Since it would appear that my economic recovery plan has little chance of being adopted, I’ve turned my attention to something that would improve long-term U.S. economic growth: improving university education. Comments on this draft would be appreciated.
20 thoughts on “Improving university education to spur economic growth”
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People have been talking about problems in university education for a very long time; see The Closing of the American Mind, How the University Works, and others. But it also tends to work well enough and be resistant to large-scale changes in part for that reason and in part for other structural reasons relating to tenure.
The big question to me is how one is going to incentivize universities to make the kinds of changes you propose, and how one is going to institute feedback mechanisms to tease out any unintended consequences they might cause. Saying “tie it to federal money” is too simplistic and unlikely: universities have better lobbyists than you do.
The secondary important criticism is in Project-Based Education? A Response to Mark Taylor. Who is going to evaluate teaching? Who is going to decide what body of knowledge students should master? And so forth.
The third observation I would make is that what works for the highly motivated at Harvard and MIT might not work for the vast majority of people who view universities as job training, four to five years of partying, and what not. Perhaps they should be ignored, but when they’re the majority of the university population, that’s just not going to happen. Murray Sperber’s Beer and Circus has more about this.
I’m reminded of Thomas Toch’s Tell the Truth About Colleges, where he effectively says colleges should just be more transparent in what they’re teaching, which would provide market signals to students. Right. That’s going to be _real_ simple. Two fields where outcomes are incredibly hard to measure—education and health care—are also among the fastest growing expenditures in the country and concomitantly have become major political issues (Megan McArdle pointed this out originally, though I don’t have the post). Trying to find a meaningful grade for something like “grade students on their ability to assist other students” would be really hard, verging on impossible.
Anyway, not all of this responds directly to your article, and I haven’t said enough about the incentives on the professors’ end toward publishing, but I also have to run (to a university, funnily enough…).
Jake: Thanks for the links. One problem with criticism of universities is that it tends to concentrate on the experience of humanities students at the wealthiest colleges. There is also a lot of ink spent on the question of whether professors are indoctrinating students with liberal ideas. I guess it is fun to worry about the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies department at Yale (http://www.yale.edu/lgbts/ ) but there aren’t that many kids rich enough to get a degree in queerness on a leafy multi-billion dollar campus. The real action is how much a Business, Education, Criminology, or Engineering major is learning at a state school.
The idea that project-based learning is only for an elite group of students has been disproved by Neumont, cited in the article. Their incoming student body is measurably worse-prepared than University of Utah’s (itself not an especially elite school). Furthermore, as soon as students graduate from any college they are expected to accomplish projects. Not too many employers pay people to sit passively in a lecture. So doing projects must be within the capabilities of most American workers or they wouldn’t have jobs…
The most striking misfeature of our current education system is the complete disregard for the value of carefulness, nuance, and true mastery.
This is readily apparent to anyone who interviews modern graduates. The emphasis is on thinly covering an enormous scope of material, giving even the best students exceedingly temporary marginal competence.
The entire system is permeated by the attitude that 90% is good enough — exemplary in fact. The student that stops during an exam to consider the nuances of a question and how the ‘right’ answer might not actually be true in every case, will fail the course. Doing this in primary or secondary school can even cause a child to be labeled as having a learning disability!
In business (or even life), on the other hand, 90% is far from acceptable. The thin line between success and failure is usually out in the noise past .99999. Ninety-percent thoughtfulness burns up expensive camcorders. Ninety-percent uptime means being down over a month every year. Ninety-percent correctness on a processor die means a generation of computers that are useful only for boiling water.
Perhaps the primary value of project-based education is that careful attention to important details once again promotes fitness.
You asked: “How many jobs are there in the U.S. that pay someone to do something like sit passively in a lecture?”
In the corporate world, this is called “attending meetings”. It must be a very valuable skill, judging by the amount of time devoted to its exercise.
I haven’t read Clark but I’m pretty sure the genetic evolution claim (“genetic personal tendency towards future-mindedness…[because] wealthier men had more surviving children”) is bogus; the relevant evolution was cultural, not genetic. Read Thomas Sowell on this; I recommend _The Economics and Politics of Race_. What he looked at in great and interesting detail was how well one genetic group does when they move somewhere else. For instance, the “overseas chinese”. There was quite a long period in which people who lived in, say, vietnam, were dirt poor while people who were driven *out* of vietnam or left voluntarily – essentially the same genetic stock – did phenomenally well in essentially every other country of the world that would have them. You can ascribe some of this to motivational/selection factors – the people who moved had more moxie than the ones who stayed – but not all of it. Most of it seems to be that some places have persistent dysfunctional social dynamics. There are some places where if you get rich it is generally expected that either the government, the local community, or your immediate family will come mooch off of you. In those places, very few people get rich. This is a stable equilibrium; the social mores that might allow significant accumulation of capital evolve very slowly.
While most undergraduates are not heading for professional school, I do think the first order of business would be to stop requiring a bachelor’s degree in “something” in order to get professional training. I’m also suspicious of degree requirements that are measured in time, rather than the amount learned.
