"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members."
A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.
EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?
"I actually took the time to spend a day at a university where I could gain access to IEEE papers without wasting my private money. I picked out twenty recent realtime related papers and did a quick survey. Twelve of the papers were a rehash of well-known and well-researched topics, and at least half of them were badly written as well. From the remaining eight papers, six were micro improvements based on previous papers where I had a hard time figuring out why the papers had been written at all. One of those was merely describing the effects of converting a constant which influences resource partitioning into a runtime configurable variable. So that left two papers which seemed actually worthwhile to read in detail. Funny enough, I had already read one of those papers as it was publicly accessible in a slightly modified form.
That survey really convinced me to stay away from IEEE forever and to consider the university ranking system even more suspicious."
That's funny. If you took a look at startups, you'd find that 99% of them are me-too crap. Badly designed websites for Yet Another Social Networking Gimmick, bad mobile apps, outlandish bad business ideas, etc.
1% of them ever truly go anywhere. 0.1% of them change the world.
My point is that anytime you randomly sample a field of work of any kind, you're going to get an exponential distribution of quality with a few hits and a long tail. All papers are not the Church-Turing thesis, and all startups are not Google or Apple.
A lot of academia-bashing amounts to criticism of academia for having the same sorts of failings that are present in equal measure in all other societal institutions public or private. Things like: elitism, know-nothing overpaid leadership, poor quality control, loss of focus, abusive labor practices, perverse incentives, poor success ratios for new ventures, etc.
You fail in academia too, but the floor is different. With a startup, you cease to exist or drop off into an abandonware project. In academia, failure means you get lackluster appointments, little grant money, etc. You kind of stagnate.
I've noticed that smart self-aware people in academia can right this by recognizing that kind of stagnation for what it is, namely failure, and responding by changing course, increasing effort, etc.
The dangerous thing about academia is that failure just looks like mediocrity... mediocrity is failure. This isn't the case in the real world, where mediocrity is just mediocrity and failure is... well... you see them sleeping on the sidewalk.
Your dopamine system is not calibrated this way. So to succeed in academia I think you have to realize that if you're not a star you're sleeping in a gutter and respond to your situation accordingly. Respond to mediocre results the way you would respond to sleeping in the gutter in the "real world."
Looking at journals isn't the only way to do it. You can take encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries, and check for citations and mentions there.
Funnily enough, one such attempt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment) finds that per capita scientific achievement seems to start declining around the 1920s or 1930s, which is also (with WWII and whatnot) the beginning of the modern university system.
I think per capita scientific achievement has declined, but I think it's because we did all the easy stuff already. We are starting to hit a wall where new discoveries increasingly require one or more of the following:
1) A lot of expensive tools. (accelerators, genomics cores, supercomputers, etc.)
2) A lot of labor. (The "armies of graduate students and postdocs" phenomenon is a product of this.)
3) Intelligence beyond the capacity of a single individual. (Supercomputers, large numbers of people over time, etc. are required to "grasp" something. Anything ending in "omics" is a perfect example of this.)
You can think of it as being loosely analogous to peak oil, though the underlying causes are different. With peak oil, it's because the resource itself is limited. With scientific discoveries, you might have an infinite ultimate supply but you have a finite horizon of vision. It's like if there actually was infinite oil deep in the earth, but we were strictly incapable of building drills longer than one mile.
Personally I think #3 is the limit we're really hitting. I sometimes doubt that we have the IQ power as a species to truly grasp the genome or to unify QM and gravity. We either don't have the IQ or we don't yet have the language or philosophical framework to think about those things.
We're not infinitely smart. Can your dog read Hacker News? Maybe aliens are watching us now and thinking "well, they're sort of clever but they're really just still animals... they only see two sides to every conflict, they can't think in more than three dimensions, and they can't hold more than seven or eight simultaneous ideas at once..."
I'm not saying academia is perfect. It needs to change. If we really are nearing our IQ limits, we need an environment that removes distractions and allows people to really focus to get that last bit of creativity and intelligence. Academia is too bureaucratic, noisy, interrupt driven, and stressful. All those are IQ-killers.
