
What's Wrong With the American University System - frossie
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/whats-wrong-with-the-american-university-system/60458/
======
blahedo
I'm a little surprised to see the negative reaction to this article. I've
asked many people the question "do great researchers make the best teachers?",
and the answers form a strong dichotomy: undergrads and people who completed
their college education at the bachelor's level universally 100% respond "no."
People who went to grad school, and especially those who continued on to be
professors, mostly either answer "yes" or waffle, with only a very small
number answering "no."

If the purpose of the college/university system is to conduct research, that
would be one thing, but there is at least a wide belief that the purpose of
the university is to educate; and my read of the original article, with which
I largely agree, is that Hacker wants to raise awareness that our "higher
education" system is _not_ well-geared toward actual undergraduate education.
At most highly-ranked universities, teaching ability and interest are fairly
actively selected against: the retention decision is made almost entirely
based on research, and while they would love the professors to be good
teachers _too_ , they can't evaluate that and have no incentives to promote it
(and PhD students aren't taught anything about it anyway), so it is purely by
luck that they manage to retain good teachers.

I guess I'd like to hear from the commenters who disagree with the article
about what made their researcher-professors better teachers, particularly at
the lower levels where the only things that might be cutting-edge are the
teaching techniques. (I'm not that interested in hearing about the professors
bringing you in on their research, which _is_ valuable but necessarily not
available to every undergraduate student.)

Disclaimer: I _am_ a college professor, I value (and am good at) teaching, and
was denied tenure (at a liberal arts college, even) apparently because my
publications were in CS education rather than in something more "researchy".
Even the liberal arts colleges are not immune to the movement placing research
above teaching as retention criterion for their teachers.

------
rdl
I disagree with his anti-engineering and anti-research points. Attacking
pseudo-technical degrees like undergraduate business, sure. Attacking
humanities research, sure.

When I was at MIT, the best professors in lecture were actually top
researchers (to the point of winning the Nobel). The best actual experiences I
had were participating in faculty research (as an undergrad, you can actually
contribute fairly meaningfully outside the core focus of the research; a
CS/Math student can help out with data acquisition in a substantive way in
Physics). Plus, undergraduate organizations like SIPB (which has developed
KSplice, and which worked on many other interesting projects before)

I don't think most of this would happen at a small liberal arts college.

High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program;
this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship.
College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a
high school or college educator).

~~~
yardie
_High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science
program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to
citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps
becoming a high school or college educator)._

In general, this is a bad idea. It's like saying colleges should only teach
for jobs that exist and not for what could be. No one is hiring buggy whip
engineers and no one is teaching people to be computers (ie. the human kind in
the 40s and 50s). The whole point of a university is to do advanced research
and break off a little knowledge on the incoming students.

Also, there is no one true degree or one true job. Engineers ,and everyone
else, are at the mercy of the market. You can't get paid if no one is buying
your stuff. This applies to the CEO as well as the janitor. Ask aerospace
engineers how they felt at the end of the coldwar. There used to be a joke
about aerospace engineers being able to only get jobs that involved burgers.
Now, Boeing can't hire enough, but that's it. The only place that hire those
type of engineers, in quantity, are NASA and Boeing.

------
Lewisham
Honestly, these authors sound pretty nuts. Take engineering only after liberal
arts because "young people today are going to live to be 90"? Really? So we're
all going to work until we're 75 and hope that modern medicine is able to wind
back the clock of youth and add useful working years, rather than just prevent
our aged bodies actually dying? Who's going to pay for 25 straight years of
education?

Even after throwing away the obviously mental comments, it's bothersome that
they've framed the problem of universities doing public research as: a) Wrong
- Who else is going to do it? Industry? b) American only - I've been at
universities in the UK, US and New Zealand, and it's all the same.

It's not wrong for good scientists to do research, it's reality. Not only
that, but America actually has a system that supports teaching colleges: the
state and community colleges are almost entirely geared towards teaching. That
doesn't exist in the UK and New Zealand, and I'd hazard other places as well.

Universities have always been research-oriented, even Plato's Academy was: "In
at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to
teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to
be studied and solved by the others." [1]

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy>

EDIT: Because this interview is just filled with little morsels of insanity, I
couldn't resist another good one: "It's a third-tier university, but the
faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired
away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously." Read:
the faculty are resigned to the fact they're not going to get hired by anyone
else because they didn't make the grade, so they're just going to teach rather
than bother getting their papers rejected.

