Outside of teaching schools (which pay lower salaries than balanced or research-oriented schools), full-time professors are evaluated primarily on their research productivity (“publish or perish” may be 70-99% of their career). For grad students working as TA’s, teaching may be an annoying part of their workload that’s keeping them from the research that will get them their doctorate or masters degree. Career adjunct professors are busy driving from college to college, supporting themselves through 2-4 part-time teaching jobs, which doesn’t leave them much time to focus on helping individual students. And yes, once tenure-track professors get tenure after their six-year probationary term, their incentive to help students may fall by the wayside.

This suggests if you’re an 18 year old and you (or your parents) are primarily concerned with teaching quality, you should go to a liberal arts school, because the professors there have already agreed to accept lower pay in return for a focus on helping students. Of course, the high tuition and/or potentially low starting salaries after graduation may give you a poor financial ROI.

My experience at William & Mary in Virginia was a nice balance. As a medium-sized public liberal arts university, full-time professors had the incentive to help undergrads. One of my favorite professors took his students on weekly field trips. We did the reading on our own during the week, and then met on Saturday morning to visit local historic sites and see history for ourselves. That was really cool (and he was already tenured, no less). And the in-state tuition didn’t hurt.

All things being equal, if you want to see whether you’ll be a school’s priority, find out how the faculty gets compensated and promoted, and see if you’ll benefit from — or be penalized by — their incentive system.

Concerning lifelong learning – I agree that we need to reduce or eliminate finite gates. Early on in life I was really bored in school – I just really had no interest. It wasn’t until later in life when I discovered professors with real-world experience who would guide my learning based upon interest and correlate it to usefulness that I really began to take notice.

Johns Hopkins is a great example of this philosophy – as a research university there is less emphasis on competition and grades and a great emphasis on learning and practical application. In my experience with the engineering and business schools their programs really embody the philosophy of lifelong learning.

Great article and we can only hope that more people become aware of the need for this change!

I am a fan of Philip Greenspun’s constructivist / project based approach to university undergraduate education. While it is mainly aimed at technical (principally CS) degrees, it could be adapted to other areas as well.

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth

I believe this model is in use at Neumont University in Utah, according to Greenspun, and the students complete an undergrad degree in 2.5 years with extensive near-”real world” project experience.

-jack

1) All of the professors that are full-time and run most of the integrated programs (Information Systems, Accounting, etc) are very surprisingly out of touch with the real world. On the other hand, the professors that I have had that are only part-time teach with much more passion, they teach with many more real world examples, they are hands down better teachers overall.

2) I have never understood this! We don’t need to memorize so many specific facts! Everything is so readily accessible that gone are the days when you had to be able to pull up everything from memory (unless you’re a doctor, etc). You said, “Today’s jobs aren’t representative of a factory line, but instead require employees to make connections between fields and ideas, and be responsive and flexible to change.”

I just heard Seth Godin speak about his new book Linchpin. I love how he talks about this concept of how are schools are still producing factory workers.

3) I’ve found it sad how much students have to do outside of class to REALLY stand out these days.

Great points, I’ll definitely be following your blog from now on.

I learned a ton in spite of the tenured professors, not because of them. I’d say this sentiment from students is accurate, widespread, and needs to be addressed.

And a final note to all those incredible professors out there that are are changing lives through real education. Thank you.

The problem isn’t that colleges are failing Gen Y, many have failed multiple generations in this way.

First, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly that college needs a lot of fixing. I am also a UW grad and think that we sort of got lucky in our school pick but that again there could have been some things done better.

Are these suggestions focused on a particular field or general school of study?
I was a computer science and mathematics major, so let me come at your suggestions from that view point.
1. Get rid of full-time tenured professors – I have to partly disagree with you here. My best advisors and experience from college came from interactions with tenured professors, at least in the mathematics field. I think it might be hard to find Mathematics professors that were part time, and it would be hard to advance the field without the math research. Professors in Math put in long hours to do research. The question of who is the best teacher I can’t answer because all of my professors were full-time and some were good teachers, some weren’t. Those that weren’t I just didn’t put extra effort into getting to know them then.
For computer science, I would like to see more real life people be teachers instead of hiring non-tenured track people to teach. The classes that I took that were taught by non-tenure track instructors were horrible. The tenure-track or grad student courses were much better.