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouth 'look over there'" http://xkcd.com/552/
I might buy the End of Science argument, but this would be far from the first time that it has been made, and I'm not sure it really works. Look at computer science; how much of that was or could have been worked out in the absence of an actual computer? And as much computer development was aided by government funding, the commercial imperatives were just as compelling. (Look at IBM's pre-digital computer success.)
I agree... like an economic bubble, I don't think it's possible to ever "call the top" except in retrospect. But it does worry me. I don't think human beings like to think about it because it bruises our collective ego to think that there might be a bunch of stuff that we're too dumb to get.
But I do wonder if we've passed "peak innovation." The biggest reason is the 1960s. It really feels like virtually every piece of technology that we use outside of maybe biotech was invented in the 50s and 60s.
Looking back, I see two peaks. I see a peak in per capita innovation in the early 20th century, and then a second peak in absolute terms centered at approximately 1960.
A random sample of an entire field or industry should have an exponential distribution, yes. Journals, though, are quality-gated: there are supposed to be review processes in place so that only the interesting/important/hopefully-seminal stuff gets published. That they reflect the same exponential curve is a testament to the fact that the review processes don't work.
I agree that journals do not have the quality control they claim to have. I was responding to the larger idea that academia is somehow unique in having such a quality distribution.
Some years ago, I saw a 60 minutes episode on issues in higher education. The reporter picked a biology journal off a shelf, read its arcane title, and exclaimed "who actually reads this stuff?" to back up her claim about how useless journals are... as if she were somehow qualified to judge the importance of a paper by its title.
I couldn't help but imagining what she would have said if she picked up a paper titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" or "On formally undecidable propositions of. Principia Mathematica and related systems".
Fortunately it's not up to her to decide. That said, it seems that some papers go out of their way to hide what the paper is really about by looking at the title.
Usually you just don't know. I got shamed in front of a prof once by saying that a given paper title was a good way to make people not want to come to your talk, and he responded by explaining why he thought it was an interesting talk.
There are plenty of examples of things that might be meaningless to a graph-theory professor that are a core part of the language of a combinatorics specialist.
And of course, undergrads and humanities majors best keep their mouths shut.
One of the things taught to undergrads in the humanities—specifically, in communications design—is that you should make the metadata of something interesting-seeming to a wider audience than the data it represents, so that it spreads further—that way, more of the people interested in the data will see it.
As an example, one of my friends told me about a very interesting paper called, and I quote, "Three Monkeys something something." He didn't know what it was about, but he said it "sounded like something I'd be interested in." He was quite right—but if it hadn't been for the monkeys, he wouldn't had anything vivid about the paper to recall at all.
I noticed that too, and I wondered if they were even capable of making that judgement. I looked up their backgrounds: the review writer is an English professor at Emory; one of the book authors is a Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Queens College in NY.
This continues the tendency I've seen elsewhere, which is to lump science and engineering education and research in with humanities when criticizing higher education.
It's a fair point, but he's probably focusing on the arts and soft sciences because those degrees are the most overpriced for the value they deliver.
To put it another way, an MIT grad with an engineering degree is going to be much better off career-wise than a Harvard grad who majored in gender studies.
The long term studies of technical degrees vs 'soft science' hasn't been looked at in depth on a national scale with relation to earnings and salary. These studies are just beginning.
From AACRO: after 10 years the earning potential for an engineering degree drops below someone with an English degree. Technical degrees are way more valuable out of the gate while soft science take time to develop.
To put it into other words: where an engineer can make 65k right after graduation an english major will start at 35k. The engineer's salary increases on par with inflation while the english major increases substantially over time and overtakes it on average at the 10 year point. The paraphrased quote from AACROs lobbyist: 'we're seeing through earnings study that technical degrees go stale over the career of an individual, this is shown when comparing the average english major vs the average electrical engineer' There's alot of background nuance (politics) there behind the study but the idea hasn't really been broached before in higher ed. It's really quite interesting to look at on a US scale, but that data hasn't been collected yet.
Oh: I'm not contesting that some soft science degrees aren't total wastes of money. Just that there will always be a place for a gender studies Harvard grad. We just don't need 10,000 of them.
