<p>"...The student went on to write that he would not advise a high school student to come to Wharton. If a 17-year old had his or her sights set on a consulting or i-banking job and nothing else, I might suggest he or she look into Wharton, though I would not say theres a clear advantage over Harvard or Princeton. But if he or she wanted to learn more about business inside of the classroom, the best bet would be to go anywhere else, because the quality of at least 50% of my core classes have been no better than community college (and Ive taken courses at a community college). I dont discount the value of great student-run organizations and experiences outside of classroom, but thats not the core of what Wharton does. It does teaching, and it does a very poor job of it...."</p>
<p>“Core courses” being the key words. I would bet these are fairly large classes with more lecture and less discussion. His tune may change in upper-level courses when he begins to interact more with professors.</p>
<p>…Okay, I see he is/was a junior. Still, I believe that what you get out of an education largely depends on what you put in to it. In many cases people say that Wharton’s name and the opportunities it provides post-graduation is worth the price. Perhaps this particular student was one that would have benefited from a smaller college, but some people excel in the environment of UPenn. It’s certainly not for everyone, but if he learned so little, I would think it is at least partially his own fault.</p>
<p>DrExPat, I must inquire, what exactly is so wrong with that Wharton student’s statements? You may disagree with the substance of his statements, but does he not have the right to say them? </p>
<p>Even if he does feel a sense of entitlement, well, doesn’t he have that right, just like the consumer of any high-end, luxury-brand service does? For example, if I pay $20 a night to stay at the Motel 6, I won’t expect much, but if I fork over $500 a night to stay at the Ritz-Carlton, I will expect an impeccable level of service - and complain vociferously if I don’t receive it. I suspect that most of us would do the same. Is there something wrong with demanding the level of service quality that you expected from your provider? It seems to me that high-priced services with prestigious brand names ought to meet a high standard of quality, otherwise, why accord those brands such prestige and price? </p>
<p>In that student’s case, he’s apparently not receiving the teaching quality that he expected…and he’s not shy about expressing his disappointments. Is that wrong? Are students never allowed to object if they do not receive the teaching quality that they expected?</p>
<p>The supposed Wharton student has every right to express his or her opinion. Likewise, I have every right to form and express opinions based on what was written.</p>
<p>A person as smart as one might expect the average Wharton undergrad to be ought to be capable of better analysis and interpretation.</p>
<p>Here are some questions to ponder:</p>
<p>1) Is the student the consumer?</p>
<p>2) Who pays for a bond rating and who is the consumer of the service?</p>
<p>3) What would you pay for a Wharton education without evidence of admission or completion?</p>
<p>4) If Wharton determined admission by conducting a Dutch auction for a fixed number of seats open to anyone with stats equal to or better than those of the least qualified candidate admitted to the prior year’s class, would you expect the clearing bid to be greater than or less than the current tuition rate? Explain.</p>
<p>4.1) Extend the one-shot game to multiple repetitions. Does the price evolve?</p>
<p>5) You choose two instructors. The first is chosen primarily on the basis of teaching ability. This instructor is tasked with teaching five or more classes per semester (including summers) to average but poorly motivated students. Retention decisions for this instructor are based primarily on assessment of teaching effectiveness. The second instructor is chosen primarily on capacity to produce cutting-edge research. This instructor teaches three classes or less one semester of each year to exceptional and highly motivated students. Retention decisions for this instructor are based primarily on research outcomes. Assuming that both are retained by year 5+, which instructor would you expect to be better in the classroom? Explain.</p>
<p>6) What fraction of teaching effort (do you suppose) is devoted to lecture delivery?</p>
<p>7) How qualified is an undergraduate student to assess the quality of curriculum design, topic selection, emphasis or framing?</p>
<p>8) Consider the two hypothetical instructors from question 5. Which do you expect to perform better the tasks discussed in question 7?</p>
<p>9) Is not every snowflake unique yet perfect in its own way?</p>
