I agreed to write the post for this blog, not as a raving lunatic nor some kind of an academic maverick (to borrow a word from the ongoing US presidential campaign) who has a bone to pick with his bosses and/or colleagues. Actually, I love my job as a university professor and I enjoy my interactions with most of my students. I have been teaching in the biological sciences for the last eighteen years as a tenured associate professor at a state university in New England. During this period I have had some serious doubts about the whole idea of education, including the quality of education the students receive and at what cost to parents and the state.
Education, especially university education is the only product I know that has no guarantee. I am speaking of “if you are not satisfied return it” for a refund kind of guarantee. I wonder how many students and especially parents will ask for refunds from those universities for producing a bad product, i.e. giving their ward a bad education. The producers of this product are not seriously held accountable for producing a bad, deficient and inoperable product. The products can neither construct a complete sentence nor communicate effectively, without using text message abbreviations, nor perform a long division without a calculator. Sometimes only the president of the university resigns and the faculty continues producing bad non-serviceable products. Albeit you did not know the university education today is run like a business: meaning they are in it for profit or to make money.
In the beginning of my academic career, I thought only private institutions needed to make money to run their schools and state institutions would be supported always by the state. Boy was I wrong! These days one key word on campuses is assessment: only God knows what it means. Supposedly you use some rubric to determine whether the students are learning some expected objectives at all. I always thought that tests and examinations were it. There are a lot of research funds in this area too: some faculty love it and other hate it. Then there is retention and enrollment. Retention means how many students you can keep or should maintain on your rolls and for how long. Schools keep formal rolls between the third and fifth week of every new school year. It also means how many freshmen students actually graduate from university in four years. Parents, let me tell you this, contrary to popular opinion, only about 30% of your children will graduate in four years. That is why some schools have stopped using first, second, third and fourth year and instead they are using eighth semester or tenth semester or twelfth semester to hide the fact that they are keeping your child for more than four years by offering fewer courses.
Housing is another money maker for universities. Fill the rooms and more money comes to the universities. Your child is not graduating because he/she did not take any math classes in high school neither did he take foreign language (Latin, French, Spanish or Mandarin) so remedial classes will be offered before getting the chance to take the required university classes.
Another term or key word on campus is access/accommodation. When did being smart, stupid, crazy, inattentive, disruptive and irresponsible become a badge of honor? I love this one. A student visits a professor and tells the professor that he, the student, has some alphabet soup syndrome or is on some kind of mind or mood altering medication so he will need extra time (double the normal allowed) to take the examination. That is what we call on campus accommodation. The professor has no choice but to give the student all the time he needs to take the examination.
Endowment is another key word on campus. It means money and ability to build more buildings and still not improve the quality of education. Some private universities have huge endowments that can support all students for a few years for free. Oh yes, I forgot free education like public transportation is un-American in this country; however, people believe in an unfunded mandate like the NCLB to correct any deficiencies in the primary and secondary education system.
What kind of students are we admitting into our schools? They are supposed to be bright, intelligent, respectful, sociable and inquisitive. Then why are they behaving like mad village idiots: speaking loud on cell phones about their sexual and personal lives in public, text messaging in the classroom, sending emails with incomplete sentences to professors, walking around with their pants below their butts and walking like they have more than two balls between their legs. And ladies wearing pajamas to class is not proper and I am pretty sure that your parents will be pissed.
Why are the female students (both the bold and the ugly/beautiful) all interested in showing more cleavage and tits than brains, showing tattoos and piercing metal rings and hooks on their bodies? Sometimes students come to class smelling alcohol on their breaths. I am aghast when students come to class and ask me for a pen or pencil. Why is it that students today want a good grade for doing nothing? They want to be praised or commended every hour on the hour. They cannot take good notes so you have to give them printed copies of your notes. Whoever came up with the Powerpoint presentation has done a disservice to the academic teaching profession. It is misused, misapplied and misunderstood. Students will cheat with their iPods, iPhones, cut and paste paragraphs or pages with improper sourcing, and, by the way, watch out for those wearing Red Sox, Yankees and Patriots hats during examinations they may cheat too.
The cell phones really bug the hell out of me and the iPods have made students non-sociable-everyone is wired sometimes literally on something, and do not wish to make eye contact with anyone. A student called one of his former professors from a college she had just graduated, and complained that a chemistry course she took and got a grade of A did not prepare her for an advance level chemistry in graduate school. The former professor told her to write a letter to the university asking for a refund. He never heard from the student again. I guess she is still drafting the letter.
The message for this post is this: when it comes to university education you don’t get what you pay for. However as long as some businesses are willing to give 50-100k to a tested inexperienced graduate from a university, we will keep producing products with great potential but no intention of achieving high goals without praise. Or why go to university, play basketball, football or baseball (batting .300 is very good: do people know that 70% at the time you stink? Or do they know that 30% is definitely a failing grade for any course?). You will make more money in sports and sometimes you can behave like a fool and no one will give a damn.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste and we surely can’t seem to stop wasting it.
Peace Out!
By Daben da Sanaa