<p>Taking into account that “instruction” is the umbrella category for all academic infrastructure (including libraries, departmental operating expenses, etc) and not just faculty, it seems that you would have to cut faculty expenses in half to reduce tuition by 50%. That would result in a student:faculty ratio of upwards of 30:1 (currently 18:1). Not unimaginable, but do we really want to adopt European standards for higher education?</p>
<p>I would like to take a closer look at the methodology, because it struck me that the paper is using “student credit hours” as a measure of faculty teaching load. With that definition, a professor teaching a lecture with 200 students has ten times the teaching load of a professor teaching a class of 20. No surprise that 20% of the faculty are teaching 58% of the students!!! (The author remarks himself that the top 20% of faculty are teaching an average of 900 students per year, while the bottom 80% are teaching only 63 students per year.) </p>
<p>So, when he the author suggests that the teaching load of the bottom 80% be raised to that of the top 20%, he is saying that we could cut tuition by teaching only big lectures instead of small classes. Duh.</p>
<p>I am wondering if the 20% of faculty who are only teaching 2% of the student credit hours are administrators (deans, department chairs, etc), visiting scholars and faculty on sabbatical, all of whom don’t usually teach much. That would also explain why they don’t have much external research funding, since administrators are not doing much research either.</p>
<p>I don’t understand where the saving money comes in. Someone, please explain it to me like I’m 4. Are they firing 2/3 of the professors? Are they taking in double the students using only the same number of professors? What?</p>
<p>I don’t think that is something that can be done quicky. Many tenured professors have it specifically spelled out in their contracts what their teaching loads will be and for many of the big guns, it is as low as possible. It’s what they have earned for their excellence in research and reputation and pulling it away from them is not going to be easy if even possible. Not going to do much good to the students either having resentful profs teaching courses.</p>
<p>It also means changing the direction of a research university to a teaching school. More hours teaching means less hours on research. Not that simple when it comes down to the missions of a university. Teaching undergraduates is a goal of only one part of the university system. </p>
<p>Also when it come to these reseach unis, they are fueled by grad students many who get their way paid through teaching stipends. They are often the ones teaching most of the students during the recitation times. They grade the papers, and field the students’ questions. That the great professor shows up once or twice a week to lecture often means he enters the lecture hall after all are seated, gives a 45 minute canned lecture, if that long, and ducks out letting the grad students do the question and answer session. Yes, some do more, but some even less than that.</p>
<p>Vladeschutte, what I think the study is saying is that many universities are paying $X for professors. They need Y hours of teaching undergraduates. But there are a number of professors that may only teach a course or two each term, and have grad students doing most of the work on those courses any ways. Those professors are doing research, writing, doing PR instead of teaching. If their loands are increased, the university can have fewer grad student stipend and fewer adjunct professors and the need to hire more profs can be cut too. Most unis these days depend heavily on the adjuncts which became the way to deal with the teaching load and costs. Much cheaper than hiring assistant professors. So departments are much smaller these days at many schools with adjuncts taking up ta lot of teaching load, freeing the full time professors time even further so they can focus on those other activities.</p>
<p>So, yes, it would work. The professors who are full time at the universities would have to spend more time teaching, and less time doing research. So they will not be getting as much in research grants, royalties or writing/speaking fees. Some how that might have to be adjusted. But if they all teach more, fewer adjuncts and fewer grad students need to be paid.</p>
<p>It’s probably not quite as easy as the article states but the cost of college tutition is vastly overpriced. It’s really no different from the run away costs of the city police force, the firemen, or the prison guards. All have bloated bureaucracies, low productivity, early retirement, and nice pensions. Exactly what incentive does a college have to hold down the costs? Colleges are just like every other out of control public union.</p>
<p>Of course, research is relevant. Some schools get a lot of their money from government and private industry grants for the research it does, not to mention the reputation.</p>
<p>But much of the knowledge taught to college kids is not from current research. A lot of it is canned stuff. It is unusual to get the current info as a UG. There is alot of old stuff kids need to learn before they can get involved in the leading edge of research.</p>
<p>cofth you are correct. Many/most tenured profs do little teaching at major universities, they can’t be fired, and the college president has little power over them. Fancy accounting allows the burdened costs to be disproportionately assigned to undergraduate education when in reality as you stated most of the research and costs have virtually nothing to do with teaching undergrads what they need to learn(basics). </p>