~~~
gwern
> Take engineering only after liberal arts because "young people today are
> going to live to be 90"? Really? So we're all going to work until we're 75
> and hope that modern medicine is able to wind back the clock of youth and
> add useful working years, rather than just prevent our aged bodies actually
> dying? Who's going to pay for 25 straight years of education?

Lifespan increases are not due to dragging out the time where one is feeble
and sick, but by increasing the healthy part. People in their 50s are
'younger' than they were decades and centuries ago. Thinking that the
increases are increases in morbidity has been called the 'Tithonus error' or
fallacy.

Here are some links for your perusal:

\-
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=compression+of...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=compression+of+morbidity)

\- <http://www.jstor.org/pss/2664720>

\-
[http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?page=1...](http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?page=1&article_id=1)

\-
[http://www.courant.com/health/sns-200910201351tmspremhnstr--...](http://www.courant.com/health/sns-200910201351tmspremhnstr
--k-h20091021oct21,0,4810521,full.story)

\- <http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8731sci2.html>

------
hugh3
Complaining that professors spend too much time doing research and not enough
time teaching is like complaining that basketballers spend too much time
playing basketball and not enough time making advertisements for shoes.

Research is what professors want to be doing (at least in the sciences -- I
understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities). Teaching is what they're
obliged to do. If you want to get some of the smartest people in the world and
pay them a barely-six-figure salary to teach the same damn introductory-level
BS to spotty-faced teens every damn year, you'd better be offering some damn
good perks, and the number one perk is to be allowed to spend most of your
time researching whatever you're interested in.

If you want to be taught by professors who _aren't_ at the top of their
fields, you can go to a community college, but your questions will be rubbing
up against the edge of their knowledge pretty damn quick.

~~~
telemachos
You're presenting a false dichotomy, and nobody with who thinks of students as
"spotty-faced teens" should be allowed within miles of a college faculty
position.

Andrew Hacker himself (one of the co-authors of the book under discussion) is
a good counter-example. He was a longtime professor at a public college
(Queens College). (Full disclosure: I was a student at QC from 1986-1992. I
never took a full class with Professor Hacker, but I heard him lecture a few
times.) His classes always filled up quickly despite their reputation as
challenging, he won numerous teaching awards and he was near-universally
regarded as an inspiring lecturer. Nevertheless, he was also a respected
scholar who regularly published articles and books that nobody in his field
could ignore. It doesn't have to be either/or.

~~~
plorkyeran
Great. Now find enough people like him to teach every single class.

Obviously brilliant researchers who happen to also love to teach (and are good
at it) are the ideal professors that every university should want, but merely
wanting people good at all parts of being a professor does not make them exist
in large quantities.

~~~
ippisl
With today's technology there are enough technologies to scale a great
teacher. youtube(especially with it's minute by minute engagment measurement),
stackoverflow (for questions and answers), and others.

And you can see this happening, slowly.

------
aliston
I disagree with pretty much every position in this article as a matter of
opinion. However, I disagree with this part as a matter of fact:

"Yet if you look at all those powerhouse [college football] programs across
the country, only seven or eight actually rake in money."

I've now heard this point made by several individuals and it's simply not
true. Purely in terms of revenues versus costs, the majority of division 1A
programs in the country make money. For 76 of the 120 div 1A programs,
revenues exceeded costs as reported to the government in 2008. In many cases
(20+), the profits are significant -- 10's of millions of dollars. Football
programs make it possible for other non-revenue generating sports to exist.

The raw data can be found here: <http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/>

Also, I can anecdotally say that having gone to a school with a decent
football team, it has kept me in touch with a number of my friends, provided a
rallying point for alumni, and will play a role in my future giving to my alma
mater.

Edit: For clarification...

~~~
gwern
His numbers are pretty specific, making me think he is drawing on specific
studies which naturally he doesn't cite in a short interview. (Likely the
citations are in the book... which doesn't help us.)

But I'm not very satisfied by those statistics. I looked up one school, Stony
Brook University (in NCAA Division I-AA, whatever that is), and looked at its
expenses:
[http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e6974696...](http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e697469643d31393630393726796561723d32303038267264743d372f33302f3230313020343a32323a343920414d)

I see listed salaries, recruiting costs, financial aid costs, and operating
costs, which yields a net profit of ~$700,000.

