10 ms·

Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University

187 points by jackfoxy 15y ago

chalst 15y ago
"I've never worked out whether I was, in American terms, an assistant professor or an associate professor." Generally speaking, British lecturers are equiv. to associate professors, and assistant professors are untenured. Most post-docs in proper academic departments are assistant professors, but this is not a hard and fast rule; post-docs in tenure-track programs nearly always are assistant professors.
cdcarter 15y ago
Not just in Britain. The grade "scaling" or inflation is rampant in the US, but not nearly as bad as the insane focus on research. The number one job of a professor should be to teach the students of the college.
- rubidium 15y ago
  Research is teaching; teaching the graduate students how to do research. I agree with your sentiment that college profs should care about teaching, but to be honest too much is asked of them. They're expected to be excellent researchers, inexhaustible grant writers, engaging teachers, inspiring mentors, and part-time entrepreneurs. Those who can achieve 4 of the 5 are still impressive, and more often then not somethings got give.
  - Retric 15y ago
    In the US 'Research' generates money for a University. You apply for outside grants and then fund your students who are then able to pay the University the vast majority of that money. Depending on the grant you may even pay for lab space and equipment as well as a large chunk of a professors salary.
  - cdcarter 15y ago
    Yes, too much is asked of them. In my mind, the solution is to just ask less, specifically ask them to primarily be teachers. This does have implications for grad programs and I don't know what, but it would certainly clean up undergraduate education.
- waqf 15y ago
  In the US the tying of funding to results is accomplished by market forces (which also favour, say, campus facilities) whereas in Britain it's administered directly by the government (which also favours "research", that is, publication count). But since both place a substantial weight on "graduation rate", the same effect is seen vis-à-vis teaching quality.
- pmb 15y ago
  Professors will do or become whatever is required of them to achieve tenure. The number on job of a professor is therefore to meet the tenure requirements of the institution - which at most places, means "do lots of research". Change the reward system and you can change how things work.
- jseliger 15y ago
  I'd observe a couple things, which are much elaborated here: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/31/college-graduate-earning-and-learning-more-on-student-choice/ http://jseliger.com/2011/10/31/college-graduate-earning-and-... 1) Professors are responding to institutional and student incentives: institutions reward research, so professors prioritize research over teaching. 2) Students are, for the most part, choosing easier degrees; as a result, those degrees are prospering, and many non-easy disciplines are watering down their criteria to attract remaining students. 3) The only real impetus for change that I can see comes from two areas: a) the amorphous group of employers who want better outcomes—but they have very little leverage and b) graduates who are unhappy to discover they have a great deal of debt and few marketable skills. Again, however, they have little leverage.
- Lost_BiomedE 15y ago
  Two types of schools that I have seen in the U.S., diploma mills, and failure mills. I went to school in a fail as many as you can school. Almost every class I walked into was 50-70% fail by design. I learned a lot, mainly studying on my own. The focus on research vs. teaching was just as strong.
- tansey 15y ago
  Then none of the people in top universities would be there. Talented researchers go to top-tier universities for their PhD because they want to work on research professionally. They do not wish to teach, they are forced to do it because academia is, for the most part, the only place left where someone can be a professional researcher. Although there are still corporate research labs around, the days of Shannon developing Information Theory at Bell Labs are long gone. Quite frankly, I'm fine with this setup. If you want to have a good undergraduate education provided to you by the professors, go to a school where they have that as a priority. If you want to get involved in pushing the boundaries of knowledge, then go to a place like MIT or Stanford and get involved in an undergraduate research program.
remyroy 15y ago
This gives me a better insight as to why my CS degree is a piece of shit and why I learn not much more than I already knew or that I use on a regular basis. I'm Canadian not British, but I do relate to everything that was said in this article. I completed my degree in 2004. Great read.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Most colleges do a poor job of providing CS education. Worse yet, CS is a poor substitute for the education needed to do software engineering.
  - tsotha 15y ago
    We're finding candidates with a math, physics, or engineering background are better prepared to write software than CS graduates. I don't really understand why that should be the case.
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      In my opinion those majors are generally more challenging than CS and thus the graduates will be of a higher intellectual caliber. Additionally, folks pursuing technical careers with those degrees will be more likely to have a personal passion for technology. They also won't have the bad habits that CS programs often instill in graduates, they will look to the workplace and the industry standards as a guideline for their habits and behaviors rather than their college professors and fellow class-mates.
    - arethuza 15y ago
      When I did a CS degree in the 80s we did roughly the same amount of maths as engineering courses and all of the more difficult CS classes (generally the more mathematical/formal ones) were mandatory - there was a relatively small amount of choice and certainly no way to graduate without being a fairly decent developer and quite happy with formal abstractions. Unfortunately, as the article describes, many CS courses have become "customer focused" so are now, as far as I can see, attempting to become vocational training courses, which universities are generally pretty awful at. When I finished my undergraduate course (with a 1st) the only thing I felt qualified to do was go into postgraduate research - which is pretty much what the course was oriented towards, although this was only apparent in retrospect. "Real" CS is irrelevant to 98% of development jobs. In my opinion anyone believing that a CS degree will train them to be a good developer is going to get a nasty shock. Having said that, some of the very best developers I have worked with did have the combination of awesome raw talent and CS degrees (often PhDs). Of course, I've also worked with some equally good developers (in their own way) who didn't have a degree.
kmfrk 15y ago
If you want a longer, elaborate article, NY Books has a great article on the current problems plaguing higher education: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-universities-why-are-they-failing/?pagination=false http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-uni....
edtechdev 15y ago
