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Comments: 828 + - News: What's Wrong With the American University System on Friday July 30, @03:17PM
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ideonexus writes "The Atlantic has an excellent interview with Andrew Hacker — co-author with Claudia Dreifus of a book titled Higher Education? — covering everything that's wrong with the American university system. The discussion ranges from entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching; to 22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position after graduating with six-figures of debt; to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate. It really lays out the farce of university culture and reminds me of everything I absolutely despised about my college life. Dreifus is active in the comments section of the article as well, lending to a fantastic discussion on the subject."
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That it's required for most employment these days? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fix that first.
Re:That it's required for most employment these da (Score:5, Insightful)
most employment...
...has been shipped to China.
Thanks for playing, USA.
Your decline won't end in a nice environmentally sustainable hippydom either. Alchys and neglect are your future. Detroit, writ large.
Happy Friday.
Parent
Re:That it's required for most employment these da (Score:4, Insightful)
Programming, Technical work, Networking, DBA, Whatever you want to do with computers, education doesn't really matter.
This isn't entirely true. Both outside HR and internal HR departments filter the masses of resumes they receive by education. The simple, brain-dead way to filter the vast majority of candidates, and select (on average) better ones is to require either a Masters or a PhD. I wrote quite a diatribe about the stupidity of this practice a month or so ago when this turned up on Slashdot.
So while you still can get a job without a having 4-8 years of higher education in Computer fields, you're going to have to battering-ram through stupid HR screening before you'll get noticed. The 'big' companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and such even lean towards PhD as a minimum bar for entry. That's even more stupid, and you'll find you have trouble even getting a phone interview without a PhD even if you have, say, 10+ years experience in exactly the field they want.
The root cause? Escalation. Everyone who wants to get a programming job is getting a Masters, not even a Bachelors, because employers want that because everyone in the previous generation has a Bachelors. Now employers want a PhD because, well, everyone got a Masters because employers wanted that. What happens when everyone's spent 10 years in education just to get a job? Perhaps, I dunno, people could be recruited on a basis of their quality rather than a piece of paper saying they're as good as a few million other people.
Parent
Re:That it's required for most employment these da (Score:4, Interesting)
That sounds like an issue with employers then, not universities.
If employers keep asking for ever-increasing qualifications, isn't that an indication that universities aren't providing the right education?
Parent
Re:That it's required for most employment these da (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the example of the number one thing wrong with the US higher education system: misunderstanding of the purpose of the "higher education system".
Universities are supposed to be places where people get a well-rounded education in a wide array of topics. That's why the undergraduate degrees tend to have liberal arts and science and social studies components to them. The result is supposed to be people who can look at the world and have some understanding of where we are and where we are going.
If you want a technical degree, go to a community college or trade school. You should not be looking to the Universities to provide well-trained mechanics.
The fact that tenure was listed as a fault is another sign of that same misunderstanding. Universities are also intended to further the arts through research. Tenure is a means of allowing faculty to relax a bit from having to deal with the daily grind and let them explore areas that aren't necessarily the most productive now -- but may become so. "Ok, you've shown you can produce papers and teach, now be inventive."
It's no different than Google's "free friday", or whatever company it was that gave employees work-time to do personal projects.
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Re:That it's required for most employment these da (Score:5, Funny)
Most of the time its a HR drone who thinks that PHP is some kind of street name for a drug
PHP is a gateway language, it's easy to start with but before you know it you're hooked on Python, C, Java, and even worse. I get the shakes now if I don't use Perl every few hours. PHP ruined my life man.
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Re:That it's required for most employment these da (Score:5, Insightful)
Education is only important to things you don't like. If you are truly interested in a field you'll learn these things on your own; often better than can be taught. Otherwise you are just forcing an education due to it feeling required.
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Corporate (Score:5, Insightful)
What is wrong with university... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fix our high school system by actually -failing- kids who can't do the work. None of this "can I please have extra credit despite me doing nothing but talking in class?" crap that keeps high-profile athletes who are dumber than rocks with "passing" grades.
Re:What is wrong with university... (Score:5, Informative)
Coming from a European high school, and having spend a decade in the US, it seems to me that the courses that everyone that graduated my high school had to take would be equivalent to what many Americans get if they take a whole lot of AP classes. My biggest gripe with the American University was that the entry level general courses had no material I had not covered in High school: Physics I and II, Chemistry I and II, Calculus I, II and III and College Algebra were all covered in HS. Everything higher level than that had better quality content than what I'd have seen in the local University back home.
