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What's Wrong With the American University System
ideonexus writes "The Atlantic has an excellent interview with Andrew Hacker — co-author with Claudia Dreifus of a book titled Higher Education? — covering everything that's wrong with the American university system. The discussion ranges from entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching; to 22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position after graduating with six-figures of debt; to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate. It really lays out the farce of university culture and reminds me of everything I absolutely despised about my college life. Dreifus is active in the comments section of the article as well, lending to a fantastic discussion on the subject."
it is likely the best university system in the world. Contrast that with K-12 (lower ed) and I find it hard to complain about what is seemingly a world class higher education model.
Fix that first.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University. The ticket sales and merchandising are a HUGE boon for most universities, with little in the way of player salaries to cut into all that phat cash.
And, even if they didn't make money directly, popular sports programs are often a huge draw for the local donors and alumni supporters that keep most universities going. Like it or not, wealthy alumni and locals are a helluva lot more interested in how the football/basketball teams are doing than how many papers Professor Dipschitz published this year, or how much you've improved your graduation rate.
And before a bunch of you non-Americans kick in with snide "handegg" remarks, yes I'm aware that you're "football" is different from ours. But we *are* talking about American universities here.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well, for starters they're operated like for-profit corporations, instead of education institutions
As much as I hate to say it, that's one of the biggest problems. Everybody thinks they deserve to go to college. Everybody thinks that because they have a degree, they can command six figures. That's not the reality though. Somebody has to be a cart-pusher. Somebody has to work fast food.
I'm a system administrator. I didn't go to college. I'm more competent than most of my peers that did go to college.
The biggest problem with higher education in the USA is it is just a few ticks above what the high-school diploma used to be. IMHO that's because our high-school system is rather poor when it comes down to it. In the end experience is what gets you a job and diploma and degrees simply show that you aren't an absolute idiot. There a lot of jobs that require a degree when there is no need for it.
people stop trying to find faults with the american university system. It is the elementary/high schools in america that needs to be fixed. The higher education in USA is the best in the world. People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
What is wrong with the university system is because we've screwed up our high school system to pretty much let -everyone- graduate, a diploma now means nothing. Because of this, people who usually should go to a trade school, or just have on-site training from high school is now attending university to stand out in the job market. So because of this, universities are forced to hire sub par teachers to meet the demand and because no one wants to attend a university with a 60% flunk-out rate, universities lower standards. Of course this is just a cat and mouse game, eventually employers are going to require things beyond a bachelors degree for entry-level jobs, etc.
Fix our high school system by actually -failing- kids who can't do the work. None of this "can I please have extra credit despite me doing nothing but talking in class?" crap that keeps high-profile athletes who are dumber than rocks with "passing" grades.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Name one profession that is _not_ filled with petty politics, sucking up to superiors, back stabbing and arguing over parking spots?
The difference is only academics write a thick book about it.
The summary started out good but:
"They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts".
"The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education."
I'm not saying get rid of liberal arts. They're great. I loved taking them when I got my BSME. I'm probably going to sneak into a few when I go back for my masters. But there is no reason every decent sized school needs to be graduating even 20 theater majors a year. Hurray, you spent 4 years and $50k to learn to do theater. Now what? Most highschools require you to have a teaching degree too. So now you're limited to off broadway and the such. Something tells me that there isn't a huge demand (at least not enough to match supply).
The most successful liberal arts major you'll ever meet was most likely one of your liberal arts professors.
We NEED to be focusing more on vocational training. The world needs ditch diggers. The world also needs mechanics, electricians, welders. We need to quit making high schools force someone who would be an excellent mechanic into going to college 'just because'. Too many parents push their kids into college thinking either "I'm successful, they have to go to be successful too." or "I want my kid to go to college because I didn't to get rich".
Personally I've liked what I read about other countries where they sort of guide you into a track early in high school. I'm sure it's not perfect and they get the track wrong, but it's a ton better than graduating 10,000 students a year from a decent sized education, 50% of which have a degree that is more or less 100% useless. WTF does an "Art Appreciation" major do?