See also this recently published book for more on the problem of publishing in academic journals that nobody reads: Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy A free version is online: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/ http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsol... Here are some quotes from an interview w/the author from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/30/planned_obsolescence_by_kathleen_fitzpatrick_proposes_alternatives_to_outmoded_academic_journals http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/30/planned_obsole... "Here are two ideas Fitzpatrick proposes to kill for good: Peer review is necessary to maintaining the credibility of scholarly research and the institutions that support it; and publishing activity in peer-reviewed journals is the best gauge of a junior professor’s contribution to knowledge in her field." "Little in graduate school or on the tenure track inculcates helpfulness,” she writes, “and in fact much militates against it." "But to the extent that individual academics continue in their lust for “power and prestige” by vying for exclusive spots in elite journals, they should not be surprised to find themselves as irrelevant and moribund — indeed, zombie-like — as print monographs have already become, warns Fitzpatrick." “If we enjoy the privileges that obtain from upholding a closed system of discourse sufficiently that we’re unwilling to subject it to critical scrutiny, we may also need to accept the fact that the mainstream of public intellectual life will continue, in the main, to ignore our work,” she says. “Public funds will, in that case, be put to uses that seem more immediately pressing than our support.”
john_flintstone 15y ago
I graduated from one of the top 5 British universities in the mid 90s with a 2:1 degree in History, and I have to say that it was one of the easiest thing I ever did. I had class and lecture time of 4-6 hours a week, and spent another 8 hours reading and writing essays. The essay requirement, which contributed almost half to the degree grade, was only about 12 3,000 word essays a year. I had so much free time that I turned my part time job into a full time job, working 35 hours a week. Of course, I should have worked harder, and I would have learned more if I had, but I was 19 and 20 years old and it was just so easy to get a good degree without working at all. I know I was far from alone in this. Every degree course is not the same, and no doubt others may have worked long hours to earn theirs, but my own experience has left me with no respect for UK degrees, to the extent that when I read CVs from candidates I consider a third level degree irrelevant.
- waqf 15y ago
  If it was so easy, why didn't you get a First? Sounds like you chose low standards for yourself.
  - john_flintstone 15y ago
    I addressed that above: "Of course, I should have worked harder, and I would have learned more if I had..." My point (which I thought I'd made clearly) is that it was far, far too easy to do well, with little effort.
    - waqf 15y ago
      My point is that by your own admission, a 2:1 requires little effort and therefore is not to be considered "doing well".
  - dextorious 15y ago
    Or that his standards weren't the kind measured by a "First".
- nick_dm 15y ago
CJefferson 15y ago
This is, in my opinion, entirely the government's fault. The government decides how much to fund universities based on publication quality, which they rate based on the journals the papers are accepted into. There is almost no benefit to teaching students better, and there are huge advantages to passing students who would otherwise fail. This is because universities have a strict limit on the number of students they can accept, and these are not replaced if students fail their first year. So, to maximise income universities have to keep hold of students, while getting as many papers as possible into high quality journals.
ig1 15y ago
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737616 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737616
iRobot 15y ago
The conclusions are unfortunately correct, it is the student who is being made to pay for this policy. Bad course modules and bad degrees de-value the whole system and do NOT help those who scrape through but who are then unable to follow the level of skill required through to the workplace. As an employer who has interviewed and employed countless computer degree candidates, this has simply devalued the word 'degree' to a point where it may no longer get you even to the interview ahead of say a non-degree candidate with a tangible track record of real project work or experience behind them. This is not just a British phenomenon.
- UK-Al05 15y ago
  What are you looking for in a candidate? Are you looking for computer science? Or Software Engineering? I hear people interviewers are expecting cs graduates to know the MVP pattern or similar things and shocked when they hear they don't know. That's software engineering and not computer science.
  - frou_dh 15y ago
    If a candidate has applied for such a position then I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that they've tainted their pristine porcelain skin with -gasp- a few run-of-the-mill software projects.
frou_dh 15y ago
This aligns with my experience as a British student who received a first class degree from a fairly well-respected program. The reality was that the teaching was uniformly mediocre, I remained pretty clueless about the subject material, and I produced so-so quality work. I should have worked harder for my own curiosity, but there was a complete lack of external motivation because the academic standards were so low. To paraphrase someone's quote: I wouldn't recommend a club that had me as a member.
- 0684 15y ago
  >To paraphrase someone's quote: I wouldn't recommend a club that had me as a member. Well then, hypothetically, no institution you attend would be good enough.
  - frou_dh 15y ago
    That doesn't make sense to me. "Had" past-tense implied completing the duration of the degree in the manner described without receiving the slightest reprimand.
    - 0684 15y ago
      I was merely addressing the quotation.
- rbreve 15y ago
  Woody Allen
  - morganpyne 15y ago
    I thought it was Groucho Marx? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx Although apparently the sentiment even predates his usage of it by about 60 years.
- tankenmate 15y ago
  I think one of Groucho Marx's other quotes is probably more applicable to the sentiment of the article; "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."
jpdoctor 15y ago
> An easier way is to water down the educational system to a lower standard and then peg the university income to the number of students accepted while reducing the funding per head. In that way universities are given the happy choice of losing money and enforcing redundancies or watering down their requirements. This has also become true at many US universities. You can't water down the requirements and maintain placement stats at the same level. Many companies will simply pull the plug on recruiting and hiring once they have a bad experience with lame recent grads. The really sad thing: The universities take the student's money, and then leave the kid unemployed at the other end. All that student debt is not dischargable in bankruptcy.
- UK-Al05 15y ago
  I don't know how elite US universities were. In the UK very very few people went and pretty much guaranteed middle or upper class life. One of reasons we boosted universities in the UK was because USA was sending a lot to univeristy. However it ended the guarantee of middle or upper class life. They were education path of the elite, but we let a few working class smart people in via the grammar schools(Elite state schools) to keep the majority happy. Grammar schools selected at 11. The other way to get in was private schools, if you had the money. My ex-school is now an ex-grammar school because selection was banned for state schools. The people who did not pass selection went on to vocational training at 11. Note - Working class in the UK is roughly the same as lower middle class US. The university system in UK is still one of the best, were small country and have many universities in the top 100. However it's gone down.
  - wisty 15y ago
