…as taught (or not) at Bowdoin College. Sadly, I suspect that it’s not alone in that regard.
[Update a while later]
Here’s a long-overdue idea: No repayment plan, no student loan:
Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, will soon require students to go above and beyond Education Department requirements to receive federal loan funds. Starting next fall, students who want the college to certify their eligibility for student loans must complete personal budget worksheets, outlining a “realistic picture of their financial situation” both before and after graduation, and a student loan repayment plan estimating how their monthly payments fit into those budgets.
As Glenn says, “If this were to catch on, it would have devastating effects on certain colleges and majors.”
Yeah, like maybe history majors at Bowdoin.
Personally it doesn’t look like that useful a curriculum, but as a private college it has the right to teach the courses it wants to teach. That is how a free market works.
If its customers don’t like what it offers they are free to go elsewhere. Or are you advocating for increasing regulation of private universities? Or perhaps nationalizing them so they all teach what the government thinks should be taught like in China or Russia?
…as a private college it has the right to teach the courses it wants to teach. That is how a free market works.
Who said otherwise?
Or are you advocating for increasing regulation of private universities?
I’m not “advocating” for anything. I’m simply pointing out yet another symptom of the academic bubble.
Do you have any more straw men? Why don’t you just respond to what I write instead of what you fantasize that I wrote?
Holy shit, Spatula must be drunk again. It’s the only charitable explanation.
Rand,
[[[I’m simply pointing out yet another symptom of the academic bubble.]]]
Bowdoin College has been around since 1794 and has had a liberal arts tradition since day one. And has had a stable clientele of students seeking a liberal arts education, mostly from wealthy families that have attended it for generations given the cost of attending it and its selective admissions. Its hardly a poster child for the academic bubble since its unaffected by it one way or another.
If anything is driving the “so-called” academic bubble its the for profit schools offering career oriented instruction based on federal loans and promises of jobs resulting from their degrees. IF you bother to look at the actual statistics you will see most of the growth in college students and degrees in the last decades have come from the For-Profit sector.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/04/education-forprofit-idUSN0421762120100804
I doubt you will find any “studies” programs or similar humanities at those schools. Or anything other then standardized history classes. But again, its a free market and consumers are free to make the choices they wish. But again, look at the data before echoing those that are completely unfamiliar with it.
Titus,
Rand is the one that is using a Strawman, using Bowdoin College, a private college with an endowment of $850 million that is about as isolated from the academic bubble as a institution could be as poster child for it.
…before or after the call for nationalizing it so we can be like China or Russia or something?
I feel dumber for having read TM’s comments. I award him no points, and may God have mercy on his soul.
Among other things, he doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of the phrase “straw man.”
Bowdoin has always been a very liberal (read: lefty) college. I know several people that went there. Not surprised to see a curriculum like that.
Flyover,
Yes, but it doesn’t seem to stop it from producing its share of CEO’s, like the founders of Subway and NetFlix.
Rand,
I could see you using it as an example of the short comings of a liberal education. But using it to illustrate the academic bubble as you did was just plain stupid.
You are just mad at Bowdoin because they rejected Tony Soprano’s daughter:-)
TM says “Personally it doesn’t look like that useful a curriculum, but as a private college it has the right to teach the courses it wants to teach. That is how a free market works.”
Precisely why I never, ever as a graduate contribute a dime to Tufts University. Why subsidize insanity aimed at wrecking the USA?
I feel dumber for having read TM’s comments
This is true. But these things happen.
Harkin pointed out “a cruel irony” in that for-profit colleges “seek out and enroll large numbers of minority and low-income students, offering them opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Mr. Splatt, can you explain the purpose of the first set of “quotes” in your link.
Perhaps a less sinister explanation of Bowdoin’s lack of a general survey course in American history is that I’d imagine the vast majority of the students that a highly selective school like Bowdoin admits took AP American History or an equivalent IB course in high school.
lack of a general survey course in American history
Hell, for $53,000 why would anyone expect it?
I don’t think the higher-education bubble, to the extent it exists (and I’m not fully sure it does) is related to a drop-off in the relevance or quality of the degrees. It may be a history degree from Bowdoin is fairly useless. But it may always have been useless — only the nature of its uselessness may have changed, from the teaching of how to read The Odyssey in the original Greek to studying the shibboleths of the left through the prism of Reconstruction history (or vice versa).
