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I would not say that the system “works,” but rather that it survives. Otherwise, this is right on the mark. And it’s a dirty shame.</p>
<p>Xiggi, I usually agree with you and even when I don’t, I always find your posts interesting and well founded, but I have no idea what you are talking about in your condemnation of the entire US higher education system. I don’t quite understand how you are conflating the presence of foreign professors and grad students with a system which is rotten to the core.</p>
<p>Teaching undergraduates is only one function of a large research university. If parents and kids don’t want to “share” the stage with the other functions then great- attend a college which does not have grad students and focuses exclusively on undergrads. If parents and kids don’t want to be taught by professors who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge via research and scholarship, then go to community college.</p>
<p>But you can’t show up at University of Michigan or Harvard or Johns Hopkins and claim you’ve been cheated when you discover that the faculty has to balance teaching, research, presenting papers at conferences, writing grants, meeting colleagues at NSF meetings, flying to Oslo to collaborate with a team conducting a global study on XYZ, etc. That’s what professors at these places do- that’s their job. You don’t like it- get an online degree.</p>
<p>There are many things wrong with education in the US, but boy, have you picked the wrong thing to be aggravated about! </p>
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I mostly agree with this, and I have said so. And that’s the reason for my original “buyer beware” comment.</p>
<p>At the same time, and as someone who works within the system, I have to say I don’t like it very much. I think there are many steps a college student can take proactively to minimize the problems. But I would also like to see a larger, nationwide initiative to reform the system. Since no one else is looking out for undergraduates (don’t even ask about accrediting agencies) it’ll have to start at the bottom, with ordinary citizens expressing their outrage. Maybe I’m an idealist, but such movements have caught on before.</p>
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I agree with this, and this is what I would tell my kid to do. But I have to say, when I myself was a freshman in my first week of college, without much of a clue about anything, I didn’t do this. The unintelligible teacher was teaching a section of calculus to non-majors. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have tolerated it. But because I was a freshman, and didn’t make waves, the school got away with foisting this guy on us. Note: I looked him up on Rate My Professor, and he’s still teaching math, and many of the comments note that he mumbles and talks to the board. Perhaps the advent of that and other teacher rating systems will make this less of a problem, as students avoid these teachers in the first place.</p>
<p>Welcome to the real world.</p>
<p>On one hand, there is a motto “there are too many bright kids in US, top colleges can’t accommodate all of them. Too many bright kids. Too many smarties. We need holistic leaders, not some plain kids, who are interested in Chemistry / Physics / Computer Science”</p>
<p>Next tread “Why don’t we have enough American Profs.?”</p>
<p>Predictable answer: “Americans are not interested on Ph.D. / work in academia”. However, if you talk to HS students, they are interested in academia! Where are they lost? </p>
<p>There are plenty of really great, STEM interested, HS kids (personal experience). 5 years later, after college, these kids are lost somewhere in the pipeline and starting to be replaced by internationals (Ph.D. level, postdocs, Junior Profs). </p>
<p>My personal IMHO is that there is a tremendous mismatch between the students selected by adcoms and students valued by faculty. Mismatch of expectations, for example. </p>
<p>The American kids find out that they can spend 5-6 years pursuing a PhD and then spend a few years competing with hundreds of really smart people for a few jobs that don’t pay all that well. Or they can choose a non-academic career and earn way more money with far more employment opportunities.</p>
<p>@californiaaa, ask all those STEM-interested high school kids how many of them are planning to go to med school, become engineers or sell their math skills to the highest bidder on wall street. There might be a few left.</p>
<p>Not many Profs are excited about an opportunity to teach freshman class in Chemistry. Sometimes it is hard to find a volunteer in the department. Often the most Junior member is assigned of teach freshman classes. </p>
<p>Your child could complain to department chair. What could dept chair do? Go and teach himself? 300+ students, 8 AM class, plenty of mismatched students that think that they could learn Chemistry, but in fact they can’t understand even Algebra … </p>
<p>Chemistry - Microbiology - Physics etc. freshman classes are often used to scare and weed students, not to assist them. </p>
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<p>Money.
