

Screwed up incentives in higher education - amackera
http://www.tophatmonocle.com/blog/2010/11/27/screwed-incentives-education/

======
timr
_"The system is broken in the sense that teaching is at best a low priority,
and that universities have essentially become testing centres. Students spend
2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker
at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque. That's about it
from the student's perspectives on the academic side of it."_

Spoken like a person who has never actually taught a college course. There's a
_tremendous_ amount of work involved, from both students and faculty. Most
students go to class, and most professors give lectures that aren't directly
taken from the book. So can we please stop elevating the cartoon, straw-man
portrayals of the incompetent lecturer and the lazy student? Please?

If this blog post weren't written by the CEO of a company that's trying to
sell enhancement software to universities, I'd dismiss it as anti-intellectual
trolling. I'm also trying hard not to dismiss it as the griping of a guy who's
finding resistance selling his product to a somewhat conservative clientele
(university staff), and interpreting their reluctance as the behavior of
dinosaurs (rather than a sensible reaction to the generations of educational
snake-oil salesmen who have come before).

Instead, I'll give the benefit of the doubt: there are certainly lazy,
incompetent professors. There are also lazy students that have no business
being in college. But if your only contact with the university system comes
from when you're trying to sell or beta-test your products in the
classroom...well, you don't have a very representative sample from which to
draw conclusions.

~~~
axiom
Where does the article accuse professors of being lazy or incompetent? where
does it say (or imply) that teaching a course isn't a huge amount of work?

So I take it you disagree with the central thesis that tuition is absurdly
high for the value that students get?

Edit: from the article "There are many phenomenal teachers at universities. We
at Top Hat Monocle have had the privilege to work with some of them. They
should be treated like rock stars and paid accordingly - they generate
literally millions in revenue for the universities and don't get nearly the
recognition they deserve. They do their work out of benevolence and dedication
to a job they love, mostly in spite of the system they operate in."

~~~
timr
_"Where does the article accuse professors of being lazy or incompetent?"_

About five paragraphs in, by my count:

 _"what do students actually get for their money? They get herded in like
cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them
with the help of a powerpoint slide deck. The classroom environment hasn't
changed in nearly a century. If you brought someone from 1940 into today's
classroom they'd hardly notice a difference, except perhaps for the fancier
projector and massively increased class size. This is not due to lack of
technology or lack of tools being available."_

You're calling out the system for being outdated and broken. Just because you
don't _explicitly say_ that _"most professors are lazy and incompetent (except
for the ones I like)"_ doesn't mean that you can fling these sorts of casual,
rhetorical stones without having to embrace the conclusion.

~~~
wnoise
> You're calling out the system for being outdated and broken. Just because
> you don't explicitly say that "most professors are lazy and incompetent
> (except for the ones I like)"

The system can be broken without attaching any blame to the workers in the
system.

The real problem is of course the high-up administrators and board. The
purpose of a university is not education. The purpose is to funnel money via
inflated salaries and unneeded construction jobs to those that are politically
well-connected.

------
nocipher
As someone who recently graduated with a bachelor's at a large state
university, I find that this article exaggerates most of its points.

"Now, what do students get for their money? they[sic] get herded in like
cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them
with the help of a powerpoint slide deck."

This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the university
was required to take. Above the sophomore level, all classes were, at an
absolute maximum, 35 people. Even the large lecture classes were closer to
half what the author states.

"Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,)
get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat
cheque."

Anyone doing this has little reason to be in school. Admittedly, some classes
are easy and sufficiently unrelated to your career goals that they can be
safely ignored. Once you get past those courses, though, if you can still cram
and come out with a respectable grade, you've made a terrible choice for you
degree program and university. Cramming just doesn't cut it when you're in a
senior level math course and supposed to derive the heat and wave equation on
an exam by justifying the simplifications necessary to get a clean
mathematical model. You won't even get that far if you crammed in your
Calculus 3 course and have no idea how to deal with multivariable derivatives
and integrals. Nor will you have any idea about how such an equation is
supposed to work if you failed to learn anything in your differential
equations course.

The picture of the university described in the article is flawed for all but
the lowest performing students. If people want to actually learn something,
they can. If they don't, that's unfortunate; they probably won't and can,
instead, attempt to game the system (i.e. cram for tests) to maintain their
GPA. Giving these people better teachers won't help them because they don't
care about learning.

The real issue seems to be that too many people are going to college for the
wrong reasons. If you have no aspirations of learning what a college attempts
to teach, then don't go. There should be no expectation that merely attending
college will cause you to learn something.

~~~
neilk
> This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the
> university was required to take.

Why does this change the conclusion?

One could argue that students new to a topic need more one-on-one instruction.