Do you have a link to back this claim up? I don't believe it.
If you look at PayScale.com, for example, you'll see a ranking of undergrad majors, with starting and mid-career salaries, where mid-career is defined as "full-time employees with at least 10 years of experience in their career or field who hold a bachelor's degree and no higher degrees."
English Majors start at $37,800 and get to $67,500 after 10 years.
Electrical Engineering Majors start at $60,800 and get to $104,000 after 10 years.
AACRO has an incentive to overstate the benefits of non-technical college degrees, as these are the most common types of degrees, and these are the degrees that are leading more people to question the value of a college education.
Does anyone know of any studies that take into consideration labour-force dropout as well? It's a bit less enlightening if you compare the 95% of science grads who are employed doing science with the 60% of soft studies grads (both numbers purely hypothetical), to compare the most career-driven X-students with all the Y-students is unfair to Y-studies.
Tenored professorships are nicely paying, hard to get but exist in every discipline (let's pick on Gender Studies) so if 2/100 GS grads become 100K/year tenured profs and 98/100 opt out of the labour force, you're really measuring the wrong thing.
I do not have any reports to back this up as the transcript from the meeting is yet to be released. I've been curious to dig into the distinctions and locations used for the selection populations.
The discussion I paraphrased was made at an AACRO tech conference during a talk about the creation of a federal student tracking database - the speaker was Barmak Nassirian who is a lobbyist in DC for higher ed. I'm going off of the data presented in that talk.
On the same note, I've never used payscale.com for more than a glance. Their methodology sounds valid, but I don't know how they make their money.
I bet you have some tremendous selection bias going on.
I bet they only looked at the english majors who still had a job in the field after many years. If you include all the english majors, including the failed ones who work in a different field then the numbers might make more sense.
Definitely, it's from an AACRO conference which is full of collegiate registrars and provosts. The message may ignore contrary data to get a political agenda across. Until I can review the actual reports the argument is based upon, I can't really say for certain. To truly analyze the information across the nation the feds will have to create a US student tracking and lump it in with K-12 & IRS data. There's a quiet movement to do so - but there's resistance to that idea hence the discussion. Resistance stems from the orwellian aspects while proponents trend along "we spend federal dollars on these diplomas, we need to make sure they're doing GOOD for the society somehow." A figure quoted at the same talk was that we spend 3% of our GDP on education.
I didn't say I agreed with what was said, it's just something that higher ed is talking about at the top of the greater organization and was worth a mention.
Personally I feel state academia is bloated and backwards and many changes need to be made. Admissions should be highly curtailed where the whole nation makes an effort towards math and science instead of 'getting a degree so you can get 10k$ extra starting out.' I'm still not convinced that the federal dollars lost to defaulting loans wouldn't be better spent on k-12 education.
Payscale make their money by helping companies figure out what salary ranges to offer in new markets, offering benchmarking and other compensation guidance.
This is very true. Most young male engineering grads like to gloat the fact that they make a lot more than their humanities counterparts (perhaps to make up for the misery and lack of female companionship during their undergrad?)
But the reality is that if you graduated with a humanities/social science degree from a ivy league or sub-ivy school, you are bound to do pretty well. As opposed to their state school counterparts, English majors from Harvard have the academic clout to get into a top law/med school which will put them with far greater earning power over engineers in 10 years.
But if you are a true-minded humanities major, you might even become a true humanitarian for a couple of years; maybe travel abroad to a Peace Corps or get a masters at a International Studies program. Then only later, you get on the fast-track to a management program at some Fortune 500 to manage some engineers.
> But if you are a true-minded humanities major, you might even become a true humanitarian for a couple of years; maybe travel abroad to a Peace Corps or get a masters at a International Studies program. Then only later, you get on the fast-track to a management program at some Fortune 500 to manage some engineers.
Keep telling yourself that.
Only a small fraction of humanities grads make that transition.
Oh, and the Peace Corps wants folks who can actually do things. Food, shelter, etc come from applied technology.
Ahhh this is one of the issues I've heard tossed around - what makes for a successful individual post graduation? How can we measure it?