For a long time students pursued these fields for love of the work even though salaries were low. Now the grant money is disappearing, positions are eliminated entirely. Labs disappear. State legislatures try to eliminate departments. PhD graduates do not feel confident they will have jobs in the field 10 or even 5 or 3 years past graduation. OTOH sometimes they can make a whole lot elsewhere. Elsewhere looks like a conceivable future. Academia, not so much.
IMHO</p>
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<p>I agree with Blossom that college students need to become proactive in learning from a variety of sources, including listening to the professor’s lectures, reading the textbook, doing the homework assignments and, if needed, attending any available TA sessions offering study help. The students need to be engaged participants, not members of an audience expecting to be entertained and spoon-fed.</p>
<p>Research suggests that at least 30% of students are primarily visual learners and that up to 70% would benefit from a combination of visual and auditory approaches. There is a lot more than just accent which can cause trouble with a pure lecture method – comprehending a lecture is like working on an auditory assembly-line which moves past you at a steady pace: if the pace is too fast, you might miss or not fully comprehend a key concept; too slow and your mind drifts so you are also inclined to miss key details.</p>
<p>I have always been one of those visual learners and had trouble learning all I needed from lectures, to the point where I LIKED having an incomprehensible lecturer because it gave me an edge in the class, since most of my learning derived from studying the textbook.</p>
<p>At the same time, I agree with Xiggi that at today’s tuition prices, even research universities need to prioritize competent teaching for a least A PORTION of their faculty if they expect to have competent future grad school candidates. Sure, some can be hired exclusively for their cutting edge research and only teach grad students, but others should be sought out for their undergrad teaching ability. Some professors, like Richard Feynman, might turn out to be masters at both.</p>
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<p>I wonder if the economics that are based on one PROFESSOR teaching six classes of three hours per week for 6 semesters in a row before earning a one semester sabbatical might be sufficient to pay him or her a VERY decent wage! How many classroom-hours would such shedule mean … per student? And we could use anywhere between 20 to a couple of hundreds students to arrive at a plausible ratio! Then we finish the job by calculating the cost of tuition per hour in class paid by the student! </p>
<p>Do we really have to keep assuming that teaching 18 hours a week is an unbearable when considering the additional work such as grading and filling stacks of silly surveys and other admin non-sense? How about making the number a bit higher with two full classes a day for 4 days a week? That brings it to a total of 24 hours! And is it really that hard to expect Mr. Prof to actually work during the summer tri/semesters? Really?</p>
<p>In a nutshell, the above type of simple back-of-the-napkin arithmetic is what places the fear of God in many minds of academics. There is little wonder about the reasons why they keep dreaming of the benefits of earning tenure! </p>
<p>The bottom line is the academic model is clinging to economics that are no longer tenable. We have an average population that does not earn enough to survive the cost of educating their own kids. </p>
<p>xiggi - I hesitate to criticize (because you are the age of my own children), but you really don’t seem to understand what is happening at universities. Or what professors actually do, for students, beyond teaching hours. Before we even consider service work. I know a lot of profs. None are working as little as a 40 hour week. All year long. Including most holiday breaks.</p>
<p>^ Why do people always find the need to assume that different opinions are based on mere ignorance. I happen to know my share of people who make a living as teachers, administrators, professors – including several friends and family. </p>
<p>Having had discussions related to my earlier posts with the professors, I know how to calculate the teaching loads and add the research and office hours. I have heard it all … how long it takes to fill the adminstrative paperwork, how long it takes to grade papers, and how long they sit in their office. </p>
<p>And it simply does not add up! </p>
<p>xiggi, my son’s P.I.s are in their labs a lot–late hours, weekends. when I met the PI., he regaled me with stories of their all-nighterss. He thought it was fun stuff, I was less than amused.</p>
<p>Whenever my son is a TA, He his doing a office hours and a section. If someone wanted to shift, they could. It was the same as his UG. No TAs taught a course. I went to a flagship, and it was no different. The profs took the large classes, I did a section.</p>
<p>A hundred years ago, when I was an UG, I decided to take a class in Chinese history. I dropped it after first lecture. I could not understand the prof, I was only Anglo in lecture hall, and I didn’t want to jeopardize my GPA. I always signed up for 7 classes, as it was easy to drop, but not to add a class. </p>
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<p>Another major factor from observation and many accounts from relatives and friends who teach/TA undergrad courses is there’s a much larger proportion of un/undermotivated students among your 16-20 year old traditional freshmen classes who don’t expect much changes from high schools where they didn’t really have to exert themselves as teachers spoon-fed material due to district/local parental expectations. </p>