I _don't_ see any entries for the $22,000,000 stadium the football team uses
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_P._LaValle_Stadium>), nor operating
costs for the stadium. 22m wipes out an awful lot of 700k years.

And that's the first off-the-books cost that occurs to me, a college sports
ignoramus, to look for. So now I know that those statistics are at least
incomplete for the purposes of examining the overall picture; but can I even
trust the statistics provided? I suspect that further investigation would
reveal many more expenses and costs, and few revenues.

------
jdhopeunique
The biggest problem I find is that universities avoid free market forces by
bundling everything together. Tenure is only one part of this.

Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take
regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly
the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the
costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus
less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other
people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt.
Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the
educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no
surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and
emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM
(other people's money).

Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An
exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the
system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position
so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to
their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some
departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the
hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they
can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have
underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and
highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the
same salary as the overpaid professors.

Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught
by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered
something like that following:

$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor

$300 an instructor

$150 by a teaching assistant

$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center

Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of
the university system.

Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together
so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions
work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad
ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors
where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real
problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no
instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too
expensive.

Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors
degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This
is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a
college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part
of the universities' way of promoting their own.

The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by
bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled
choice.

The university system has not changed despite increased information
availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of
the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class
tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.

Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous
salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is
infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a
computer.

~~~
gwern
> Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take
> regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has
> roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded
> from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money.

My understanding is that this bundling, as far as the liberal arts/hard
division goes, works massively in the favor of the latter, because the liberal
arts courses are much cheaper to provide and subsidize the latter. (How much
does it cost to run a poetry course? How much for a Cisco networking class?)

~~~
jdhopeunique
A networking class and a poetry class have few expenses in terms of equipment.
The main expense is faculty salaries if you take a look at the budget(and my
state is cutting budgets so people have scrutinized them). My point is not to
argue who is favored and I have no grudge against the liberal arts or the
sciences. I only point to the equal tuition and salaries to show how
completely isolated the system is from anything like free-market forces and to
suggest that this equality is far more likely to be caused by political and
social forces.

~~~
gwern
it seems to me that a poetry class has close to $0 in expenses, and low
faculty salaries since English grad students & post-docs are a dime a dozen,
while a Cisco networking class involves at least as well paid faculty
salaries, and a great deal of equipment - thousands and thousands of dollars
worth. (The Cisco hardware itself, none of which comes cheap, basic networking
setup, a few dozen computers for the students to use, software licensing fees,
etc.)

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

~~~
wmf
Their argument seems to be that you should get a four-year liberal arts degree
and then an engineering degree _in addition_. Sounds great as long as you're
not paying for it.

~~~
starkfist
I went to one of the small liberal arts schools the authors of the book favor.

Many of them have a 3-2 arrangement with an engineering school. You take the
more general science and math courses at the liberal arts school, then 2 years
of engineering classes at the engineering school.

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

------
adamdecaf
> They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational
> training over liberal arts.

Then go to a school that focuses on teaching (mine does).

> And they'd like to see graduates worrying less about their careers, even if
> it means spending a year behind the cash register at Old Navy.

That's not an issue with the schools, it's an issue with society. People
expect a high paying job right out of school, they expect a fancy house and
nice things. Sadly, it doesn't happen like that.

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

~~~
elblanco
If I'm not mistaken, Mudd has a very well regarded engineering school as well.

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

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

------
seis6
When you get tenure, you should be free to live. Nothing is so inspiring as a
free mind.

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

~~~
anigbrowl
There's also some interesting supplementary material on the website for the
book. <http://highereducationquestionmark.com/>

------
jgg
_In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They
want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of
college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer
Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? Besides,
young people today are going to live to be 90. There's no rush. That's why I
say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a
year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do._

If students did this, then they would find a passion and become highly
motivated. They would then enter a university, where they find that they have
to shell out a large sum of money every year. This goes towards ensuring that
they're able to live in small, inadequate rooms with loud, obnoxious people
with whom they sit in boring, superficial lectures and take tests that assess
one's ability to learn by rote. All of this, just so they can earn a piece of
paper that says they are allowed to work in a field they _liked enough to
learn about on their own_.

~~~
anamax
> In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so.

Huh? "They" are ready for you as soon as you're ready for them.

~~~
dhume
Aye, Hacker seems to miss that the years they want you to have behind you are
years spent working in that field, not simply years alive.