The feds are putting in place systems to track income as the best metric. But... I hesitate to call a 100k$ rockstar EE major ten times more successful than a rockstar chem e doing water purification work in Guatemala for 10k$ as a humanitarian.
Pretty simple answer to that. You don't. Most college grads don't realize that how much you make at a job is a really poor indicator of your self-worth. But you don't realize this until after you've been on the job for awhile - kind of like high schoolers thinking where you go to college is the ultimate determination of your worth.
For some values of 'value'. Because you can't put a dollar sign on everything, right? I feel much better about the value I got from my humanities classes than I ever did about my computer science classes, whether or not that translates directly into money-earned.
2) Spending 8 years advocating "deficits don't matter", then changing their opinion 180 degrees within 24 hours of a new President being inaugurated.
3) Writing screeds castigating liberals for being coastal elitists and out of touch on an iPad from the back seat of the author's car service, while drinking a latte on the way to yoga class.
/me watches the comment thread change over time as those who are more motivated by tribal allegiances start to outweigh those who appreciate a fair joke
I appreciate the well placed joke now and again. "Punching hippies" was funny because its truthy enough to be relevant, and relevant enough to be in the thread.
HN goes through a phase every now and again where I think it takes itself a little too seriously. Its for important discussions unlike that red-place with the silly alien (pretentious snorteling and huffing). All attempts at humor are immediately voted down.
I'm not one of the greats, but I've been here for a few laps and I've got some karma so I'm calling it:
When I feel like lightening up, I go to that red-place. When I'm serious, I come back here. It's nice to have the separation; if we weren't all so serious all the time on HN—if it was just another Reddit, in other words—would there really be a point to coming here? :)
just a glance is enough at this table of contents of academic journal - classical and quantum gravity- http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 to wonder how much of this -research- is advancing knowledge and how much is --about advancing the career of the authors--
It's a very good question, and hardly a trivial one. Quite a lot of science is nearly worthless, and only published to pad the author's cv. A couple of blog posts on the topic:
Lasers were thought to be a laboratory curiosity when they were invented. On the other hand, you have a ton of academics who are convinced that the "semantic web" is the next big thing.
Part of the problem with science is that it's an activity where it's very hard to have any useful metric. Even experts in the field have a tough time deciding whether a given research direction is going to be fruitful. They're often wrong.
So far the best thing we've figured out for science resembles the Underpants Gnomes' business plan:
1) Fund lots of science.
2) ????
3) Profit!
The ???? part is "pray that some of it is useful and that some of that gets into the hands of people who will use it."
Why do we need this? By every metric I know of, governments spend orders of magnitude more on science than they did in the 1800s. Are we getting orders more "Profit!"?
You can't split atoms with a chisel, nor email the international space station with telegraph lines. The discoveries possible with 1800-vintage equipment are mostly already made, so now we have to spend orders of magnitude more to learn anything new. And I'd much rather we roll the dice again and keep looking, not just wait and see how civilization survives the decline of oil and fertilizer.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf tells me that non-commercial (government or government-subsidized) R&D represents ~1% of GDP in 2006 for the US. I believe equivalent figures for the 1800s would be closer to 0% R&D inasmuch as there were no Departments of Energy, Health & Human Services, etc., but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Maybe the Gilded Age governments in the US actually spent 2% of GDP on R&D.
State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge.
The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should private research universities focus on education instead of research? (I would give that a resounding no.) (2) Are the private research universities actually producing useful knowledge? (Here, I would be somewhat negative, but probably not for the trite reasons cited by the authors.)
Those are completely different questions, especially since one is empirical and one is normative. And it is a hallmark of poor editorializing to try to address both an empirical question and a normative question in the same small space.
Um, really ignorant question here, but what book on reasoning can I read to be able to see through arguments and debates like you just did? I want to learn about empirical and normative questions, etc.
Boy, it's hard to answer such a flattering comment without letting it get to your head and sounding like a pompous jerk!
I'll give the same advice I give as a teaching grad student to undergrads who think us grad students are incredibly smart: it only takes a tiny amount of knowledge or training for someone to have that you don't for them to seem so much smarter. Don't be fooled. As a grad student enslaved by a university, I have become quite familiar with all the arguments about the purpose and place of research vs. teaching.