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But put this in pespective (Score:5, Insightful)
Name one profession that is _not_ filled with petty politics, sucking up to superiors, back stabbing and arguing over parking spots?
The difference is only academics write a thick book about it.
Re:But put this in pespective (Score:4, Funny)
Sir, I defer to your greater experience in this matter.
Parent
Almost had me... (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary started out good but:
"They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts".
"The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education."
I'm not saying get rid of liberal arts. They're great. I loved taking them when I got my BSME. I'm probably going to sneak into a few when I go back for my masters. But there is no reason every decent sized school needs to be graduating even 20 theater majors a year. Hurray, you spent 4 years and $50k to learn to do theater. Now what? Most highschools require you to have a teaching degree too. So now you're limited to off broadway and the such. Something tells me that there isn't a huge demand (at least not enough to match supply).
The most successful liberal arts major you'll ever meet was most likely one of your liberal arts professors.
We NEED to be focusing more on vocational training. The world needs ditch diggers. The world also needs mechanics, electricians, welders. We need to quit making high schools force someone who would be an excellent mechanic into going to college 'just because'. Too many parents push their kids into college thinking either "I'm successful, they have to go to be successful too." or "I want my kid to go to college because I didn't to get rich".
Personally I've liked what I read about other countries where they sort of guide you into a track early in high school. I'm sure it's not perfect and they get the track wrong, but it's a ton better than graduating 10,000 students a year from a decent sized education, 50% of which have a degree that is more or less 100% useless. WTF does an "Art Appreciation" major do?
I wish I could go back to my high school and give a swift cock punch to my guidance counselor that told me I couldn't take welding because I was college bound. There is so much stuff I'd love to make. Thankfully my dad taught me wood working and home repair and I learned to solder in an internship.
Re:Almost had me...[Almost Educated] (Score:5, Insightful)
Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking.
No, Liberal Arts is about thinking the way pre-scientific people did it.
Read CP Snow's "Two Cultures", which laments the divide between the sciences and the liberal arts, and justly so.
So long as the liberal arts fail to adapt to the scientific world-view, including accepting the importance of mathematical reasoning alongside poetry etc, they have ceased to be what they once were, which is the living voice of Western culture. Instead they are just a cozy backwater for the scientifically illiterate.
The sciences, at the same time, become a cozy backwater for the poetically illiterate.
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discovery of the obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:discovery of the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
But in the end I enjoyed the German university far more. For one, tuition was free*. Dealing with the bullshit that comes with a higher education is so much easier when you know you're not digging yourself into five figure debt for the privilege. Aside from that there were lots of perks on the side. The cafeteria served a choice 6 complete meals at lunch time, all between 2 to 4 euros for students including some salad, dessert, soup and a main dish. Students were able to ride all in-state public transportation for free, and it was good public transport. Single dorms were about 250 euros a month. Student loans were provided by the government with 0% interest, 50% to be paid back with payments starting 5 years after graduation. Good marks and early payment could lower that amount even further.
Last but not least, I was able to get a part time job at the university helping with research projects in my field. I probably learned more about programming through this work with the professor and his staff than I did in any of the lectures, and I was paid for it at the same time. These sorts of jobs were available in almost every department if you cared to ask.
I still had plenty of gripes, but I'm sure it could have been far worse.
*Before I get the inevitable "But it's not free you pay for it with taxes" reply yes, you're right. The point is the cost of your education is spread over your entire working life, instead of being dropped on you all at once. And I still had to pay a 120 euro/semester "fee" for administration, student union and so on.
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Tuition increases! (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article -- "Tuitions now are twice what they were 25 years ago".
Hmm, I started at the University of Texas almost 25 years ago. Tuition has gone up by a factor of *10* since then.
(Seriously -- it was about $400 per semester back then, and now it's over $4000/semester now.)
Back then, I put myself through college. No loans. Not sure that kids could do that now ...
What's wrong with this article (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts...
..liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later--by the way, in two years rather than four.
Disagree. Engineering classes also allow people to communicate and explore new ideas, the subject matter is simply more practical and concrete (i.e. the correct answer is more narrowly defined). Also, many quality engineering programs have liberal-education requirements for this reason. People pay a lot of money for college, and forcing them to take non-practical classes won't solve any problems, it will just further burden them with debt when they go back to "engineering school", or whatever the author is suggesting.
...you even suggest that graduates should work at Old Navy for a year and ruminate on their lives.
In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? ... There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do.
ARE YOU SERIOUS!? I quit reading the article at this point. I worked my ass off in shitty IT jobs over the last 7 years, double majored in 5 years, and this guy want me to go fold shirts or flip burgers?! I didn't expect (and don't have) a fat salary, but I do well enough to be comfortably middle-class at age 24, doing work that I somewhat enjoy. Also, there is a "rush", its called interest on my student loans.
