University Education

A good friend of mine gave me an interesting model for defining the roles of universities: discovering new knowledge (research), disseminating knowledge (education) and preserving knowledge (libraries). Though there are many other aspects to universities (dorm life, campus clubs, and don't even get me started on the tail-wagging-the-dog of athletics), these three seem at the core of why universities exist and their traditional value in society. 

If asked to rank these three in order of centrality, I bet most people would place education at the top of the list. When we think of colleges and universities, we think of going to classes, cramming for tests, and reading books (among other things). We have the phrase "a college education" for a reason and for most people, we aspire to such an education. Being college educated means something in our culture and the effort it takes to get that diploma is generally respected.

Without an education role, universities would look very different and be unrecognizable.  There would be no lecture halls and classrooms, no student union, no students milling around campus.  There would be labs and libraries filled with older men and women working on the next great idea.  In some sense these would be like monasteries where the chosen or the elite go to their private work.  It may be possible to visit and observe but it would be difficult to ever be a part of the life of the university.  They would be places where important people did important things and most of us would never really participate.

Thankfully, this is not how most of our universities exist today.

Sort of.

Though our universities continue to espouse a role in education, classes continue to be held, tests administered, grades given, it doesn't take too much time of being a university student to discover that something is distinctly  wrong.  Classes can be large, instruction may be provided by graduate students instead of faculty, instructors don't always know their students by name, textbooks are expensive and unreadable; students can feel like small cogs in the university machine.  Getting an education, actually learning something, takes place in spite of the system, not because of it. Pay these fees, pass these classes, get this diploma, feel college educated.  And the larger and most prestigious the university, the more alienating this feeling can be. How did the education part of university become so lacking?


At least part of the answer (perhaps all of it) becomes clear when the other half of the eduction process is examined: that of the knowledgeable professor who it would seem has been charged with filling eager young minds with profound thoughts. Particularly at larger, research-oriented universities, job security for faculty members comes from the number of scholarly articles they write, the number of conference presentations they give, and the general esteem they develop for themselves and the university as a result of their research. When the time comes for the university to decide if they will retain a professor indefinitely (tenure), the primary factor in that decision is often their research activity. A professor can have documented proof in the form of student surveys and complaints demonstrating a distinct lack of teaching skill or disregard for the education process and still be granted tenure at many universities.  The converse, an excellent educator who has mediocre or poor research accomplishments has virtually no chance of being retained.

So you can see the problem.  Even if a new faculty member desires to be a good educator and wants to invest the time and energy into providing an excellent classroom experience for his or her students, there is little incentive to do so.  The new professor can read the writing on the wall and if he or she wants to still have this job ten years down the road, the path is clear: produce original research, get published, get noticed.  In this context, classroom responsibilities are a hindrance and barrier holding back the new faculty member.

In light of the incentives universities have placed before their faculties, it is easy to see how a university-level education isn't always what it is cracked up to be. New faculty can't be bothered to care about classrooms, their jobs are on the line if they don't produce research.  Even tenured faculty who do have a large degree of job security have no specific incentive to become excellent educators.  If they desire to do so they have that freedom but it will mean walking away from the traditional measure of a successful faculty, namely research. Using graduate students as instructors in lower-level classes allows universities to free up faculty to do research, provide instruction at a much lower cost, and provide graduate students an opportunity to learn how to teach in a very trial-by-fire manner. 

The scenario described above is obviously a generality but it is true.  There are universities that have avoided this problem and generally they do it by choosing to be not research-oriented.  Many of these colleges and universities have no graduate program and have very little if any research being conducted. Often they are also smaller, less prestigious, and private (rather than state-funded).  But because the faculty make their bread-and-butter teaching, the instruction can often be excellent and the students get the benefits of a true college education. 

To the extent that big state schools have diminished or forsaken their role in truly educating their students, they have become corrupt, placing the prestige of the institution over the good of the students.  The students in these places are forced to make a choice: do they stay in the system that has walked away from education to get a name-brand diploma or do they find a smaller school that can provide a high-quality education.  (Often, there is little choice due to other factors like cost and lack of feasible alternatives.) So the universities keeps producing graduates who may or may not have learned what they should have learned and the diploma of a school is less and less a marker of quality and more a symbol of which club the graduate belonged to.

The situation is more complex than I paint it here and as you might suspect, money is wrapped up in many aspects of it.  My point is simple, though.  Despite these complexities if a university is not providing a worthwhile education, if the faculty has little or no incentive to provide excellent instruction, if the seal of approval that is called a diploma does not certify something meaningful and valuable about the product of a given university's education process, then the university is failing in one of its fundamental roles.  Furthermore, the value of the university to society will diminish over time and what a college education once meant, it will mean no longer. If graduation from a given university is not related to the demonstration of the acquisition of something (skills, knowledge, expertise of some kind), then the university has become a diploma mill and we are all the worse off for it.