<p>Unfortunately, the report lumps graduate student and postdoctoral fellows within the same group. Tenured graduate students? Lol</p>
<p>I was hoping some of the school papers would do better analysis. Nothing in that article from Princeton.</p>
<p>The relevant statistic, which may be hard to get, is what fraction of the undergrad classes is taught by the tenured or tenure-track faculty. I know at least two professors in the Ivies and one at Stanford who only taught 2 or 3 undergrad classes over a 4-5 year period. Good professors are often attracted by being told they will not need to teach more than one undergrad class a year. Sometimes even less.</p>
<p>Many schools are making a transition from medium to light teaching loads, with earlier-hires teaching more, and later hires teaching a lot less. It's great that at Harvard (for example), Mankiw teaches the intro Ec10 course, but this is not so common a situation at the top schools, especially for younger stars.</p>
<p>For me there were 2 main benefits neither of which had to do with "prestige". First, my classmates were overwhelming motivated and very sharp ... being with this cohort group was great for me. Second, the school was tough (Cornell engineering) ... not competative at all but tough ... there was no way to slide by; you had to get focused and do the work. </p>
<p>For me, a kid who tended to slide by while trying to not stand out from the group, raising both the performance expectation level and "the norm" of the students helped me grow tremendously. And I'm sure at my State U (pre honors programs) I would have skated by learning little while getting much better grades than I did at Cornell (and having not learned work/priority lessons I severly needed before hitting the job market). </p>
<p>For some kids getting thrown into the deep end is the best approach to help them learn to swim.</p>
<p>Ah, statistics.... which is why I decided to manually count the instructors in two departments rather than trust reports that mix apples and oranges. Not Quite Old, however, makes a good point about profs who teach very few undergraduate courses. It's hard to get information. Econ profs are known to have outside consulting jobs and not to teach a full load of courses, as do many scientists. So numbers alone will probably not give a good picture of what may matter the most as far as undergraduate education is concerned.</p>
<p>Maybe things have changed a lot, but my experience at Yale in the 70s could not have been better. In four years, I had five classes with non-tenure-track faculty (and all of them were electives I chose to take): a seminar on dance history with a seminal dance critic, a seminar on Emerson with my favorite grad student, and three excellent accounting classes taught by adjuncts.</p>
<p>Mainly, I was interested in literature. Anyone doing cursory research would have found out that (a) the two most famous literature professors there at the time were Harold Bloom and Paul de Man, and (b) it was impossible to get into Bloom's classes, and de Man had not taught an undergraduate class in 10 years. My experience? I took three classes with Bloom (two huge lecture classes, one graduate seminar) and he was my advisor for two years -- long conversations in his office, etc. I had two classes with de Man, one a seminar on Proust with ten students, and he was perfectly willing to give me office time to discuss what I should be reading even before I took his classes. Just as importantly, practically everyone who was anyone in the world of literary studies came through to lecture or visit. I attended lectures or seminars by the following, and met all of them (a partial list, this is what I can remember): Jacques Derrida, Robert Penn Warren (who had retired), Roman Jakobson, Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Rene Girard, Neil Herz (with whom I took an incredible seminar on academic writing), Fred Jameson (who supervised an independent study for me), Jonathan Culler, Georges Bataille, J.D. McClatchy, John Ashbery, Derek Wolcott, Adrienne Rich. Three of my TAs wound up as department chairs at Yale, Harvard, and Michigan; one junior faculty member I liked a lot later became a department chair at Minnesota and then UCSC, and another was chairman of NEH. One of the other grad students I got to know well was David Milch, who has had a fabulous career as a writer and producer of shows like Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Deadwood.</p>
<p>Through the university, I got seven months' worth of paid internships at a major Wall Street financial institution, where I did trivial stuff like staffing its first comprehensive internal assessment of how its various offices and departments were responding to requests by Arab governments to certify compliance with their boycott of Israel.</p>
<p>I also met my wife, who had a similar experience in totally different fields. The grad student she took a course with is now a famous law professor at Michigan. Her junior-faculty department advisor was Judy Rodin, later president of Penn and chair of the Carnegie Foundation.</p>
<p>As a bonus, we saw student acting by Meryl Streep, Susan (later Sigourney) Weaver, Mark-Linn Baker, and Angela Bassett, and student plays by Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.</p>
<p>I wouldn't trade that for anything. I was smart, aggressive, and engaging; I would probably have done fine anywhere. But doing fine there was a richer learning experience than would have been available almost anywhere else.</p>
<p>JHS, Yours is the finest post I've read in this thread, if not the entire CC. </p>
<p>As an aside, do you think back in time when you are having a madeleine in bed?</p>