Folks: I’ve completed a review of Higher Education? and would appreciate comments/corrections.
18 thoughts on “Book review: Higher Education?”
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A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Folks: I’ve completed a review of Higher Education? and would appreciate comments/corrections.
Comments are closed.
Partial explanation for the higher prices:
http://i.imgur.com/vJm22.jpg
I work as a Junior Prof in a university outside the US. My bias: I’m a researcher, but the only way I can get time to research is if I’m paid to teach; I don’t mind teaching providing I don’t have to do too much of it. You can probably see why I am “anon” for this post.
I have worked in research intensive and non-research intensive universities. The staffing profiles obviously reflect those priorities.
The “teaching academics” in the non-research intensive universities are well liked personally (they knew all the students by name; give them emotional support; etc.) by students, who connect with these staff as people. Yet the students consistently give such members of staff poor (often VERY poor) feedback on their teaching, despite liking them as people. Why? Because, in my opinion, the students quickly realise that most of these staff don’t understand their subject beyond a superficial level. They’re basically school teachers and their understanding reflects that: they tend to be 1 lesson ahead of the students, at best. Students spot this in a few weeks and are turned off.
The “researcher academics” in these same institutions are not necessarily well liked (they’re remote, don’t reply to e-mail, and are emotionally cold) but they get good feedback. They understand the subject and students clearly derive confidence from the fact that they believe the person at the front understands things deeper than the students do.
What conclusion to draw from this result which took me a couple of years to believe was actually happening? In an ideal world, yes, I’d spin research out from teaching; but, ironically, I suspect the overall quality of teaching would nosedive. In particular, good students would derive even less from their university experience than they do at the moment. The consistent efforts to ensure as few students fail as possible already means the brightest – the ones who society will most benefit from giving a university education too – are increasingly held back. If the quality of the teaching were to go down more, bright students would be better off given a textbook and told “learn it yourself – it’ll be quicker and you’ll do a better job on your own.”
Anon: Ouch! The “1 lesson ahead of the students” hurts because that was me, in January, pretending to know something about Android application development.
I’m assuming that you teach a technical subject. The authors of Higher Education? have a bias towards liberal arts. A person doing publishable research in philosophy right now is probably manipulating symbols in a manner that resembles mathematics more than the Plato and Aristotle that young people need to learn. A researcher in English literature, similarly, probably isn’t writing anything for a journal that would help in a classroom where students are going through Beowulf, Chaucer, etc.
The whole higher ed. complex is ripe for disruption a la Clayton M. Christensen, yet no one entrepreneur has yet figured a way to take the colleges head on and provide students with an alternative to getting a degree to prove to would-be employers of their worth as good job candidates.
The bubble will burst because families won’t be able to afford the tuition increases, period. For example, at an annual increase of 2.5 percent above inflation in 25 years tuition that costs $30,000 today will be $55,000 in constant dollars. With the typical family having 2.5 kids who on average take 5 years to graduate it will cost them in total $687,500 for what is increasingly a depreciating asset.
brian,
You’ve got a great point about disruption. In small ways this happens around every campus. There are test prep services that convince college students to part with some more loan money for a non-PhD, non-tenured, unpublished, twenty-something to teach them how to pass the LSAT/MCAT/etc exams. The school could open a section and hire “qualified people” to handle such common demands, but they are on sabbatical.
Beyond that example, Americans are not voracious consumers of education like students and parents from Asia. Beyond the Asian communities I see around CA, there is little demand for cram schools, much less a demand for a quality college education. There is little companies can do with people who don’t know what they want out of school besides a diploma the easiest way possible. University of Phoenix and Devry could certainly try harder and charge less, but with direct access to federal cash, why try?
Phil,
From your review, it seems the authors got most of contemporary academia right. My grad school friends are amazed at how long their “PI’s” are away from campus. They also notice how the campus doesn’t even seem to care much about them or the undergrads who are miserably failing even introductory sections. Some TA’s have been ordered to give minimum grades on things like history papers.
I need to stop reading this stuff.
One of your better more thorough reviews, especially the more critical points lobbed at the authors. I haven’t finished the book yet, but have a few minor points to add so far. The authors assume that thinking skills can be taught at university on such a broad scale. I think that it is an unrealistic burden, as this skills have to be developed at an earlier age. Instead k-12 education emphasizes conformity – how are these kids going to start thinking for themselves spontaneously at age 18, especially in the context of another structured institution?