Anyways, this confusion between normative and empirical claims is extremely common; once you become aware of the difference, you see it everywhere. The easiest way to familiarize yourself with this and related ideas is to take a introductory course on moral philosophy or read an introductory textbook. Unfortunately, even if I thought the book I used in college was all that great (it was OK), I forgot the name of it. The material is fairly universal at the introductory level, though, so any decent book would do.
As a student about to start on the honours portion of my degree, I find solace in analytic philosophy (as opposed to those damn ethical/post-modern philosophers).
That question is somewhat addressed in Sean Carroll's post that I linked to:
> If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. Sure, some would complain that they enjoy teaching, that it keeps them fresh, or that students can be useful as research assistants. But those are reasons why the students are useful to the faculty; they are not assertions that the purpose of the institution is to educate students for their own sakes.
>Don’t believe me? Here is the test: when was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer “never,” the question itself is somewhat laughable.
Honestly, once you realize that private research universities use undergraduates as a source of money, all sorts of seemingly strange behaviors by the university become simple. Why does Princeton allow so many academically unqualified students in to play sports? Alumni donations. Why does it charge $40k+ per year (albeit with financial aid) if it really wanted to attract the absolute best students (since it doesn't actually need the money)? Because the students aren't important and, heck, might as well pay for a couple more buildings.
A few places do this, or so nearly do it that they might as well; in sciences, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies comes to mind. In the humanities, a lot of Yale senior profs only need to teach three classes per academic year and can get a semester off every third year. That's not quite the same as getting rid of undergrads, but it's close.
My father is a senior, tenured professor of mechanical engineering. He's won a bunch of prizes and fellowships. He's probably one of the best in his field. I don't ever recall anything about substantial raises. In fact, all I ever hear out of him is that they're cutting staff, restricting bonuses and cutting raises.
This coming from a man who works on research and the related papers/books almost every waking hour of his life. I'm serious too, I grew up around it. Saturday and Sunday, absolutely. Friday night, definitely. Breaks only for PBS News Hour/CNN, meals, and the occasional friendly tennis match (when the rotator cuff isn't giving him trouble).
He teaches only one undergraduate class a semester. Sure, you might consider that a "light teaching load," but that would be insulting to the graduate, doctorate, and post-doc students who fought hard to spend 50+ hour weeks in the lab (those students probably spend more than 80 hour weeks there themselves). If he could, he'd opt out of that class too. Can't blame him either: most of those students aren't even interested in being an engineer, they're just in it for the degree.
His biggest complaint? Administrative overhead. The university and related agencies take sometimes up to half of his grant money. Hard to pay those students at those rates. Which means he has to spend more time there himself. Time that's getting scarcer due to increases in course and paper requirements.
If you ask him, he'll tell you that colleges serve their administration (in the same way that some say government only exists to serve itself). But maybe someone's just holding on to that 58% raise check for him.
It's been observed that once any organization reaches a certain size or age it acquires so many institutional rules and traditions, and has so many layers of staff, that it effectively lives more to serve itself than to serve the outside world. It also acts increasingly not to fight the problem it was meant to be a solution for, but to actually preserve and continue that problem, thereby maximizing the chance for future job security for the institution itself. It will increasingly not want to cure the problem, but to temporarily alleviate it -- alleviate it for only as long as the institution's services are purchased. Once that happens, the organization has become a bureaucracy.
In my experience, it's the professors who operate on the Richard Feynman model who are the most successful. While there are lots of professors who are of the mind that teaching and researching are antithetical, I had a few who were just PHENOMENAL, passionate lecturers who say teaching and the future of research as going hand in hand. And it's not so much the material they conveyed; it was the passion for the subject. To me, that's where all of the brilliant students go, to the professors who convince them, through their passion and excitement for the next generation, to take up a particular field of study. In that regard, I think the system can on some level work itself out. Programs with little regard for the next generation simply burn out and attract fewer acolytes. When I look back on my education, as well as what I got out of college, it's totally the handful of passionate professors who shaped me and influenced my future.