What has happened, I think, is that the cost of the thing has risen way far beyond its true value, driven by any number of things, but first by government subsidy and second by the the proliferation of so much civil rights regulation and legal terrorism that firms are more or less required now to substitute degrees on your CV for any of the cheaper and faster ways they might have assessed your general competence in the old days.
In this it rather resembles the housing bubble: it’s not that the houses people bought were worthless, but only that they were worth much less than was paid. The problem with a degree in Afrofeminist history from Bowdoin is not so much that its value is near zero, but that its cost is not.
Moreover, I think this is reflected in where the money goes. It’s not like university faculties have expanded enormously (just ask anyone in the market for an academic job). Nor is it that academic salaries have skyrocketed (ditto). What has happened, however, is that administration and support has expanded enormously, and the university is now involved in far more random activities only distantly related to education. Essentially, universities took out a HELOC on their “academic equity” and spent it on big-screen plasma TVs, “diversity” officers and whatnot.
One might excoriate them for not spending it on improving the quality of their product, viz. education, but alas the sad and sordid fact of the matter is that no one actually knows how to teach people better, any more than anyone really knows the sure-fire algorithm for a happy marriage.
They probably don’t teach the Constitution because, after all, it was written 100 years ago, and no one can understand it.
Carl, I don’t think the issue is so much teaching them the subject better so much as teaching it at all…
The reason the super-liberal curriculum at traditionally liberal Bowdoin College is part of the academic bubble is because it costs too much. None of those courses are worth today’s astronomically high tuition costs. At least the old version of a “liberal” education involved something that actually has to be taught, like Classical Greek. Today’s NuLiberal course list seems to consist of reading old Black Panther tracts, putting together a poster display on the Underground Railroad, and sitting around grousing about how the Racist Patriarchy just ruins everything. Fuck me blue, I could teach that with my eyes closed. Pay me fifty bucks, kiddies, and you can gather round and bitch about the Man for an hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to your heart’s content. And you won’t have to take out a third mortgage on your kids to pay off the loan.
Rand,
The assumption you are making is that their customers, the student who elect to go there, are not interested in what you think they should learn. And Bowdoin is very selective, only 15% are admitted, so as Chris points out they may have well taken it at the prep school or high school they attended before admission.
You need to remember that students, by the enrollment choices they make as well as their selection of colleges, do have an influence on the curriculum offered. Courses with low interest are usually dropped, unless they are required for specific degree or general education requirements.
That should be “interested” instead of “not interested”.
Andrea,
[[[None of those courses are worth today’s astronomically high tuition costs.]]]
That is for the Market to decide. If students feel its too expensive they will decide to go elsewhere. The fact that they only admit 15% of those that apply would argue the market they serve doesn’t agree with your assessment of their worth or the value of an liberal arts degree. Indeed, IF you believe in free market economics they should increase their tuition so demand equals supply (i.e. 100% of those who apply are admitted and the market clears properly…).
Now if this was a state university, or one of the service academies you might have justification in complaining. But they are a private institution governed by the laws of the marketplace.
I don’t drink beer, but I don’t argue that it shouldn’t be available for those that prefer to waste their money that way. This is the same principle.
“That is for the Market to decide”
Oh, you mean there isn’t any government money (loans, grants, etc.) flowing into Bowdoin College and therefore jacking up costs like other colleges? Okay then. I’m okay with an officially Rich SWPL college meant to turn out modern-day Ashley Wilkeses, as long as government money isn’t shoring it up.
(By the way, why are you capitalizing Market? We don’t capitalize nouns in English unless they are places or names or at the beginning of sentences.)
By the way, why are you capitalizing Market?
Hey, you know,
FascistsGermans capitalize all their nouns. Especially the important ones.Well actually, all nouns are capitalized in German whether they are important or not. [/END PEDANTRY]
Me, I thought Mr. Matula was just doing that to mock the sort of worship of the free market that he seems to think people here engage in. You know, just playing around with another of his Straw Men.
I attended a college in upstate NY during the early 80s, before I went into mechanical design, that specialized in turning out teachers. My major was history, and after 3 semesters came to the conclusion that the graduates knew very little of history, other than for stuff such as mentioned above. Few, if any of my classmates knew who Napoleon was, the Middle Ages was totally off the radar, and George Washington was only a slave holder. So I walked, and went into drafting. I am close to a BA in History, but would have to take a 4 semester sequence to get the degree, yet with all the independent study I’ve done on the Middle Ages I could probably teach at the undergrad level, say up to the 400 level. At least in my own study I don’t have to attend classes discussing the role of left handed lesbians in the Hundred Years War, or other such claptrap.