<p>A good analogy is the constant bailouts of the post office. In a sane world the solution is obvious and involves decreasing the work force and going to three/week deliveries. Does anyone really need mail service 6 days/week? But of course politics and union protection prevent any attempt to increase the productivity of the workers. While a far more educated work force the principles really are the same at the major universities. For the most part teaching is secondary while the primary goal is obtaining research grants. </p>
<p>The truly special experience of attending an elite university has much more to do with the social grouping of thousands of high achieving accomplished 18-21 year olds rather than anything the college itself provides.</p>
<p>This may vary from department to department, but at least in STEM fields there would be a knock-on effect on how grad students get paid. Most STEM grad students receive research fellowships which are usually funded by the research grants written by professors. And, of course, the universities take a significant overhead cut from any grant. I’d want to see detailed numbers on the tradeoff of giving up grant overhead income versus cutting adjuncts and grad student teaching. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that graduate education requires access to research, and the opportunity to learn how to teach. Leading discussion sections is supposed to be part of the academic apprenticeship process, with appropriate feedback and training. Which of course often doesn’t happen…but that speaks more for the need for more training rather than cutting the training entirely. </p>
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<p>I disagree with this, and it was not my experience. As an undergrad, I most certainly was told about current research by my professors. As a teacher of undergrads, I most certainly would talk about current results. That’s one of the best things that a teacher can do–show how this is not a stultifyingly dead body of knowledge, but one that is continually growing and changing.</p>
<p>ST I believe his point was that for 98-99% of undergrads the cutting edge of new research is not necessary for their relatively basic education. Your analysis about graduate education shows just how the univerisities shift costs. The profs need the army of Ph.D students to work as minimum wage assistants so they make getting a Ph.D almost free and then shift the costs to the undergrads and the professional dregrees like med and law school. The key to them is to feed the education beast with a steady supply of Ph.D candidate low wage workers. </p>
<p>Now in reality most of these Ph.D students will never find tenured jobs in their respective fields so the colleges respond by making their education nearly free and shifting the costs elsewhere. Does it really make sense to base the cost of the education on the supposed earning potential? Should an engineering degree then cost more than one in english lit?</p>
<p>At most major universities the key objectives are to raise money, attract star faculty that can raise money via grants, and hire superstar money managers(that make far more than entire depts. combined) to invest the endowment to raise more money.</p>
<p>The interest in the undergrads is limited mainly to attracting top(mainly full pay) students by nice facilities and high rankings in USNWR so that the parents will be convinced that paying a ridiculous sum for a relatively low value degree is critical to their child’s future.</p>
<p>I went to a major research university, and that was not only the case for me and for my husband, but for nearly everyone. Very occasionally a job would open at the UG level where exposure to leading edge stuff was included, but there were and are a lot of graduate students whose needs came and come first in terms of jobs and exposure to these things. That is the way the infrastructure of the university is and has been. </p>
<p>My son is going to a large state research university that does indeed charge different tuitions and fees for the different “schools”. Yes, the engineering degree will cost more than the one in arts and sciences. So will the business school (UG level we are talking). The many graduate and professional schools also have different pricing structures. </p>
<p>Our state schools are a bargain in cost so the UG s here not are not supporting the grad school infracstructure at all. The state is.</p>
<p>My point was that pricing mainly reflects the whatever the market will bear mentality rather than true costs. Now for the most part my points are focused on private schools, but the priniciple that for the most part undegrad education is an afterthought, is also true for public schools. </p>
<p>The overriding and primary concern for all college presidents is to raise money, raise more money, and keep raising more money. Almost each and every decision they make concerns this single primary focus. Educating the undergrads is of little concern except as how it relates to money(USNWR rankings and keeping the full or near full pay student’s parents willing to pay).</p>
<p>You could certainly make a college where most professors do no research and teach for a living. This is how community colleges work, and the professors there teach lots and lots of courses, sometimes at multiple institutions, in order to make a living. </p>
<p>Any college or university which aggressively moves to take away research time from everyone who doesn’t pay for it with grant money, is in effect making itself a big version of a community college, and will gradually lose its better faculty to other programs. </p>