I agree that there is a lot of stuff wrong with American Universities. Rich kids have an inherent advantage because they don't have to work during college. They socialize in Greek organizations, making connections to their future rich buddies, while lower and middle class kids like me bust our asses.
Cause of skyrocketing tuition (hint: not football) (Score:5, Insightful)
Football (and athletics in general) are not causing tuition to skyrocket. As much as I wish it were so, the numbers just don't add up. For example, tuition has also skyrocketed at schools (like mine) that don't even have football teams.
I think the cause is even simpler. The problem is, no one wants to talk about it because there is no easy, feel-good solution.
Thesis: The raise in tuition rates over the last 40 years or so is largely due to the easy availability of *cheap student loans.*
I don't think this should be particularly controversial: It is a logical outcome completely consistent with classical supply/demand economics.
Let's say the government prints money and starts giving it away. Everyone is richer, right? Wrong, of course -- that money is now worth less, so prices all go up. That's inflation. This is the same scenario, except that the money can only be used for one specific purpose: education. It should logically follow that the price of that education will simply go up correspondingly.
I'm not going to propose any solutions, because I don't want to start some stupid partisan flamewar. I just want to suggest that the widely perceived *solution* to high education costs is actually the *driver* of those costs.
- AJ
EDIT: Just found this:
"The simple economics of student loan crises"
http://dmarron.com/2009/09/15/the-simple-economics-of-student-loan-crises/ [dmarron.com]
Re:And yet- (Score:5, Insightful)
it is likely the best university system in the world.
[citation needed]
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Re:And yet- (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.4icu.org/top200/
http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/worlds-best-universities/2010/02/25/worlds-best-universities-top-400
You'll notice that the United States is disproportionately represented. (Effective troll though...)
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Re:And yet- (Score:5, Interesting)
The first poll is crap. The popularity of a university's web page have no bearing on the quality of its education and research performed. Until recently most German universities added their web pages as an afterthought and they were maintained by some IT admin sitting in a basement. I know that from first hand source having a friend working as IT admin at the University of Heidelberg [uni-heidelberg.de]. Having graduated there I always found its abysmally bad web presence a constant source of embarrassment.
There are some objective polls measuring research effectiveness using solid and well defined measures. And as one would expect the top tier well funded US research universities have a strong showing [wikipedia.org].
Yet, there is no strict correlation between good research and good education. Scanning the rankings listed in the related wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] does not show anything equivalent to the PISA effort [oecd.org] for college level education.
The US does dismal in the PISA rankings despite of course the existence of some outstanding private and public high schools. In the same vein the fact that the US hosts a good dozen of the best research universities tells us little to nothing of how the gross of the US colleges are holding up in international comparison. The only thing we can be certain off is that it costs much more than in many other places to get an advanced degree (i.e. Canada, Europe).
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Re:And yet- (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:And yet- (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:And yet- (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And yet- (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, but the difference between traveling to other countries and traveling to the US is that you have to go through American airport security. You have to really want to enter the country to voluntarily do that.
Parent
Re:And yet- (Score:5, Insightful)
no, what's wrong here in the US is that people EXPECT that simply throwing some money at an institution and attending some classes and doing the old pump-and-dump method of test taking is a RIGHT for all those graduating from lower education levels.
Living in a town with a major state university, it is appalling how basically stupid and ignorant of the real world most students at this university are.
The american student has basically been conned into believing that attendance of higher education is mandatory, yet at the same time is basically just a way to postpone entering the working force for a minimum of four years (and more likely 5-6 for that 4 year degree) and continue to act as a child while amassing a huge debt load for which the government is happy to keep taking their interest payments for the next 20 years.
it's pathetic actually.
Parent
Disciplined minds by Jeff Schmidt (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ [disciplined-minds.com] "The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
See my other post in this thread, too:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738326&cid=33090340 [slashdot.org]
Parent
Re:And yet- (Score:4, Insightful)
But then there's typically a good 30-40 year delay between actual achievement and Nobel prize. Add to that some 10 years worth of doing unnoticed stuff, and then 10- years worth of education, and we can conclude that American universities were awesome in the '50s-'70s.
Parent
Re:And yet- (Score:4, Interesting)
This one puzzled me.
Most any college team I know of (SEC ones in my experience) MAKE the universities money by the barrel full.
These teams not only support themselves, but pour money back into the general university system.