------
wyclif
_If higher education didn't exist in it's current form..._

"Its" not "it's." If you want academics to read your writing, it had better
not have grammar or punctuation errors. This is not rocket surgery.

~~~
wyclif
Also, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between "too" and "to." I
like his thesis, but the grammar needs work.

P.S. I've got the karma to burn.

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

------
Derbasti
There is one issue no one ever seems to talk about. The one thing that really
really screws up incentives at universities is the money the students have to
pay. If students have to pay for individual courses, they will try to minimize
the amount of courses they have to take. They will try to get in cheap
courses. They will try to get in cheap universities. They will optimize their
education for Bang For The Buck. They will optimize for bad teaching.

Look at European universities. For students, they are free. Or ridiculously
cheap (like $500 per semester). Actually, last year, students in Germany were
fed up with the bad quality if teaching. Guess what they did? They went on
strike! They blocked rooms and prevented courses from happening. Without
students, universities can't exist. So, professors and management had to act.
And teaching improved.

I think you will agree that something like this is completely and utterly
impossible in the US. If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the
money he had put in that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against
bad teaching. If students pay huge amounts of money for each course and
semester, they will try to get cheap education at a big-name place. I guess in
the choice between cheap, big-name and good, you can pick any two. Hence,
there is little incentive to get good education.

Furthermore, if courses are free, students can freely choose which courses to
take. Hence they try to get the best teaching they can get. If that means they
take a few extra semesters, so be it. If that means that they actually change
universities or even curriculums, no problem. You see, by not paying (much)
for universities, students optimize for quality.

~~~
whimsy
>If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the money he had put in
that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against bad teaching.

Too true.

There's a pretty big strike movement growing in the California school system.
Strikes aren't continuous, but there has been a few rather large actions.

It doesn't seem to be working - tuition has increased at UCs 42.56% over the
last year alone. (Last ~Nov, a 32% increase in tuition was approved by the UC
Regents; this year, another 8% this month.) Despite the massive tuition
increases, classes and professors - and in some cases entire departments -
continue to face the chopping block.

Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a plurality of student support - most students
I've talked with are against the protests.

------
stretchwithme
This problem is caused by government funding of education. If students and/or
parents were paying the tab or at least everything over the bare minimum ,
there'd be a laser focus on value. But with other people picking up everything
over a certain amount, there's no need to scrimp on amenities or prestige
instead of getting the most education for the money.

Perverse incentives? Absolutely. But thats what government does best. It
perverts incentives. It hides the costs and makes a big show of benefits, even
ones that don't truly matter.

~~~
yequalsx
Government funding per student has been decreasing and the amenities have been
increasing.

~~~
stretchwithme
damn. all things are supposed to happen properly in sequence. what could
possibly have gone wrong. maybe you can share your data and we'll figure it
out

~~~
yequalsx
My theory is that increases in tuition aren't immediately felt by students
because we've come to a point where everyone is comfortable getting a student
loan. Since you don't start paying on the loan right away the effect of the
borrowing isn't immediately felt. This makes students more amenable to a frame
of mind of just accepting tuition increases.

~~~
stretchwithme
It could also be that it takes years to build new athletic centers and
research centers and less time for bubbles to pop and tax bases to evaporate.

------
icegreentea
Haha, oh top-hat. Going off topic here a bit (the points in the post itself
are more or less sound).

Top-hat monocle is a web-based quiz/online tutorial system. You can put flash
based demos, and random quizzes on it, and students can answer on their
laptops, or text in the answers from their phones.

We got use to top-hat monocle for one of our courses last term. It was a joke
(took forever for the demos to load... flash...). Beyond the usual 'a tool can
only make a poor user screw up even with ever greater speed', we had to pay to
get our license... to what was then beta software. They admitted to us that
'they weren't done testing' and that we were going to be the last group to
'get to try' the system before it went into wide release.

I won't argue about the effectiveness of the system (it is a tool, whose
effectiveness depends on its user), but paying to be part of the final set of
testers definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

~~~
jskopek
I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle.

Were you in the UW System Design course last term? We had a couple of courses
that had issues with monocleCAT, and we learnt a lot from them.

One of the biggest issues that caught us by surprise was the effect a room
full of connected students can have on a lower-quality access point. We learnt
from that, and totally rewrote our synchronization code to be much more robust
and efficient with bandwidth (something I'd love to write a post about some
time in the future).

We used to be hosted on Google App Engine, and we suffered greatly from
dowtime issues that plagued every App Engine site all throughout the term. We
learned from that and switched to Amazon EC2, where we've built a backend that
automatically scales up to thousands of simulatanous connections.

We discovered that while most users have laptops or netbooks, few users like
lugging them to every class. We learned from that and introduced iPhone and
Android applications, as well as enhancing our SMS submission system to send
back confirmation messages (with an easy opt-out process) for students on
legacy phones.

We discovered that some professors had teaching styles that didn't take
advantage of our software, so we've started being more agressive in our
professor approval process, as well as introduced training sessions to help
professors get a feel for how to incorproate the system in their lectures.

The biggest lesson we've learned is to find early adopters that are willing to
work with you to improve your product, and to build strong relationships with
them. Our product has improved monumentally in the last few months thanks to
their support.

We've signed on a number of new professors in the Engineering department at
the University of Waterloo, so it's quite likely you'll be using monocleCAT
again next term. In recognition of the issues some students experienced last
term, we'll be giving vouchers for a free term to students in the courses that
had serious issues (you'll probably be seeing yours in the mail in a few
weeks).

\-------------

EDIT: when I say we had a couple bad courses... the System Design course was
the one that really had issues (hence my guess).