    In the old days, you could study at a library, go to private tutorials, then take a bar exam or accounting exam to become a lawyer or accountant or doctor. I doubt even the public service required a degree, as long as you could pass their entrance exam. There were other requirements for the professions, (such as an apprenticeship), but a degree wasn't always needed. (note, I'm not certain of the details, that's just what some of my relatives have said about how people used to cope without degrees). The more people get degrees, the more things they are needed for. The lower class were mostly freed by economic growth. In 1960, the UK GDP/capita was about $3 a day, which is about the point where people stop worrying about what they are going to eat, and worry about health, education, their career, and where they are going to eat. If they needed to study at privatized training centres, then pay for a professional board to assess them, they'd have done that too, but the government responded faster than the professional societies.
k-mcgrady 15y ago
Two and a half years ago I made the decision not to go to University and so far I think it was one of the best decisions I've made. I have learnt a lot more through experience (I'm a freelance iOS developer). I have also learnt about life quicker. After living with some of my friends who went to University I quickly realised how easy they have it. A few hours of classes a week (depending on the course) and very little studying outside of class. They also have everything paid for them through student loans and grants. On the other had I had to work hard and ensure my business succeeded or I wouldn't make rent. University in the UK has been something that is just 'what people do'. Most people coming out of A-levels wouldn't even consider not going to University, especially because High Schools push it so hard (as it makes them look good). There needs to be more education in High Schools about the option of not attending University.
- highace 15y ago
  You're right, and I think you made the right choice. I'm beginning to regret my decision to go to university. The intellectual grade of my colleagues is shocking, a significant proportion can't even write a paragraph properly, and I'm constantly carrying all the slack on group projects. I'm a final year student on an Information Systems degree, and one of the modules I'm currently taking, "Web Application Development", is nothing more than an introduction to HTML and CSS. In fact we don't even have to produce anything aside from a few snippets. I feel like I've wasted my time and been ripped off, if I'm ever in the position to hire I would never employ someone based on a degree alone.
  - k-mcgrady 15y ago
    That sounds pretty bad. Only time will tell which decision works out though. At the minute most employers won't even consider someone without a degree so it would be difficult for me to find a decent 9-5 job. University still works well for some courses too (e.g. law, medicine) but it needs to stop being presented as the only option. In schools now you are told to either pick a trade (plumber, electrician etc.) or go to University but there are other options.
    - 15y ago
ugyuyguy 15y ago
The SHOCKING Truth about a pootly organised educational system by a hugely unsuccessful government. Living standards in the UK are good due partly to the NHS and the private sector jobs, but the corrupt government attitude of take take take yet give back little is turning this country in to a 'toilet'.
rluhar 15y ago
I graduated in Computer Science in 2004 from a very well respected British University. I graduated with a first. There is usually a very clearly signposted path to getting a "good degree" without necessarily having to know all that much core computer science. My course was a four year course. The total weighting for each year was 10-20-3-40 (years 1-4). The first two years had non-optional, core CS modules (algorithms, logic, discrete maths, etc.) and the final two years had a lot of electives. If you could muddle through the first two years, you could take a series of electives in the final two years (foreign languages, Accounting and finance, etc.) that were agruably much easier. I got mediocre grades in the first two years, but good grades in the final two years, resulting in a first class degree overall. I regret my choices, but as a lazy undergrad, I took the path of least resistance to achieve my target (a first class degree). I was not the only one who did this. The problem is that people like me made the University look good, so I think they made it very easy to game the System. The only thing I worked really hard on were the programming assignments and projects. The exams were easy to pass provided since they had a very clearly laid out pattern, and questions tended to be repeated year and after year. If you could solve exam questions from the last 3-4 years before your final exam, you would probably ace it.
shanemhansen 15y ago
I experienced how poorly CS classes prepared students for jobs in Software Engineering (I do realize they're not the same thing, but that's obviously the main degree we look for). I interviewed people who have a masters degree with an emphasis in Java, yet they were unaware of even the simplest details about how the JVM works (implementation details of String class, JIT compilation). I felt bad for this person, I wonder if it's too late for them to get refund on that degree because it sure as heck didn't increase their earning potential.
- ugyuyguy 15y ago
  I too have a degree in CS, which required me to 'play' with Java. Most students on the course did not have the basic concepts of Strings and ints let alone JIT. Most left with the ability to "avoid programming and CLI at all cost" and are still working in jobs they could have done without a degree paying £16-21K with zero career progression and / or training.
UK-Al05 15y ago
I find threads like these funny, people complain about not enough software engineering such as not knowing design patterns or the details of a java implementation. On the other hand a different group complain about the lack of of 'real' cs, which is mostly math. Two opposing views, but they think the argument is both in their favour. There is also a massive backlash against universities in the UK at the moment. I am seeing many 'apprentice' software developers, and freelance developers skipping university. They tell me they know more than the average university graduate. So I ask them about complexity? Nope. Predicate Logic? Nope. These are things taught in even the lowest polytechnic school and they don't know them. They don't know the bounds of their own ignorance because they think cs is just knowing a few programming languages, whipping up a few apps and websites. They know more languages the average graduate? Maybe. Can they do software engineering? The easy business stuff. Do they know cs? No. I think they have never been exposed to cs and don't how deep it goes. I've seen the accredited software developer apprenticeship curriculum and it's mostly java and design patterns. I think the focus on apprenticeships at the moment is creating a generation of software developers who don't know what NP-Complete means. Computer science is not whipping up applications with fancy design patterns, that's why you're better than them. Give them a few years and their cs background + Software engineering experience will begin to shine.
- wmf 15y ago
  Are those views really opposing? Do people who ask for more software engineering want it to replace hard CS or augment it?
  - UK-Al05 15y ago
    I think you will find if you start adding design pattern modules or methodology modules. The people on the side of cs will moan about it being watered down. If you don't add them, the people on the side of software engineering, will say it's not relevant to business needs. If you try to compromise they both moan about university not being relevant...
    - demian 15y ago
lhnz 15y ago
