the article is flawed for all but the lowest performing students. If people want to actually learn something, they can. If they don't, that's unfortunate; they probably won't and can, instead, attempt to game the system (i.e. cram for tests) to maintain their GPA. Giving these people better teachers won't help them because they don't care about learning. The real issue seems to be that too many people are going to college for the wrong reasons. If you have no aspirations of learning what a college attempts to teach, then don't go. There should be no expectation that merely attending college will cause you to learn something.
- neilk 16y ago
  > This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the university was required to take. Why does this change the conclusion? One could argue that students new to a topic need more one-on-one instruction.
timr 16y ago
"The system is broken in the sense that teaching is at best a low priority, and that universities have essentially become testing centres. Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque. That's about it from the student's perspectives on the academic side of it." Spoken like a person who has never actually taught a college course. There's a tremendous amount of work involved, from both students and faculty. Most students go to class, and most professors give lectures that aren't directly taken from the book. So can we please stop elevating the cartoon, straw-man portrayals of the incompetent lecturer and the lazy student? Please? If this blog post weren't written by the CEO of a company that's trying to sell enhancement software to universities, I'd dismiss it as anti-intellectual trolling. I'm also trying hard not to dismiss it as the griping of a guy who's finding resistance selling his product to a somewhat conservative clientele (university staff), and interpreting their reluctance as the behavior of dinosaurs (rather than a sensible reaction to the generations of educational snake-oil salesmen who have come before). Instead, I'll give the benefit of the doubt: there are certainly lazy, incompetent professors. There are also lazy students that have no business being in college. But if your only contact with the university system comes from when you're trying to sell or beta-test your products in the classroom...well, you don't have a very representative sample from which to draw conclusions.
- axiom 16y ago
  Where does the article accuse professors of being lazy or incompetent? where does it say (or imply) that teaching a course isn't a huge amount of work? So I take it you disagree with the central thesis that tuition is absurdly high for the value that students get? Edit: from the article "There are many phenomenal teachers at universities. We at Top Hat Monocle have had the privilege to work with some of them. They should be treated like rock stars and paid accordingly - they generate literally millions in revenue for the universities and don't get nearly the recognition they deserve. They do their work out of benevolence and dedication to a job they love, mostly in spite of the system they operate in."
  - timr 16y ago
    "So I take it you disagree with the central thesis that tuition is absurdly high for the value that students get?" If that was your thesis (it was well-buried), then yes, I disagree with it. And I can fairly conclusively prove my point with your own words: professors spend most of their time raising money to do their research. They don't do that because the school is showering them with cash (in point of fact, the school takes a substantial percentage cut from every grant dollar, too). So where is the tuition going? It sure isn't going to the research programs. If you're going to make the claim that universities are squandering student tuition/fees (and that IS what you're doing here, even if you're doing it obliquely), you're going to have to defend that claim with more than just hand-waving assertions that students would gain just as much from private tutors. Because that's not a claim that stands up to casual scrutiny. Honestly, I think you're succumbing to the fallacy of the university as a provider of first-year coursework. Yes, some students could probably learn calculus 101 from private tutors. But most of the people qualified to "tutor" students in anything more complex than first-year coursework are already doing so -- at universities. I'm open to a frank discussion of inefficiencies in the university system (and I think there are tons -- what's the average student-contact-hour rating of a professor in comparative lit, versus a first-year professor in chemistry or math? How much does that new dorm cost? What about the Taj Mahal gym with the fancy climbing walls?), but it's wrong to suggest that the whole institution is "absurdly" overpriced from the teaching perspective. The numbers just don't bear out that hypothesis.