I know, and sometimes agree that there is WAY too emphasis on sports on the college level, over academics, but really...the complaint shouldn't be that it costs them any money, it is quite the opposite!
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Re:And yet- (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And yet- (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on the school. Mine makes money from football, but the money then gets sucked-up by all the other less popular sports like soccer, field hockey, gymnastics, and so on.
Where sports is REALLY a waste is at the High School level. Yeah I know people need exercise, but that's what gym is for. You don't need all those extra afterschool (and expensive) sports teams.
Parent
Investments... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most any college team I know of (SEC ones in my experience) MAKE the universities money by the barrel full.
Well, you have to beware of creative accounting and bad investments/contracts.
Basically it can sometimes become a 'school pride' issue, because the sports teams 'make' the college money they press for additional benefits - more pay for the coach, more money for recruiting efforts, new stadium, etc...
Of course, all this is justified as 'payoff in X years', the problem is that you never reach X...
On the creative accounting side you end up with sports expenses not being counted as part of the sports programs, things like ticket sales being counted as income even as they count stadium expenses as 'infrastructure' like actual classrooms.
Parent
Re:And yet- (Score:5, Insightful)
"It never ceases to amaze me how smart people seem to achieve greatness in spite of the many failings of our education system."
The reason for this is quite simple: a diploma gets you in the door, but your particular qualities, if any, pave the way to greatness.
/* soapbox */ in spite of our horrible primary education system. So we have to breed high achievers, American's aren't willing to teach greatness to children any more.. Having spent many of my formative years in Asia I know first hand that the situation exactly is. The issues we have with our primary schools are our real problems. K through 12 aged children come of age in and must excel despite a primary system that frankly teaches them shit about the reality of life and learning in the modern age. Children are indoctrinated into thinking about being accepting of other cultures, "valuing" and fostering their own fragile egos and at the same time that winning isn't really the right thing to strive for and how global warming is a hideous result of modern civilization and all manner of politically correct nonsense, none of which is taught in any other country that I've ever lived in.
Japanese school children on the other hand are given the basic tools of rational and critical thought, drilled constantly to master both mathematical and lexical (language) skills, and everything is done to prepare them for secondary education. Japan has many 2ndary schools, but any Japanese person will tell you that only 3 count; Tokyo, Todai, and a third whose name escapes me. If you are a Japanese citizen of means and you can't get your child into one of those three, that's when you consider sending your child to Harvard, Yale, Oxford, etc. And fortunately for those foreign students there's plenty of room because American children are off doing anything but achieving. Foreigners send their children to western schools because they don't have enough room in their own schools.
Meanwhile we're teaching our children to hug trees which they can presumably use to ultimately flip burgers with their liberal arts degrees. Are we really casting a critical enough eye at our primary education system?
Parent
Re:In defense of football (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:In defense of football (Score:4, Informative)
No, they don't. The ONLY thing they do is raise enrollment. The year after a team wins a championship or does well, they've seen enrollment rise.
UConn lost roughly $280,000 in football, according to the numbers. Only three BCS programs lost more — Syracuse, which lost $835,000, Wake Forest ($3.07 million) and Duke ($6.72 million). Rutgers, which spent $19.07 million on its football program, was the only other school to fail to make a profit, although the Big East school broke even. [courant.com]
Basketball doesn't make money either. [csmonitor.com]
"Let's just take a look at two schools, my own Holy Cross and big-time power North Carolina to highlight the flaws. According to the article, the Holy Cross basketball team racked up $1,549,329 in expenses while generating an identical amount in revenue and therefore exactly broke even.".
And as a whole, only 19 D1 Football schools were in the black. [sectalk.com]
Parent
Re:In defense of football (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a member of a college athletics committee, and I can tell you with all confidence that while is the common perception of college and university football programs, it simply isn't true. Even in Division I institutions football teams are, as a rule, largely funded by state dollars, student fees, and creative tax exemptions rather than by ticket sales, television contracts, etc. And this has been shown in study after study -- it's even a line that the NCAA toes.
You can check NCAA financial disclosures to verify this at http://www2.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports/ [indystar.com] thanks to a study completed by Mark Alesia in 2006, but a quick Google should point you to a bunch of other studies that give this position the lie. If you'd rather not click through and see the reports yourself, this is a nice summary statement:
"First off, he [Alesia] found that athletic departments at taxpayer-funded universities nationwide receive more than $1 billion in student fees and general school funds and services, and that without such outside funding, fewer than 10 percent of athletic departments would have been able to support themselves with ticket sales, television contracts and other revenue-generating sports sources. In fact, most would have lost more than $5 million."