<p>Actually, that’s false, at least, on CC. For example, I have plenty of personal opinions about various CC members. But I do not express them here because doing so would surely violate the board’s Terms of Service regarding respectfulness towards other members. I therefore may choose to disagree with somebody’s ideas, but not with ad-hominem attacks such as declaring somebody to be ‘entitled’ or insinuating that they “ought to be capable of better analysis and interpretation”. </p>
<p>Now, granted, the Wharton student in question is not actually a member of this board. Nevertheless, I believe that the same rules of personal courtesy that protect board members ought to protect him as well. After all, he might become a member one day. Even if he never does, other non-members are surely reading these posts and they will decide whether to join or not based on the perceived courtesy of the other members. </p>
<p>Look, if you want to engage in personal attacks on people you’ve never even met, feel free to start your own board/blog where you can say whatever you like. But everybody on this board has agreed to abide by the terms of service to refrain from such attacks. </p>
<p>I also utterly fail to see what your proposed questions have to do with the topic at hand. The topic at hand is that the person in question is unhappy with the teaching quality he is receiving at Wharton. Period. Now, granted, perhaps he simply has unrealistic expectations. Perhaps he’s a statistical outlier. I don’t know. But I do know that whenever I receive what I perceive to be sub-standard quality from a supposedly high-end service, you’re darn right I’m not going to be shy in expressing my dissatisfaction. Frankly, I think we all should. </p>
<p>And we should be able to do so without fear of personal attacks. Let’s say that you pay for a night in the Ritz-Carlton only to find that the sheets are filthy, and so you express your dissatisfaction publicly. Should we now express sarcastic shock about your supposed feeling of “entitlement”? Should we call your analytical skills into question or somehow deem you to be unqualified to assess hospitality services? It seems to me that the only thing that matters is that you are dissatisfied with the services rendered.</p>
<p>I agree with sakky’s “entitlement” points - the wealthy or gifted should not be taken advantage of just because they have the money and gifts to take. </p>
<p>But don’t many people try to demand their money back if they feel the service or product they purchased is not what they expected? So why would the student continue to attend Wharton if he feels he (or his parents, or whoever is funding the education) is not receiving what they essentially paid for? Unless he is receiving a substantial amount of aid (not in the form of loans), I think he should look for more affordable options that could meet his expectations. UPenn is known for the research produced there, so I would expect top researchers, not necessarily excellent teachers. </p>
<p>I am not saying that top research universities should not have good teachers, but it is difficult to strike the perfect balance in the faculty, and at least some of the responsibility should be on the student’s part to make the most of a class. Unfortunately, as long as the good researchers keep on publishing and making a name for their selves (and the school they work for), realistically not much will change. You would have to see many more news articles complaining about the same problems at the same school in order to create a large enough stir. When only one or two articles like this are published, many readers will think what DrExPat initially posted. One college cannot please every one of its students, so those who are that dissatisfied might look for other options if their opinion is of the minority.</p>
<p>I commend sakky for commitment to civil discourse. One of the ways that I try to promote civil discourse in online forums by eschewing follow-ups. Most of these things go on too long because someone feels that they must have the last word. However, I think that in this case there has been some misunderstanding and it provides a teachable moment of sorts.</p>
<p>As there are a few point of confusion, this may require multiple posts.</p>
<p>My initial post was neither an example of ad hominem nor a personal attack. (NB Those two are not the same thing.) Though, it was rather terse and informal, so some of the responsibility for the misunderstanding is mine.</p>
<p>First, ad hominem is different from ordinary name calling or simple unpleasantry. It is a particular form of logical/argumentative fallacy in which one argues that a particular proposition is false because the individual promoting it has some (unrelated and generally undesirable) quality. I did not suggest that the proposition that Wharton provides inferior instruction is false because the supposed student (SS hereafter) is an entitled whiner (EW hereafter). Rather I inferred that the SS was (likely) an EW on the basis of the opinion expressed. While I may be incorrect, there was no logical fallacy.</p>