Carl, I think the real problem is that the vast majority of one’s learning happens outside the classroom, and no one has invented a pill to stimulate curiosity.
“but alas the sad and sordid fact of the matter is that no one actually knows how to teach people better, ”
In my opinion, at the college level most teachers teach well enough. Yes I’ve had great kollije and grad skule teechers, and lousy ones.
In my opinion, when it comes right down to it, a college student gets as good an education as they want to: it’s a question of what they put into it. How badly they want it. How much they value it.
Even in grade school, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent nationwide, exposing teachers to the latest and greatest teaching technique and I find it hard to believe that today’s techniques are THAT much better than they were when I was in grade school, or the 50 years before that. Enough better to justify the hundreds of millions spent.
Just how MANY ways are there to effectively teach second graders how to add?
I exempt special ed from that opinion because that is an area where special techniques, and new ideas have proven worthwhile.
But I digress…..
I went to a 4 year University. One buddy of mine, at the time, did it a little differently…While I took the lower division courses at the 4 year school, he got all that stuff out of the way (physics, chem, math, English etc) in 2 years at a community college. Less cost, less pressure, smaller classes. And he did great in his upper division work. I think that was a pretty smart way to go.
I have to take issue with no one knows how to teach. It may be that some students aren’t teachable, but I even find that difficult to believe. We used to teach. What’s changed is ideology. Schools are focused on something other than teaching from grade school on up. I suspect bloated bureaucratism to be the main culprit. When you have worthless bureaucrats you get worthless everything else.
People want to learn. Perhaps teaching things of value would be a nice change.
…he got all that stuff out of the way (physics, chem, math, English etc) in 2 years at a community college. Less cost, less pressure, smaller classes. And he did great in his upper division work. I think that was a pretty smart way to go.
I did that as well.
One irony of the modern academic left…they wanted to diminish the focus on Western Civ because they thought it was overrepresented in the curricula – but Americans tend to have very spotty knowledge of European history between 1066 and 1933.
Rand, Andera,
In the field of marketing Market with a capital is used to refer to a specific market, in place of markets which is more generic. You see a similar convention in Astronomy where Moon with a capital M refers to the satellite of Earth while moon is generic for any planetary satellite. But I expect you know that and just playing at being dumb because you have no counter to the idea that in a market based systems individuals have a right to make their own choice. Even though Libertarians claim a belief in free markets as you show here many don’t respect that right and criticize those that wish to follow the beat of a different drummer…
At least communists don’t pretend to believe in free markets which is why Ayn Rand found them to have a higher moral character then libertarians…
Andrea,
In checking the financial statements it appears about 2% of their income was from Federal Grants, about 2 million dollars. It also appears that nearly all of it went to the usual suspects, namely the Physics, Earth Sciences and Biology faculty who are dependent on such government entitlements for their research and promotion. The grants for history seem to be from private sources and the schools own research endowment.
BTW one of the books one of the history faculty wrote: Weapons and Fighting Techniques of the Samurai, 1200-1877, by Professor Tom Conlan, looks interesting. I may order it to add to my military library which focuses on the war in the Pacific in World War II. So it looks like Rand’s rant might have resulted in some productive value 🙂
In the field of marketing Market with a capital is used to refer to a specific market, in place of markets which is more generic.
ok… so the Field (you are being specific here) of Marketing (again, you are being specific) doesn’t follow standard English grammar conventions. But utiliizing your argument, where are you being specific with this use:
That is for the Market to decide.
Were we supposed to realize that “Market” in this case meant “Market of Academia”? Because you seemed to use the word in a more general sense in that sentence.
Also, if the market gets to decide, then why can’t Rand, as a potential buyer or advertiser in that market, point out short comings in that particular brands or industry’s product? Isn’t that a market activity rather than a government activity? Or is any comment about the market made by market participants considered a Tea Party issue simply because you neither agree with the Tea Party or Rand on your own political peccadilloes.
Gregg,
[[[In my opinion, when it comes right down to it, a college student gets as good an education as they want to: it’s a question of what they put into it. How badly they want it. How much they value it.]]]
You are right on target. Some students truly want to learn and they are a joy to teach. Others just want a check in the box and prefer to slide by with the minimum they are able to get away with. And you see the difference when you do follow up assessments, with those that wanted to learn being successful while those that slide in school continuing to slide by, and still blaming others for their problems.