I wish I could go back to my high school and give a swift cock punch to my guidance counselor that told me I couldn't take welding because I was college bound. There is so much stuff I'd love to make. Thankfully my dad taught me wood working and home repair and I learned to solder in an internship.
... and being prohibitively expensive for a large part of the population?
one of these "22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position"? I never have personally though they are a common complaint. No one I knew expected to even have a job upon graduating, just offers and maybes and that seemed normal.
"What's wrong with the American University System" is also what's wrong with any university that i've taught at, (ok, that's just the states and a random sprinkling in Europe). "entrenched tenured profs" -hah- in Germany, they don't even have to get out of bed after tenure. and what 22 year old anywhere has realistic expectations? granted, the american university athletic industry connection is an ugly situation special to america, but the rest is just stating an obvious "problem" with universities since 12th century Bologna (no... not some old lunch meat)
As a college instructor, I hope I know something that my students don't. Isn't that the point of having professors?
Shaun: I have to go to college.
Cindy: Why?
Shaun: Because it's what you do after high school.
Just remembered this quote
Most any college team I know of (SEC ones in my experience) MAKE the universities money by the barrel full.
Well, you have to beware of creative accounting and bad investments/contracts.
Basically it can sometimes become a 'school pride' issue, because the sports teams 'make' the college money they press for additional benefits - more pay for the coach, more money for recruiting efforts, new stadium, etc...
Of course, all this is justified as 'payoff in X years', the problem is that you never reach X...
On the creative accounting side you end up with sports expenses not being counted as part of the sports programs, things like ticket sales being counted as income even as they count stadium expenses as 'infrastructure' like actual classrooms.
I don't read AC A human right
Liberal Arts is not about Theatre, Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking. This country needs more people who can think before they do, not more doers whose educations become obsolete before the ink on their diploma is dry.
there are many good essays on exactly what Liberal Arts is, you should try reading a few of them before penning ignorant rants.
This is one of them, http://www2.fiu.edu/~hauptli/MyViewofTheNatureofALiberalArtsEducation.html
This is a page that describes the expectations of a student that has graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts (please note that I did not say Theatre or Art Appreciation, those are part of Liberal Arts, but They are not all of Liberal Arts [if you don't understand why this is so, then you should review your logic]).
http://www.evergreen.edu/about/expectations.htm
Most of the time its a HR drone who thinks that PHP is some kind of street name for a drug
PHP is a gateway language, it's easy to start with but before you know it you're hooked on Python, C, Java, and even worse. I get the shakes now if I don't use Perl every few hours. PHP ruined my life man.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
they all acted like they know something we don't.
If you're literally sitting there paying them to teach you something they damn well better know something you don't, otherwise your wasting your money. Also, you've got a bit of a paradox here unless you want someone in the situation to bow down and act like they don't have anymore knowledge than the other party. Someone has to have more knowledge than the other and one would certainly hope it's the person standing at the front of the class being paid to give it out.
Software design, scientific computing, algorithmic analysis, etc.
A university education is very important if you want to do much more than configure routers and hack code together.
Programming, Technical work, Networking, DBA, Whatever you want to do with computers, education doesn't really matter.
This isn't entirely true. Both outside HR and internal HR departments filter the masses of resumes they receive by education. The simple, brain-dead way to filter the vast majority of candidates, and select (on average) better ones is to require either a Masters or a PhD. I wrote quite a diatribe about the stupidity of this practice a month or so ago when this turned up on Slashdot.
So while you still can get a job without a having 4-8 years of higher education in Computer fields, you're going to have to battering-ram through stupid HR screening before you'll get noticed. The 'big' companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and such even lean towards PhD as a minimum bar for entry. That's even more stupid, and you'll find you have trouble even getting a phone interview without a PhD even if you have, say, 10+ years experience in exactly the field they want.