This was my experience doing Computer Science at a British University, too. Most of the modules which I took were so watered down that they were absolutely useless to me. I knew this and I was pretty depressed at the time. I'm not very good at doing mindless work: some of the lectures I just stopped going to and other times I completely ignored the vacuous assignments I was being asked to do. Looking back I wish I had dropped out and gone straight into a job with the programming skills I was teaching myself. (But I guess if I had done this I might not have learnt about fundamental CS concepts.) I actually love learning but like to do it in my own way, on my own accord. I'm thinking of taking those online Stanford classes which are starting soon -- I guess the only thing that is missing from these is human conversation. I wonder if one day people might informally meet for coffee to discuss the online courses they're taking together. ;)
lgeek 15y ago
Final year CS student in a British University here. I can certainly see where the author's coming from, although I don't find the situation this dire. I'm not British so I don't know that much about how Universities worked and were perceived in society in the past and I guess I might have a slightly different mindset. Anyway, let me explain myself. We have this modular course structure at my school. Yes, you can pick courses varying from "Developing web applications with Java" to hard CS stuff like compiler design and advanced algorithms. As far as I can tell, no course has been dropped because it was too hard - because students like challenges and take them. The same goes for final year projects, I've seen a student saying that she won't be doing any programming for her project (yeah, WTF), but I also know of more serious engineering projects (like a guy refreshing the electronics and more importantly, the software of a popular home-build 3D printer - and using the capabilities to do some stuff I'd really like to have on my 3d printer), or more experimental projects like mining Twitter for medical drug information (like perceived effectiveness, side-effects, usage patterns, etc). What I'm trying to say is that there might be some easy paths you could take, but the students which always pick the easiest choice are usually the ones who end failing or dropping out. Sure, some of them graduate and I have mixed feelings about having the same degree as some of my fellow students. The author says that ' By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the students should have been failed.'. Well, in my school about 20% of the students are failed - each year. Another topic is grade scaling. Yes, most lab and coursework grades are scaled in the first year and some in the second year. Exams are never scaled! But here's the thing, scaling is always down. It can be argued that labs are too easy if you need to scale the grades down and it is frustrating to do a perfect job and end up with a 70 something percent mark. But grades are never scaled up to 'turn a fail into a II'. Finally, some people argue that a formal CS education is useless and out of touch with reality. I definitely don't agree. Knowing algorithms and data structures can give you an edge even for simple programs, knowing that some research areas and approaches even exist helps you avoid a lot of easy mistakes, labs will help you design better and faster because you sort of develop your own process and you get to know common pitfalls, reports and presentations train you to communicate better and using the proper domain language, having a clear image of how computers work from the grounds up is great when you're debugging. TL;DR: Formal CS education still useful, just more chances to shoot yourself in the foot. (Yes, I consider getting a first without learning too much to be shooting yourself in the foot.) Study the fundamentals and the hard stuff and you should be better off than a self-taught person.
lambda 15y ago
You know, I'm getting pretty sick of all of these "doom and gloom" stories about the modern higher education system. Yes, the modern higher education system is not ideal. But what, in life, really is? That's not to say that we shouldn't pursue a better system, but we shouldn't give up on a system just because it's not ideal. And with all of these doom and gloom stories, I have yet to see anyone offer an alternative. Yeah, there's a lot of paperwork involved in being a professor, and you get evaluated on criteria that don't quite line up with the ideal for being a great professor. But what would be better? How can we create a better system? And if there's such an obvious better answer, why doesn't someone do it? If there is some obviously better system, I'd love to see it. If such a thing exits, it should be quite competitive with the current higher education system. No one wants to hire incompetent new graduates. No one wants to be one. So we should see something better, something that indicates there is some better way of doing this. Instead, we see a steady stream of technological progress. I can do things that no one could do before, like carrying a device around that allows me to pinpoint my precise location, stream maps down to me, find me directions to wherever I want to go, read those directions aloud in a synthesized voice, all for the price of of 2% of median yearly income (including hardware, software, and the service). And that, of course, is not to mention all of the other things that are available to me. Now, maybe I'm living in a bubble, built by people who got a proper education before all of this grade inflation and other nonsense. But really, this article is complaining about the last 20 years. A large portion of the people who are doing work in technical fields finished school within the last 20 years. And yet, we're still seeing significant progress; we are still living in a world that is tumbling into the future at a high rate. So I want to know two things. For one, why are we still progressing so quickly, despite these apparent problems? How are we managing to innovate, if our educational and academic foundation is so unsound? And for another, what is the solution? What do you propose we do better? If it's so much obviously better, why don't we do it? Or why doesn't someone, somewhere do it, and show significantly better results? I think one reason is that when you are doing work in the top few percent of human ability, you look around and realize how ordinary it is. Even being at the top, everyone has their flaws. No one is perfect. Systems designed to prevent people from cheating also prevent some people from doing amazing work. But overal, it isn't a few geniuses at the level of "Mozart" that we need; it's a lot of people, doing work at a high level, but not what some might consider "genius." If you are immersed in it seems somewhat boring, but when it all adds up, it winds up opening new possibilities that were simply not available 10, 20, or 30 years ago.
noderivative 15y ago
A string vibrates on me when in the online course about Machine Learning a voice said "you don't need to know what a derivate is ..."
sbarlster 15y ago
I have experienced two degrees in two different universities in the UK. First was a standard undergraduate course finishing in 1992, a joint BSc in Economics and CS. Course content was fine (complexity, algorithms, compilers, database design etc). However the students attitude was poor. As an undergrad straight from school I did not self learn, did not study - generally not motivated. Left in recession and with poor CS skills could not find work so delivered pizzas, worked the call centres, manned beach car park huts - all fun however. Second degrees was a 1 year MSc in Software Engineering - this time focusing on the softer skills around methodologies, design, large systems modularity etc. This time the student was motivated. I read, studied, wrote C++ and Java programs, delivered tasks on time and used my previous economics knowledge to build a dissertation on neural networks analysis of wholesale electricity prices. I left and went straight into a C/C++ job helping to build a mobile phone network planning system. On both occasions the tools, environment and time were available. Just the student attitude differed. I saw what I wanted and went for it - just not the first time.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
> As the Chinese say, I have lived in interesting times. Nitpick: this is not a Chinese saying. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_tim...