The authors also feel that higher education should be open to everyone. That is the case in many European countries. Does it make European twenty somethings more interesting people or better citizens? Not in my experience. Instead higher education becomes a glorified parking spot waiting for jobs to open. Why not make working and studying an intertwined life long experience? It’s healthy to have a job early. Any rational employer will encourage smart employees to further their education. Communication skills, so often lacking today, can be developed later on. It’s time to break the study-study-work-work bifurcation and use a more rational approach of working and studying.
philg: I’m not giving too much away by saying I’m a computer scientist. It may be a miserable subject but someone’s gotta do it.
We all do the “1 lesson” ahead thing sometimes – no-one knows everything (or remembers everything they once knew). But there’s a big difference between: having a solid base upon which to talk about something with which you’re less familiar; and talking about something with little idea what it really is or what context it fits into. Too many teaching-only staff that I’ve seen fit exclusively into the latter, hence, I now believe, their poor feedback from students.
It’s a delicious irony: at university level (in computer science, at least), the more you concentrate on teaching, the worse you get at it in the long term.
anon: A lawyer called me yesterday looking for a software expert witness with experience developing Web browsers. Typically such experts are academics, but I noted that “You could probably drop bombs on 50 university CS departments without killing anyone who knows how to write a Windows application.”
Anyway, in a fast-changing field such as biology, I can see the virtue of having a current researcher teaching the intro subject. I’m not so sure about the liberal arts. St. Johns College in Maryland has, by reputation, a great undergrad program based around discussions of original works, e.g., you learn calculus by reading Newton and Leibniz. The teachers are not even specialists in any one field, much less current top researchers. I wish the book authors had visited St. Johns because it is a very interesting alternative to the conventional undergrad program.
A good read, if depressing to yours truly with two kids in college right now. And due to the 2008 market crash their college funds are no longer sufficient to see them through. (I guess daddy coulda gone a bit more conservative so close to jr going to college?)
Is this a typo in the first sentence under the heading Tenure:
“I can be fired for any reason, except incompetence,”
Or is our dear professor just exceptionally witty?
Bob: It isn’t a typo. And my friend was hardly witty before he went to physics grad school, so I think it would be a stretch to say that he is witty now. His statement is literally true. The (state) university where he works can fire him if he were to throw a chair at a student, for example, or fail to adhere to an affirmative action policy. They can’t, however, fire him if his lectures are incomprehensible, if he fails to win any research grants, if he fails to accomplish anything in his lab, or indeed, if he fails to show up to work aside from the scheduled lecture hours.
I’ll have some longer comments later when I have more time, but regarding the inclusion of MIT in the ten “acceptable” schools, and the reasons, I have a short reaction.
While I think that choosing a school because it pays its adjunct faculty well is ill-advised, a “student experience” criterion is too generic.
My experience at IHTFP was miserable; just like track team practice was miserable in my teens. But I never learned more per unit of effort, or put so much effort per day, than at IHTFP; I never progressed faster as an athlete than when I had a hard coach.
As a faculty member at a school that I won’t name (it’s a state University in Berkeley, California, with a big white tower and a football team named Golden Bears; but I won’t name it), I saw the corrosive effect of the “student experience,” which came to mean “avoid anything that may get in the way of the student feeling great about themselves,” including — of course — teaching them, if that contradicted their preconceived notions.
None of that nonsense at IHTFP, at least not in the 90s.
I thank my miserable IHTFP experience every time I meet someone who gets fazed if they have to think three angstroms out of their credentialed intellectual box. I assume they had a very rewarding college experience, where they never had to go outside their comfort zone. (I don’t think I ever saw my comfort zone at IHTFP. It was rumored to exist beyond the forest of problem sets, past the valley or weekend research projects and the fire lake of quals.)
A second short comment, based on Charles Murray’s book “Real Education.” There are too many people going to college that shouldn’t, so what we call college now is but a shadow of what it would have been with more selectivity.
Cheers,
JCS
PS: Calling it IHTFP instead of MIT should make it clear what my experience there was.
Proposal: make it illegal for employers to ask about education. (And they will quickly learn to not let applicants offer it, like any other the other forbidden things an employer should ask about.)
