An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kevin Carey argues that Harvard should have used some of its fantastic accumulated wealth to expand the number of undergraduates. The U.S. population keeps growing and yet Harvard produces the same number of graduates each year. Thus Harvard becomes progressively more elitist.
[Related 2005 posting: “Radcliffe Southwestern Pre-Professional College for Women of Color”, in which I argued that Radcliffe should have used its substantial endowment to start up a new women’s college in the Phoenix or Los Angeles, rather than disappearing into Harvard. I did not argue for this as a moral imperative, as does Mr. Carey, but rather as something Radcliffe could have done to remain relevant.]
What do you think about universities making lecture videos and other material online for free? Isn’t that a reasonable way of providing education to more people. It also has an almost zero marginal cost for each new person using that.
Roger: A university buying a few video cameras and a server with part of its multi-billion-dollar stash is indeed noble. Sadly, however, there is no evidence that people learn anything by watching lectures (see http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth ).
From my experience the best learning is done in interactive groups and group projects. When I went to University, the best learning was when you got a good group of students together to push each other through the course. There where a few good professors that really stood out, but it largely depended on the students in the class. It was mostly professors that interacted with students that were the best, one of our professors stayed in the labs with his students usually way past 6:00 pm helping groups of students go through the material.
One of the best experience that I had was in a graduate stochastic systems course, in which three of us in the class got together a week before the final and went through three previous exams in two days. We all met in the lab and decided and spent three hours doing one of the previous exams individually. After the three hours we got together and went over each of our answers and our approach to solve the problems. We repeated this for two more exams. The learning experience over these two days was incredible. Another good learning experience was building an autonomous flying helicopter for a competition, learning during this project was much more effective then sitting through a lecture.
A university learning experience does not depend on the University or how expensive the tuition is, or how many nobel prizes the faculty has, but on the quality and the dedication of the students in forming groups to help them learn the material.
Yale actually is using some of its largess to expand its undergraduate population. I think they are building another college or two, though plans may be on hold with the recent financial shrinkage.
I was always under the impression that “national research universities” would be happier without undergraduates. Your average American sees a university as a place where you go to get a BA/BS degree, but faculty and administrators tend to see them as places where you do research. I suspect they’re more interested in Ph.D students (Harvard has way more grad students than undergrads) than undergrads.
There are two main approaches to this – limit the number of undergrads (elite private such as ivies, stanford…) and treat them all nice so they’ll give you money later, or explode the number of undergraduates (berkeley, ucla, washington, etc…) and use a “second cut” of gpa, weeder courses to force most of them into cheap and easy majors that don’t require much in the way of expensive university resources.
Interestingly, public and private research universities tend to have roughly the same number of PhD students, which is where they actually compete with each other.