Leland,
[[[Also, if the market gets to decide, then why can’t Rand, as a potential buyer or advertiser in that market, point out short comings in that particular brands or industry’s product?]]]
Last I looked Rand had little interest in going back to school, so his opinion on it matters about as much as the opinion of a teetotaler on which brand of beer is best….
Also Grammar, especially English Grammar, is not a rigorous as calculus, it is constantly evolving and varying by field, which is where Jargon and Slang originate from… And unlike the L’Académie française there is no official body to rule what is right and wrong. Unless of course you want to create one 🙂
Also Grammar, especially English Grammar, is not a rigorous as calculus
You are right, it’s a liberal art! Or if you prefer Liberal Art!
While it may be technically correct to refer to college students at a private university as “customers,” the fact that students see themselves this way has an effect on their attitude towards learning: because their mommies and daddies paid all that moola, they expect to get excellent grades no matter what. They also seem to be more attached to Mommy and Daddy than was the case in my (boomer’s) days. This does not bode well for America’s future (or its present, for that matter)
I would have thought that even a private university would endeavor to prepare its students to be solid citizens of the educated sort, which would include a more comprehensive American history offering, especially if it (Bowdoin) is to be taken seriously as a liberal arts college.
It’s a sad fact that very few people complain about not getting their money’s worth when it comes to education. Prof wants to get out of class early? Cool! Don’t learn anything from a class? Less work for me, more time to party!
Don,
Yes, it is sad how education is treated like a consumer good these days. It would be nice to go back to the days of Professor Kingsfield. I liked the scene where after a student gives a poor answer to a question he calls him to the head of the class, hands him a dime, and then tells him to call his mother and tell her he is going to flunk out of law school. Of course today that would be an instant lawsuit.
I was fortunate in that when I went to NM Tech in the 1970’s it still had that culture. As they told us in the freshman orientation, they may be required by the state to have an open admission policy, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t be flunked out. Then they told us to take a good look at the student at either side, as they wouldn’t be there come the Spring Semester. And that we should remember that only one in ten of the freshman class would likely EARN a degree from NM Tech. My room mate dropped out about three weeks into the semester. I earned my degree from NM Tech in 1983 and there were indeed few of that freshman class left 🙂
I prefer liberalia studia to get my money’s worth out of Latin. Or, if you prefer, iberallay artway in the New Latin.
I have to admit, my grades and education received from college took a gigantic leap when I suddenly realized *I* was the employer (along with the rest of the class) and that we were *hiring* that guy up front with the strange jacket. And that my share of the cost of hiring that employee was X dollars per hour.
My best teachers realized that we were the bosses, and he/she was an employee of ours. My worst teachers seemed to have no idea there was a connection between their paychecks and that group of slack-jawed idiots they stood in front of several times a week.
Also Grammar, especially English Grammar, is not a rigorous as calculus
Rigorous English is totally non-triumphant, dude.
My english comp I & II teacher was rather non-plussed when I explained that marinating in Maya Angelou and the guilt of white males was not what I was paying her for. That was two semesters wasted. Just give me the blasted style manual and go away, I’ll figure it out myself, you incompetent hack.
I’m sure she’d deeply have preferred to be able to do without us ‘non-traditional’, aka olde pharte military retiree, students.
And my American history through 1865 instructor had certain views of Gen’l Sherman that I, as a relative, found rather, shall we say, shallow, and uneducated.
In high school chem in the early ’70’s shattering glassware, noxious odors and loud noises were part and parcel of the learning experience. College chem I w/lab in ’99? Really, really lame.
Over time, this is what happens when you give women the vote. 😉
That is for the Market to decide.
That would be a fair statement if there were anything like a free market in education, Thomas. But the market forces in education are fantastically distorted by government regulation and subsidy. I wouldn’t give a damn what Bowdoin taught — and would argue it’s no one else’s business either, too, as you do — if there was no such huge market distorting forces as financial aid, rules against IQ and related aptitude tests in employment, and massive civil rights liability for job refereees. As it is…people have acquired the right to inquire into and perhaps influence Bowdoin’s choice of teaching priorities, because all of the rest of us are helping to pay for them. Many of the risks of a poor choice of curriculum have been socialized, another dumb unintended side effect of the noble goals of the left.
Carl, I think the real problem is that the vast majority of one’s learning happens outside the classroom, and no one has invented a pill to stimulate curiosity.