While this is a statement about athletics programs in general rather than football programs specifically, the NCAA financial reports make it clear that even among popular sports like basketball and football, the overwhelming majority of programs are perennial money losers.
Parent
Re:In defense of football (Score:5, Informative)
"In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University."
Not for the university, no. Football funds generally go to the athletic department, which still runs at an overall loss to the university. This is according to the NCAA.
Those funds are typically used to support the rest of a university's athletic department budget. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, most departments operate at a yearly multimillion-dollar deficit. [PBS Nightly Business Report: The Business of College Football, Part 1]
http://www.pbs.org/nbr/site/onair/transcripts/071112c/ [pbs.org]
Parent
Re:In defense of football (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, because that wasn't a mistake. It was an indication that I went through 12 years of primary and secondary education, 4 years of undergraduate work, and 6 years on a Masters and a Ph.D. and was never once told the difference between "Your" and "You're." Until you came along and enlightened me just now, I was ignorant and lost. A lot of people would have just assumed that it was a mistake--but not you. You, and only you, realized that I needed the grammatical guidance of a kind scholar like yourself. You stepped forward, ignoring the citics who would dismiss you as a smug grammar Nazi, and said "No, I will not allow him to remain ignorant!"
Thank you, sir! Thank you!
Parent
Re:What's wrong with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
... and being prohibitively expensive for a large part of the population?
Parent
Re:What's wrong with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>I'm in Canada and I pay $900/semester + book costs
False. You are right you are paying $900/semester now, but then you will get a job and you will pay the remaining $80,000 or so in the form of weekly taxation. So in the end, you're paying the same amount as I did in the States...... just spread out over the next 60 years.
It's just the same as I got "free" K-12 education, but now I have to pay ~$6000 a year in school taxes. I am paying-off the education I received several decades ago. It was never free - just a deferred charge. Like buying a sofa at a store with deferred payment. It's free now; but I pay next year.
BTW: Were you really so naive as to not realize this? (Education is not free; it's simply paid later)
If so maybe your education was not that great after all.
Parent
Re:What's wrong with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:What's wrong with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
It worked well for 150 years.
Did you know that George Washington, for example, taught himself geometry? Back in the days when we had actual education it was understood that any person with the capability to read and access to the correct books could teach himself any skill he was capable of learning.
Parent
Re:What's wrong with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, you can buy on amazon for cheap excellent book on general relativity and quantum mechanics. My bet is that without a couple years in a good physics program you will no actually understand anything.
Because (advanced) maths are not simple. Because the level of abstraction reached is mind-boggling. Because these books build on centuries of maths and physics knowledge.
Now you can, perhaps, teach yourself to that level. It will take you probably more time than the college/university path. It is cute that you compare the level of education of Washington to today: basically, in his time, you could essentially know everything.
Now go read some articles on Riemanian manifolds on wikipedia. That's modern geometry for you. Go ahead. Teach yourself that.
Parent
Re:What's wrong with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
they all acted like they know something we don't.
If you're literally sitting there paying them to teach you something they damn well better know something you don't, otherwise your wasting your money. Also, you've got a bit of a paradox here unless you want someone in the situation to bow down and act like they don't have anymore knowledge than the other party. Someone has to have more knowledge than the other and one would certainly hope it's the person standing at the front of the class being paid to give it out.
Parent
Re:What's wrong with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone truly believes in the principal that one person's production should be forcibly taken and given to someone that an arbitrary authority has decided needs it more then that person should lead by example.
You're arguing from a faulty premise: that of the myth of one person's production.
Anything a person who dwells in civilization produces is the result of a partnership between that person and the society in which they live, without which their production (to some small or large degree) would be either impossible or less. Therefore, logically, the fruits of that production also logically belong in part to that person and in part to society.
It's not about redistributing what's yours; it's about your partner in a venture getting their cut.
Parent
Re:Sense of Entitlement (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's true that some come out of college with a nasty sense of entitlement for an awesome, high-paying job, not all do. The majority of people that I graduated with surely didn't share that sentiment (probably because they saw how much more I knew than them due to my actual real work experience, vs their school-only experience).
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Re:Sense of Entitlement (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:It would be more helpful if (Score:4, Insightful)
People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
Sorry, but you are making a sweeping and entirely false generalization there. From what I have seen, most of the international students in my engineering program came here because a degree from an American university was perceived as more valuable than a degree from their own country. I saw far more cheating and far less competence among the international students, even those that spoke English fluently, than I did among the American students; they were not going to school because they were seeking a better education than what they could get back home.
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Re:It would be more helpful if (Score:5, Insightful)
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