I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I knew so many teachers that just didn’t much care for their work and probably would have been fired if not for tenure. I understand the arguments in favor of tenure, particularly when it comes to recruitment, but given the bloated pipeline into academia, I’m not sure they hold.
At the university level, good teaching is a value only some institutions hold. They'll all say they care, but research schools are paying way more attention to grants, publications, parents, etc than to student evals. There are universities that prioritize teaching over research and, unsurprisingly, they tend to have better teaching professors. I went to a school that didn't emphasize research and never had a TA teach a class, for instance
Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers trying to pay off college debt, I think it's a good idea for the government to focus more on improving the quality of teaching, even if that comes at the cost of diminished research output. As it stands, the system saddles undergrads with tons of debt and not much to show for it, with socially disastrous results.
If a university wants to focus on research and doesn't care about undergrad teaching quality, let them drop the pretense of offering undergrad education at all.
You found the symptom, but prescribed the wrong treatment.
> Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers trying to pay off college debt
> As it stands, the system saddles undergrads with tons of debt and not much to show for it, with socially disastrous results.
If you have a degree, and are working retail, and are near-poverty, then you screwed up somewhere. Your degree is objectively useless if this is the only prospects available after graduation - so why did you get that degree? Why didn't you continue into postgrad or change degree paths?
Perhaps we should stop offering student loans for useless degrees. Still offer them, but no loans allowed. That would go a long ways towards solving the diagnosed problem.
We've spent decades telling everyone they must get a degree to live a successful life - then we puppy-mill them into garbage/completely-useless degree programs, and are surprised when they go back to the same job they held in highschool. Now, we're going to forgive all those poor choices, because we think we did everyone wrong, but we're going to change not one thing to prevent it from happening again. Brilliant.
I worked retail for 2 years after completing a master's in condensed matter and transistor physics. It just happened to be during a time (~2014) when that degree alone was insufficient in getting me a job, even an entry-level one.
I think barring student loans is part of the strategy. Also, focusing on financial literacy prior to high school graduation. If we must have student loans, then colleges need to publish data about graduation rates, job placement rates, etc for a given program, and let lenders determine if loans for that program are a good idea. The whole situation is maddening because there are so many loud voices blaming the literal children who signed for the loans in the first place but (as you say) nobody making any meaningful change to prevent it happening again.
I really wish I could go back in time to slap 18-year-old me before I signed on for student loans, but by the time I understood what I was in for, my options were "take on more loans to pay to finish school and get a high-paying job, or take on jobs that will never pay well enough to pay off this debt". The sunk-cost fallacy is supposed to be a fallacy but perversely, as it pertains to student loans, its the inventive to keep going.
Speaking to your situation - I've come to think that degree programs that only "pay off" after a certain level is obtained (masters, phd, credential, license, etc) - then there should not be an option to get out of the program until it's completed.
By that I mean eliminating the intermediary and largely useless degrees. You would instead enter into the Condensed Matter Program, which at the end awards a phd, and nothing in between.
This sort of program could still offer minors/concentrations and elective/exploratory classes, but the main degree program would only result in the final destination.
I could be persuaded this is a terrible idea - but the idea here is to eliminate the ability for someone to footgun themselves after dedicating 6-8 years to a degree that ends up being worthless.
The problem is that sometimes, you aren't really cut out for the PhD. Or the program burns you out. What then? What if you and your advisor have such severe conflicts that a PhD (or whatever) is not really feasible? What if your advisor just decides one day that they're not going to help any of their students become part of the community of minds, so all you have at the end of all this is a piece of paper and no meaningful contacts to get a job? In my case, I was still clinging to this idea that I could be a college professor, and it wasn't until I got the chance to exit with a masters that I started to accept that I wasn't cut out for it.
The problem is not that people end up with "useless" degrees - it's a rare day indeed that I do something even vaguely related to what I went to school for. The problem is that we as a society are addicted to blaming 18-24 years olds for not being perfect fucking fortune tellers when it comes to choosing a profession for the next 20 years, with an absolute minimum of data or tools to collect or evaluate that data. The problem is that we as a society say "you specialized in creating and operating specialized widget 'A', but while you were studying for that, the market shifted and now we only want specialized widget 'B', and the consequences of that market shift are completely and solely your burden to bear".
