

We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303531204579204201833906182?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

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bushido
Alternate url[0], in case WSJ requests you to log-in/subscribe to read the
article.

[0]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+Pretend+to+Learn&oq=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+Pretend+to+Learn&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64l2&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8)

edit: changed link to point to google search, click on the search result
(first result in my case); it should lead to an article that doesn't require a
login.

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mandalar12
It also requires to log-in.

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mdip
I got the login as well. I launched chrome in Incognito mode and the link from
the google search worked. I'm guessing they set a cookie or something to get
people who clicked the link directly then tried to work around it via Google.

------
Dirlewanger
Yeah, the system's fucked up on many facets. Government handing out no-
strings-attached-until-it-matters monies by the bucketfuls, your average high
school counselor drilling into student's heads to "Apply, apply, apply! You
better be applying to colleges and working on those college essays!", colleges
more bloated than your uncle after Thanksgiving with bureaucratic puss,
disillusioned professors whose wages stagnate while the football and
basketball programs get new buckets of cash...

We can go on and on with the external reasons. They're all valid. But could we
spare some blame for lazy-as-fuck kids who go to class drunk (if at all) and
waste their time playing the new Call of Duty? What about their listless
parents who barely ever stuck their nose in their kids' high school lives? You
know how at every college orientation they rattle off to you everything that
goes on there and all the different clubs, all that shit they shove in kid's
faces? They want them to become engaged and take advantage of what the school
has to offer. Networking. I despise that word but the more connections one
gets and the more they get involved in is how the job's are going to be
landed. It's not about what one knows anymore.

That, and being prudent about your program choice helps too. We know art
history is cool...but cmon.

~~~
widdershins
There was a time when studying at university was about more than simply
preparing young people for employment. It was about studying something in
depth, at a high level. And actually, I don't happen to think it's a waste of
time to study art, or history, or literature.

Now that university has become simply about getting a qualification that looks
good on your resume, is it any wonder that people don't take it seriously,
especially when the jobs market looks mostly hopeless for young people?

~~~
mathgladiator
> And actually, I don't happen to think it's a waste of time to study art, or
> history, or literature.

It's not a waste, but it's a waste on many. Basically, there are two core
questions we have a species: how we live and why we live. art, history, and
literature help answer the why and the how is very clearly answered by the
sciences/engineering.

Honestly, people just going to college for a future job is a waste of their
time, the professor's time, and college resources.

If I had the time, I would enjoy taking a literature or art class these days.

~~~
colomon
I'd love to take another few semester's of Great Books. But would I love to
pay $1800 to take it? Not so much.

The current prices for college only make sense if you are preparing for a good
career. Very few people would willingly go $50,000 in debt to learn for the
sake of pure learning.

~~~
mathgladiator
This is why I think supply and demand should apply to college classes.

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spiritplumber
The root problem is simple to define -- The assumption that professors have
been able to make, historically, is that university students are there because
they are motivated. With everyone going to college, that is no longer the
case.

~~~
orclev
Students are there because society at large has demanded that they be there. A
college degree has transformed from a certificate of achievement into a proof
of purchase that HR departments must validate in exchange for an offer of
employment. The Universities are only too happy to play along with the charade
as they hoover up increasingly absurd tuitions. The increase in tuition is yet
another bubble being driven by "too big to fail" banks, this time saddling
what are for all intents and purposes children with crippling lifelong debt
which is conveniently immune from bankruptcy protection. Sometime soon the
music will stop and all that's left is to find out who's going to be left
without a chair. One thing that the previous bubble should have taught us is
that it won't be the banks who are left holding the bag, which means it's
between the universities and the students.

If I was running a University right now, I'd be _very_ worried. The many and
sundry administrators in particular should be asking themselves what's going
to happen when universities suddenly find themselves in the position of having
to cut their budgets by 50% or more of their current levels due to the sudden
lack student financing options and the inability of students to pay even a
fraction of current tuition levels. For that matter the worth or need of a
degree in a great many fields will likely be called into question quite soon.

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theorique
The universities are top heavy with "Associate Vice Provost of Faculty
Diversity" and other such bullshit admin pukes pulling down $300K per year for
made up jobs, while the actual teaching is done by adjuncts who get literally
raped by the universities who pay them a couple thousand dollars a course and
cobble together a handful of courses to teach to break into the five figure
salary range without health insurance or benefits. It's a travesty.

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pirateking
We pretend to publish, they pretend to pay.

\- The Wall Street Wall

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drcube
No paywall at Google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702303531204579204201833906182)

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endtime
> Dr. Collier is a psychology professor at South Carolina State University in
> Orangeburg, S.C.

I don't mean to sound elitist, but it's not like he's teaching math at Courant
or CS at MIT. What does he expect from students with the "default" major at a
school which accepts 91% of applicants [1]?

[1] [http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
colleges/...](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
colleges/south-carolina-state-university-3446)

~~~
mercer
Good point. I studied social psychology and communications, and in both fields
I found the difficulty, and motivation/engagement levels shockingly low.
Observing friends of mine who studied philosophy, engineering or physics
painted a completely different story.

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nnnnni
Ugh, "log in to view the rest of the article". Nope.

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jimhefferon
The kind of tripe I hear around the fac lounge sometimes; I get my tea and
leave as quickly as I can.

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im3w1l
What would make you pay to read this article?

