McCollege - Why “Fast Food” education is hurtingAmerica and squandering opportunties for todays youth.
Students head off to college ideally to gain the knowledge skills and experience necessary to compete in the world. If you measure the quality of education by lifetime earnings, the education received at American colleges and universities has been largely successful. A college degree is worth nearly a million dollar boost in lifetime earnings. But the world is changing and the requirements for success are increasing dramatically as we now must compete globally with an increasingly agressive world market. Universities are changing too, but in the wrong direction to help our students compete. Students at public colleges and universities are increasingly herded into large lecutre halls where they doze to the drone of a professor who would rather be doing research. And those are the lucky students. Increasingly, students aren’t even taught by professors. An alarming number of undergraduates receive their instruction from graduate student teaching assistants or a member of the growing herd of “hired hand” adjuct faculty with temporary positions and a transient academic lifestyle. American universities like to boast about their award-winning faculty with fabulous research accomplishments, but those talking points rarely translate into positive aspects of undergraduate education. Quite to the contrary, the drive to the pinnicle of research prowess is understood to be blocked by time committments to undergraduates. New faculty are counselled to avoid wasting time on teaching in order to prepare themselves properly for tenure. At some institutions, one sure path to a negative tenure decision is to win a teaching award.
What drives this dismal situation? Money. Research quality can be measured in dollars and cents. Most research, especially in the sciences is funded by grants from the federal government or private agencies. The competition for these dollars is fierce, with only 12 to 15 projects being funded for every hundred proposals submitted. The only way to win these competitions is to have excellent ideas and a stellar repulation girded by a long list of publications in respected journals. The average faculty member at research universities spends over 60 hours a week working to achevie that reputation, win the grants and conduct their research. This work is critically important for our country and a critical driving force in our economy. Research performed by our public university system has made much of our current technological world possible.
Research reputation also translates into rankings in the USNews and World Report rankings of colleges and universities. This source and others like it play to the cycle that reinforces administrators that downplay the value of undergraduate teaching, largely because there is no measure of teaching quality. How many undergraduates are doing research under the mentorship of nationally known professors? How many courses are taught by those faculty using the approaches known to facilitate learning in the best possible ways? You can’t find those measures, or others like them.
The result (to quote my colleague Steve Brewer) is a conspiracy between faculty who don’t want to teach and students who don’t want to learn. The student side of this conspiracy can not be ignored. Many students are happy to glide through college unchallenged. Learning is hard work, and given the choice between a gruelling course where expectations are high, and a lazy lecture with the notes posted on a web site, in case you miss class, many students make the easy choic e. A recent survey of student engagement has shown that full time students at research universities spend less than 20 hours a week on their studies.