callmeed 16y ago
I'm 10 years out of state school (in Calif.) and only recall a handful of classes with over 100 students, with the max being around 300 (general psych I think). Has there really been an increase in large classes as the author states?
- thebooktocome 16y ago
  I've been at a state school in Indiana for the past two years, and our largest class (in the math department) is around 150 students.
- kgermino 16y ago
  Private school in Milwaukee and our largest lecture hall seats less than 300.
stretchwithme 16y ago
This problem is caused by government funding of education. If students and/or parents were paying the tab or at least everything over the bare minimum , there'd be a laser focus on value. But with other people picking up everything over a certain amount, there's no need to scrimp on amenities or prestige instead of getting the most education for the money. Perverse incentives? Absolutely. But thats what government does best. It perverts incentives. It hides the costs and makes a big show of benefits, even ones that don't truly matter.
- yequalsx 16y ago
  Government funding per student has been decreasing and the amenities have been increasing.
  - stretchwithme 16y ago
    damn. all things are supposed to happen properly in sequence. what could possibly have gone wrong. maybe you can share your data and we'll figure it out
    - yequalsx 16y ago
      My theory is that increases in tuition aren't immediately felt by students because we've come to a point where everyone is comfortable getting a student loan. Since you don't start paying on the loan right away the effect of the borrowing isn't immediately felt. This makes students more amenable to a frame of mind of just accepting tuition increases.
      - stretchwithme 16y ago
        It could also be that it takes years to build new athletic centers and research centers and less time for bubbles to pop and tax bases to evaporate.
Derbasti 16y ago
There is one issue no one ever seems to talk about. The one thing that really really screws up incentives at universities is the money the students have to pay. If students have to pay for individual courses, they will try to minimize the amount of courses they have to take. They will try to get in cheap courses. They will try to get in cheap universities. They will optimize their education for Bang For The Buck. They will optimize for bad teaching. Look at European universities. For students, they are free. Or ridiculously cheap (like $500 per semester). Actually, last year, students in Germany were fed up with the bad quality if teaching. Guess what they did? They went on strike! They blocked rooms and prevented courses from happening. Without students, universities can't exist. So, professors and management had to act. And teaching improved. I think you will agree that something like this is completely and utterly impossible in the US. If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the money he had put in that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against bad teaching. If students pay huge amounts of money for each course and semester, they will try to get cheap education at a big-name place. I guess in the choice between cheap, big-name and good, you can pick any two. Hence, there is little incentive to get good education. Furthermore, if courses are free, students can freely choose which courses to take. Hence they try to get the best teaching they can get. If that means they take a few extra semesters, so be it. If that means that they actually change universities or even curriculums, no problem. You see, by not paying (much) for universities, students optimize for quality.
- whimsy 16y ago
  >If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the money he had put in that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against bad teaching. Too true. There's a pretty big strike movement growing in the California school system. Strikes aren't continuous, but there has been a few rather large actions. It doesn't seem to be working - tuition has increased at UCs 42.56% over the last year alone. (Last ~Nov, a 32% increase in tuition was approved by the UC Regents; this year, another 8% this month.) Despite the massive tuition increases, classes and professors - and in some cases entire departments - continue to face the chopping block. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a plurality of student support - most students I've talked with are against the protests.
blasdel 16y ago
> They get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck. How does leasing them tools to herd more efficiently do anything but amplify the screwed up incentives further? You could aspire to be the Temple Grandin of higher ed reform, but that doesn't do anything to fix the underlying problem — it only makes it easier to ignore.