187 points by jackfoxy 15y ago

"I've never worked out whether I was, in American terms, an assistant professor or an associate professor." Generally speaking, British lecturers are equiv. to associate professors, and assistant professors are untenured. Most post-docs in proper academic departments are assistant professors, but this is not a hard and fast rule; post-docs in tenure-track programs nearly always are assistant professors.

cdcarter 15y ago

Not just in Britain. The grade "scaling" or inflation is rampant in the US, but not nearly as bad as the insane focus on research. The number one job of a professor should be to teach the students of the college.

rubidium 15y ago
Research is teaching; teaching the graduate students how to do research. I agree with your sentiment that college profs should care about teaching, but to be honest too much is asked of them. They're expected to be excellent researchers, inexhaustible grant writers, engaging teachers, inspiring mentors, and part-time entrepreneurs. Those who can achieve 4 of the 5 are still impressive, and more often then not somethings got give.
- Retric 15y ago
  In the US 'Research' generates money for a University. You apply for outside grants and then fund your students who are then able to pay the University the vast majority of that money. Depending on the grant you may even pay for lab space and equipment as well as a large chunk of a professors salary.
- cdcarter 15y ago
  Yes, too much is asked of them. In my mind, the solution is to just ask less, specifically ask them to primarily be teachers. This does have implications for grad programs and I don't know what, but it would certainly clean up undergraduate education.
waqf 15y ago
In the US the tying of funding to results is accomplished by market forces (which also favour, say, campus facilities) whereas in Britain it's administered directly by the government (which also favours "research", that is, publication count). But since both place a substantial weight on "graduation rate", the same effect is seen vis-à-vis teaching quality.
pmb 15y ago
Professors will do or become whatever is required of them to achieve tenure. The number on job of a professor is therefore to meet the tenure requirements of the institution - which at most places, means "do lots of research". Change the reward system and you can change how things work.
jseliger 15y ago
I'd observe a couple things, which are much elaborated here: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/31/college-graduate-earning-and-learning-more-on-student-choice/ http://jseliger.com/2011/10/31/college-graduate-earning-and-... 1) Professors are responding to institutional and student incentives: institutions reward research, so professors prioritize research over teaching. 2) Students are, for the most part, choosing easier degrees; as a result, those degrees are prospering, and many non-easy disciplines are watering down their criteria to attract remaining students. 3) The only real impetus for change that I can see comes from two areas: a) the amorphous group of employers who want better outcomes—but they have very little leverage and b) graduates who are unhappy to discover they have a great deal of debt and few marketable skills. Again, however, they have little leverage.
Lost_BiomedE 15y ago
Two types of schools that I have seen in the U.S., diploma mills, and failure mills. I went to school in a fail as many as you can school. Almost every class I walked into was 50-70% fail by design. I learned a lot, mainly studying on my own. The focus on research vs. teaching was just as strong.
tansey 15y ago
Then none of the people in top universities would be there. Talented researchers go to top-tier universities for their PhD because they want to work on research professionally. They do not wish to teach, they are forced to do it because academia is, for the most part, the only place left where someone can be a professional researcher. Although there are still corporate research labs around, the days of Shannon developing Information Theory at Bell Labs are long gone. Quite frankly, I'm fine with this setup. If you want to have a good undergraduate education provided to you by the professors, go to a school where they have that as a priority. If you want to get involved in pushing the boundaries of knowledge, then go to a place like MIT or Stanford and get involved in an undergraduate research program.

remyroy 15y ago

This gives me a better insight as to why my CS degree is a piece of shit and why I learn not much more than I already knew or that I use on a regular basis. I'm Canadian not British, but I do relate to everything that was said in this article. I completed my degree in 2004. Great read.

InclinedPlane 15y ago
Most colleges do a poor job of providing CS education. Worse yet, CS is a poor substitute for the education needed to do software engineering.
- tsotha 15y ago
  We're finding candidates with a math, physics, or engineering background are better prepared to write software than CS graduates. I don't really understand why that should be the case.
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    In my opinion those majors are generally more challenging than CS and thus the graduates will be of a higher intellectual caliber. Additionally, folks pursuing technical careers with those degrees will be more likely to have a personal passion for technology. They also won't have the bad habits that CS programs often instill in graduates, they will look to the workplace and the industry standards as a guideline for their habits and behaviors rather than their college professors and fellow class-mates.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    When I did a CS degree in the 80s we did roughly the same amount of maths as engineering courses and all of the more difficult CS classes (generally the more mathematical/formal ones) were mandatory - there was a relatively small amount of choice and certainly no way to graduate without being a fairly decent developer and quite happy with formal abstractions. Unfortunately, as the article describes, many CS courses have become "customer focused" so are now, as far as I can see, attempting to become vocational training courses, which universities are generally pretty awful at. When I finished my undergraduate course (with a 1st) the only thing I felt qualified to do was go into postgraduate research - which is pretty much what the course was oriented towards, although this was only apparent in retrospect. "Real" CS is irrelevant to 98% of development jobs. In my opinion anyone believing that a CS degree will train them to be a good developer is going to get a nasty shock. Having said that, some of the very best developers I have worked with did have the combination of awesome raw talent and CS degrees (often PhDs). Of course, I've also worked with some equally good developers (in their own way) who didn't have a degree.

kmfrk 15y ago

If you want a longer, elaborate article, NY Books has a great article on the current problems plaguing higher education: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-universities-why-are-they-failing/?pagination=false http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-uni....