For instance, to become a lawyer in most states, you need to get an undergraduate degree in something and log three years in law school. It doesn’t really matter what you study, if anything, as long as you get the parchment from an accredited university. Next, you have to spend three years in law school. It doesn’t really matter how quickly you learn. A genius who could pick it up in three months still has to sit through three years (a few schools allow students to speed this up through summer session, but total time spent in class is the same).
I spent one semester in law school at Columbia, and while the students are smart, there’s nothing that a bright high school senior couldn’t understand.
I’m not sure what would replace it, but ideally we’d be able to come up with something more competitive that would allow a fast learning student from a more effective learning environment to move through the system more quickly. At least then it could get competitive.
Law is an extreme case, and most occupations don’t require a formal degree or license (even the ones that “require” an education”), but it might be a good place to start, as these are the fields where a university can force its inefficiency on students through the force of law.
As a graduate of the U. of Utah, I suspect the methods Neumont uses are indeed much more effective for teaching computer science. But as I look back on my coursework, computer science was just a small fraction of what I studied there. Classes in physics, art, landscape architecture, history, film production etc.were major contributions to my overall skill set. I gained much more experience learning to research and write effectively in a demanding military history class than anything offered by the English or CS departments.
The opportunity to study from a broad range of topics is one of the major benefits of going to a large university and spending four years there. I think your suggestions for overhauling the way instruction happens are good, but turning university education into focused trade schools would be a loss.
In the second half of this talk Bill Gates talks about how the most direct fix for education is better teachers. His presentation is focused on primary education, the same points could easily be made for universities as well.
Excellent article.
On universities in the middle ages, I’ve learned a few interesting things from a book from Jacques Le Goff called Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (in french : Pour un autre moyen âge) where we learn that students had to offer very expensive presents to professors, with payments in money or in kind, especially just before the exams and that all those payments were precisely written into the University rules. It came from the fact that professors had no other (or very low) wage coming from the university.
At a time, you say : “If American workers aren’t better educated than Chinese, Indian, and Mexican workers, why would you expect their wages to be higher?” You mean by this that there is yet a possibility for Americans to be better educated than Chinese, Indian or Mexican workers… But as those countries are also taking education for a serious matter for their economic growth, maybe the only attainable goal is to be equally good in the front of the massive group of well-trained engineers in “emerging” countries. So at best, we could hope to have the same wages as any of the well-trained china citizen.
A typo : “you can delivery the same quality” in “University of Phoenix”
One of the problems with reforming colleges is that many professors and college presidents will disagree with you on the importance of colleges preparing graduates for economic success. Here’s one example: http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2006/10/whats_the_point_of_a_college_e.php and any search on “college is not job training” will no doubt pull up richer examples on a similar theme. As long as a good number of professors think they are preparing students for “life” rather than “jobs,” I think you’ll be disappointed in the positive economic impact of recent college graduates.
Your point on the damaging effect of faculty tenure on performance is well-taken, but what about the student side? Is there anything our society can do in terms of better motivating students for economic success? You only have a brief blurb on high schools, but what about making a driver’s license contingent upon a certain score on the MCAS or other standardized test? This would not only potentially help the performance of students on mathematics and science, but it might also help to free up highway congestion and lower obesity rates, depending upon the dropout rate.
Your points on pedagogy are interesting, and colleges probably do lecture too much, but I wonder if colleges will ever be much of an economic solution regardless of how they run their classes when people like Gates, Dell, Diller, and Disney avoided college altogether with spectacular economic results, but Jefferson, arguably the best college student of our founding fathers and later architect of a college, died owing a ton of money to sundry creditors.
With all the world’s information online, getting rid of university education might be a better way. It’s become more of a business & less of a teaching service for these people.
Improving primary education seems to be the main problem. Maybe teach a useful language like Hindi instead of French. Those Chinese kids are solving Schroedinger’s equation & writing optimizing compilers by the time we’re starting geometry.
Write down a precise spec? Discuss the adequacy with customers?
It may be sad to say, but most “professional organizations” I’ve been around ignore these rules. Or to be more precise, the manager doesn’t know such “rules” exist in the first place. (Maybe that’s why software projects have such a high failure rate?) There’s never enough time to write, much less discuss a spec. To these guys, if a programmer isn’t typing code into an IDE, she’s not working!
That said, your plan is definitely on the right path. Let’s just hope that when your graduates start working, they don’t have manager asking why they’re wasting time getting precise requirements…
I would like to know how the effectiveness of learning in small groups really is.
I have two personal experiences on the matter. In junior high, my teachers believed in group work, so we were split in groups to do whatever task assigned and got a mark for it. Groups always worked on the lines of lazier students piggybacking on more motivated ones (I would just say from the start I’d do 100% of the work — my mates would get my exact mark — on condition that they got out of the way and let me work without having to explain stuff to them). Not the best way of getting weaker students to catch up.
At Uni (Bologna, btw) we would often study in groups, and that was very beneficial because everyone pulled their weight as much as they could — but we got no marks from that effort and we were all individually examined at the end of the year. Just a thought.
I agree wholeheartedly on most points. Now the question is, how to make universities introduce any changes?