<p>Second, personal attacks are typically bad form, but they are less clearly defined than are the classic logical fallacies. In this case, I would argue that my original posting and my follow-up fall short of the standard of personal attack on two points. One, neither were personal, and two, neither were attacks. I was responding to a third-hand report of a rather vague opinion posted to different public forum by an anonymous poster. If there is anything personal about that, the same reasoning would render the OP a personal attack as it is parroting the original statement of opinion which is, by that standard, a personal attack on members of the Wharton faculty.</p>
<p>Further, neither of my postings contained attacks of any sort. Note that even when very indirectly addressing remarks towards the thrice-removed anonymous SS, I criticized the evident quality of the analysis. The SS’s analysis is evidently deficient, though it is deficient in a way that is so typical as to be almost unremarkable.</p>
<p>To clarify, the point of my original response was to say that it was hardly newsworthy that students (even students fortunate enough to be recipients of what is arguably the best education available in their chosen subject of study) complain about their instructors. </p>
<p>I agree that the questions that I propose in the second follow-up may not appear immediately to relate to the quoted statement of opinion. That was intentional. Critical thinking is developed through exercise, not by having someone else tell you what to think.</p>
<p>That said, maybe I can provide a more gentle nudge. Thinking of education narrowly as an ordinary experience good misses most of what is really going on. However, students have almost unavoidably limited experience and narrow perspective. From where they stand it is difficult (but not impossible) to see the forest for the trees.</p>
<p>Professors are also challenged by the egocentric predicament, but we enjoy a few advantages. Most of us have sat at least double the number of hours of classroom time than our typical students ever will. Most of us continue to do so throughout our careers. Further, we study our craft. Most of us regularly read books and articles about pedagogy as well as works like Rebecca Cox’s College Fear Factor and Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year. There are few comparable titles about educational institutions and faculty targeted to student audiences. Most importantly, however, virtually all faculty have been the best and the brightest as well as the slow kid and everything in between. One doesn’t get into a decent PhD program without excelling at the difficult subjects as well as those that come easily, and virtually no one walks out of a PhD program without the experience of being the slow kid.</p>
<p>Also, we each get a pile of student evaluations every semester. It’s typical to get both best-prof-ever and worst-prof-ever comments from the same classes. Too little variance is almost as worrying as an average that is too low. Also, we all know that there are many irrelevant factors that strongly influence student opinions of the quality instruction. It’s a big plus to be a tall, fit, middle-aged man with a “radio voice.” Younger women, shorter men, and those whose accents are not considered “sophisticated” receive ratings that are biased downward. Someone even did an analysis of Rate My Professor scores and found a strong positive correlation between ratings of overall quality and chili peppers. Similar studies have found that having an apparently unrelated party set up a free chocolate give-away table outside the entrance to the classroom on the days that evaluations are taken raises evaluations considerably. </p>
<p>The point is that students’ subjective experience of educational quality is only one very narrow dimension of quality and it not positively correlated with many other dimensions.</p>
<p>Further, a business/economic analysis of institutions similar to UPenn would reveal that neither the cost nor the price of their education varies much from those of rather ordinary schools. UPenn students are not paying top-dollar for a luxury good. In fact, these students are arguably underpaying for the fair market value of what they are receiving. Maybe the SS should have gone to Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, students will whine and gripe. Every professor I know can tell a story about at least one instance in which they themselves were the EW and just how ridiculous they feel now looking back on it. I can tell more than a few of these. It’s a good thing too, because this is what enables us to have empathy and patience with the fresh crop of EW that pass through our classes each semester. I really do understand how bad it can feel to struggle in a class or to have an overwhelming semester, and I’m sure that most of my colleagues do too. Yet, tough love is sometimes the caring response.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that you’ll necessarily enjoy the process of seriously engaging the questions that I proposed, but I think that you will benefit nonetheless.</p>