~~~
icegreentea
Yes I was in that class. Thank you for responding.

I understand the the need for early adopters and feedback. I have nothing
against your project in principle, and I wish you the best. And I appreciate
all the effort you've put into improving the product.

Honestly, I would have no problem with putting up with many of the problems we
ran into, just that we paid for it. Part of the problem was that it wasn't
explicitly made clear that it was 'beta' software until most of the class had
purchased their licenses. Seriously, it completely coloured the way we saw any
short comings in Top Hat. A lot of us felt that we were tricked/cheated out
and generated a lot of unnecessary ill will. You probably heard through the
grapevines some of the rumblings from the class regarding possible financial
transactions between your company and our professor.

It wasn't pretty.

On the side, one of the implementation problems that we ran into a lot in
tutorials when we ran quizzes was that since we all had laptops, we all had
msn open. Which meant that for ~60% of the class, it was just a matter of
getting added to an msn convo, and grabbing the answer. I don't really believe
there's much of a technical solution that you can implement. In fact, for my
class, more than half of the class who actually showed up to tutorial had
their laptops there (part of this had to do with our class schedules).

I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking
that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from
dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place.

And much appreciation for the voucher. After reading this, I'll definitely try
to look at Top Hat with fresh eyes (and enjoying demos that load on time!).
Thanks!

~~~
CamperBob
_I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking
that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from
dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place._

That's a good point. I occasionally get texts that my GF sent eight to twelve
hours earlier... literally enough time to have come from Voyager 2.
Confirmation messages are absolutely mandatory in any text-messaging
application that matters.

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

~~~
axiom
Yeah, but the point of grad school is to do research. I understand why grad
school tuition may go towards paying for research labs and publishing papers.

Also, grad students have funding - so tuition is more like an overhead fee on
the funding provided by grants and private research partners. Grad courses are
also typically seminars, with no more than 10-15 students per course where you
get to work one-on-one with the professor. Not to mention that profs tend to
actually like teaching grad courses.

Grad school makes sense to me, conceptually at least. Undergrad tuition and
the whole system is just insane. It's all basically diploma mills.

~~~
wnoise
> Also, grad students have funding

In the hard sciences, yes. Much less so in other fields.

~~~
thebooktocome
Tell me about it. My boyfriend is in hospitality management, I'm in
mathematics. Whereas I pull in enough to live comfortably in a single bedroom
apartment downtown, he's on financial aid and living with two roommates on the
outskirts.

It blew my mind when I found out.

~~~
blasdel
What use would the government have funding market research for hotels? It's
blatantly vocational, with even fewer pretenses to academics than MBA
programs.

At least english majors don't have a profit motive!

~~~
thebooktocome
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_management_studies>

Without getting into specifics, my bf's research deals with epidemiology and
things related to improving public health in the hospitality/tourism industry.
Sure, at the undergrad level it's mostly vocational, but it's not like there's
no public benefit to full-fledged academic research in this area.

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that his work will probably have a greater
positive net effect on society than mine will. But since math is a "real
science", I make the "big bucks" (relative to graduate students, i.e., two
steps above ramen-profitable).

~~~
blasdel
What's keeping him from working primarily in Public Health and getting NSF
grants? Does he need access to industry for his research?

------
blasdel
_> They get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone
read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck._

How does leasing them tools to herd more efficiently do anything but amplify
the screwed up incentives further?

You could aspire to be the Temple Grandin of higher ed reform, but that
doesn't do anything to fix the underlying problem — it only makes it easier to
ignore.

------
callmeed
I'm 10 years out of state school (in Calif.) and only recall a handful of
classes with over 100 students, with the max being around 300 (general psych I
think).

Has there really been an increase in large classes as the author states?

~~~
thebooktocome
I've been at a state school in Indiana for the past two years, and our largest
class (in the math department) is around 150 students.

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

~~~
nano81
That's 250 hours per term (4 months).

I'm fairly certain you don't spend 1000+ hours in lectures out of the ~2880
hours in four months.

~~~
jules
Oh, right I thought per year. I checked and I have about 300 hours of lectures
per term, in 10-20 (say 20) person classes. This costs the government and me
combined about €10000 per year. That's about

    
    
        300/180*500/20*24000/10000 = 100x 
    

better value for money than what he's sketching in his blog post.