edtechdev 15y ago

See also this recently published book for more on the problem of publishing in academic journals that nobody reads: Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy A free version is online: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/ http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsol... Here are some quotes from an interview w/the author from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/30/planned_obsolescence_by_kathleen_fitzpatrick_proposes_alternatives_to_outmoded_academic_journals http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/30/planned_obsole... "Here are two ideas Fitzpatrick proposes to kill for good: Peer review is necessary to maintaining the credibility of scholarly research and the institutions that support it; and publishing activity in peer-reviewed journals is the best gauge of a junior professor’s contribution to knowledge in her field." "Little in graduate school or on the tenure track inculcates helpfulness,” she writes, “and in fact much militates against it." "But to the extent that individual academics continue in their lust for “power and prestige” by vying for exclusive spots in elite journals, they should not be surprised to find themselves as irrelevant and moribund — indeed, zombie-like — as print monographs have already become, warns Fitzpatrick." “If we enjoy the privileges that obtain from upholding a closed system of discourse sufficiently that we’re unwilling to subject it to critical scrutiny, we may also need to accept the fact that the mainstream of public intellectual life will continue, in the main, to ignore our work,” she says. “Public funds will, in that case, be put to uses that seem more immediately pressing than our support.”

john_flintstone 15y ago

I graduated from one of the top 5 British universities in the mid 90s with a 2:1 degree in History, and I have to say that it was one of the easiest thing I ever did. I had class and lecture time of 4-6 hours a week, and spent another 8 hours reading and writing essays. The essay requirement, which contributed almost half to the degree grade, was only about 12 3,000 word essays a year. I had so much free time that I turned my part time job into a full time job, working 35 hours a week. Of course, I should have worked harder, and I would have learned more if I had, but I was 19 and 20 years old and it was just so easy to get a good degree without working at all. I know I was far from alone in this. Every degree course is not the same, and no doubt others may have worked long hours to earn theirs, but my own experience has left me with no respect for UK degrees, to the extent that when I read CVs from candidates I consider a third level degree irrelevant.

waqf 15y ago
If it was so easy, why didn't you get a First? Sounds like you chose low standards for yourself.
- john_flintstone 15y ago
  I addressed that above: "Of course, I should have worked harder, and I would have learned more if I had..." My point (which I thought I'd made clearly) is that it was far, far too easy to do well, with little effort.
  - waqf 15y ago
    My point is that by your own admission, a 2:1 requires little effort and therefore is not to be considered "doing well".
- dextorious 15y ago
  Or that his standards weren't the kind measured by a "First".
nick_dm 15y ago

CJefferson 15y ago

This is, in my opinion, entirely the government's fault. The government decides how much to fund universities based on publication quality, which they rate based on the journals the papers are accepted into. There is almost no benefit to teaching students better, and there are huge advantages to passing students who would otherwise fail. This is because universities have a strict limit on the number of students they can accept, and these are not replaced if students fail their first year. So, to maximise income universities have to keep hold of students, while getting as many papers as possible into high quality journals.

ig1 15y ago

Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737616 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737616

iRobot 15y ago

The conclusions are unfortunately correct, it is the student who is being made to pay for this policy. Bad course modules and bad degrees de-value the whole system and do NOT help those who scrape through but who are then unable to follow the level of skill required through to the workplace. As an employer who has interviewed and employed countless computer degree candidates, this has simply devalued the word 'degree' to a point where it may no longer get you even to the interview ahead of say a non-degree candidate with a tangible track record of real project work or experience behind them. This is not just a British phenomenon.

UK-Al05 15y ago
What are you looking for in a candidate? Are you looking for computer science? Or Software Engineering? I hear people interviewers are expecting cs graduates to know the MVP pattern or similar things and shocked when they hear they don't know. That's software engineering and not computer science.
- frou_dh 15y ago
  If a candidate has applied for such a position then I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that they've tainted their pristine porcelain skin with -gasp- a few run-of-the-mill software projects.

frou_dh 15y ago

This aligns with my experience as a British student who received a first class degree from a fairly well-respected program. The reality was that the teaching was uniformly mediocre, I remained pretty clueless about the subject material, and I produced so-so quality work. I should have worked harder for my own curiosity, but there was a complete lack of external motivation because the academic standards were so low. To paraphrase someone's quote: I wouldn't recommend a club that had me as a member.

0684 15y ago
>To paraphrase someone's quote: I wouldn't recommend a club that had me as a member. Well then, hypothetically, no institution you attend would be good enough.
- frou_dh 15y ago
  That doesn't make sense to me. "Had" past-tense implied completing the duration of the degree in the manner described without receiving the slightest reprimand.
  - 0684 15y ago
    I was merely addressing the quotation.
rbreve 15y ago
Woody Allen
- morganpyne 15y ago
  I thought it was Groucho Marx? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx Although apparently the sentiment even predates his usage of it by about 60 years.
tankenmate 15y ago
I think one of Groucho Marx's other quotes is probably more applicable to the sentiment of the article; "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

jpdoctor 15y ago

> An easier way is to water down the educational system to a lower standard and then peg the university income to the number of students accepted while reducing the funding per head. In that way universities are given the happy choice of losing money and enforcing redundancies or watering down their requirements. This has also become true at many US universities. You can't water down the requirements and maintain placement stats at the same level. Many companies will simply pull the plug on recruiting and hiring once they have a bad experience with lame recent grads. The really sad thing: The universities take the student's money, and then leave the kid unemployed at the other end. All that student debt is not dischargable in bankruptcy.

UK-Al05 15y ago
I don't know how elite US universities were. In the UK very very few people went and pretty much guaranteed middle or upper class life. One of reasons we boosted universities in the UK was because USA was sending a lot to univeristy. However it ended the guarantee of middle or upper class life. They were education path of the elite, but we let a few working class smart people in via the grammar schools(Elite state schools) to keep the majority happy. Grammar schools selected at 11. The other way to get in was private schools, if you had the money. My ex-school is now an ex-grammar school because selection was banned for state schools. The people who did not pass selection went on to vocational training at 11. Note - Working class in the UK is roughly the same as lower middle class US. The university system in UK is still one of the best, were small country and have many universities in the top 100. However it's gone down.
- wisty 15y ago
  In the old days, you could study at a library, go to private tutorials, then take a bar exam or accounting exam to become a lawyer or accountant or doctor. I doubt even the public service required a degree, as long as you could pass their entrance exam. There were other requirements for the professions, (such as an apprenticeship), but a degree wasn't always needed. (note, I'm not certain of the details, that's just what some of my relatives have said about how people used to cope without degrees). The more people get degrees, the more things they are needed for. The lower class were mostly freed by economic growth. In 1960, the UK GDP/capita was about $3 a day, which is about the point where people stop worrying about what they are going to eat, and worry about health, education, their career, and where they are going to eat. If they needed to study at privatized training centres, then pay for a professional board to assess them, they'd have done that too, but the government responded faster than the professional societies.