Oh God yes, I can't agree with this more. My wife worked as an adjunct at Indiana University, killing herself with a 15-hour load for eight thousand bucks while the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus.
This year, she's got a real job (for a year as a visiting professor) for $35K and benefits; it's going to feel like we're rolling in cash. This is after 30 years of education, including a doctorate in theoretical physics.
The American university system may well have jumped the shark.
the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus.
University presidents may well be overpaid, but it is simply uninformed to claim that they "contribute nothing whatsoever." Besides setting the direction of the entire institution, an effective president will raise far more income for the school via fundraising than the cost of their salary.
Great. That's a wonderful justification for paying the majority of their actual instructors less than minimum wage with no benefits at all - then they can attract that guy to raise more money than they pay him.
Sooner or later, America will have to start funding its research and its education as two separate services; the current model isn't working. It's just taking a very long time to be obvious.
It's not a "justification": the pay of instructors and the pay of university presidents are just two very different things. I don't really see what the point of comparing the two is.
Sooner or later, America will have to start funding its research and its education as two separate services
Well, this is at least partly the case today: NSF, NIH, and similar funding bodies support research. At most top research schools, very little (if any) of the money from undergrad tuition goes to support research.
BTW, what about this is specific to the American education system? As far as I know, non-tenured instructors teach classes in many countries, and are usually poorly paid.
At most top research schools, very little (if any) of the money from undergrad tuition goes to support research.
But a large amount of the money devoted to research goes to support education/administration. Most universities will take about half of a grant as overhead.
Actually, there are plenty of competent administrators who would probably work for ~ $150K plus benefits (no free house).
Having administration who are paid like landed gentry while professors and grad students are paid peanuts and students have to engage huge amounts of debt relative to their expected future earnings IS THE PROBLEM.
This is very true. We don't see too many administrators who are paid outrageously, our athletics department handles all of that. Highest paid state employee for a few years - the ex Coach Mangino.
For the big name schools, College football and basketball both generate huge revenues They are basically pro sports masquerading as collegiate activities. I don't have an issue with the coach of a team that in fact does generate millions getting a high salary. Arguably the US should have a club system similar to Euro soccer for football and basketball, or the NBA should start to pay higher than pennies for its minor league and the NFL should start a minor league limited to 18-22 year olds to groom players (NFL football is too rough for 18 year olds' bodies).
I think the coach of a football program making a huge sum is different from the administrator of a college - for one thing, elite football coaching talent is in short supply. The supply of executives who can lead a university is not. Last I checked there are plenty of executives cooling their heels golfing etc.
However I could be convinced to hold football/basketball coaching salaries way down as part of a movement to de-professionalize college athletics by sending the coaches who are really using college athletics as a way to huge salaries to the pros. The way it operates now is simply absurd, especially given that elite level players receive none of the spoils of filling stadiums during the prime athletic years of their lives.
Back directly on topic, the problem with administrators making huge multiples of professors is it is attracting the wrong kind of people, i.e. profit maximizers who figure out how to funnel increasingly large sums of money into their own pockets. As an example consider the activities of the UC Regents: http://www.metroactive.com/features/diploma-mills.html
"Besides setting the direction of the entire institution, an effective president will raise far more income for the school via fundraising than the cost of their salary."
To what end?
The answer does not seem to be "providing a quality education to the university's students." So, regardless of the dollar amounts raised, "contribute nothing whatsoever" may very well be an accurate assessment of value. It depends on what that money is going towards, and what you consider a worthwhile contribution.
To what end does a university president raise money? Erm, well, it differs, but in general they are raising money for either new projects or the general endowment. Income from the endowment is typically used to support a wide variety of areas, many of which directly contribute to "providing a quality education to the university's students" -- scholarships, maintenance, staff, and so forth.
Alvin Kernan quotes the Princeton professor who say his president browsing the university bookstore: Why is that man reading? He should be out raising money!
edit: I just read on and you mention her new salary is $35K and it's a huge improvement but I find it still hard to believe that someone would actually go to work 15 hours per day for a $8K pay per year. That works out to be substantially less than minimum wage.