51 points by amackera 16y ago

So the article talks about undergrads getting screwed out of a good education. What about grad students. Whereas undergrads are coached to write tests we're coached to publish. Am I learning yet?

axiom 16y ago
Yeah, but the point of grad school is to do research. I understand why grad school tuition may go towards paying for research labs and publishing papers. Also, grad students have funding - so tuition is more like an overhead fee on the funding provided by grants and private research partners. Grad courses are also typically seminars, with no more than 10-15 students per course where you get to work one-on-one with the professor. Not to mention that profs tend to actually like teaching grad courses. Grad school makes sense to me, conceptually at least. Undergrad tuition and the whole system is just insane. It's all basically diploma mills.
- wnoise 16y ago
  > Also, grad students have funding In the hard sciences, yes. Much less so in other fields.
  - thebooktocome 16y ago
    Tell me about it. My boyfriend is in hospitality management, I'm in mathematics. Whereas I pull in enough to live comfortably in a single bedroom apartment downtown, he's on financial aid and living with two roommates on the outskirts. It blew my mind when I found out.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      What use would the government have funding market research for hotels? It's blatantly vocational, with even fewer pretenses to academics than MBA programs. At least english majors don't have a profit motive!
      - thebooktocome 16y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_management_studies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_management_studies Without getting into specifics, my bf's research deals with epidemiology and things related to improving public health in the hospitality/tourism industry. Sure, at the undergrad level it's mostly vocational, but it's not like there's no public benefit to full-fledged academic research in this area. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that his work will probably have a greater positive net effect on society than mine will. But since math is a "real science", I make the "big bucks" (relative to graduate students, i.e., two steps above ramen-profitable).
        blasdel 16y ago
        What's keeping him from working primarily in Public Health and getting NSF grants? Does he need access to industry for his research?
TheEzEzz 16y ago
What I've learned in grad school is that being knowledgeable and being a good researcher are surprisingly orthogonal. I'm a little bummed that I don't get to spend more time learning, but what it comes down to is that learning is a personal pursuit to be pursued on a person's own time. Academia is about producing original work.
Untitled 16y ago
> Whereas undergrads are coached to write tests we're coached to publish. That is the big problem. The problem is that the sole method of employee evaluation for University professors (and postdocs - anyone in an academic career) is publications. This encourages bad publications, a focus on research (or more accurately, publication milling) rather than teaching and a focus on many publications - instead of good research. At least 99% of conference articles are worthless and 85% of journal articles are crap. I wonder if the world would not be better served if professors were encouraged to study deeper and target the high-hanging fruits, instead of producing (mostly) worthless research.
- ylem 16y ago
  What are you basing your conclusion on? How do you evaluate the effectiveness of a researcher? Especially in an era where there are often ~200 job applicants for a given position? At one point people simply tried number of publications. But, as you say, many of those publications could be lousy. Thus, the h-index was born (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) in which not just the number of publications is counted, but also their impact (citations/yr). It's an imperfect system, but it does put more emphasis on higher impact (more cited) publications rather than simple quantity of papers.....
  - Untitled 16y ago
    > which not just the number of publications is counted, but also their impact (citations/yr). But that is completely flawed! Some research areas (which is inconsequential but easy to do) produces a lot of citations. And what also happens is that people start building research groups which cross-cite each other.
    - ylem 16y ago
      How do you judge that? If you write a paper and no one cites it, is it important (a tree falls in a forest...)? This is a serious question--I agree that h-index is vulnerable to fads, but if one adds aging (the effect of citations decays with time, so if people stop citing the paper when the fad passes, then the h-index decays--for researchers who are post tenure and intend to stay in the field, they can think long-term) then it's hard to think of a better way. There are so many papers produced (the number of researchers is huge) that I don't see a feasible way of judging research outside of using "crowds"--aka citations....I suppose that one could try to look at page-rank (based on citations as links) as a proxy for citations (I think this has been done) and use it to remove the academic equivalent of link farms--but there are legitimate uses of cross-citing. For example, imagine that you have group 1 with technique A and group 2 with technique B that work in a similar problem space. It might be very natural for them to cite each other if they disagree or agree with each other. This may happen several times--it's not malicious, just economics at work (even if both groups could afford both sets of techniques and one of the groups was really good at both techniques, it would make sense for them to only pursue one--comparative advantage).... What is your solution?

wyclif 16y ago

If higher education didn't exist in it's current form... "Its" not "it's." If you want academics to read your writing, it had better not have grammar or punctuation errors. This is not rocket surgery.

wyclif 16y ago
Also, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between "too" and "to." I like his thesis, but the grammar needs work. P.S. I've got the karma to burn.

jules 16y ago

250 hours of education in 500 person classrooms? I get 1000+ hours of lectures in 10-20 person classrooms.

nano81 16y ago
That's 250 hours per term (4 months). I'm fairly certain you don't spend 1000+ hours in lectures out of the ~2880 hours in four months.
- jules 16y ago
  Oh, right I thought per year. I checked and I have about 300 hours of lectures per term, in 10-20 (say 20) person classes. This costs the government and me combined about €10000 per year. That's about 300/180*500/20*24000/10000 = 100x better value for money than what he's sketching in his blog post.

icegreentea 16y ago

Haha, oh top-hat. Going off topic here a bit (the points in the post itself are more or less sound). Top-hat monocle is a web-based quiz/online tutorial system. You can put flash based demos, and random quizzes on it, and students can answer on their laptops, or text in the answers from their phones. We got use to top-hat monocle for one of our courses last term. It was a joke (took forever for the demos to load... flash...). Beyond the usual 'a tool can only make a poor user screw up even with ever greater speed', we had to pay to get our license... to what was then beta software. They admitted to us that 'they weren't done testing' and that we were going to be the last group to 'get to try' the system before it went into wide release. I won't argue about the effectiveness of the system (it is a tool, whose effectiveness depends on its user), but paying to be part of the final set of testers definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