One thing is the choice of courses. In the Eastern Europe where I’m from, we don’t have any much choice. I remember when I studied CS, half of the study program was math subjects, like “equations of mathematical physics”, for instance.
As another commenter aptly put it, most professors think that they are “preparing students for life”, not for a job. Therefore they decide what you “need to know”, and a lot of obscure but “necessary” knowledge is getting taught. This gets especially cumbersome if you are getting a second education. Here, if you want a secong education, you have to enter undergraduate school again from the start. And professors start preparing you “for life” once more.
An important theme to me is relationship between memory and knowledge, as understood by university system, and actual skills and proficiency. I myself am a quick learner, but I forget things just as quickly. Therefore I usually get good marks on exams. But maybe a better measure of my profiency would be to ask those same exam questions after a year or two, without chance of prior preparation? I know as well that there are many people who are slow learners but with a better long-term memory. They have hard times passing the exams and are not favoured by university system. But later you discover that they are the ones that actually remember something of that material after several years. What you learn in university is the ability to absorb a lot of information superficially during a couple of days before the exam, and throw it out of your head afterwards. And rightfully so, because I never needed “mathematical physics equations” in my work, neither did 100% of my coursemates, I guess.
I don’t quite agree with distant learning. The direct lecture has some behefits, it is again memory – we may remember something better if this memory is anchored to some feeling, to the tone of the professors speech or to his personality. After some years, I may remember some things from my courses just because I remember the way professor said them. This never happens with Wikipedia.
I totally agree on the idea to make office-like environment for students to collaborate, university as a workplace. Right now, my education is crippled – I only sit passively through lectures in the university, and do all my work at home, alone and without feedback. Then deliver the work at the university and get grades, university acts as a grading machine.
Another problem lies in the relationship between student and university. We can compare it with relationship between employee and employer and see that, although superficially student has much more freedom (“can skip classes”), employee has many more rights.
An employee gets paid every month. A student “gets paid” with a degree, and this happens only after completing several years of education. Therefore employee can terminate his job ar any time, but student is totally at the discretion of the university for several years. More precisely, at the discretion of the professors.
To fire an employee, something must go really wrong and there should real evidence to employee’s misperformance. However, nothing prevents a university professor for course A to set much higher passing standards for his course than other professors, and to fail as many students as he likes during exams.
If there is a bizarrely unfair/counterproductive person in a company, he will usually get fired sooner or later. However, a bizarre/unproductive professor may spend many happy a semester in the university.
Good essay, and your observations on your personal experiments tally with Seth Godin’s on his alternative MBA programme.
I suppose the question is, how do we get there from here? The fact that Neumont exists is hopeful, and perhaps means that the market will take care of this in time. When the graduates from your programme and the re-engineered schools get into the position of making hiring decisions, things should start to change.
Before you fix it you have to know the problem. A major one that is not discussed much because it’s not PC is how the education system in general and universities in particular are failing boys. I have read that women are now 60%+ of college students. That was hit home to me recently when I attended a science seminar where some summer students also sat in. This was a ‘hard science’ area (astronomy) and I would say about 3/4 were women.
Regardless what you hope, most women devote a large part of their energy to raising children. So universities are spending most of their money and effort educating people who will not fully use their education in their work. I am NOT opposed to women attending universities but the universities are not educating men. And as you mention in your essay, the level of education has a major effect on the country.
So any discussion of universities and education has to address this problem.
I talked about the ideas in this article to a variety of folks over the last week or so. Quite a few people had a negative reaction to pairs of students doing projects together. My experience is that two students can get a project done four times as fast as one student because they have complementary skills. However, for those who think that group learning is not effective, it is still possible to replace lectures with projects. They just become individual projects.
Hey Phil, I’d love to see some words on how to scale project oriented classes like your MIT’s 6.171 (Software Engineering for Web Applications) to a larger set of students. This is probably the most valuable class in the MIT curriculum, but only a small minority of the students have a chance to take it. (I didn’t, though I wish I did)
I believe MIT started as a very practical-oriented institution, with students spending most of their time learning by doing in the labs. Over time, however, the lecture system became more appealing.
The Olin school of engineering does have a good model. It’d be good to see a larger university adopt it too.
Murali: The best way for an engineering school to scale up project classes is to involve alumni, a much easier task now that the Internet is universal. Since there are far more alumni than students at MIT, for example, even if only 10 percent of alumni are willing to critique a project, that still gives at least one alum per student. There is no reason for a university to try to do everything in a self-contained manner. Alumni are willing to do boring stuff such as fund-raising for free. Surely they would be much happier to exercise their brains interacting with students. (In fact when I surveyed working engineers to get mentors for 6.171 teams I had no trouble finding one mentor for each team. I was also able to bring in working interface designers and business people to provide critiques. All that I had to do was pick up the phone or email.)
Universities right now are trying to do too much and too little at the same time. The school says “we don’t have sufficient staff to interact with students doing projects” but at the same time does not use the Internet to (1) outsource grading to a neutral third party, and (2) bring in alumni to assist.
Phil, following Calif*’s allusion to primary education, I’d love to read your thoughts on IB programs in public schools.