Most academics didn't choose the career for the management side of their responsibilities. Perhaps concentrating those responsibilities in a few managerial types would free many people to do what they really want.
I've always disliked the perverse incentive of universities to hire professors who are good researchers but perhaps abysmal instructors. They may be subject matter experts but that doesn't necessarily qualify them to teach. They know as much, and often pawn off their undergrad classes on their grad students. I had a CS theory professor who was always out at math conferences and it made me wondering what the point of paying thousands in tuition to that school was if I'm just getting an underpaid grad student to teach me everything.
I've heard some professors are recruited with the explicit promise that they'll do a minimal amount of actual teaching. Ironically this can mean that the supposedly "best" universities in the country have some of the worst in-class experience for undergrads, where huge lecture halls with 200 students are taught the fundamentals by people only a couple years older than them and not the world-renowned experts that they paid to see. If this isn't good enough for them, it's on the student to make up the difference via after-class labs with the grad students who help them solve their homework problems
It feels like in some universities, research is the point and the undergrad programs simply exist to subsidize the graduate and PhD work and not to develop a new generation of people for the good of society
>The point of undergraduates is to learn enough on their own that merely talking with them does not make the professor want to poke his own eyes out.
I would agree if the students weren't paying insane sums to be there. When they pay tens of thousands a year to be there and be taught by experts, it's disrespectful to the customer to not even show up for work. If the student is required to teach themself, then what value does the university add? Why not just buy a set of textbooks and have some kind of exam company certify you? What is the value proposition of an institution which doesn't give a fuck about its customers?
1. This is mostly confusing individual paying for their own education and a state paying for future workers. Even the US is coming round to the idea it has to forgive most student loans which eventually becomes state pays for university (because now that 50% kids go to further education the school leaving age is now 21)
2. You are not there to be taught. You are there to learn on your own, near people who will tell you an effective way to get through the syllabus (ie grabbing a text book on your own require huge amounts of effort and is probably impossible in say chemistry or most sciences. This is the other part of the fees - paying for buildings, explosive glowing stuff etc etc
3. Other students - 50% of the experience of university is meeting people not from your walk of life, getting to work with them, have sex with them etc. see point 1. It’s not about educating one person - it’s about building a new generation
4. That’s why well designed conscription actually seems to breed stronger societies (but usually confounded by most conscription is during times of actual war so hard to tell but post WWII societies seemed more egalitarian- but again lost confounding factors
> 2. You are not there to be taught. You are there to learn on your own, near people who will tell you an effective way to get through the syllabus (ie grabbing a text book on your own require huge amounts of effort and is probably impossible in say chemistry or most sciences. This is the other part of the fees - paying for buildings, explosive glowing stuff etc etc
This just sounds like lazy professors trying to shirk the aspects of their jobs that they hate so they can do the parts they like. I don't buy this argument because, in fact, most people who pay lots of money to go to several lectures a week expect instruction. To say that you have to teach yourself is to say there's no point in paying the professor other than the generate research.
> 3. Other students - 50% of the experience of university is meeting people not from your walk of life, getting to work with them, have sex with them etc. see point 1. It’s not about educating one person - it’s about building a new generation
Yes, I think a large factor of why people go to college is because they've been marketed a lifestyle to them by these gigantic franchised institutions. Universities have wormed their way into the American psyche as a necessary stage of (very very late, post-adolescent) development and so students are willing to shell out tens of thousands on what has effectively become an all expenses paid sex resort with occasional and minimally competent instruction. I think anyone who goes to college mostly because they bought into this is a sucker
On the second part, as Inunderstand it the Netherlands expects an 18 year old to spend the next five years in some combination of three years education, a years volunteering and a years travelling.
The goal is well rounded citizens not corporate trained drones.
Is it expensive - of course. Is it necessary to educate all your citizens like this? No of course not - just stick the the rich ones, or the ones with certain racial traits or no disabilities … oh sorry sarcasm was turned on
Yes it’s expensive and yes the state should pay. The elite have been attending universities for ever and have worked out a deal till the 1990s where the elite could keep going as long as they paid for the brightest to attend and accepted the less smelly brightest into the elite levels.
However this is falling apart - the actress paying for her daughter to go to IVy league colleges knew, Donald Trump admits it, the whole thing is rigged and you need money to buy the contacts. Honestly I don’t know where I am going with that except to say you cannot fix university without fixing what comes after - business investment shoukd be based not on who your banker knows but …
As for the first part, yeah we could have amazing teachers and amazing researchers and amazing administrators rolled into the same person but, bear with me, it might be viable to have different people do many of those roles.
Look, groking calculus is rarely an issue of how clever the person who explains it is. It’s mostly how hard you bang your head on the desk doing the problems.
Most teaching is making sure you keep banging your head.
Making it entertaining is just tricking kids that the next level will also be fun. It’s only fun if you enjoy not knowing and the process of problem solving.
Students who see themselves as customers have come to the wrong place. Universities, and particularly research universities, are primarily places of scholarship. They offer a socially acceptable excuse to spend a few years learning about things that interest you, in an environment designed to support it. If you are not interested in that, you should find your education somewhere else.
Unfortunately politicians repurposed universities 2-3 generations ago as places for educating the middle class. The situation got particularly bad in the US. Unlike in many other countries, there is no clear separation between universities and institutes that offer more practically oriented higher education. Universities became expensive to attend, because the society started seeing education primarily as the student's investment in their own future. And instead of seeing all universities as more or less equivalent, Americans are particularly concerned about prestige and rank research universities consistently higher than those focusing on education.
This is blinkered given the hockey-stick growth of higher ed management over the past ~30 years. If anything, there was a much reduced need to write grants back when there were few managers in the university. Bureaucrats create bureaucracy, they don't protect people from it.
I've heard some professors are recruited with the explicit promise that they'll do a minimal amount of actual teaching. Ironically this can mean that the supposedly "best" universities in the country have some of the worst in-class experience for undergrads, where huge lecture halls with 200 students are taught the fundamentals by people only a couple years older than them and not the world-renowned experts that they paid to see. If this isn't good enough for them, it's on the student to make up the difference via after-class labs with the grad students who help them solve their homework problems
It feels like in some universities, research is the point and the undergrad programs simply exist to subsidize the graduate and PhD work and not to develop a new generation of people for the good of society