I looked into teaching math at a California community college and the pay was just under $2000 per course. A course was either 3 or 4 credits. $8K for 15 credit-hours worth of teaching in Indiana sounds about right. When my sister was an adjunct faculty at a big state school she made $17K a year.
Wow. I had no idea pays were this low. How do you live? Is the job really that great? Why put up with it? I started making 50K a year when I first graduated from college and I still complained it was too low after a year there. And now I think that making $100K a year is still too low. You need to choose a different career. Else no point in complaining.
He's saying she's being paid eight thousand for teaching fifteen credits of classes in a single semester. Presumably she'd make another eight the next semester and a couple extra thousand in the summer. So probably $22,000 a year.
Yes, right, as noted in the other responses, 15 credit hours, not 15 hours a day. It just felt like 15 hours a day, given preparation and grading and the fact that two of her five classes were in the next town over and so there was four hours of driving per week in there as well (and no, no mileage).
I can't ... well. I can complain, clearly, but income is income, and she paid for our summer in Europe this year, and it was good prep for the visiting professorship, but ... it's still wrong. With all the time she actually spent, I doubt she hit minimum wage.
Isn't the old joke that colleges are the only place where the employees get all of the good parking and the paying customers get the shitty, far away parking.
Man, if only that was the truth here at KU. Everyone has shit parking here unless you carry a massive title or tenure. maybe 100 cars total don't have to hike up a hill.
I go to a state funded college. This is my last semester and was lucky enough to get a great internship. I wanted to start early, however, I live pretty far away. I decided I would just live in the dorms.
I started negotiations and was surprised at how much it would cost me to stay there for 20 days- 1/2 of what it cost me to live there for a whole semester! After some digging- first they told me that it was not allowed(rooming early)- I find out that they do this on purpose to keep kids from bunking early.
Normally I wouldn't have a problem with this but, I am a senior meaning I've spent a ton of money at that school. I have also served on the housing board for the dorms I was going to live in- volunteer work for the school. They were also very rigid and would not really help me- a future alum.
Needless to say I couldn't afford the amount and as a result I start my internship later which makes my schedule even more cramped. I know what I will be doing when they start soliciting money.
The article disparages universities for having a larger and larger percentage of courses taught by lecturers rather than researching profs, but in my experience (ME, Stanford) the lecturers did a much better job teaching me than the Profs did, on average. Probably because they saw it as their primary occupation rather than an annoyance.
I found the title of this article quite ironic because that's exactly what happened to me in college. I was employed by the school and benefited more than the regular students. I was able to get a job on campus as a Sys admin and that's where most of my education came from. I really wish the opportunity I had was offered to more students on campus. Working 40hrs and going to school more than half time (9 hours or so) was a hard but the experience really put me ahead when I was applying for work. I already had 5 years of experience when I graduated and got the first job I applied for when I decided to leave the school.
I guess my point is, if you go to a school try to find a decent job on campus (not something useless like working as a library clerk if you want to be a programmer). Most universities will pay for your school if you work for them full time.
I still ended up racking some student debt ( I didn't work full time for the first 2 years which got expensive) but hopefully I'll have that gone soon. Not so lucky for my wife, she's earning a masters in library science right now and we are looking at over 50K total for her education. I'll probably have to get a new job when she graduates to cover the increased expense. 50K is ridiculous, and they won't give you 30 years to pay that off anymore.
I have not read the book the article references. However, in reference to what Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus call the "immorality" of using adjunct professors, the article's author does not address the fact that there are potentially very good reasons why the use of adjuncts is increasing.
In engineering, for example, adjunct professors may come from industry and provide students with perspective and experience full-time professors may not provide.
Adjunct professors may choose to teach as adjuncts because they have a passion and a talent for teaching they want to pursue without the pressures of publication. Many full-time professors may readily admit that the pressures of producing academic work causes the quality of their teaching to decrease. Perhaps this is one reason Yale offers its professors time so that both the quality of teaching and research remains high.
Some departments opt to hire adjunct professors because its set of full-time professors does not have the expertise to offer a course in a particular area of the field. While this may seem more applicable to technical fields, any department that opts to do this can provide students with more diversity and variety in course offerings over an academic year and over a student's academic career.