Is it the price? The effort of typing in all your details? Would you be
willing to one-click purchase it for $1 ? $0.1 ?

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Scienz
I wanted to read it, and considered paying since it claimed to be a mere $1,
then realized my main interest in reading it was simply that it confirmed my
prejudices about the (non-)educational system. Kind of silly to pay for an op-
ed just to reinforce stuff you already think to be true, as opposed to paying
for new information or debunking your false beliefs, so I think I'll save that
dollar. Plus there's the google cache link below.

~~~
dredmorbius
And this is the key reason why micropayment schemes don't work.

If they _were_ effectively priced, the decision cost of trying to figure out
if an item was worth purchasing or not would exceed the value of virtually all
content.

It's why bundled subscriptions became popular, at a time when these were tied
to a service (delivery by the publisher) and a set of enabling technologies
(low-cost printing, paper, and ink). Even if a given article within the
magazine, or a given issue in the year, left you wanting, the gross price was
about right. And the result was achieved: people could share and commonly
discuss ideas.

With Web-based publishing, the tollgate which postal delivery afforded is
gone, and an alternative business model is wanted. And the result is that
we're not discussing the content of the article (pretty light, BTW, from
Google cache), but of the publishing model itself.

Twist: Though _that_ topic is HN-worthy in its own right.

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al2o3cr
Shorter WSJ: "We've been saying for years that those commies in the
universities should 'run their schools like a business', but now that they're
doing it OMG IT'S BAD!"

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dragontamer
The point of lecture is not to "teach", the same way a high school lecture
was. A College Lecture was designed to introduce concepts and clarify
questions that occurred in studies.

But "learning" and "teaching" don't really happen in the lecture halls. They
happen in the labs, in the after-hour question / answer sessions. After all,
it is difficult for a professor to individually answer questions when there
are 300 students in a hall (and similarly, most students are too shy to ask a
question in front of so many people).

Surprise, college is not the baby-hand-holding that high school / grade school
was. Students are expected to learn by themselves, and set up their own study
groups. Students are expected to come to after-lecture study halls for
clarification.

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

Lets put it this way. The _student_ is the one who is paying for the
education. If the student wastes his $30,000+ by partying and socializing all
day long, the problem is NOT with the professors.

~~~
j2kun
But the onus is on the institution to only grant degrees to those who deserve
it. The worthlessness comes when you start giving bachelor's degrees to people
who chose to waste their tuition on partying, and this is what's happening.

~~~
HarryHirsch
_But the onus is on the institution to only grant degrees to those who deserve
it_

Unfortunately, with an ever greater share of universities' budgets coming from
tuition, they cannot afford to throw people out. It's also why you see so many
summer courses offered where for lack of time they cannot even hope to cover
the material appropiately, and it's why you see this proliferation of taught
masters degrees. It's disgusting, and it ought to stop.

 _worthlessness comes when you start giving bachelor 's degrees to people who
chose to waste their tuition on partying_

Taught Masters degrees sold to students whose GPA isn't sufficient to get them
into medical school are a different kind of worthless. They are disgusting and
reprehensible.

~~~
Scienz
_they cannot afford to throw people out._

Not always true. I flunked out of my last school due largely to depression
issues and extreme isolation which led to heavy drinking and low grades. My
advisor, who I'd only talked to once before when switching into that major,
was so happy to see me go he wouldn't even speak to me when I needed him to
sign a form so I could drop out, instead of failing out. Instead just told me
he was busy and left me sitting outside his office for an hour and a half
before I finally got the point (I waited so long because I at first assumed he
was actually busy, and not just blowing me off). Needless to say it's hard to
do well at a school in spite of isolation and depression when your professors
automatically assume you're just a lazy shit who isn't trying and your advisor
won't even let you into their office. I know in his head he was probably
"upholding the quality of the degree for the alumni" or some shit, but it's
hard to justify that when they're doing so based on snap judgments about
students who depend on them and who they've never even really spoken to, and
furthermore refuse to. Also, to justify that I'm not actually as much of a
loser as this guy thought I was, I should say that part of the depression was
due to failing to maintain a 4.0 GPA in my classes (I wanted to go to grad
school for physics and felt this was required). I found out later I'd actually
been one of only three students to even pass the hardest class, and somehow
ended up with a B in it despite thinking I was failing the entire time.

Trust me, they do not give a fuck about you. Unless you can get their name on
a paper you're publishing, you're just an ID number and a tuition payment to
them.

~~~
j2kun
Not all schools are like that. My alma mater had no research program, and all
the professors did was teach. Though the student body was largely comprised of
partiers, so you may have gotten the same sort of treatment.

That being said, it sounds like you're a proponent of the "alternative routes"
that the OP suggests at the end of the article.

~~~
Scienz
I am indeed a huge proponent of the alternative routes method. My criticisms
of higher education could go on for a long time, and I'm not even going to try
and list them all here. My experience has also been that professors who also
do research are not nearly as good teachers as the ones who don't. The best
teachers I had were in community college, despite probably not being as
"qualified" or well-versed in the subjects as the ones publishing papers, a
good number of them actually cared about the students and went out of their
way to help you get through the class. Counterintuitively, it seems the more
prestigious the school the more self-centered and hostile the professors.

~~~
j2kun
This is true. In research communities they actively tell graduate students not
to care about teaching because it looks bad on a CV to have teaching awards,
etc.

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daphneokeefe
Paywall