k-mcgrady 15y ago

Two and a half years ago I made the decision not to go to University and so far I think it was one of the best decisions I've made. I have learnt a lot more through experience (I'm a freelance iOS developer). I have also learnt about life quicker. After living with some of my friends who went to University I quickly realised how easy they have it. A few hours of classes a week (depending on the course) and very little studying outside of class. They also have everything paid for them through student loans and grants. On the other had I had to work hard and ensure my business succeeded or I wouldn't make rent. University in the UK has been something that is just 'what people do'. Most people coming out of A-levels wouldn't even consider not going to University, especially because High Schools push it so hard (as it makes them look good). There needs to be more education in High Schools about the option of not attending University.

highace 15y ago
You're right, and I think you made the right choice. I'm beginning to regret my decision to go to university. The intellectual grade of my colleagues is shocking, a significant proportion can't even write a paragraph properly, and I'm constantly carrying all the slack on group projects. I'm a final year student on an Information Systems degree, and one of the modules I'm currently taking, "Web Application Development", is nothing more than an introduction to HTML and CSS. In fact we don't even have to produce anything aside from a few snippets. I feel like I've wasted my time and been ripped off, if I'm ever in the position to hire I would never employ someone based on a degree alone.
- k-mcgrady 15y ago
  That sounds pretty bad. Only time will tell which decision works out though. At the minute most employers won't even consider someone without a degree so it would be difficult for me to find a decent 9-5 job. University still works well for some courses too (e.g. law, medicine) but it needs to stop being presented as the only option. In schools now you are told to either pick a trade (plumber, electrician etc.) or go to University but there are other options.
  - 15y ago

ugyuyguy 15y ago

The SHOCKING Truth about a pootly organised educational system by a hugely unsuccessful government. Living standards in the UK are good due partly to the NHS and the private sector jobs, but the corrupt government attitude of take take take yet give back little is turning this country in to a 'toilet'.

rluhar 15y ago

I graduated in Computer Science in 2004 from a very well respected British University. I graduated with a first. There is usually a very clearly signposted path to getting a "good degree" without necessarily having to know all that much core computer science. My course was a four year course. The total weighting for each year was 10-20-3-40 (years 1-4). The first two years had non-optional, core CS modules (algorithms, logic, discrete maths, etc.) and the final two years had a lot of electives. If you could muddle through the first two years, you could take a series of electives in the final two years (foreign languages, Accounting and finance, etc.) that were agruably much easier. I got mediocre grades in the first two years, but good grades in the final two years, resulting in a first class degree overall. I regret my choices, but as a lazy undergrad, I took the path of least resistance to achieve my target (a first class degree). I was not the only one who did this. The problem is that people like me made the University look good, so I think they made it very easy to game the System. The only thing I worked really hard on were the programming assignments and projects. The exams were easy to pass provided since they had a very clearly laid out pattern, and questions tended to be repeated year and after year. If you could solve exam questions from the last 3-4 years before your final exam, you would probably ace it.

shanemhansen 15y ago

I experienced how poorly CS classes prepared students for jobs in Software Engineering (I do realize they're not the same thing, but that's obviously the main degree we look for). I interviewed people who have a masters degree with an emphasis in Java, yet they were unaware of even the simplest details about how the JVM works (implementation details of String class, JIT compilation). I felt bad for this person, I wonder if it's too late for them to get refund on that degree because it sure as heck didn't increase their earning potential.

ugyuyguy 15y ago
I too have a degree in CS, which required me to 'play' with Java. Most students on the course did not have the basic concepts of Strings and ints let alone JIT. Most left with the ability to "avoid programming and CLI at all cost" and are still working in jobs they could have done without a degree paying £16-21K with zero career progression and / or training.

UK-Al05 15y ago

I find threads like these funny, people complain about not enough software engineering such as not knowing design patterns or the details of a java implementation. On the other hand a different group complain about the lack of of 'real' cs, which is mostly math. Two opposing views, but they think the argument is both in their favour. There is also a massive backlash against universities in the UK at the moment. I am seeing many 'apprentice' software developers, and freelance developers skipping university. They tell me they know more than the average university graduate. So I ask them about complexity? Nope. Predicate Logic? Nope. These are things taught in even the lowest polytechnic school and they don't know them. They don't know the bounds of their own ignorance because they think cs is just knowing a few programming languages, whipping up a few apps and websites. They know more languages the average graduate? Maybe. Can they do software engineering? The easy business stuff. Do they know cs? No. I think they have never been exposed to cs and don't how deep it goes. I've seen the accredited software developer apprenticeship curriculum and it's mostly java and design patterns. I think the focus on apprenticeships at the moment is creating a generation of software developers who don't know what NP-Complete means. Computer science is not whipping up applications with fancy design patterns, that's why you're better than them. Give them a few years and their cs background + Software engineering experience will begin to shine.