<p>Uh, so what? What difference does it make? At the end of the day, you’ve chosen to personally insult the - as you call it - “SS”, by stating that he’s (likely to be) an entitled whiner. It doesn’t matter why you’ve arrived at that conclusion, it only matters that you arrived at that conclusion. </p>
<p>More importantly, even if you did arrive at that conclusion, you also chose to express it publicly in what is a clear personal attack (reference post #3). Like I said, I have plenty of personal opinions regarding certain members of this board. But I have chosen to keep them to myself. </p>
<p>But most importantly of all, you’ve chosen not, until perhaps your more recent posts, to engage the SS on the issue he laid out, that being the quality of the experience at Wharton. I once again refer you back to post #3. How exactly does that discuss the topic at hand? Even if he is an entitled whiner, that has nothing to do with the quality of the Wharton program. </p>
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<p>Really? So by that same token, if I suffer from a poor experience at the Ritz-Carlton and then complain about it, then I am making a “personal attack” upon the hotel staff? Then by the very same logic, nobody ever has the right to ever complain about anything ever, because doing so could always be construed as a “personal attack” upon the providers of that product. {Me: “Battlefield Earth is a terrible movie!”; You: “Are you making a personal attack upon the filmmakers?”. Heck, we could even extend that to many conversations here on CC: Me: “Harvard is a better overall school than Southeast Missouri State”. You: “Are you making a personal attack upon the staff of SE Missouri State?”} </p>
<p>It seems to me that the operative principle that the vast majority of people here would subscribe to is that if an organization is providing a service, then the customers of that service have every right to publicly complain about that service if they feel that they are not receiving the quality that they expected. And so I ask again: what’s wrong with that? Is that not allowed? </p>
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<p>Again, so what? Sure, perhaps students’ experience of educational quality is subjective and only one very narrow dimension of quality. Maybe they can’t see the forest for the trees. But - get this - their subjective experience of quality is the only measure of quality that they will be allowed to experience. Again, if you spend a night at the Ritz-Carlton and find that the room is filthy, it doesn’t matter that you’re not a hotelier expert. It doesn’t matter that perhaps the hotel staff is providing excellent service in other dimensions. All that matters to you is that you found the quality of your room to be unacceptable. And it then certainly seems to me that you then have every right to complain publicly. </p>
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<p>Again, so what? The mark of a savvy organization is to then leverage the irrationality of their consumers in their favor, not to ignore it. Many restaurants have determined that playing soothing, classical music or soft jazz enhances the dining experience. Given that knowledge, how foolish of a restauranteur would you have to be to deliberately ignore that information by playing death metal? Similarly, TV news channels have determined that more viewers tune in when their newscasters consist of gorgeous women and handsome men. How foolish of a newsroom manager would you have to be to then deliberately choose to populate your news staff with ugly people? </p>
<p>It doesn’t matter why customers prefer certain things. It only matters that they like them, and if an organization chooses not to provide them, then fine, they may then have to tolerate poor quality assessments. </p>
<p>As a case in point, I think it is entirely appropriate for a business school to assess the gravitas and eloquence of a potential faculty member when making hiring decisions. After all, that person is going to be in charge of teaching business students, including MBA and exec-ed students. It won’t matter how brilliant that person’s research may be if he can’t command the respect and attention of his students. Let’s face it - the guy who stutters, who speaks in an impossible-to-hear voice, who lacks self-confidence in his public speaking, who constantly looks at the floor - he will provide a terrible teaching experience, even if he does have numerous heavily cited pubs in Administrative Science Quarterly. {Maybe the school should simply assign him to a pure research or PhD mentorship role with no classroom responsibilities.} </p>
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<p>Uh, how’s that? Last time I checked, Swarthmore was also a luxury good being one of the elite LAC’s in the nation, and is in no sense a “rather ordinary school” by any reasonable metric. </p>
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<p>Uh, they do? What school are you talking about? </p>