Depends. If you mean the core principles of life, no argument. If you mean how to build a bridge, solve the Schroedinger equation, or interpret an MRI of someone’s liver…well, this is where the classroom is an excellent substitute for trial-and-error or the School O’ Hard Knocks. In principle, that is. In fact, all we know about teaching for sure is that if someone who knows the subject talks about it, people often learn. Which brings me to…
In my opinion, when it comes right down to it, a college student gets as good an education as they want to: it’s a question of what they put into it.
I’m sure you’re right. But consider: do we tolerate this kind of evasion of responsibility in any other profession? A doctor is supposed to know how to cure illnesses, whether or not the patient does. If he gives the wrong medicine, he can’t shrug his shoulders to the malpractise jury and say Well, Joe should have known it was bad medicine. His health is his responsibility, after all. He wasn’t paying attention to the labels, I guess. Or maybe he described his symptoms poorly. Not my fault. Pay me better so I can feel motivated to try harder next time. But of course this is what a union teacher will say if your kid, or your entire neighborhood school of kids, can’t add 2 and 2 after 12 years of their efforts.
Frankly, I don’t accept the proposition. If teaching were a real scientific profession, we would know how to teach people whether or not they were truly motivated to learn, in the same way physicians rely on antibiotics and not giving motivating pep talks to the immune system to cure infection. Perhaps we’d know clever tricks to “get” to someone who doesn’t start off motivated. (Indeed, any good teacher already has some of those up his sleeve, discovered on a purely trial-and-error empirical basis.)
I am not saying there isn’t some conservation-law limit on how much you can teach someone, given his psychological nature, the time and resources available, et cetera. But my experience is that the amount of learning that a student does in the usual way is considerably less than one might expect from his level of motivation, resources, et cetera. Today’s teachers are like the “doctors” of the 6th century AD: witch doctors, in essence, who try random stuff and shake rattles and blame the patient or the stars if it doesn’t work well. It’s a disgrace that the profession is not a lot more humble than it is.
Carl writes:
“I wouldn’t give a damn what Bowdoin taught — and would argue it’s no one else’s business either, too, as you do — if there was no such huge market distorting forces as financial aid, rules against IQ and related aptitude tests in employment, and massive civil rights liability for job refereees. As it is…people have acquired the right to inquire into and perhaps influence Bowdoin’s choice of teaching priorities, because all of the rest of us are helping to pay for them.”
Agreed
>>In my opinion, when it comes right down to it, a college student gets as good an education as they want to: it’s a question of what they put into it.<I’m sure you’re right. But consider: do we tolerate this kind of evasion of responsibility in any other profession?<
I did not mean to imply that college teachers have no responsibility to do their jobs reasonably well. It's not like they get to show up and then read comic books all day (unless the course is Fine Literature or Fine Art).
What you left out was my statement that, upon the whole, at the college level teachers teach "well enough". I was specific about at the college level. They get up front, go over the material, answer questions. I said that yes there are great teachers, lousy teachers and everything in between. Most of them are in between. I had them all.
Given that most teach well enough *at the college level* , then, in college, it comes down to the student.
"But of course this is what a union teacher will say if your kid, or your entire neighborhood school of kids, can’t add 2 and 2 after 12 years of their efforts."
Careful – I wasn't talking about grade school on this..I was clear:
"In my opinion, when it comes right down to it, a college student gets as good an education as they want to:"
Much of what I wrote doesn't transfer to grade school. That's a different proposition altogether. For one thing in most places you can't teach K-12 without a piece of paper…training. As far as I know, no college teacher is required to have Education training. As an aside I do believe that grade school teachers' pay should be merit based. A good conversation would be how to achieve that. It's not obvious to me what metrics one would use nor how to measure them.
Carl then writes:
"If teaching were a real scientific profession, we would know how to teach people whether or not they were truly motivated to learn, in the same way physicians rely on antibiotics and not giving motivating pep talks to the immune system to cure infection. Perhaps we’d know clever tricks to “get” to someone who doesn’t start off motivated. "
Well maybe. But it isn't a scientific discipline just yet. Personal motivations are a horrid mess of tangled inputs. And people are in college for a large variety of reasons.
More to the point, I know of no practical way a parent or student can figure out if the teaching staff at Bowdoin (or anywhere else) are good at what they do. It's simply not practical for parents to figure that out and in general I don't think the students know how to figure that out. Nor do either have the time for it. For that information, they have to rely on the school's reputation for the kind of student they turn out. We know the percentage of MIT grads who get accepted to grad school at CalTech; and we can compare that to the percentage at any other school. And we use macro-info like that.
But those things somewhat depends upon what kind of student they induct.