All of this to say that no matter how up-front we are about what the end of these long programs is, we are still, STILL asking people to make the right long-term decision, while insisting that they are also too young to rent a car because they won't make the right long-term decisions. "You're too young to buy alcohol, as you might make the wrong decision which could lead to an outcome that will haunt you for decades. Also, pick your career, right now. Delaying this decision will definitely cost you thousands of dollars, waste years of your life, and disrupt your social development (but picking wrong will have the same impacts, but magnified). It may bar you from certain housing situations. No, we won't help you meaningfully engage with the question, or help you understand the right questions to ask. You're an adult now, no one is going to hold your hand, take responsibility for yourself!".
I'm not sure increasing the quality of teaching will do much for outcomes. A little, probably, but likely not much. AFAIK the vast majority of jobs that expect applicants to have a degree, or favor those who do, don't do it because they need their workers to have a good college education.
I think if we increased the quality of education, say, 20% (let's just assume there's some useful measure of quality here, and that expressing it in percentages makes sense) across the entire country, it'd have only a small effect on employment for grads, all else being equal (i.e. those changes don't also reduce the number of grads per year)
From what I can tell, most people attending US colleges and universities are mainly paying a fee to participate in a scheme that keeps the unemployment rate down by warehousing capable workers in dorms, keeping them out of the "seeking work" category, and those students-but-potentially-workers are doing so because (they believe that) participating in that program gives them advantage in the employment market, some years later... but not exactly to learn anything, which is a secondary concern at best, for a majority of those attending.
I'm dunno how much of it was intended to work that way, but it seems like the main actual thing the whole system is doing now, whatever anyone's intentions were or are. Only semi-reasonable way I can think of to break the cycle would be to decrease the unemployment rate and keep it low for a long time, which ought to get employers to start "out-bidding" the alternative of "go to college, delay career" for recent high school grads, and to stop worrying so much about whether applicants have a degree.
In fact, now that I lay it all out like that, I'm pretty sure one of the core problems with higher ed is that labor is too weak, which has led to some really weird outcomes as far as how higher ed is treated.
[EDIT] Put another way, that seems perhaps less at-odds with itself than the above contention that increased university attendance acts to keep unemployment rates down, while I also think decreasing the unemployment rate might be a way to reduce university attendance—so many people are going to college, because companies aren't desperate enough for workers to offer many "mere" high school grads real money—they can afford to hold out for college grads, even if they don't really need them.
US government should focus on making higher education more affordable.
In Australia for example college debt is managed through the taxation system allowing people to invest in the careers in the early days and then pay off their debt when their taxable income reaches a high enough threshold.
America has affordable higher education; state schools and community colleges are generally very affordable. The problem is when naive highschool students get lured into taking on huge amounts of debt by expensive private schools that have no intention of teaching undergrads well, but nevertheless assert that pretense to lure in more suckers.
The living arrangements are getting more expensive. My college tore down their old, low cost dorms. They replaced them with suites that cost twice as much.
There's an awful lot of students that held no job during college, and instead relied 100% on student loans to buy Taco Bell, pay rent, and put gas in the car.
The huge numbers you see tossed around almost always include living expenses. "$120k for a state school!" sort of thing.
The failure in reporting is those living expenses would have been incurred regardless if the person attended university or not.
As a society, I think we need to encourage people to work at least part time, if not full time during university - and take a slower path toward their degree. The result will be more experienced, mature graduates that have had time to evaluate their future.
While I agree that the high numbers are often because people are ill informed or even irresponsible about the loan, I don't think dragging out schooling is the best answer either, especially if you have higher earning power once you get a degree.
Also keep in mind the current system incentives - aid is inversely correlated with income and balances are forgiven in some cases. Why work harder if it means getting a worse deal? If one really wants it for "free" then there's always the military route.
In my experience, most recent college graduates are effectively useless anyway. I say that as a once-recent graduate.
It's often thought, incorrectly, that university teaches you how to do a certain job. People go to university to learn how to become an X.
University isn't supposed to teach you how to do a job... it's supposed to teach you how to think critically. Along the way you learn, in varying depth, knowledge about specific fields of study, but that's not the same as learning a job.
Recent graduates are often immature (barely 21, who can blame them), limited in both depth and breadth of knowledge, and inexperienced. Most new hires have to be trained within industry for at least several months if not longer before they become productive for any business/organization.
Having students work part time, or preferably full time jobs while attending university would be a net gain for all of the above.
Working a job teaches teamwork and responsibility. Employees gain life experience, learn skills (learning a skill is the point, not what the skill is), discipline, and how to interact with others professionally and maturely. Basically everything university is not capable of teaching.
Working a job is complementary to an education, under this idea. The notion that university should be completed in four years needs to change - maybe it should take 6-8 years after all. The quality of an average graduate would be immense, and future earning abilities would be equally increased.