The root cause? Escalation. Everyone who wants to get a programming job is getting a Masters, not even a Bachelors, because employers want that because everyone in the previous generation has a Bachelors. Now employers want a PhD because, well, everyone got a Masters because employers wanted that. What happens when everyone's spent 10 years in education just to get a job? Perhaps, I dunno, people could be recruited on a basis of their quality rather than a piece of paper saying they're as good as a few million other people.
Every single redistributionist that excludes himself from the group having "excessive" wealth is simply a thief trying justify stealing.
If someone truly believes in the principal that one person's production should be forcibly taken and given to someone that an arbitrary authority has decided needs it more then that person should lead by example.
>>>I'm in Canada and I pay $900/semester + book costs
False. You are right you are paying $900/semester now, but then you will get a job and you will pay the remaining $80,000 or so in the form of weekly taxation. So in the end, you're paying the same amount as I did in the States...... just spread out over the next 60 years.
It's just the same as I got "free" K-12 education, but now I have to pay ~$6000 a year in school taxes. I am paying-off the education I received several decades ago. It was never free - just a deferred charge. Like buying a sofa at a store with deferred payment. It's free now; but I pay next year.
BTW: Were you really so naive as to not realize this? (Education is not free; it's simply paid later)
If so maybe your education was not that great after all.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking.
No, Liberal Arts is about thinking the way pre-scientific people did it.
Read CP Snow's "Two Cultures", which laments the divide between the sciences and the liberal arts, and justly so.
So long as the liberal arts fail to adapt to the scientific world-view, including accepting the importance of mathematical reasoning alongside poetry etc, they have ceased to be what they once were, which is the living voice of Western culture. Instead they are just a cozy backwater for the scientifically illiterate.
The sciences, at the same time, become a cozy backwater for the poetically illiterate.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Wait, are you saying we haven't rebuilt New Orleans because we *don't know how*?
That is patently false. New Orleans isn't getting rebuilt because no one wants to live there. Likewise, new home sales have crashed not because we lack a knowledgeable workforce, but because *no one is buying.*
If someone truly believes in the principal that one person's production should be forcibly taken and given to someone that an arbitrary authority has decided needs it more then that person should lead by example.
You're arguing from a faulty premise: that of the myth of one person's production.
Anything a person who dwells in civilization produces is the result of a partnership between that person and the society in which they live, without which their production (to some small or large degree) would be either impossible or less. Therefore, logically, the fruits of that production also logically belong in part to that person and in part to society.
It's not about redistributing what's yours; it's about your partner in a venture getting their cut.
That sounds like an issue with employers then, not universities.
It worked well for 150 years.
Did you know that George Washington, for example, taught himself geometry? Back in the days when we had actual education it was understood that any person with the capability to read and access to the correct books could teach himself any skill he was capable of learning.
most employment...
...has been shipped to China.
Thanks for playing, USA.
Your decline won't end in a nice environmentally sustainable hippydom either. Alchys and neglect are your future. Detroit, writ large.
Happy Friday.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
That sounds like an issue with employers then, not universities.
If employers keep asking for ever-increasing qualifications, isn't that an indication that universities aren't providing the right education?
A modern liberal arts degree is a mostly worthless piece of paper. The degree is chock full of courses in dead literature and useless philosophy. All of which are a holdover form the days of royalty and privilege. The upper classes didn't have to work, so they spent their leisure time filling their heads with literature and philosophical trivia. This made them appear more intelligent than the working-class slobs whose days were filled by 16-hour shifts in the coal mines. And this in turn was used to rationalize a mythical genetic basis for the wealth and leisure of the upper class. It's time to bring colleges and universities into the 21st century. Instead of trying to recreate the old European culture of wealth and privilege, let's trash the whole university system, and create a whole new, publicly funded set of technical degree generating institutions that don't bother with dead and arcane subjects like English or Art. It would be well worth the investment of public funds to have a populace that can compete on a global scale in technical fields. Of course the useless f-tards from wealthy families can still waste their lives on "private sector" liberal arts degrees, the difference being that their lack of technical focus will label them as useless idle slugs instead of the erudite and effete members of the upper crust.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
From the article -- "Tuitions now are twice what they were 25 years ago".
