| Context: I attended a small (1500 students, no grad school), private (read: expensive), liberal arts college from 2004-2008 and dropped out. I finished my degree in 2014 at the same institution because I was so close it was pointless not to. > I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition. Some people pay a shitload of tuition, yes. It's somewhat like buying a car (in the US). Nobody pays sticker price. There is a lot of very cheap money floating around (gov't loans, grants, scholarships), which is keeping the price artificially high. The sticker price of my school was about $35k/yr, or $140,000 for a degree. I left in 2008 with about $22k in loans. The rest was grants and scholarships. I did well in HS but not so well that you would immediately think people would throw $120k at me for school. The important thing here is that the school actually received the $140k. They've got zero incentive to control costs. > If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money. This is true to an extent, but I had no instructional interaction with the professors prior to my first day of classes. I spoke to a few as a visiting HS senior, but even the professors were in sales mode at that point. > It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it. It's misaligned incentives (mentioned in greater detail elsewhere in the comments here). The professors do not get any more money if all of their students understand the subject perfectly and go on to become professors themselves compared to if half the class fails. The only mitigating factor to this is some universities place promotion/review weight to student evaluations, but even then it's only an issue until one receives tenure. My college was primarily a teaching college, and approximately 2/3 of the professor workload was teaching, grading, and related. Some of the larger survey classes would have a few TAs that would do reviews for smaller groups, but a TA leading a class was unheard of. There was no graduate school (they've since added a few Master's programs), so the TA's were just other undergrads who had gotten A's in the course in previous semesters. > If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken. I don't think anyone will disagree with you here :) |