The issues you describe could be addressed in other ways. Your claim about college teaching critical thinking is misguided. While it's true that is the theoretical goal, in practice they're mostly just cranking out degrees and requiring a lot of memorization.
"maybe it should take 6-8 years after all."
This has multiple negative economic effects, such as delaying family and decreasing g retirement savings compounding.
"The quality of an average graduate would be immense, and future earning abilities would be equally increased."
I highly doubt this. Without the qualifications to work in their field, they would likely have limited benefit. If they are able to work in their field without the knowledge gained in college, then we should do away with that requirement and move to apprenticeships.
How much research do we need? Sure there are advances to make in physics, but do we really need another paper explaining why Richard III wasn't completely evil, or whatever similar activity English professors research? How much more research into the real nature of the Greeks do we need? Don't get me wrong, both are interesting subjects, and the thinking that goes into those papers is worth teaching/knowing. However the real reason to support most college programs is teaching to think (a topic hard to define!), not having the professors do research.
If you are a medical researcher there is a lot of useful research to do. Most subjects are of questionable value. It is unknown if knowing more about how quarks work will ever be useful.
For example, the fields you mention (sciences/engineering, medicine) pull in vastly more money that humanities. Because they have more money, they hire more faculty, and they also train and graduate more PhD students.
I knew a few humanities PhD students while I was in grad school, and none of them were funded by research grants. If they were lucky, they got fellowships. That's a stark contrast to engineering where both grant and fellowship funding was relatively plentiful (though I've got a few horror stories there too).
On top of it, humanities jobs are really hard to find (even more difficult than fields like physics that are already known for multiple postdocs, etc.), making it a bad deal all around for PhD students in those fields.
Overall, I think things are already allocated more or less the way you expect, and I don't think we need to piss on humanities for this. They already have it hard enough.
Yeah I always laugh when I see people complain about people in the humanities scooping up grant funding. Like, NEH is already basically defunct. When I was in grad school for CS I was on a seven figure grant. My wife is a history professor. Her grants regularly run like $3,000. There is already no money being funneled to the humanities, but people choose to shit on it them incessantly because they haven't the faintest clue how funding works or even what the research output of the humanities looks like.
This is a pretty myopic view of how scientific discoveries happen. This is a good time to remind people that truth-tables were first created by Wittgenstein, who wrote some pretty obscure and borderline indecipherable books on natural language, placed well inside the walls of the humanities departments.
Philosophy of Language would have been dismissed by most making these types of arguments in the late 1800's, but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.
> but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.
You'd be shocked how many people in the software industry regard Turing machines as some esoteric construct that is of no value and wasn't necessary for the invention of the iPhone or Javascript.
Well thankfully people like you are in the minority and can be safely ignored.
Because learning more about our history and the world we live in furthers humanity in immeasurable ways often only appreciated years and decades in the future.
In my experience Humanities professors cared way more about the classes they taught. It was the Engineering / "Hard Science" professors cared way more about the research and treated teaching undergraduates as a chore and/or an afterthought. (Though there were a couple of exceptions)
That's part of the issue in research though, you don't know what will have value. The actual problems that particle/nuclear physicists attempt to solve might not be valuable but the engineering required for the experimental apparatus could be revolutionary.
Even in physics or most of the hard sciences, how much important research is even being produced outside of the top (and may even second) tier, given the increasing laboratory costs?
Tenured researchers shouldn't be teaching, IMO. They can be doing research full-time, and leave teaching to those who care to teach. I, personally, dislike research, but I would love to become a CompSci professor and teach the next generation of software developers and technologists. The problem is, I do NOT want to do research. Give me a Master's in CS with some sort of "teaching extension" on it and I'll go teach and the researchers can go do important work researching!
Edit: for the upper division courses, researchers certainly should have some involvement, I agree with several of you on that point!
My university had lecturers that were precisely this (masters in CS, focused on teaching intro undergrad courses).
However, I think there is still a lot of benefit from having researchers teach upper level courses. Firsthand experience in research brings an additional dimension that can be appreciated by students who are beyond the introductory level.
There are also tenured professors who are good at both research and teaching!
I believe that this is yet another case of middle ground being the best: leave the bulk of teaching to specialists, but keep the research professors doing courses close to their actual field. Don't underestimate how educative teaching can be for the teacher. But this is certainly no big insight. Or are there places that do not, at least to some amount, do it like this?
The big problem is that the teaching faculty are paid like absolute garbage and have no job security or continuity between semesters. They are widely abused by universities and often are paid at or below wages you'd get working the cash register at Target.