Now how does this change people’s incentives to go to college?
philg: I agree wholeheartedly that there is a difference between the arts and technical subjects in this regard.
In subjects whose main foundations go back centuries, you’re probably right that competent teachers can do an excellent job.
In subjects that refresh themselves every decade or two (computer science, biology etc.), it seems that research active people are the only ones who refresh themselves (to some extent) along with the subject. Of course, we could throw everyone over 35/40ish out of computer science, which would keep the faculty pretty up to date; I’m not sure many of the oldies would be able to get a job in the wider world though. In most computer science departments I know, you could drop a bomb and not kill anyone who’s been involved in developing a substantial application (Windows or otherwise). That’s a whole other problem!
For a consumer’s (i. e., parent’s) view of the problem, read Crazy U, by Andrew Ferguson. Crazy U has a remarkable report of a question and answer session at Harvard for prospective applicants and their parents (pp 127 – 128).
“What about legacies?”
“What do you mean?”
“How many of class are legacies?” he said. “Their parents went to Harvard.”
“Oh, I don’t have that information,” she said. “I’m not sure we even keep that information.”
Just a guess, then, the man persisted.
“I wouldn’t want to guess.”
“So you have no way of knowing?” he asked, with exaggerated incredulity. “The numbers don’t exist?” His wife, short and stocky, stood next to him, staring at the dean. Their son bowed his head and closed his eyes.
“Legacy is just one of many factors that Harvard considers,” the dean said. “I like to say, ‘legacy can help the wounded, but it can’t raise the dead!” She laughed uncomfortably but the father and mother still stared.
“Answer the question,” another father called out.
“Maybe I can get that information for you afterward,” she said, twisting one hand with the other. She moved one foot backward.
“Come on,” said another parent, with just a hint of insurrection.
She was quiet a moment before surrendering. “If I had to say,” she said, “thirty, maybe thirty-five percent.”
There was a shock before the murmuring began. The number was hard to square with the egalitarianism of the video we’d just seen. The number suggested the traditional Ivy League primogeniture.
One thing that I neglected to add to the review is that the authors don’t examine their assumption that a liberal arts education is as good or better a way to prepare for a career in the U.S. as a vocational degree. They cite some examples of successful people who majored in history, but don’t look at the averages or consider how many American young people can afford to spend four years in college and then another few years in professional school. Nor do they mention that their enthusiasm for liberal arts is not shared by employers. Government-run schools nationwide offer excellent union wages, lavish pension benefits, and a 9-month/year, 6-hour/day work schedule. It would actually be illegal for such a school to hire a recent standard bachelor’s graduate in philosophy or history. Instead they will hire someone with an education degree. Similarly, anyone hoping to earn $150,000 per year (plus pension and other benefits) cruising up and down the Massachusetts Turnpike as a State Trooper should be studying Criminology, not English Lit. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but it sure pays well in the U.S.
I have to agree with ‘anon’, at least in terms of comp sci. Most of my profs not only seemed just one lesson ahead, but had no real grounding in any technologies created after 1986 (or really any knowledge of those made BEFORE 1986). Now, most of them were fairly friendly and open, and a couple seemed quite energetic and you could forgive them for only being one lesson ahead, but with everyone else I felt like I would have actually done better just reading a few books, or StackOverFlow everyday and just built my own websites, and rather than spending four years learning nothing, spent two learning quite a bit.
However, I like the idea that nearly every subject in undergrads could be learned buy just buying a handful of cheap Dover publications and learn subjects that way.
But I also don’t think it should be all that hard for any HS teacher or college professor to keep up with any subject. I’d assume, even if they’ve been in education all their lives, they should learn that C might not be the best way to teach intro programming, and instead learn Python or Ruby (or Lisp?!) With a large amount of theoretical knowledge, the semantics don’t really change that much, just learning a new syntax. I’d assume the best teachers are the ones that know things would be able to teach things better, and the cold, emotionless ones are that way because, well, they’re cold and emotionless, not super geniuses.
Anytime you hear your professor who’s been at it for 20 years say, “You have to write these programs on the lab computers, for some reason they won’t compile in Visual Studio on your home computer.” It should be time to run far, far away. (That, or until I graduated in ’07, having the DATABASE course be an elective.)