If a public university were a restaurant, it would be a fast food joint and the education students receive would be a kids' meal. The restaurant is a huge place where you wait in long lines, rarely talk to another person (even to place your order), and get lousy food -- if you get anything at all. And if they get your order wrong, there's another long line and at the end, nobody cares anyway. The parents themselves don't eat there -- they just pay for the kids' meal. Students pour in like an army and are served huge gobbets of sugary information -- quickly gulped down and almost as quickly eliminated. Parents mostly know that their kids really ought to be eating something other than kids' meals -- and there are a lot of other choices out there. But they really couldn't sell it to you if it wasn't good for you, could they? Could they? And the other options cost so much! So parents spring for the kids' meal.
A serious problem is that it's difficult (and expensive) for anyone to tell whether education is really good or not -- there simply aren't many good measures in education and all of them except for the very worst, are expensive. The current high-stakes testing being used in public school is ridiculously bad -- it's like putting a scale at the doorway where you can't get out until you've eaten enough to trip the scale. But just bulking up doesn't mean you're eating a healthy diet. And all too many students approach education like a bulimic: they binge and, once they've passed the test, they purge. You have to look at much broader measures to know whether the growth is healthy and whether it will be persistant.
Getting a good education, like a healthy diet, requires changes in lifestyle and attitude. You can't just guzzle down whatever is set in front of you. You need to look carefully at yourself, understand your own strengths and weaknesses, and set goals for improvement. Each person's needs are different across a whole range of factors. Just like nutrition needs to consider more than just calories, getting a good education is more than just memorizing "content". It's possible for a seriously motivated person to do well on their own with no other help necessary. But just like a dieter surrounded by people munching chips and gobbling ice cream, the temptation to give in can be immense.
Universities could do education well, but there is no clear incentive for them to improve and it's not clear who could drive improvement. The administration is focused primarily on cost -- they get rewards for cutting costs, not for making the food better. The faculty are like musicians who flip burgers as a day job -- they're focused on their music and their reviews, not their cooking. And the students just want to grab the kids' meal and get out into the playland. As long as the students keep coming, who's to say there's a problem?
State funding for public higher education has declined dramatically over the past 15 years. In my state, funding was cut by nearly one-third just between 2001 and 2004 making the state 47th in per-capita funding of public higher education. This has placed tremendous pressure on administrators to reduce costs everywhere possible. In my department the numbers of tenure-system faculty have declined by nearly fifty percent while the numbers of students have quadrupled, leading to gigantic class sizes. In this environment, the administrators are running around wedging sticks into place just to keep the roof from falling in. But yet the students keep coming. In fact, the university is planing to increase enrollment.
Most university faculty are compelled to stay very tightly focused on their research. Most are required to maintain externally-funded research programs and are barely evaluated on teaching -- most have had no training in teaching whatsoever and are simply winging it based on their experiences as a student and whatever resources the textbooks companies provide. Some come to realize how disingenuous the university teaching enterprise has become and work to improve their small part of it, but many are simply unaware of the situation or are cynical about investing effort to improve it.
Students might be expected to demand educational excellence, but their experience with education has taught them there's not much point in expending anything beyond the minimum effort required. They have been trained to think about the effect of the degree on their prospects, not the effect of their education upon themselves.
People have known for a long time how to do education well -- just as we know what's required for a healthy diet. But it costs more and it takes real dedication and willpower to follow it through. We need to create an educational environment that supports students doing the hard work necessary to become well-educated. We need to reduce the incentives that currently reward students for shortchanging their education. Students and their parents should demand something more than a kids' meal, but it will take everyone to fix the problems.
We need more than a scale at the door to assess student learning. Questions that ask students to remember or to know are not enough. Students need to be challenged with real-world, open-ended problems that have no single right answer: How can we cure cancer? How do we balance energy policy and global warming? How can we predict earthquakes? And then students need to be provided with the feedback, support, and mentorship to learn how to ask the right questions to get to the best answers available.
In turn, faculty need to be held accountable to create challenging learning environments for students. They need to be meaningfully evaluated on designing their teaching based on sound learning theory and rewarded for maintaining currency, trying new approaches, and taking risks. A demonstrated committment to undergraduate education should be required for hiring, tenure, and post-tenure reviews.
In an age where increasingly any particular fact or figure is only a google-search away, public universities need to focus on what value they add to the proposition.