Texas Threatens Shutdown of College Physics Programs for Low Graduation Rates

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<p>I am quite certain that nobody is advocating the abandonment of research any time soon. However, one can question the direct link betweeen a basic undergraduate education and research, especially in fields that move a glacial speed. Indeed, current knowledge comes from research, but what is the percentage of BASIC education that comes from research conducted in THIS century? </p>

<p>The real issue is one of correctly balancing teaching and researching, and most importantly balancing the costs and dedication of departments. A school such as Texas A$M has a research budgets of well over 600 million per year. How much of this annual expenses are directly targeting the students? I can assure you that some areas of research I am familiar with have NOTHING to do with education. At least, the responsible for this research do not pretend to be educators. They only happen to work for a dot.edu organization! </p>

<p>On the surface, it appears that the motivation behind the decisions in Texas are extremely sound, and perhaps not far-reaching enough. Were the numbers really 25 graduates in a five years period time? One might think that a department finding such number hard to attain should not have been created in the first place, and a testament that the education of students component of this education was a mere afterthought and took an obvious backseat to researching and publishing.</p>

<p>The bottom line is that we, as a society, can no longer afford the excesses of yesterday, and that the fig leave that has protected education spending is slowly wilting away.</p>

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<p>Or that majoring in the subject became less popular than it used to be, or was expected.</p>

<p>Perhaps it is a surprise to people here more because physics is considered a foundational subject. If some relatively unknown department like Mining Engineering or Manchurian Language and Literature is closed or merged into another department due to unpopularity, people might not notice as much. But the disappearance of physics may be seen almost like the disappearance of subjects like English, history, math, biology, or chemistry.</p>

<p>I suspect same notice went out to several other departments in Texas colleges but the Physics people seem to have a lobby! The universities in Texas are stuck with huge budget shortfalls over the coming years. Lot more departments in different schools will get the same message.</p>

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I don’t find this to be true. I have adjuncted at two private schools and one public. The two privates are about the same enrollment size. One has a physics department and the other does not. The one with the department maintains a full-time physics faculty of 4 to 6 as well as an adjunct or two. There is also more facilities (labs, etc.). The one with NO department has one full-time physics professor and several adjuncts and very limited lab capacity. Hardly the same expenditure. Nonetheless the school with the department would be hard-pressed to graduate 5 students a year.</p>

<p>^ You have a sample size of two here and you are attributing differences to ‘department or no department’. Or are you suggesting they are planning to lay off the existing department faculty and close labs and stop offering courses? THAT would be a cost savings and it would be useful to know of that is the goal which was my point: we really don’t have information here. But simply moving from departmental to non departmental status tells us nothing. If you have a large number of tenured faculty, and you have 5,000 kids needing to take some physics courses, what exactly are they planning to do? </p>

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<p>25 graduates in 5 years…but what if they also provided necessarily courses for say 10,000 students who passed their physics courses, as needed for different majors or transferred to other programs (whether it be another science major, engineering, kinesiology, and the like)? I just don’t get the hang up about graduation numbers. Some courses are foundational to so much-english, math, physics- whereas others are popular, easy, but vary narrow and maybe even useless. Not to pick on any one major, but directional colleges are famous for marketing cool sounding narrow and applied majors, that everyone picks because of the latest TV show or world event, but there are NO JOBS in those majors and nor are they foundational and disciplined based enough to be useful for any other occupations. </p>

<p>To me what matters are metrics that measure the worth of the faculty in the department: are they effectively educating a lot of students? How many are taking physics, how many are passing, what are the evaluations of the education received in physics courses? How many graduates are actually getting jobs from their majors? And if it’s a relevant mandate, are faculty producing quality research (or would it be better subsumed under a research intensive university)?</p>

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AFAIK this particular school is not planning to shut down the physics department, however those that do simply dump the faculty, tenured or not. You don’t need that much tenured faculty to teach the intro courses, adjuncts can do those. If you want to offer a major, you need more faculty and facilities, but you are going to have classes with only a few students. So you are paying huge faculty costs for people to be teaching these really small classes. </p>

<p>So, in answer to your question, yes, the goal would be to stop offering courses and reduce the faculty and maybe sell off laboratory equipment, etc. Whatever isn’t needed if you are not supporting a major in the subject. </p>

<p>Personally, I find it telling that this would be happening in Texas.</p>

<p>I just don’t see the big deal.Texas isn’t terminating physics programs altogether.
I have been advocating that state universities should specialize. Why should every Taxas state school offer the same majors? Why not have some schools offer physics while others offer other specialties?</p>

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I thought what was telling about this quote is that Marder primarily views these faculty members as “researchers,” not professors or educators. Perhaps Texas is just more interested in funding education than it is in funding research.</p>

<p>^ Going back to the Yale example, they take pride in stating that no professor is above teaching undergraduates and everyone is required to.</p>

<p>Why does a researcher from UT view his/her job as just research? Shouldn’t they be in some company that does research if they are not interested in their students?</p>

<p>Not too long ago, I saw one of the parents provide a lead to a kid on this forum who wanted to know more about engineering at UT. The kid was given a contact for the parent’s father who is a retired professor at the engineering school but still goes to school everyday and would be willing to help this kid out with some answers. </p>

<p>I would expect similar level of interest from any department faculty in their students.</p>