Hmm, I started at the University of Texas almost 25 years ago. Tuition has gone up by a factor of *10* since then.
(Seriously -- it was about $400 per semester back then, and now it's over $4000/semester now.)
Back then, I put myself through college. No loans. Not sure that kids could do that now ...
At the largest universities, men's football, men's basketball, and men's hockey make money. At smaller universities, some or all of those 3 lose money. All other mens' sports lose money. All womens' sports, except University of Connecticut basketball (and maybe 1 or 2 others) lose money. For all sports programs that lose money, participants should pay user fees.
Another problem, though, is that these sports teams reach semi-professional levels while shafting most of the participants. They aren't paid, and they don't really get an education (everyone knows the idea of a student-athlete is largely a farce). An exceedingly small number of college athletes go on to make big money in the pros.
A good read: http://www.john-martens.com/universities/college_sports_intro.html
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
From TFA:
One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts...
..liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later--by the way, in two years rather than four.
Disagree. Engineering classes also allow people to communicate and explore new ideas, the subject matter is simply more practical and concrete (i.e. the correct answer is more narrowly defined). Also, many quality engineering programs have liberal-education requirements for this reason. People pay a lot of money for college, and forcing them to take non-practical classes won't solve any problems, it will just further burden them with debt when they go back to "engineering school", or whatever the author is suggesting.
...you even suggest that graduates should work at Old Navy for a year and ruminate on their lives.
In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? ... There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do.
ARE YOU SERIOUS!? I quit reading the article at this point. I worked my ass off in shitty IT jobs over the last 7 years, double majored in 5 years, and this guy want me to go fold shirts or flip burgers?! I didn't expect (and don't have) a fat salary, but I do well enough to be comfortably middle-class at age 24, doing work that I somewhat enjoy. Also, there is a "rush", its called interest on my student loans.
I agree that there is a lot of stuff wrong with American Universities. Rich kids have an inherent advantage because they don't have to work during college. They socialize in Greek organizations, making connections to their future rich buddies, while lower and middle class kids like me bust our asses.
Yes yes and when my lung collapsed I didn't actual get "free healthcare" because my taxes are slightly higher than yours. I would rather have higher taxes and the services whenever I need them then not be able to attend a good university because my family lives on one civil servant's income. You disagree, whatever. I'm not having a socialism/libertarianism debate.
Football (and athletics in general) are not causing tuition to skyrocket. As much as I wish it were so, the numbers just don't add up. For example, tuition has also skyrocketed at schools (like mine) that don't even have football teams.
I think the cause is even simpler. The problem is, no one wants to talk about it because there is no easy, feel-good solution.
Thesis: The raise in tuition rates over the last 40 years or so is largely due to the easy availability of *cheap student loans.*
I don't think this should be particularly controversial: It is a logical outcome completely consistent with classical supply/demand economics.
Let's say the government prints money and starts giving it away. Everyone is richer, right? Wrong, of course -- that money is now worth less, so prices all go up. That's inflation. This is the same scenario, except that the money can only be used for one specific purpose: education. It should logically follow that the price of that education will simply go up correspondingly.
I'm not going to propose any solutions, because I don't want to start some stupid partisan flamewar. I just want to suggest that the widely perceived *solution* to high education costs is actually the *driver* of those costs.
- AJ
EDIT: Just found this:
"The simple economics of student loan crises"
http://dmarron.com/2009/09/15/the-simple-economics-of-student-loan-crises/
You could say that, but I say they are searching in the wrong places.
If I had to choose between a mechanic who has worked on cars for 8 years or a mechanic who just got out of 8 years of schooling - I am going to pick the one I know can do it.
If you exclude people based on educational institutes and not education period - you deserve what you get. You only help the political and broken system stay exactly in place.