wmf 15y ago
Are those views really opposing? Do people who ask for more software engineering want it to replace hard CS or augment it?
- UK-Al05 15y ago
  I think you will find if you start adding design pattern modules or methodology modules. The people on the side of cs will moan about it being watered down. If you don't add them, the people on the side of software engineering, will say it's not relevant to business needs. If you try to compromise they both moan about university not being relevant...
  - demian 15y ago

lhnz 15y ago

This was my experience doing Computer Science at a British University, too. Most of the modules which I took were so watered down that they were absolutely useless to me. I knew this and I was pretty depressed at the time. I'm not very good at doing mindless work: some of the lectures I just stopped going to and other times I completely ignored the vacuous assignments I was being asked to do. Looking back I wish I had dropped out and gone straight into a job with the programming skills I was teaching myself. (But I guess if I had done this I might not have learnt about fundamental CS concepts.) I actually love learning but like to do it in my own way, on my own accord. I'm thinking of taking those online Stanford classes which are starting soon -- I guess the only thing that is missing from these is human conversation. I wonder if one day people might informally meet for coffee to discuss the online courses they're taking together. ;)

lgeek 15y ago

Final year CS student in a British University here. I can certainly see where the author's coming from, although I don't find the situation this dire. I'm not British so I don't know that much about how Universities worked and were perceived in society in the past and I guess I might have a slightly different mindset. Anyway, let me explain myself. We have this modular course structure at my school. Yes, you can pick courses varying from "Developing web applications with Java" to hard CS stuff like compiler design and advanced algorithms. As far as I can tell, no course has been dropped because it was too hard - because students like challenges and take them. The same goes for final year projects, I've seen a student saying that she won't be doing any programming for her project (yeah, WTF), but I also know of more serious engineering projects (like a guy refreshing the electronics and more importantly, the software of a popular home-build 3D printer - and using the capabilities to do some stuff I'd really like to have on my 3d printer), or more experimental projects like mining Twitter for medical drug information (like perceived effectiveness, side-effects, usage patterns, etc). What I'm trying to say is that there might be some easy paths you could take, but the students which always pick the easiest choice are usually the ones who end failing or dropping out. Sure, some of them graduate and I have mixed feelings about having the same degree as some of my fellow students. The author says that ' By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the students should have been failed.'. Well, in my school about 20% of the students are failed - each year. Another topic is grade scaling. Yes, most lab and coursework grades are scaled in the first year and some in the second year. Exams are never scaled! But here's the thing, scaling is always down. It can be argued that labs are too easy if you need to scale the grades down and it is frustrating to do a perfect job and end up with a 70 something percent mark. But grades are never scaled up to 'turn a fail into a II'. Finally, some people argue that a formal CS education is useless and out of touch with reality. I definitely don't agree. Knowing algorithms and data structures can give you an edge even for simple programs, knowing that some research areas and approaches even exist helps you avoid a lot of easy mistakes, labs will help you design better and faster because you sort of develop your own process and you get to know common pitfalls, reports and presentations train you to communicate better and using the proper domain language, having a clear image of how computers work from the grounds up is great when you're debugging. TL;DR: Formal CS education still useful, just more chances to shoot yourself in the foot. (Yes, I consider getting a first without learning too much to be shooting yourself in the foot.) Study the fundamentals and the hard stuff and you should be better off than a self-taught person.

lambda 15y ago

You know, I'm getting pretty sick of all of these "doom and gloom" stories about the modern higher education system. Yes, the modern higher education system is not ideal. But what, in life, really is? That's not to say that we shouldn't pursue a better system, but we shouldn't give up on a system just because it's not ideal. And with all of these doom and gloom stories, I have yet to see anyone offer an alternative. Yeah, there's a lot of paperwork involved in being a professor, and you get evaluated on criteria that don't quite line up with the ideal for being a great professor. But what would be better? How can we create a better system? And if there's such an obvious better answer, why doesn't someone do it? If there is some obviously better system, I'd love to see it. If such a thing exits, it should be quite competitive with the current higher education system. No one wants to hire incompetent new graduates. No one wants to be one. So we should see something better, something that indicates there is some better way of doing this. Instead, we see a steady stream of technological progress. I can do things that no one could do before, like carrying a device around that allows me to pinpoint my precise location, stream maps down to me, find me directions to wherever I want to go, read those directions aloud in a synthesized voice, all for the price of of 2% of median yearly income (including hardware, software, and the service). And that, of course, is not to mention all of the other things that are available to me. Now, maybe I'm living in a bubble, built by people who got a proper education before all of this grade inflation and other nonsense. But really, this article is complaining about the last 20 years. A large portion of the people who are doing work in technical fields finished school within the last 20 years. And yet, we're still seeing significant progress; we are still living in a world that is tumbling into the future at a high rate. So I want to know two things. For one, why are we still progressing so quickly, despite these apparent problems? How are we managing to innovate, if our educational and academic foundation is so unsound? And for another, what is the solution? What do you propose we do better? If it's so much obviously better, why don't we do it? Or why doesn't someone, somewhere do it, and show significantly better results? I think one reason is that when you are doing work in the top few percent of human ability, you look around and realize how ordinary it is. Even being at the top, everyone has their flaws. No one is perfect. Systems designed to prevent people from cheating also prevent some people from doing amazing work. But overal, it isn't a few geniuses at the level of "Mozart" that we need; it's a lot of people, doing work at a high level, but not what some might consider "genius." If you are immersed in it seems somewhat boring, but when it all adds up, it winds up opening new possibilities that were simply not available 10, 20, or 30 years ago.

noderivative 15y ago

A string vibrates on me when in the online course about Machine Learning a voice said "you don't need to know what a derivate is ..."

sbarlster 15y ago

I have experienced two degrees in two different universities in the UK. First was a standard undergraduate course finishing in 1992, a joint BSc in Economics and CS. Course content was fine (complexity, algorithms, compilers, database design etc). However the students attitude was poor. As an undergrad straight from school I did not self learn, did not study - generally not motivated. Left in recession and with poor CS skills could not find work so delivered pizzas, worked the call centres, manned beach car park huts - all fun however. Second degrees was a 1 year MSc in Software Engineering - this time focusing on the softer skills around methodologies, design, large systems modularity etc. This time the student was motivated. I read, studied, wrote C++ and Java programs, delivered tasks on time and used my previous economics knowledge to build a dissertation on neural networks analysis of wholesale electricity prices. I left and went straight into a C/C++ job helping to build a mobile phone network planning system. On both occasions the tools, environment and time were available. Just the student attitude differed. I saw what I wanted and went for it - just not the first time.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

> As the Chinese say, I have lived in interesting times. Nitpick: this is not a Chinese saying. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_tim...