<p>In contrast, most such un/undermotivated 16-20 year old freshmen either end up getting scared straight and adapt or end up being eliminated from the pack* once their class end up becoming upper-division undergrads and moreso grad students. </p>
<p>One thing which defines motivated students is the traits to either learn to adapt/adjust to instructors with issues or take proactive initiative to deal with it through appropriate channels without prompting from others. </p>
<ul>
<li>Either flunking out or being forced by parents to come home and get a job/enlist in the military after achieving less than desired academic results.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>Some professors will take feedback to heart. This discussion reminds me of the story of Prof A, who started in my MechE dept my junior year. Due to his accent and poor lecture skills, few could understand him. The students picked him to receive the department “Purple Shaft Award” . He worked really hard and vastly improved his teaching style, so the next year the students voted for him be Outstanding Prof. </p>
<p>@xiggi, sorry but I really think you are just showing your ignorance of what professors do. </p>
<p>Also, with regard to the numbers you cited. You are calling for college professors to teach 24 hours per week? Recently our teachers were required to increase their student contact hours. That number went UP to 17 hours per week. So, you are saying that all K-12 teachers are incredibly lazy because they teach even less than you think college professors should and they have far fewer responsibilities of course. And maybe, just maybe, it’s a little more difficult to teach quantum mechanics than to teach algebra 1…</p>
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<p>The students in the quantum mechanics course in college may be easier to teach than the students in algebra 1 in high school (or college…), since the former have self-selected themselves as being interested in the subject, while the latter include many who dislike and/or are poor at math but need to take it to graduate or for some other requirement.</p>
<p>If a professor has to teach 24 hours a week (plus associated planning, marking, advising) you will not have world class experts teaching classes. You may get someone with a PhD, with decent knowledge of the field, something like at a community college. Maybe that is enough for many or most students, but it isn’t enough to maintain the highest possible level of academic institution. </p>
<p>“Not many Profs are excited about an opportunity to teach freshman class in Chemistry. Sometimes it is hard to find a volunteer in the department. Often the most Junior member is assigned of teach freshman classes.”</p>
<p>FYI: In most, if not all departments, teaching is assigned by the head. There is discussion between the parties but the characterization that departments go around begging does not apply in most cases.
Junior members are often assigned to teach the introductory classes. When they are in my College it is because this is part of the P&T process. Teaching a larger class is expected because it is a better indicator of ones current and future teaching abilities. Among other things, you get more data points in student evaluations. My experience suggests that junior people do as well on student evaluations as senior instructors in introductory classes. Now, whether student evaluations really measure teaching effectiveness, that’s another debate. It only measures satisfaction. I think we can agree many 18 yos still don’t know what’s good for them versus what they want.</p>
<p>Actually, the decision to place a poor teacher in an introductory class is avoided at all costs. You see, retaining majors is a big issue. Especially in the sciences where incoming students have an unrealistic view of their abilities in this area. In addition to this point, many depts. Make the unofficial decision to “do the least harm”. Better to place a poor instructor in a junior-senior level course. He/she contacts fewer students and these students are more sophisticated and can adapt to a wider variety of teaching styles.</p>
<p>The stories of professors with low English speaking skills have various origins and contributions to the folklore behind them.</p>
<ol>
<li> truly there are language problems related to accents or limited vocabulary. I tend to believe the frequency of this is far overstated</li>
<li> cultural differences and the inability of students to accept people with accents and/or styles</li>
<li> plain old bitching and moaning</li>
<li> An excuse to family and friends for a poor performance or a way for students to get more attention to there fine performance. I’ve come across a few blatant examples of this interacting with my kids friends. One went on and on to her mother about how terrible one professor was (teaching and language). Little did she know that I knew him and his language skills and the fact that he won two teaching awards!</li>
<li> And finally, yes, what one other wrote. The students are not paying attention or preparing for class. Texting, daydreaming and carrying on with their friends limits their ability to follow someone with even a slight accent or a slightly unusual teaching style. There’s a reason why stats show accidents increase when people use phones in the car or are distracted by other means!</li>
</ol>