Your criteria in a job search should be "Can they do the job" - something that universities were great at filtering before the advent of the internet. Almost any career can now be self taught - but at least with computers you already have the tools necessary to develop experience without working in the field or going to school. I mean with accounting, how are you going to get experience with handling corporate finances without working corporately? However you can take any ratty old desktop and set up a web server at home - all for relatively cheap.
Education is only important to things you don't like. If you are truly interested in a field you'll learn these things on your own; often better than can be taught. Otherwise you are just forcing an education due to it feeling required.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
My daughter yesterday received her Masters Degree from the Auckland University of Technology (NZ). Guest speaker at the event was eminent New Zealand scientist Dr Ray Avery. One of those brilliant scientists who actually did some great things and provided for underprivileged around the world.
He also has a lot of experience teaching at some of the best known schools. The one thing he underlined in his speech yesterday was the fact that New Zealand students have a big advantage to the most of the places he visited in being taught by educators who not only are of the highest professional calibre but people who, almost across the board, have retained the most important attribute of any educator at any level - their humanism.
Now, if indeed there is something wrong with the high education system in the USA, I'd suggest this would be the starting point in fixing it.
You know, before I went to university, I thought the exact same thing. What's in it for me? I'm a smart guy, have a high IQ, know a lot. I'm generally smarter than many people who've graduated university. So why do employers insist on a post-secondary degree or diploma to hire for certain positions?
Then I went to university. Shortly after I got in, my world view got blown the fuck up. There are a lot of important lessons that I've learned in university.
Humility, respect, and perspective were the first to come. Most of us here were probably at the top of our graduating classes in high school in practically every subject. But once you get into a good university that requires you to take different courses (mine requires at least one full year course or equivalent in each of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Sciences), while you may excel in your own particular field of study, you'll also start to realize that people in other fields of study are equally impressive in their reasoning and knowledge. You'll also start to realize that your interests and expertise do not encompass the world, and that the world is a lot bigger than we tend to give it credit for. People are more intellectually diverse, and that diversity does not mean that they are intellectually inferior. You gain a lot of perspective.
Your social skills will also improve if you choose to engage in campus social life. Once you get past high school and into university, it seems like most people just press a social reset button. Gone are candies and nerds and other cliques, everyone's just a student. You'll quickly learn the benefits of networking, especially with those people with interests outside of your own, both as a social support mechanism as well as for professional purposes. If you're in the sciences, you'll often find yourself having to work with other people and improving your co-operation and leadership skills, two skills that are key to your professional success.
Individual work ethics and research skills will also be developed. You learn that there's a lot more to research than Wikipedia (your ass will swiftly be kicked if you try to use it as anything other than a quick overview/starting point). Your post-secondary institution will grant you unlimited access to many research portals, where you can find papers on practically any field of human knowledge. If you do well in university, your employer will know that you've had experience doing a lot of individual research and with strict deadlines approaching. Having good time management skills, self-control, and generally good work ethics are also key to being a good employee.
Then there's the actual knowledge. I can't personally speak to computer programming/science/engineering, but I do have a friend who graduated with a BSc in Software Engineering. He's told me over the years that he's really learned a lot about programming and software engineering from the school. Software engineering in particular requires you to be open minded and have different perspectives on possible solutions. He learned how to look at the problem from different angles, and different ways to attack similar problems. From my own view, there can really be no replacement for the knowledge I've gained in the past few years at this school. In fact, if I never attended this school, I wouldn't even have known that I was interested in what I'm doing right now, philosophy.
That's only a few of the many things that I can easily put into words about my experience in university. I've experienced and learned so much more, but I wouldn't have the time, nor the words in many instances, to write about them here. The catch is that you have to be willing to learn. You have to open your mind and look at university as a whole life learning experience. I know many people who just come to school in order to get that piece of paper that will get them a better chance at a job. Some of those people end up realizing the social and educational potential of the university experience at-large, but most of them learn n
A lot of the liberal arts classes that you dismiss as snobbery and fluff are geared at enhancing context (know history so you don't repeat it) and communication (get your point across effectively). They're also often kind of fun and very different kind of work -- a fantastic change of pace and a welcome relief when you're loaded up on math and physics, say.
