If professors want to teach whatever they want, and want the kids to pay 80k-90k/yr and have the students give their time, if the material being taught doesn’t meet the students’ needs, they’ll just walk away. And then these departments get shut down. I am just describing a mechanical process. There is no ideology here.
It is useful for the departments to have a clear understanding of who the customer is. If you think the kid paying the 90k is not the customer, there is some lack of clarity here. Some broader society is not paying you the 90k. This is not Soviet Russia where you are doing the state’s bidding.
Plain technical writing and an adequate but plain presentation style is probably what they’re looking to hire on behalf of the organization.
Expert-level creative writing skills and internal salesmanship will elevate a person within the organization, even when it hurts the organization itself. Not everyone can be upper management, and when they’re hiring out of schools, they’re looking for role players, not the ones who can play the game better than they can!
Education is neither this transactional nor this autocratic. The demand supply relationship is not flexible enough to capture every market turn, and what is out of vogue now might turn out to be very much in demand later.
I think that I agree with a lot of what you’ve posted. It has definitely never occurred to me to see students as customers (though I am not sure that I thought of them as clients either). I think that sort of transactional view is problematic for many reasons. Also, I think the customer mentality can sometimes warp classroom dynamics leading towards feelings of entitlement around grades, course content, and campus amenities. “My kid deserves an A and he is owed a certain experience/curriculum because I am spending 80,000 per year.” I can see how a family might feel duped if they enroll their child because the college promised to teach one set of topics and the professors all actually taught a different set of topics. Similarly, I get the frustration with professors who do a terrible job teaching the subjects and leave students confused or misinformed. So I am sympathetic to the notion that colleges should pay attention to students’ interests and desires. On a practical level when professors ignore those desires, students drop their classes and no one wins. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean students are customers, it just means that they are joining an educational community that morphs and changes according to its membership’s interests and needs.
The clients of colleges are society as a whole. Colleges provide the opportunities for students to obtain an education. They do not, or at least should not, provide an education based on what a bunch of parents want.
I was always under the impression the purpose of most universities was to further scholarship in various disciplines and to train future scholars in those fields. In other words, along with producing graduates, universities are supposed to produce knowledge. I realize that the balance between producing graduates and knowledge can vary with some colleges being more focused on teaching undergraduates and/or providing job training for certain employers. However, even if the balance is different depending on the particular college and whether it is a university or not, I think it is dangerous to think of an education as a merely an individual purchase. Furthering discipline specific knowledge is a societal good that should take precedent over any individual student’s desire.
Yet enrollments are declining, and this thread exists to discuss that decline. Seemingly things are at least more transactional than what the higher ed industry likes to believe.
Colleges are definitely in the business of selling product/services, and therefore are subject to demand factors that drive any business. But, current students/families are not their only customer/clients. You would have to include alums/donors, federal and state governments, and faculty (most businesses understand the internal customer, their employees, are as important as their external customers). The major disconnect with student/families are those who view the product as an outcome vs a tool. It’s like going to a Home Depot and buying the material and power tools to construct a shed and expecting a perfect shed even if you are an oaf in carpentry. That’s how I view the students/parents who expect an “A” and passage to medical school (or whatever) regardless of their aptitude or work ethic.
Huge believer in the utility of critical thinking and being able to view and solve problems from multiple perspectives. The real world these days though is that many jobs/careers that did not need quantitative skills (at least off the bat) 10/20 years ago are diminishing. Humanities majors that do not supplement their time in college with classes that exercise those skills do so at their own peril.
My comment on teaching canon. I just don’t see how an education is complete without a basis in a common set of knowledge. While majors should not be based solely on the teachings of long dead white men, I’ve always felt at the heart of great humanities education is understanding the history and evolution of thought and their related works. This provides a point of reference to explore modern/evolving bodies of work. How much of “new” is really new and the how and why’s of changes in thought and viewpoints are critical. I just don’t see how this is possible without a foundation in “canon”.
I think we should make a clear distinction between the humanities in general, and the current state of humanities education in the us. I have great respect for the humanities, even if I don’t subscribe to the idea of millions of humanities graduates thereafter taking all manner of jobs as some sort of a super intellectual elite.
I’m an English professor at a regional university that serves the working class. I stay in this demanding job (at which I teach both the traditional writing skills and “wisdom” in all sorts of writers’ works–Thomas Gray. Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, Thomas Hardy)–because I was converted to the “cause” as a teen who discovered that literature could heal my wounds, or show me the way. I can tell you that way back when the canon was white and male in the 1950s, there were still excellent and terrible college English professors. There were professors who taught by rote, as if wisdom were somehow located in plots and rhyme schemes rather than in analysis and understanding, and there were brilliant, loving professors who passed on the love of wisdom to students. This situation has not changed. Either teachers teach dogma, or they teach inquiry. Don’t think that departing from that canon has made a difference! Good teachers with pure hearts are rare. A lot of them are still in the high schools. Passing on wisdom has never been easy, and it requires patience and sufficient control of one’s own egotistical tendencies. Don’t despair over the current situation–purity of heart and unselfish action haven’t been the goal of most people in most societies.