axiom 16y ago
Oy vey. That first beta class is going to haunt us forever isn't it.
jskopek 16y ago
I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle. Were you in the UW System Design course last term? We had a couple of courses that had issues with monocleCAT, and we learnt a lot from them. One of the biggest issues that caught us by surprise was the effect a room full of connected students can have on a lower-quality access point. We learnt from that, and totally rewrote our synchronization code to be much more robust and efficient with bandwidth (something I'd love to write a post about some time in the future). We used to be hosted on Google App Engine, and we suffered greatly from dowtime issues that plagued every App Engine site all throughout the term. We learned from that and switched to Amazon EC2, where we've built a backend that automatically scales up to thousands of simulatanous connections. We discovered that while most users have laptops or netbooks, few users like lugging them to every class. We learned from that and introduced iPhone and Android applications, as well as enhancing our SMS submission system to send back confirmation messages (with an easy opt-out process) for students on legacy phones. We discovered that some professors had teaching styles that didn't take advantage of our software, so we've started being more agressive in our professor approval process, as well as introduced training sessions to help professors get a feel for how to incorproate the system in their lectures. The biggest lesson we've learned is to find early adopters that are willing to work with you to improve your product, and to build strong relationships with them. Our product has improved monumentally in the last few months thanks to their support. We've signed on a number of new professors in the Engineering department at the University of Waterloo, so it's quite likely you'll be using monocleCAT again next term. In recognition of the issues some students experienced last term, we'll be giving vouchers for a free term to students in the courses that had serious issues (you'll probably be seeing yours in the mail in a few weeks). ------------- EDIT: when I say we had a couple bad courses... the System Design course was the one that really had issues (hence my guess).

wnoise 16y ago

The article suggested decoupling research and teaching. That might be worth doing, but it's already done. There are plenty of schools that don't do research, and don't have graduate programs. I think the more radical and effective thing to do would be to decouple teaching from certification.

nocipher 16y ago

As someone who recently graduated with a bachelor's at a large state university, I find that this article exaggerates most of its points. "Now, what do students get for their money? they[sic] get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck." This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the university was required to take. Above the sophomore level, all classes were, at an absolute maximum, 35 people. Even the large lecture classes were closer to half what the author states. "Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque." Anyone doing this has little reason to be in school. Admittedly, some classes are easy and sufficiently unrelated to your career goals that they can be safely ignored. Once you get past those courses, though, if you can still cram and come out with a respectable grade, you've made a terrible choice for you degree program and university. Cramming just doesn't cut it when you're in a senior level math course and supposed to derive the heat and wave equation on an exam by justifying the simplifications necessary to get a clean mathematical model. You won't even get that far if you crammed in your Calculus 3 course and have no idea how to deal with multivariable derivatives and integrals. Nor will you have any idea about how such an equation is supposed to work if you failed to learn anything in your differential equations course. The picture of the university described in the article is flawed for all but the lowest performing students. If people want to actually learn something, they can. If they don't, that's unfortunate; they probably won't and can, instead, attempt to game the system (i.e. cram for tests) to maintain their GPA. Giving these people better teachers won't help them because they don't care about learning. The real issue seems to be that too many people are going to college for the wrong reasons. If you have no aspirations of learning what a college attempts to teach, then don't go. There should be no expectation that merely attending college will cause you to learn something.

neilk 16y ago
> This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the university was required to take. Why does this change the conclusion? One could argue that students new to a topic need more one-on-one instruction.

timr 16y ago

"The system is broken in the sense that teaching is at best a low priority, and that universities have essentially become testing centres. Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque. That's about it from the student's perspectives on the academic side of it." Spoken like a person who has never actually taught a college course. There's a tremendous amount of work involved, from both students and faculty. Most students go to class, and most professors give lectures that aren't directly taken from the book. So can we please stop elevating the cartoon, straw-man portrayals of the incompetent lecturer and the lazy student? Please? If this blog post weren't written by the CEO of a company that's trying to sell enhancement software to universities, I'd dismiss it as anti-intellectual trolling. I'm also trying hard not to dismiss it as the griping of a guy who's finding resistance selling his product to a somewhat conservative clientele (university staff), and interpreting their reluctance as the behavior of dinosaurs (rather than a sensible reaction to the generations of educational snake-oil salesmen who have come before). Instead, I'll give the benefit of the doubt: there are certainly lazy, incompetent professors. There are also lazy students that have no business being in college. But if your only contact with the university system comes from when you're trying to sell or beta-test your products in the classroom...well, you don't have a very representative sample from which to draw conclusions.