You may be confusing adjuncts, which are part time temporary features, sort of line substitutes; and teaching faculty, which are full faculty members without research responsibilities. They are certainly paid better than Target cashiers.
I agree with your point that upper division courses need researcher involvement, but please try to be less rude about how you say things. This is a comment thread, so there’s no need to act like that, you could make your actual point in a nicer way and I would have seen it like the commenter above you and agreed that I overlooked this case. have a great weekend.
If tenure goes away, then you have to pay more to compensate. If you're getting rid of tenure while keeping wages low, you'll still have bad teachers but for that reason instead.
A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out.
My own hypothesis is that many adjuncts work under such poor conditions due to an irrational belief that it will lead to a tenure track position some day. Without that carrot the whole market destabilizes.
Tenure is the key incentive in the academic tournament model. Other fields that do “out or up” (consulting, Big Law) offer major $$$ to the winners.
Adjuncts and lecturers dont do research nor do they typically do service. If one wanted to be educated by lecturers then they could attend a community college. That is of course a viable option but no tenure will be the kiss of death to any institution who thought they were going to do research at the R1 level.
It seems the state schools don't have as much incentive for that. The university president decided to build a conference center while I was at school. They didn't have all the money secured, so the state jumped in to pay a lot and tuition. Went up substantially. They're already cheap so the have no competition pressure and they know the state will bail them out.
>> A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out.
Sure you can. That's what the current system of adjuncts is like.
>The problem is that you lose the people who are the most competent. Those who know what they are doing, have valuable skills, etc.
So, you can have your cake and eat it too... provided that the cake is half-off because it's not competitive.
I’m more skeptical of the motives that animate these decision makers. After all, these are the same people who ban books, insist on revisionist history in Texas school textbooks, and engage in all manner of opposition to free inquiry. Perhaps by some stroke of luck, it will be a net positive for students in Texas institutions of higher learning, but of all the ways of promoting the academic and economic well-being of students this would be among the most tangential.
Right. I'm surprised at the comments here that seem to be missing the bigger picture. If ultra-conservative proto-Gilead Texas is going after tenure, then that must mean the values we associate with a progressive good society are being incubated in academia, protected by tenure. Hence, tenure is good.
I was accepted to a UT Austin graduate program. After being accepted, I flew on my own dime to meet with the director and associate director, and several professors, because I couldn't imagine dedicating several years of my life and career path based on some paperwork alone.
The director was unfamiliar with my published work, which had gotten some acclaim and been featured _alongside his own_ at two industry events that summer. At one of them, I had introduced myself! It was a tense, 'look kid, why are you here?' meeting, that made it clear he had no idea who was coming to study in his tiny department and didn't care.
The associate director didn't show up to her office for our meeting, she was out of town. This was before the era of calendar-RSVPs, but she had confirmed via email a little more than a week prior.
That department may have been more of a mess than others, I never spent time in academia after all. But both of those folks had tenure, and I think it contributed to the zero shits they had to give.
If you want to become a good researcher, go to university to learn from good researchers. If you want to become good in some other task, go to a school.
Prof jobs might be researched-focused, teaching-focused, or a mix of both.
Some universities really pushed research, in order to go for grants and donations. It also helps attract grad students. They usually make less enjoyable undergrad experiences.
Then again, having profs that only teach, not research, can become very disconnected after a while. You may as well have a grad student repeat from the book.
I know a few tenured profs (and my partner is one). I think most of awesome ones are those not pressured to run after grants constantly, and those that brag about them are red flags.
2. Conceptual LEARNING to think creatively about solving
problems and asking and answering novel questions—big or small.
Many of us on Hacker News understands the huge difference between this teo modes that has been so elegantly captured in Richard W Hammings “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”.
If you want to be TRAINED then sure, go to an institution that does no research.
If you want to LEARN then go to an institution that does some research, better yet, a great deal of research.
I was an undegrad at UCSC in the 1970s—-no grades and great faculty who loved both teaching and research. I learned to learn and I still live to learn.
Now I am expected to TRAIN first year med students human genetics that will allow them to pass their boards. The boards demand insufferably ancient genetics—a cut-off date of 2001 would be fine-wonderful. But there has been a bit of progress in genetics in the last two decades. I tried to teach them a hybrid of the “classics” but with 50% of time devoted to cutting-edge modern genetics. I hate TRAINING to the test.
You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at fault?
You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at fault?
