Experiantial MBA Program
You have been critical of the current higher education system. What are your major criticisms there? Is it a cost issue? Do you think undergraduate education—easily $100,000—is not worth the cost?
The problem is that we now have an oversupply of scholars, with six new PhD’s for every new chaired professorship.
JS: You know, I’ve evolved on that in the last couple of years after thinking about it a lot. My root objection is that most universities—particularly research universities—are not being honest with their customers. I see their customers as being students and taxpayers, that’s who’s paying the bill—and funders, if you want to throw funders in. It is not negative what the school’s mission is. But when you study the school’s mission, it is really a factory to create more scholars. And when you look at the way they are set up—they will take a lot of undergrads in and flunk a lot of them early so they don’t have to spend much time teaching until they get to upper division undergraduate courses. They will pick the most intellectual graduate students and recruit them for graduate school and encourage them to become academic scholars.
The problem is that we now have an oversupply of scholars, with six new PhD’s for every new chaired professorship.
I’m a big fan of productive research. After all, I’m an engineer. But far too few of these PhD’s turn out to do any research that advances science or creates new technologies.
I think it’s wrong for university administrators and tenured professors to mislead students, parents, and taxpayers by telling them that they care about undergraduate teaching when much of the effort is being poured into creating PhD’s that can’t get a job when they graduate. It’s dishonest and it has to stop.
Today, far too many undergraduates are being taught by low-paid adjuncts who aren’t trained very well at teaching. So the quality of teaching isn’t very high in most universities. And many tenured faculty at research universities are teaching so few students that college is getting increasingly expensive and it’s reached a breaking point where many families just can’t afford it anymore.
The problem is that we now have an oversupply of scholars, with six new PhD’s for every new chaired professorship.
JS: You know, I’ve evolved on that in the last couple of years after thinking about it a lot. My root objection is that most universities—particularly research universities—are not being honest with their customers. I see their customers as being students and taxpayers, that’s who’s paying the bill—and funders, if you want to throw funders in. It is not negative what the school’s mission is. But when you study the school’s mission, it is really a factory to create more scholars. And when you look at the way they are set up—they will take a lot of undergrads in and flunk a lot of them early so they don’t have to spend much time teaching until they get to upper division undergraduate courses. They will pick the most intellectual graduate students and recruit them for graduate school and encourage them to become academic scholars.
The problem is that we now have an oversupply of scholars, with six new PhD’s for every new chaired professorship.
I’m a big fan of productive research. After all, I’m an engineer. But far too few of these PhD’s turn out to do any research that advances science or creates new technologies.
I think it’s wrong for university administrators and tenured professors to mislead students, parents, and taxpayers by telling them that they care about undergraduate teaching when much of the effort is being poured into creating PhD’s that can’t get a job when they graduate. It’s dishonest and it has to stop.
Today, far too many undergraduates are being taught by low-paid adjuncts who aren’t trained very well at teaching. So the quality of teaching isn’t very high in most universities. And many tenured faculty at research universities are teaching so few students that college is getting increasingly expensive and it’s reached a breaking point where many families just can’t afford it anymore.
Offering crap degrees is bordering on fraud. The elimination of degrees in crap like Underwater Dog Polishing should be the centerpiece of higher education reform. And if higher education was entirely run by private, for-profit, free enterprise organizations, such horsesh*t never would have been offered in the first place.