axiom 16y ago
Where does the article accuse professors of being lazy or incompetent? where does it say (or imply) that teaching a course isn't a huge amount of work? So I take it you disagree with the central thesis that tuition is absurdly high for the value that students get? Edit: from the article "There are many phenomenal teachers at universities. We at Top Hat Monocle have had the privilege to work with some of them. They should be treated like rock stars and paid accordingly - they generate literally millions in revenue for the universities and don't get nearly the recognition they deserve. They do their work out of benevolence and dedication to a job they love, mostly in spite of the system they operate in."
- timr 16y ago
  "So I take it you disagree with the central thesis that tuition is absurdly high for the value that students get?" If that was your thesis (it was well-buried), then yes, I disagree with it. And I can fairly conclusively prove my point with your own words: professors spend most of their time raising money to do their research. They don't do that because the school is showering them with cash (in point of fact, the school takes a substantial percentage cut from every grant dollar, too). So where is the tuition going? It sure isn't going to the research programs. If you're going to make the claim that universities are squandering student tuition/fees (and that IS what you're doing here, even if you're doing it obliquely), you're going to have to defend that claim with more than just hand-waving assertions that students would gain just as much from private tutors. Because that's not a claim that stands up to casual scrutiny. Honestly, I think you're succumbing to the fallacy of the university as a provider of first-year coursework. Yes, some students could probably learn calculus 101 from private tutors. But most of the people qualified to "tutor" students in anything more complex than first-year coursework are already doing so -- at universities. I'm open to a frank discussion of inefficiencies in the university system (and I think there are tons -- what's the average student-contact-hour rating of a professor in comparative lit, versus a first-year professor in chemistry or math? How much does that new dorm cost? What about the Taj Mahal gym with the fancy climbing walls?), but it's wrong to suggest that the whole institution is "absurdly" overpriced from the teaching perspective. The numbers just don't bear out that hypothesis.

callmeed 16y ago

I'm 10 years out of state school (in Calif.) and only recall a handful of classes with over 100 students, with the max being around 300 (general psych I think). Has there really been an increase in large classes as the author states?

thebooktocome 16y ago
I've been at a state school in Indiana for the past two years, and our largest class (in the math department) is around 150 students.
kgermino 16y ago
Private school in Milwaukee and our largest lecture hall seats less than 300.

stretchwithme 16y ago

This problem is caused by government funding of education. If students and/or parents were paying the tab or at least everything over the bare minimum , there'd be a laser focus on value. But with other people picking up everything over a certain amount, there's no need to scrimp on amenities or prestige instead of getting the most education for the money. Perverse incentives? Absolutely. But thats what government does best. It perverts incentives. It hides the costs and makes a big show of benefits, even ones that don't truly matter.

yequalsx 16y ago
Government funding per student has been decreasing and the amenities have been increasing.
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  damn. all things are supposed to happen properly in sequence. what could possibly have gone wrong. maybe you can share your data and we'll figure it out
  - yequalsx 16y ago
    My theory is that increases in tuition aren't immediately felt by students because we've come to a point where everyone is comfortable getting a student loan. Since you don't start paying on the loan right away the effect of the borrowing isn't immediately felt. This makes students more amenable to a frame of mind of just accepting tuition increases.
    - stretchwithme 16y ago
      It could also be that it takes years to build new athletic centers and research centers and less time for bubbles to pop and tax bases to evaporate.

Derbasti 16y ago

There is one issue no one ever seems to talk about. The one thing that really really screws up incentives at universities is the money the students have to pay. If students have to pay for individual courses, they will try to minimize the amount of courses they have to take. They will try to get in cheap courses. They will try to get in cheap universities. They will optimize their education for Bang For The Buck. They will optimize for bad teaching. Look at European universities. For students, they are free. Or ridiculously cheap (like $500 per semester). Actually, last year, students in Germany were fed up with the bad quality if teaching. Guess what they did? They went on strike! They blocked rooms and prevented courses from happening. Without students, universities can't exist. So, professors and management had to act. And teaching improved. I think you will agree that something like this is completely and utterly impossible in the US. If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the money he had put in that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against bad teaching. If students pay huge amounts of money for each course and semester, they will try to get cheap education at a big-name place. I guess in the choice between cheap, big-name and good, you can pick any two. Hence, there is little incentive to get good education. Furthermore, if courses are free, students can freely choose which courses to take. Hence they try to get the best teaching they can get. If that means they take a few extra semesters, so be it. If that means that they actually change universities or even curriculums, no problem. You see, by not paying (much) for universities, students optimize for quality.

whimsy 16y ago
>If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the money he had put in that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against bad teaching. Too true. There's a pretty big strike movement growing in the California school system. Strikes aren't continuous, but there has been a few rather large actions. It doesn't seem to be working - tuition has increased at UCs 42.56% over the last year alone. (Last ~Nov, a 32% increase in tuition was approved by the UC Regents; this year, another 8% this month.) Despite the massive tuition increases, classes and professors - and in some cases entire departments - continue to face the chopping block. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a plurality of student support - most students I've talked with are against the protests.

blasdel 16y ago

> They get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck. How does leasing them tools to herd more efficiently do anything but amplify the screwed up incentives further? You could aspire to be the Temple Grandin of higher ed reform, but that doesn't do anything to fix the underlying problem — it only makes it easier to ignore.