<p>Seems to me that professors at any research university - of which Wharton is clearly one - are infinitely more likely to be spending the overwhelming majority of their time on publishing research journal articles and - if they are reading anything at all to improve their ‘craft’ - would be reading about ways to game the journal system in order to publish more articles. {I.e. “Let’s scout out which of the several associate editors seems to be the most receptive to our particular methodology so that we can submit our papers only to that associate editor.”} </p>
<p>Reading books and articles about pedagogy? Who cares? After all, that’s not going to help you garner more A-level pubs. And that’s the problem. </p>
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<p>And there you go again, insinuating that the SS is a “slow kid”, is struggling, or is overwhelmed. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t; he certainly seemed to give no indication that he was. I don’t think it’s proper for us to speculate. After all, maybe he’s actually the highest performing student in his class. Don’t even the highest-performing students sometimes complain about the quality of the teaching, and have every right to do so? </p>
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<p>And exactly how it is “deficient”? The SS is comparing the teaching quality at Wharton to what he had received in high school and what he probably would expect at a community college. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable analysis to me, given that he’s just a student. After all, I am perfectly free to opine that Battlefield Earth is a terrible movie even if I’m not a professional movie critic and has surely seen less than 0.01% of all movies ever made in history.</p>
<p>But clearly in this case, he clearly can’t demand his money back. Seriously, has anybody ever heard of any student at a top-ranked school being rebated their tuition because the experience was not unsatisfactory? Heck, even those students who flunk out of their school - and hence clearly suffered a poor experience - typically do not receive rebates. </p>
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<p>Well, in the case of long-durational experience such as a college education, that’s not quite that simple. For example, say that you’ve booked a 4-week African safari vacation with a travel agency, only to find within a week that the travel arrangements do not meet your expectations. You can’t just simply “switch” to another vacation immediately, for you’re committed to the existing vacation itinerary. </p>
<p>A college experience presents similar difficulties. Once you’ve started any college program, then you can’t later apply to most other schools as a freshman. Rather you can do so only as a transfer applicant for which the admissions process at most top schools (e.g. the peer schools of Wharton) is far more stringent than for high school seniors. Princeton, as an example, doesn’t even offer transfer admissions at all, and only a miniscule 1% of Harvard transfer applicants are admitted (compared to about 7% of freshman applicants). It is therefore far from trivial for a Wharton student who is dissatisfied with his experience to transfer to a peer program. Indeed, such a student would have almost certainly been better off had he never attended Wharton at all and hence retain his ability to apply to those other schools as a high school senior. </p>
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<p>I agree with that. But I would also say that we’ll never know if that opinion is truly in the minority if people such as DrExPat and others (as on the WSJ forum) are automatically going to jump down the throats of anybody who dare utter a single discouraging word. Until people are free to express their complaints without fear of reprisals - and apparently his comments elicited a response on the WSJ forum to ascertain his exact identity, perhaps so that he could become the target of harrassment - we’ll never know exactly how widespread these complaints might be.</p>
<p>I never said any student could realistically get their money back from a college, just that it is the typical response from people when they feel they are not getting what they paid for, which leads to people refusing to continue to pay for the same service or product in the future. Especially knowing that even if his story effects some sort of change, he will not likely reap the benefits in his remaining days at UPenn.</p>
<p>I still think transferring would be worth the effort and money saved if a good education is what he really wanted even more than the elite name and recruitment outcomes - if the reverse is true, then he’ll eventually rationalize that the elite name and recruitment opportunities were worth the price. </p>
<p>Even if his opinion is of the majority at UPenn, I wonder how many successful business students placed into good jobs post-UPenn would have chosen a better teaching school if they could do it over again, and how many would have re-chosen UPenn. Or is it only the unsuccessful ones who complain about the teaching? There are a lot of different perspectives to look at when determining who is complaining, and why.</p>