As someone who has gone to college and worked in a college, I couldn't agree more. It was great to work there as a staff member (IT), but as an adjunct professor, the pay was laughably low and not even close to worth it. Having a large amount of debt now is a burden, but bearable because I went into a good field. However, if I was a student today, just a decade later, I'd be taking on twice the amount of detb, and I'm not sure that'd be worth it.
To be honest I'm glad that professors are doing more research and instructors are more pure instructors. The typical professor has 4 jobs: Researcher, Fundraiser, Teacher and Evaluator. They all have a conflict of interest with each other in some way and they'll all steal your shower focus. If they were all separated, universities could provide much better services in each job category. I remember Knuth saying something along the lines of "I retired so I can actually focus on research and attend less meetings". Students won't have to deal with the scheduling nightmare that is final exams because professors are too valuable to provide flexible (scheduling wise) examination services. Things like back to back finals or having them 3 days after the 'get all of your large projects in' end of classes rush don't have to happen anymore! People who want to interact with professors can come on as undergrad research assistants/apprentices and actually learn some research vs. some extension of high school. Professors wouldn't have to deal with something alot of them aren't that good at and most dread and actually get the grants they need!
The title suggests that all colleges are effected, but the facts in the article primarily criticize the major "elitist" colleges. I go to a local community college, and do not see this problem personally.
There have been a lot of articles recently attacking higher education. Maybe there's some merit there, but one might also ask 'who is served by denegrating higher education as an option for the people? who benefits by a less educated public?'
1) The students who are currently being misled into believing $125k in debt and a piece of paper are a sure ticket to financial freedom.
2) Startups who want students to eschew school for lower salaries at the startups because they don't have the credentials to get into the Fortune 500.
3) Bitter students who are now $125k in debt with no chance of bankruptcy to alleviate that debt and no job to pay it off, but want an outlet for their frustration and evidence of a community with a common predicament.
4) Community colleges that are cheaper and often provide a better more focused education with smaller class sizes, less elitist student populations, and shorter times to degrees.
5) Students who are well served by attending colleges that aren't filled to the rafters by rich kids who need 4 more years of baby sitting or who go, because well, you are supposed to, meh.
6) A society that is better served by a real focus on the quality of education provided for its citizens who benefit from the products of a well educated work force which is increasingly diverging from useful and practical skills into a grade inflated joy ride through 4 years of drunken debauchery.
Of course colleges serve the people who work there. All organizations head that direction. The only thing that stops that progression is when the folks paying the bills take their money elsewhere.
I don' think that this is news to anyone that works in higher ed. I work at a University and its repeated all throughout the campus. Basically administrators want to set up their own little empires on the campus and make themselves seem indispensable. I'm pretty sure things like this happen at most large organizations in some form.
Organizations don't even have to be large for this to happen. If you're ambitious there's no place for you to move up finding a new job isn't the only option. People often try to redefine or expand their current job.
When it gets out of control it's a sure sign of a management problem.
It's ironic the article mentions Stanford, then describes university presidents as not having "done anything memorable, apart perhaps from firing a popular athletic coach." The president of Stanford is John Hennessy, a founder of MIPS and a board member of Google and Cisco among others.
"For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended."
I would like to know how much of this applies to universities in the UK. Here there is a lot of public funding, but we're moving towards paying more funding as time goes on.
when people pay for their own choices, they carefully weigh the costs and benefits involved. And the market is disciplined by this.
But when people are able to shift the costs to others or borrow money from those who lend to anybody, many aren't careful at all. And the market responds to take advantage of this.
what the authors are saying is true in general for any -bureaucracy- and education is the oldest and biggest existing bureaucracy even after it divided itself into secular and religious education in the 18th century
any bureaucracy must -grow- continually to perpetuate itself - education does this by making education longer and longer
the same occurred to me as well thats why i qualified by saying that education divided itself into secular and religious education - as i read in this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_school
--currently the church operates the worlds largest non-governmental school system-- so it would be very hard to separate catholic church and education
A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.
EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?