Met with a family member who is a professor and it let us to dropping several potential colleges from consideration

[Anonymous]

my value is in informing the parents that 1) faculty at research universities are not incentivized to teach undergraduates, but rather to publish research. Good teaching at these well-known schools is by accident, not by design; 2) SLACs are where you will find faculty incentivized for strong undergraduate teaching;

I am not a professor but really disagree with this. It's so hard to get a job in academia now--and has been for some time--that there simply isn't a pool of applicants who ONLY apply for jobs with LACs because they are primarily interested in teaching and another that only applies for jobs in universities because they want to research. Everyone in a field applies to any opening they know about and takes any job offered. Junior faculty--even at LACs--aren't guaranteed tenure. Thus, they HAVE to keep researching and publishing in case it becomes necessary to look for another job. Junior faculty at research universities need to get good evaluations for teaching in case they do not get tenure and need to apply elsewhere.

And, of course, this doesn't include adjuncts and/or visiting professors.

I'm not saying there is NO difference in what the institution incentivizes --just that, as a practical matter there's much less of a divide than you might expect.

[Anonymous]

We have a professor in our family too. They moved their lab from a large public ranked below 50 to an ivy in the top 10 over a decade ago. They did their phd at a different ivy and their post docs at T30ish public. Their spouse was a professor and is now in industry.
Their collective advice 5-6 yrs ago, was to look at the true picture of who are kid was and how they learned as well as how they compared to peers on nationally normed tests. They said pick a school where they will be top half but if they are a less confident kid, they need to be likely to be top 1/4. We used pre-TO data to get a general idea, as our older one had already toured many when TO became a thing.
They also said professors are great at almost all schools, the difference they have to water down the content and slow the pace as the quality of student drops. Even T30-40 was different than ivy, and below T75 required very scaled down teaching and a high % of kids not prepared for college.
They showed us how to look up professors on google scholar as well as high-citation lists, then figure out if the heavy- research faculty taught undergrads, and in addition did they have undergrads in their labs? The labs have websites or linked in will help. Humanities professors do research too so it matters for them as well though often not on highly cited lists. Over and over we found the trend that ivy/top private research universities tended to have the most active researchers as well as a high likelihood those professors were involved in undergrad life: teaching undergrad courses, advising, allowed undergrads in labs.
The very large schools had much more shifting of undergrad teaching to new professors. The SLACS did not have the high caliber of STEM our premed and engineering kids were looking for but would have been great if not better in some ways for our humanities kid.
BTW neither of these professor/former professors is concerned about AI taking jobs from top kids at any school, as they have explained the jobs "taken" will be entry level jobs for average college grads (1100 SAT, not aiming for MD JD phD and not in the running for top technical jobs if they are engineers)

[Anonymous]

Troll post

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Troll post

But thoughtful discussions followed, so good of OP to start such a thread

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

my value is in informing the parents that 1) faculty at research universities are not incentivized to teach undergraduates, but rather to publish research. Good teaching at these well-known schools is by accident, not by design; 2) SLACs are where you will find faculty incentivized for strong undergraduate teaching;

I am not a professor but really disagree with this. It's so hard to get a job in academia now--and has been for some time--that there simply isn't a pool of applicants who ONLY apply for jobs with LACs because they are primarily interested in teaching and another that only applies for jobs in universities because they want to research. Everyone in a field applies to any opening they know about and takes any job offered. Junior faculty--even at LACs--aren't guaranteed tenure. Thus, they HAVE to keep researching and publishing in case it becomes necessary to look for another job. Junior faculty at research universities need to get good evaluations for teaching in case they do not get tenure and need to apply elsewhere.

And, of course, this doesn't include adjuncts and/or visiting professors.

I'm not saying there is NO difference in what the institution incentivizes --just that, as a practical matter there's much less of a divide than you might expect.

Who is getting denied tenure at a lac? Even at the top ones, you just need to play nice, grade with some inflation or the student evaluations, and publish a few articles or a book and you’re fine. It’s not very difficult. Unless you go to a campus with a hard ass chair who has institutional support to clamp hard on grades, you just inflate and give the students what they want within reason.