<p>Don’t forget, if you don’t do research you are killing your career in academics and you won’t be able to get a job in another institution – so you will need to recruit people who just want to teach and never move anywhere else, or you need to pay people extra to compensate for killing their careers. And if you pay people extra, where do the savings come from?</p>
<p>There are so many hungry academics that people will still apply for all-teaching jobs. They’ll squeeze in writing grant proposals, and their vacation time and weekends doing the research if they’re lucky enough to get funded. </p>
<p>I don’t think the original article, or the discussion above, was assuming that professors would get to keep doing research if they brought in research grants. The assumption is that research and grant-writing take time that could be better spent on teaching. Perhaps it depends on the institution? For example, here in California a UC professor is expected to do research. A Cal State professor might not be expected to do research, though the CSU profs that I know certainly are involved in research in both STEM and humanities fields. That might vary from campus to campus: the Cal Polys and SDSU may have more research than, say, Cal State LA.</p>
<p>If you make people with grants take full teaching loads, they’ll take their grants elsewhere or stop getting grants. You can’t fool people into working twice as hard for the same pay.</p>
<p>ST is right but the colleges in the US are not set up primarily to teach undergrads and they have absolutely zero incentive to cut costs. As I said before they are sort of like a bunch of highly educated union workers and as we have seen, all of them have out of control cost increases.</p>
<p>Wow, some of the posters on this thread clearly have little no knowledge of academia/research. “Published in magazines”? A peer-reviewed academic journal is NOT a magazine, nor is it anything like a magazine. </p>
<p>Also, I don’t buy really the “research is useless” claim. Research has to be built up. To give some examples, right now we’re doing randomized controlled trials on interventions designed to decrease the risk for abuse in an at-risk population–decent cause, right? In order to do that, we first had to do “useless” studies to find out if people in our subpopulation experience abuse (they do and at higher rates than the general population), how they experience abuse, what are the barriers they face to leaving that do or don’t overlap with the general population, what factors may be protective in this population, how do we validly measure those factors, etc? Could we have just guessed? Well, maybe, but we likely would have missed some important points that underlie our interventions–in fact, when this research first started, people actually thought our subpopulation was at low risk for abuse. Another example: In undergrad, I did biomedical research looking at serotonin receptors in monkey kidney and hamster ovary cells. Pointless, right? Except the overarching goal of that research, years down the line, is to possibly find a new antidepressant that doesn’t lose effectiveness as quickly as the ones currently available. Research builds upon research, and it’s a long, scientific process filled with things that may seem pointless at first blush but aren’t. Research moves knowledge ahead. Oh, and my former PI, a pure research professor? Works easily 70 hour weeks and provides employment for a few students, to boot.</p>
<p>Laurelhurst, I agree that the big grant-getters would leave if teaching loads ramped up. As for "You can’t fool people into working twice as hard for the same pay. "—why yes, you can. That’s the economy, fewer jobs, and employers in all industries cutting staffing and handing those remaining a bigger workload without much (if any) increase in pay. Most of us are indeed working much harder for the same pay. </p>
<p>Today’s WSJ has letters to the editor on this article. One (from a Cal Poly Pomona professor) argues that there would be no savings. Another says that growth in administrators (both number of employees and salary) is what’s causing growing tuition. The final letter is from a professor who says that when he started teaching at Drexel in the early 1950’s, he had to teach 15 hours a week, and there should be a return to that greater teaching loads.</p>
<p>psych your post perfectly epitomizes exactly why most people believe there is so much wasted money at most universities. These types of studies are typically aimed at getting yet more money spent for the “at risk population” from the same families(tax payers) paying the tuition costs. Studying the “at risk populations” may or may not be important but it has little to do with teaching undergrads the basics of science, math, or the humanities.</p>
<p>Our studies were/are funded completely by federal grants, which did not come with the mandate of teaching basic science. Furthermore, I easily learned more in the lab than I did in the classroom (and my classes were well taught). Science is by no mean static–it’s why many med schools won’t accept bio classes more than X years old. You REALLY think we know is all there is to science or human behavior? Seriously? </p>
<p>And, btw, it costs the tax payers far, far more when our population is out of work, institutionalized for years (talk about $$$$), or gravely injured by their abusers than it is ever did to do our studies. Which is why all of our grants have an economic justification piece to them.</p>
<p>But, really, I’m sure we can totally just revert to teaching the same things we did in 1950…</p>