Interesting thread. I’ve been on CC for several years now which opened my eyes to some of the realities here. I used to be very critical of the American education system based on my (maybe romanticized) direct and indirect experience with several other education systems in Europe and Canada. I no longer think that the problems here are easily fixable - lack of quality education in K-12, inadequate compensation and preparation of teachers, arbitrary curriculums constructed by incompetent administrators. Still, for the sake of this discussion, I’d like to point to some differences between the education that I experienced and that my children received/are receiving.
Due to better and more standardized school education, Universities in Europe do not do remedial work. The percentage of students that graduate is not a KPI. Students that cannot do the work drop out after the first year. At France’s open enrollment public universities, the first year dropout and failure rate is close to 50 percent In Germany, if you fail a course twice, you can no longer graduate in any major that requires this course.
Basic writing skills and grammar are taught in K-12. Usually you get your essays with plenty of red ink. Every misplaced comma is highlighted and brings your score down. In my kids nationally-ranked school district, anything goes when it comes to writing. I had to correct my kids essays and explain grammar rules much to their chagrin, and English is my fourth language.
Colleges are state-sponsored entities and their mandate is to prepare you for a career that can benefit society (in the humanities, sciences, whatever). The admission is direct to major, and you take classes in your major. Expanding the world of the mind is done in your own time through personal endeavors and hobbies. As there is less busy work, people have more time for hobbies, including reading. I find Europeans no less interesting and engaging.
My son goes to Stanford. To graduate, everybody needs to take 11 gen ed classes (they call them Ways) in specific categories such as diversity, social inquiry and aesthetics, plus three writing classes and a technology in society class. The Ways are kind of arbitrary - there is a list of classes that satisfy a Way, including cooking classes. I would not mind these classes but a) it does cost us an extra year of tuition/room and board, and b) why should the University impose these boundaries on my son’s learning - he is sufficiently aware to choose his own interests.
Clearly you have experience and knowledge of colleges outside the US, particularly those which only require 3 years of attendance, so why pick a Uni that requires 4?
Alternatively, there are 3k+ colleges in the US. While most require GE’s, not all do. Brown, for example, would allow your son to pick and choose courses based on his interest, with no required GE’s. Amherst College also has an open curriculum.
Why does it cost extra tuition/room and board? It requires 180 units to graduate, regardless of whether 0 ways lasses are required or 11 ways classes are required. Unless the student is doing an engineering double major, they are likely to have plenty of room for electives without needing to go beyond the minimum 180 units.
This makes the question more if it should be okay for a student to graduate with only having taken classes closely related to their major, such as an English major only taking English classes or a Math major only taking math classes. And if not, what additional classes should be required. Stanford apparently thinks students should take classes in Creative Expression, Ethical Reasoning, Exploring Differences, Formal Reasoning, Interpretive Inquiry, Quantitative Reasoning, Scientific Analysis, and Social Inquiry. Some of these categories sound more/less important to me than others.
You are right - if 180 credits are required, an extra year would have been required anyway. He enjoys his time there and does not want to graduate early but the question is whether this extra year is adding value to his intellectual self. He might have spent this extra year picking up another major, going in depth in some area that does interest him, etc. Or, he might have spent this extra year doing research for credit, travelling around the world, etc. I don’t know. It just feels like busy work to construct this elaborate curriculum of introductory classes instead of leaving the exploration up to him. It sure keeps the humanities faculty employed.
Our S graduated from Stanford in 2020 BSCS and 2021 MSCS and very much enjoyed all those Ways classes. The choices were so wide for most of them that picking was sometimes difficult. A class on Democracy from the Hoover Inst, one on Buddhism, German poetry? All fun an informative. In others he wrote papers on the history of robotics in the movies.
Not familiar with the Ways choices, but it sounds like a way to justify the employment of faculty/admin in subjects that would not “survive” if not mandated to a certain extent, and I am speaking as a person who supports general ed across multiple discipline (my experience comes from the distributional requirements my son and I had at Yale: 2 courses each in humanities, sciences, social sciences, and 2 courses in each of quantitative reasoning and in writing and a foreign language requirement). The distributional requirements are not additional to major requirements and 1 course can satisfy multiple distributional requirements.
For us, the gen ed classes were a desired bonus. In the combined experiences of my wife and I (both hold MS in engineering fields) nothing is more limiting to an engineer than being one dimensional. To have wider views and experiences that these classes promote is a definite plus.
Our S went from being a strong technical writer to a strong writer - period. He can now adjust his writing voice to match and reach wider audiences.
He evolved from being able to detail technical concerns with security to highlighting how the responses to security impact society as whole after studying writings from philosophers like Bentham (The Panopticon).
We went from having a singular view on Democracy to a wider understanding of Western Democracy and how other variations of democracy thrive in other cultures.
He evolved from having a solely academic view on his field of choice (machine learning and AI) to a more nuanced stance after studying how AI (and fears of AI) has been captured in popular media over the years.
IMO this has helped him differentiate himself in his current work environment and will serve him well into the future.
stream of consciousness debate is a tribute to the humanities.