I'm 100% confident there's room for some of that in a college curriculum, in addition to practical, career-based stuff.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Here's the example of the number one thing wrong with the US higher education system: misunderstanding of the purpose of the "higher education system".
Universities are supposed to be places where people get a well-rounded education in a wide array of topics. That's why the undergraduate degrees tend to have liberal arts and science and social studies components to them. The result is supposed to be people who can look at the world and have some understanding of where we are and where we are going.
If you want a technical degree, go to a community college or trade school. You should not be looking to the Universities to provide well-trained mechanics.
The fact that tenure was listed as a fault is another sign of that same misunderstanding. Universities are also intended to further the arts through research. Tenure is a means of allowing faculty to relax a bit from having to deal with the daily grind and let them explore areas that aren't necessarily the most productive now -- but may become so. "Ok, you've shown you can produce papers and teach, now be inventive."
It's no different than Google's "free friday", or whatever company it was that gave employees work-time to do personal projects.
Right on man, screw english and art! what good ever came from studying either of those subjects?
You know, you can buy on amazon for cheap excellent book on general relativity and quantum mechanics. My bet is that without a couple years in a good physics program you will no actually understand anything.
Because (advanced) maths are not simple. Because the level of abstraction reached is mind-boggling. Because these books build on centuries of maths and physics knowledge.
Now you can, perhaps, teach yourself to that level. It will take you probably more time than the college/university path. It is cute that you compare the level of education of Washington to today: basically, in his time, you could essentially know everything.
Now go read some articles on Riemanian manifolds on wikipedia. That's modern geometry for you. Go ahead. Teach yourself that.
Exactly. This isn't the only field where thats true either. There are places where the government tries to help people buy houses in similar ways. End result: house price skyrocketing (that happened pretty badly in places that started allowing people to use their retirement money to pay cashdowns on mortages. House price goes waaaay up instantly.)
Because so many people go to college, curricula are dumbed-down to appease the masses. Universities want to be seen as paragons of learning. However, so many kids go to college for no other reason than because they feel compelled to do so, in order to prepare them for the working world. The providers are pushing knowledge for the sake of gaining knowledge, but the consumers are looking for job training. This is a big dislocation -- the majority of students do not have any interest in the core competencies of the university system, and the university system is ill-equipped to provide what much of their market demands (how many CS or IS grads come and work in your companies and have to unlearn just about everything they've learned over the previous four years?).
The notion that white-collar training should come from college should be obsolete. Reviving and expanding vocational training would have a positive effect on higher education. Take skill set programs, such as IS (not CS though), accounting, and (especially) management, just to name a few, out of the college system, and put them into a more vocation-oriented education system. You'd end up with happier students, more appropriately-focused universities, and a workforce whose younger members are more prepared to be productive.
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ "The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
See my other post in this thread, too:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738326&cid=33090340
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
despite tenure meaning they can't be fired
There are actually more ways of getting rid of a tenured professor than people realize. I know of cases such as:
Also, though I'm not aware of any cases, most universities can declare a state analogous to bankruptcy, which lets them lay off anyone they please.
I don't know whether there's a trick for getting rid of someone for "not working hard enough", but I encountered fewer slacker profs when I was in college than slacker managers or brown-nosers in the private sector, where people don't have anything like tenure to help them keep their jobs.
And you make some other good observations. A prof who elects to slack after getting tenure:
I suspect there aren't many people willing to work themselves half to death for for pennies during 6-8 years of grad school, and then slave away for another 7 years while being evaluated for tenure, just for the chancy deferred gratification of getting to go slack thereafter.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Education is only important to things you don't like. If you are truly interested in a field you'll learn these things on your own; often better than can be taught.
