The biggest problem I find is that universities avoid free market forces by bundling everything together. Tenure is only one part of this.
Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money).
Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors.
Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following:
$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor
$300 an instructor
$150 by a teaching assistant
$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center
Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system.
Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive.
Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own.
The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice.
The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.
Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.
When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.
Be careful about making this comment. I have also worked as tech support for a CS/Maths/Statistics department at a small university. Many of them are very clever, very overworked, and do not have the same love for computers you do. A computer is a tool that is a means to an end for them, and it's not surprising many don't know the ins and outs.
> Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money.
My understanding is that this bundling, as far as the liberal arts/hard division goes, works massively in the favor of the latter, because the liberal arts courses are much cheaper to provide and subsidize the latter. (How much does it cost to run a poetry course? How much for a Cisco networking class?)
A networking class and a poetry class have few expenses in terms of equipment. The main expense is faculty salaries if you take a look at the budget(and my state is cutting budgets so people have scrutinized them). My point is not to argue who is favored and I have no grudge against the liberal arts or the sciences. I only point to the equal tuition and salaries to show how completely isolated the system is from anything like free-market forces and to suggest that this equality is far more likely to be caused by political and social forces.
it seems to me that a poetry class has close to $0 in expenses, and low faculty salaries since English grad students & post-docs are a dime a dozen, while a Cisco networking class involves at least as well paid faculty salaries, and a great deal of equipment - thousands and thousands of dollars worth. (The Cisco hardware itself, none of which comes cheap, basic networking setup, a few dozen computers for the students to use, software licensing fees, etc.)
Don't forget that these professors have often spent their whole life studying and publishing and working their way through the "machine" to get to their positions. Many of those years they would have been paid a pittance for their work. You don't go into academia for the money, you really don't. It might pay off somewhere down the line but until then you're overworked, severely underpaid, and have massive debts to pay off (if you're American).
Yes, these professors have spent a good portion of their life slaving away so that now they can be at the top. These professors slaved away in hopes for a number of things: time off, freedom to research, being able to work with bright young students, etc. They weren't the only ones who had dreams or who slaved away. What about the grad student who drops out, wants to switch to a different field(a side effect of the system is overspecialization), who chooses the wrong advisor or institution? What about the bright, but poor, undergraduate who would like to have a self-study option and a small fee for tests? (Yes there is that option for some lower-level courses but is curiously absent for higher-level courses. Similarly, universities within the same state often don't accept transfer credits from each other except for a few courses.)
If people should be paid for their hard work, then a lot of people are underpaid. People though are paid for their productivity. These professors and grad students who slave away are not productive. They are not producing what our society needs. They are feeding all their work into the machine and what is the output of this "machine" that gets fed all the blood, sweat, tears, and tax payer money?
Good research and teaching?
I neglected to mention the bundling together of research and teaching. Instead of doing one or the other well, both provide excuses for mediocrity. At middle and bottom tier schools effective teaching is possible but faculty use their research as a justification for high salaries. The students learn the material outside of class mostly. There's very little in-class discussion and the only justification teachers have for their salaries is their "research". A good teacher, as far as the students are concerned, is one who gives fair and/or lenient tests and isn't a boring lecturer. The teaching part of their jobs could be replaced by a textbook, some video lectures, perhaps an online homework system, and tests at a testing center. Such a system would make a good business model if the current system wasn't so deeply rooted in our society. As I mentioned before, a college degree is a prerequisite for a lot of state jobs and is a barrier designed to prop up the system.
Yeah, I agree that there are some academics who are really not good or suited to teaching. In fact many academic jobs that aren't specifically "lecturer" jobs don't even ask about teaching experience. I'm going into my 2nd post-doctorate and the only teaching experience I've had was back before I was doing my PhD and tutored undergrads for a bit of cash (I didn't even learn how to prepare a course!). I'm actually a bit annoyed about that because I actually really enjoy teaching, and although I also enjoy research I think I would really quite like to be a bit more well-rounded on that side. But I think that a lot of this can be solved through education of faculty staff in how to actually teach. Some universities actually have this, the university I am going to be working at from next month has a course I can attend that will teach me how to teach, and although I've done it ad hoc before, I think I will definitely get something out of it, since although I enjoy teaching, I don't really know how to plan a course. And I think these sorts of courses really should not be a one-off either: people do get "stale" after a few years if they're continually doing the same things every year.
However, I think you're being a bit melodramatic about the system. Or perhaps the US system just really does suck, because I really enjoyed doing my undergrad degree in Australia, and really felt as though it gave me more than "a piece of paper" for a job (I wasn't really originally going to go into academia, I wanted to do other things, and sort of fell into academia sideways). I also felt as though the teaching was really vital: if not just in content, but in imparting enthusiasm and interest in a particular subject.
Anyway I can't really comment on the credit stuff since I have NFI about the US system.
Sorry you've become so disillusioned by universities and such, because around the world there are still some academics who actually give a shit about quality teaching and research. Perhaps you should broaden your horizons and look outside the US?
Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money).
Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors.
Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following:
$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor
$300 an instructor
$150 by a teaching assistant
$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center
Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system.
Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive.
Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own.
The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice.
The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.
Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.