I know I sound like a cynic, but I dead that the reality is our students don’t care that much about a liberal arts education; they just need an A for their consulting application or, heaven forbid, grad apps.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:NAME THE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

No, don't, because it will lengthen the thread by 100 pages. Let this drivel die already.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Troll post

But thoughtful discussions followed, so good of OP to start such a thread

Not really, because "professors" are not reliable judges of what higher education will look like in 5 or 10 years, no more than you or I. OP is vagueposting some sort of extremely crude "look I have pRofEsSorS in my family and they know better than you". Half of DCUM is overeducated and knows better than everybody!

[Anonymous]

My, my, I wonder what you'll post when you meet a doctor.

Or - gasp - a lawyer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We met with a family member who is a professor at a university (~T100 range) over the Thanksgiving break. We also got to meet with a few other professors who were friends of the family member.

We are quite shocked by what we heard about some of the changes taking place over the last couple of years. This is especially evident in specific majors and the combination of AI use by students, administrative overhead on professors, composition of student body and recent cuts have dramatically impacted these majors. It is just such a sad situation. Professors who were totally checked out - some schedule classes on two back to back days so they are pretty free 5 days a week, giving up on tests, professors project questions on a screen and students select answers on their phones, etc. What got us even more concerned is that the professors were positive that a significant portion of these students in these majors would not be employed and they seem powerless to help. They have already given up.

We dropped several schools from consideration based on the data we were able to gather. This is not across the board, many of these schools have majors where this is not an issue.

Do your due diligence.

What "data" did you gather? A assume it is not just from this professor?

[Anonymous]

Surely you know anecdotes are not data

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm a professor too. You are somewhat accurate in what you describe but so much of that is irrelevant or without context. Scheduling classes two days per week? You realize teaching is contractually about 40-50% of the job, right? When are they supposed to do their other work? Answering questions on a phone? That's Kahoot. It's fun and not bad at all. AI, budget cuts, that's across the board. Unavoidable.

Chill.

+1. I'm a professor, too, and I agree with this PP.
When I talk with friends and family who have children applying to colleges, where I find my value is in informing the parents that 1) faculty at research universities are not incentivized to teach undergraduates, but rather to publish research. Good teaching at these well-known schools is by accident, not by design; 2) SLACs are where you will find faculty incentivized for strong undergraduate teaching; 3) do not allow your impression of your individual tour guide to color the entire college. I have observed so many college tours in my 20+ years of college teaching, and tour guides leave strong impressions, good and bad, when they should not. Make sure your kid understands this.

Please just stop pushing this tired narrative. I highly doubt you're a professor, for starters. Secondly, the bolded is just a sweeping generalization that has had no bearing in my own kids' reality at large research universities. The quality of their undergraduate teaching has been astounding - not to mention the breadth of opportunities available to them.
NP

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Only believing this if you list the unis and colleges ...

You know OP is dying for people to beg her to do so.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Only believing this if you list the unis and colleges ...

+1

My kids are working hard writing papers, taking exams/quizzes, doing labs, etc. My DD is a poly sci major and writes ALL THE TIME. My DS is a biochem major and is ALWAYS STUDYING.

+1
My DCs are history, International Affairs, and National Security majors. All three are constantly writing long research papers. None of this rings true for them at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We met with a family member who is a professor at a university (~T100 range) over the Thanksgiving break. We also got to meet with a few other professors who were friends of the family member.

We are quite shocked by what we heard about some of the changes taking place over the last couple of years. This is especially evident in specific majors and the combination of AI use by students, administrative overhead on professors, composition of student body and recent cuts have dramatically impacted these majors. It is just such a sad situation. Professors who were totally checked out - some schedule classes on two back to back days so they are pretty free 5 days a week, giving up on tests, professors project questions on a screen and students select answers on their phones, etc. What got us even more concerned is that the professors were positive that a significant portion of these students in these majors would not be employed and they seem powerless to help. They have already given up.

We dropped several schools from consideration based on the data we were able to gather. This is not across the board, many of these schools have majors where this is not an issue.

Do your due diligence.

LOL, you hobnobbed and stumbled across this info. You didn't do any due diligence

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:NAME THE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

Or don't, it's going to be a made up list anyway.