In fact the only students I ever heard complain about how lousy a teacher was, were the ones who skipped class.
Lastly, when you get to the college level, there's a "real life" (don't laugh 😉 )aspect that has to be factored in. Or ought to be.
And this is that the student has responsibilities to meet, regarding the quality of their education. Much more so than in grade school.
Carl,
[[[I wouldn’t give a damn what Bowdoin taught — and would argue it’s no one else’s business either, too, as you do — if there was no such huge market distorting forces as financial aid, rules against IQ and related aptitude tests in employment, and massive civil rights liability for job refereees.]]]
For many schools that would be true, but schools like Bowdoin are as far removed from that type of market distortion as Donald Trump is from unemployment insurance. Which is why the faculty don’t care about what others say they should be teaching but teach what they want. And with a 15% selection rate and a 850 Million Dollar Endowment they care little if students drop out.
For what its worth Bowdoin College is rated 6th in Liberal Arts schools by U.S. News and World Reports. Also the majority of its freshman class comes from prep schools, not the public school system, so its not surprising that only 46% of Bowdoin students needed financial aid. And their website reports that 65% of that aid came for Bowdoin’s own endowment.
http://www.bowdoin.edu/catalogue/admission-to-the-college/financial-aid.shtml
So at most you would see a drop in enrollment by 16% if federal financial aid programs were eliminated. And given that 85% of applicants to the school are non-accepted it would be easy enough to replace them with students that don’t need any aid.
The website collegemeasures.org shows the student loan default rate for Bowdoin College is only 2.1 percent not much higher then Harvard and MIT, compared to 34.6 percent for the University of Phoenix.
So again, arguing that Bowdoin College is a poster child for the waste of government financial aid and the education bubble, makes no sense. You need to look at where the expansion of enrollments have occurred in the last decade, which schools are dependent on federal financial aid and which have the highest default rate.
What you left out was my statement that, upon the whole, at the college level teachers teach “well enough”.
I didn’t leave it out, Gregg. Indeed, I’m most familiar with that breed, since the teaching I’ve done has all been at the undergraduate or graduate level.
Nor do I leave them out of the indictment, at all. They may not be as crassly incompetent as the K-12 public-school teachers, but they are generally no less arrogant, and often almost as clueless. College teaching generally succeeds better than K-12 teaching for several complex reasons in the United States (and that differential is reversed elsewhere, e.g. China or Taiwan). But I think relatively little of it is because college teachers know what they’re doing. As a rule, they don’t.
That’s not to say that many individuals aren’t good teachers, and fortunately they do tend to prosper more at the college than K-12 level, since students are old enough to pick the classes and teachers they want — there’s somewhat of a market operating. But they achieve their success through personal inspiration, luck, empirical guesswork, and trial-and-error.
That’s my point, recall. It’s that teaching is in an extremely primitive state, as far as an intellectual discipline. We have very little in the way of reliable empirically-based theory, very few solid theoretical principles, very little understanding of what goes on during learning, despite its profound importance to our general success. Furthermore — and here’s the rub — the profession itself is incredibly arrogant, and pretends to a level of competence and insight it simply does not have.
I think the comparison to early medicine is apt. Teachers, even college teachers, are like medieval physicians. They reap honor well beyond their actual contributions, and at least part of the reason the field advances so slowly is the unwillingness of its practitioners to admit (lest, perhaps, they be torn apart by a furious clientele) that for the most part they don’t know what the hell they’re doing, and much of their “success” — like the “success” of a medieval physician who blisters and bleeds his patient, who then recovers anyway — is coincidence.
But those things somewhat depends upon what kind of student they induct.
In fact the only students I ever heard complain about how lousy a teacher was, were the ones who skipped class.
I don’t know about that. Since I paid for my own education, I didn’t skip classes. Why waste my own money? I did have some very good college professors and a few who were horrid. One in particular comes to mind. He was so bad I seriously contemplated hanging myself rather than going back into the classroom.
A former coworker of mine graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in physics. He said that after retirement from the military, he wanted to get his revenge by taking a semester of Hindu and teaching physics in India.
One of the great rip-offs in American college education is how much of the undergraduate instruction is actually done by graduate students and not by the actual faculty. If you went to a high-priced doctor for an appointment and were seen by a paramedic, you’d be pissed (and not to diss paramedics but they aren’t doctors). Why do we accept the situation at so many universities where undergraduates are being taught by TAs instead of professors? It comes across as fraudulent to me.