<p>*We found that large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.</p>
<p>In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college. </p>
<p>*Why is the overall quality of undergraduate learning so poor? * </p>
<p>...Too many institutions, for instance, rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades. (Indeed, the 36 percent of students in our study who reported spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone still had an average G.P.A. of 3.16.) On those commendable occasions when professors and academic departments do maintain rigor, they risk declines in student enrollments. And since resources are typically distributed based on enrollments, rigorous classes are likely to be canceled and rigorous programs shrunk. Distributing resources and rewards based on student learning instead of student satisfaction would help stop this race to the bottom...*</p>
<p>I don’t know about that - I personally can think of a number of students at top 20 schools who coasted their way through creampuff majors and hence obtained a degree with relatively little effort. </p>
<p>But even if what you are saying is true, then logically, the next question would be: what exactly is the social value of schools outside the top 20? The vast majority of schools in the country are outside the top 20. If many (perhaps most) students at those schools are expending little effort and learning little, then why do we have so many of those schools?</p>
<p>My brother did his undergrad at a top 25 school, and then did a post-bacc at a top 100 school in-state. He could not believe how stark the contrast was. At the top schools all majors are intense.</p>
<p>slipper, I do not think private or public makes a difference. Most good universities (private or public) will be intense academically. I do not think top public schools like Cal, Georgia Tech, Michigan, UCLA, UIUC, UVa and William & Mary are any less intense than top private universities. Furthermore, I do not think that second rate private universities are going to be any more intense than second rate public universities. A university’s intensity is decided primarily by the quality of its faculty.</p>
<p>Because millions of kids are “going to college in the Fall” rather than “starting my university study of Physics in the Fall” Only a minority of people view college as an academic/intellectual endeavor.</p>
<p>Alexandre- sorry I didn’t mean to make the distinction between public/private. My brother went to a top 25 public, his post-bacc was at a top 100 public. I think after a certain level of there is a drop off in intensity and quality of instruction. But I disagree that faculty prowess alone determines intensity. Wake Forest is much more intense than Ohio State, which has a more renowned faculty but lacks in other areas.</p>
<p>Exactly - but that then leads to the next question: exactly why are those students going to college, if not for an academic/intellectual endeavor? More saliently, why do we as society encourage them to go - and usually even provide taxpayer funding - for those students to go? </p>
<p>Like I said, at the average school, many - probably most - students are not particularly interested in the academics and don’t really trying to learn much of anything. They might want a degree, but don’t want to expend excessive effort to obtain that degree. Consider this thought experiment: if you offered the average student at the average college an instant college degree from their school right now at this very moment without having to study any further, how many of them would take it? Even at the very top schools, a minority of students are not highly motivated to learn and would happily take an instant degree. </p>
<p>So the question then is, why does society continue to subsidize these students?</p>
<p>Any classroom instructor is going to have to teach to the median ability and motivation levels of their class. Teaching at a level that leaves the majority of the class behind would be a waste of everyone’s time.</p>
<p>You’ve stated your opinion. Here’s what the faculty of the UCLA Dept of Economics says in their 8-year internal review
Here is what History department faculty says in its 8-year internal review
These are some of the largest undergrad majors at UCLA, and what you read above are sentences pasted directly from the department reviews on the UCLA faculty senate website. They hardly sound like giving the challenge and education you’ll find in the top colleges.</p>
<p>And I have a friend who is “proud”, if that is the right feeling to have, of getting a degree in Econ from UCLA without ever writing a term paper.</p>
<p>^ Part of being a large public university makes these comments more public…they seem sort of minor problems that kids mostly complain about in student reviews. At least UCLA addressed the problem with visiting or nontenure track faculty teaching core undergrad courses.</p>