Partially true. However, some topics are very hard to find sufficient materials to learn from on your own - and some of the more complicated things even the brightest people need someone to help explain it to them so that they fully understand it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching
It really doesn't take a leading researcher to teach undergraduate classes. They should hire people who are actually good at teaching for this job.
You certainly have a good point, but one of the most commonly encountered whinges about the university system is that more classes should be taught by tenured professors.
Of course, the same whinges usually complain about the mere existence of tenure. Seems to be some substantial cognitive dissonance invoved in the public attitude toward universities.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Can you make one concrete example to back up what you said? If I make a pair of shoes by paying to learn how to do it, then buying the materials and then putting in my time and labor to make them, and then sell them, how are you entitled to a share of that?
Where did the roads over which your materials came to you come from? How were the purchasing contracts enforced? How was robbery prevented so you kept the money to purchase your materials? Any man receives great value by living as part of a civilized society. If one does not recognize that, he is truly blind.
If you mean something nebulous like I benefit from the combined knowledge of the human race then those people who made contributions that you are basing yours on already got paid for theirs.
No, he was talking about concrete, tangible benefits that you seem to blindly ignore and that you wish to "free ride" on. Nice piece of theft from the rest of us...
That is all.
And HR looks down on tech schools that are more about the job and don't have stuff like a football team and lots of filler class that get in the way.
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University.
Actually MOST college athletic programs do not make a penny. That particular fact is not exactly a secret. About 50 of the biggest athletic programs make a profit and a handsome one at that. The rest require funding. A successful athletic program does have a HUGE impact on alumni donations though which is where the justification for them sometimes comes. Seriously. It's astonishing to see the difference a good year or two on the playing field will have.
Disclosure - I was a division 1 college athlete in a non-revenue sport. (yes we exist on slashdot) I also have almost zero respect for the NCAA. Bunch of hypocrites they are...
Yep. Interesting article, very interesting. Unfortunately, as I can see, by making it the all-encompassing round-up, the author also somewhat disqualified. Which is very sad, since what was brought up about publication, sponsoring, fairness, are all topics that need urgent attention. The tertiary education system is broken.
But in the end, I lost the earlier interest to buy, or even read, the book. As someone who is in a similar position (teaching in a university), I can only laugh about sentences like "I say, 'I make them good.' Every student is capable of college."
Just think of the implied logic: A person who has been failed by parents, or society or school, whatever, in his/her first 20 years, and joins university at the age of around 20, barely able to do basic arithmetics, no chance to express herself in a consistent stream of thoughts, or subsequent sentences in writing. And then someone comes waltzing along, reversing all damage done in a course at a tertiary institution. Maybe in a single course, in a single semester. My only reaction could be, to doubt the second coming.
These Universities are awash in cash spending like crazy and still charging an arm and a leg for attending. Have you seen some of the figures for how much money large Universities have stashed in various different endowment funds. Some of the figures I read from wikipedia are that most large Universities have endowments in the billions of dollars. Some of which draw huge interest yet only a very small part of them are used for scholarships each year. I smell a rat. Not sure which breed yet but a rat none the less.
You don't come out bankrupt in the US either. There are a lot of perfectly respectable schools that are also affordable. And that is, after all, the point of the book being reviewed. I went to an inexpensive undergraduate university. In graduate school (paid for by the granting institutions funding my research) I competed with students from many good - albeit expensive - universities. They were certainly smart, but I don't think they were any better prepared than I was. After grad school I was a postdoc in labs with PhDs granted from the Ivy League. Again, smart but not better prepared.
46 & 2
So long as the liberal arts fail to adapt to the scientific world-view, including accepting the importance of mathematical reasoning alongside poetry etc
And what liberal arts college encourages students to reject the scientific world view, might I ask?
You (and I suspect others) are confusing liberal arts majors with liberal arts colleges. The article didn't advocate going to a university and majoring in something liberal arts. They're advocating going to a liberal arts college.
Beetle B.