It's the system that's at fault. Remember the noncanonical version of the Monty Python Dead Bishops skit? The murderer admits the crime to the police (in fact the Church Police), saying "It was me, but the system is at fault." The police proceed to question everyone else: "Excuse me, are you part of the system?" - "Yes." - "Come with me then!"
How important is teacher performance for students though?
What are we even measuring when something is good/bad for students? Obviously anything akin to directly abusing students would be bad for students, but I imagine we're talking about the quality of the education they get based on the quality of their professor's teaching ability.
If we are just talking about learning qualities, isn't the selection of students in higher level academic programs already heavily curated and biased towards students who have proven they are good at learning? Shouldn't this cohort of proven learners be resistant to any fluctuations in the teaching quality of professors?
Forgive me if my question shows a higher level misunderstanding, but I stumbled into my career in tech without any post-secondary education - so I don't have firsthand experience with any real academic settings.
The heuristic often repeated by folks in the profession is that you've got a top 5% of students who match your description of students who've proven they're good at learning, a bottom 5% who is entirely unprepared for university life and who knows how they got admitted, and the rest whose understanding of the subject matter is influenced by the performance of the teacher.
Post-COVID, lots of us (and you can find articles about this by conducting a simple search) have noticed that the top 5% hasn't changed, but the bottom 5% seems to have gotten significantly larger--10%, sometimes 15% of students in introductory level courses seem unprepared for university. I've seen functional illiteracy in some of my students at my good R1, for the first time ever. Our university is also on a huge enrollment drive, and are constantly hinting that faculty need to grade more easily to keep students happy.
Some tenured professors slack on teaching, or were never that great at teaching to begin with. But tenure as an institution improves teaching quality. What professors teach is subject no less to academic freedom and the protections tenure provides than what professors research. Faculty subject to short-term contracts tend to have their contract renewal dependent on student evaluation scores, which study after study show are poorly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with student learning outcomes. Good teachers aren't necessarily popular; easy graders are popular. Conveying difficult subject matter that may be controversial or technically difficult to grok is crucial to learning outcomes. This is exactly what gets cut out when you lose academic freedom, become a cog of administrators who are out to maximize enrollments not learning outcomes, and have your job performance hinge upon student evaluations.
Major universities have two functions: (1) teaching and (2) research. Teaching is further split between (1a) undergrad (basic) and (1b) graduate (advanced).
You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work.
(1b) and (2) currently rely on the existence of tenure. Teaching advanced courses (1b) requires research experience. Finding people willing to spend their lives in research (2) requires some kind of incentive, especially in STEM fields.
As others have mentioned, to eliminate tenure, you need to provide an equivalent incentive. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a race to the bottom and a very probable exodus of academics to either other states or - even worse - other countries.
>You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work.
Spoiler: this is how most universities work.
They have teaching jobs that are either filled with adjuncts, or are contract-based; or pay such small salaries that tenure is the only thing that would attract anyone to work them.
You’re missing my point. Universities that also do research cannot be sustained completely by adjuncts and teaching professors.
Also, a portion of adjunct and contract-based positions are filled by those seeking a tenure track position. Removing tenure will affect this side as well.
No, I'm not missing your point - I agree with it. My comment was meant to point that that to the extent that tenure could be gutted from research universities, it has already been done so.
Skepticism re teaching is fine, but tenure at this point is not given or denied based mainly on teaching but rather on research. Yes, UT Austin and TAM teach a lot, but tenure is driven very strongly by research performance and promise.
Has that claim ever been made? Tenure is done not because of good average outcomes, it's done because of an assumption that it occasionally results in some positive outlier with enormous upside that would not have happened without.
You can't believe how stale an introductory course can get when the teaching staff is left to its own devices and research staff looks the other way. And that's at a name brand top-10 university.
Tenure is like the jury system, in that it has a political and an administrative aspect. The administrative aspects have drawbacks (patent cases in certain jurisdictions, bad teachers unfireable). But I don't think that the legislature has the improvement of undergraduate teaching in mind.
This isn't a property of tenure. This is a property of schools not caring about teaching. Tenured faculty can still be fired for shitty performance. Eliminating tenure will not change the systems that encourage research output over other kinds of work.
The major benefit of tenure is as a protection for pursuing the truth when researching controversial academic subjects. It protects the behavioral genetics research which takes place at UT Austin from left wing attacks and the positions some professors have taken on Texas A&M's annual drag show from right wing attacks.
As a student in the Texas system, I've raised questions which my professors refused to talk about fearing political backlash. Tenure is an important institution. I think you can only go so far to incentivize good teaching through termination.
