Spin-off "The student as a paying customer"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think most people are missing the biggest disconnect in understanding how universities function.

Parents and students feel that they have a paying customer relationship with professors. Hence the attitude that “My tuition money pays your salary” They view teaching as the professors primary responsibility.

For most professors teaching is not the most important part of their job description - research is. Publishing and research is how professors keep their department rank - and this is what determines the university’s rank in their field. Faculty Raises, promotions and tenure are primarily a function of research quality. Teaching has very little impact on salary and promotion. There are countless tenured profs with terrible teaching evaluation. Professors with excellent teaching evaluations and terrible research get fired.

As long as parents want their kid to go to the “highest ranked” colleges without understanding what this means, there will continue to be this disconnect.

Bingo

[Anonymous]

Maybe people wouldn’t feel so entitled to certain outcomes or experiences if the sticker price were a sane one.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think most people are missing the biggest disconnect in understanding how universities function.

Parents and students feel that they have a paying customer relationship with professors. Hence the attitude that “My tuition money pays your salary” They view teaching as the professors primary responsibility.

For most professors teaching is not the most important part of their job description - research is. Publishing and research is how professors keep their department rank - and this is what determines the university’s rank in their field. Faculty Raises, promotions and tenure are primarily a function of research quality. Teaching has very little impact on salary and promotion. There are countless tenured profs with terrible teaching evaluation. Professors with excellent teaching evaluations and terrible research get fired.

As long as parents want their kid to go to the “highest ranked” colleges without understanding what this means, there will continue to be this disconnect.

Bingo

This 100%. I'd add that professors are not trained to teach - 90% of our training in grad school is focused on research. We may get some teaching experience in grad school as a TA, but at a research-focused university, teaching ability is a distant second priority in hiring to research ability. Many profs (myself included) put a lot of time and effort into being good teachers, but we are not rewarded for it and if anything, it comes as a cost to our research programs.

I'd add - every year I see more and more expected of the professors in the classroom, and less and less expected of the students. Why is this? Why shouldn't students be expected to take responsibility for their education?

Finally, frankly, many college students have no business being college students. They do not know why they are there, and it's a waste of everyone's time and effort. We need to bring back vocational programs in a serious way.

[Anonymous]

PP - also, your tuition dollars only cover a fraction of our salaries. Most of that money goes to ever-increasing layers of bureaucracy in the upper administration, unnecessary remodels and 'features' (lazy rivers - seriously???). As noted above, we pay much of our own salary from the research grants we raise. It's a weird system, but that's how it works. Also, we do not have 'summers off'. Summers are a frantic push to get (often travel-intensive) research done. I am busier in summer than during the school year.

[Anonymous]

If you do not like what universities are sell, then do not go.

There are low-cost ways to get an education. But families want the prestige. Part of what creates prestige is all of the extra, non-instructional things -- which cost money.

[Anonymous]

Or, if you want prestige, do not send your kid to a research university (these include Stanford, MIT, and all of the ivys). Pick a high quality SLAC - Carlton, Colorado College, Bryn Mawr, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This attitude seems to cut right to the heart of a very entitled generation.
The student is a paying customer for dorms and food, yes! The actual education, is NOT a commodity. "I paid 3k for this chemistry class and I still got a D, I should pass because I paid". I am former faulty, and I got so fed up with kids who expected to be spoon fed the answers and information, and won't open their BOOKS . Student: "You didn't tell me this would be on the exam." Me: "Is it in the assigned textbook? Is it in the syllabus?" Back in MY day, I read the entire assigned text! Imagine that! And if I didn't understand the assigned text, I read another text covering the same material. I went to lectures, and talked to TAs as needed.
I know some people may say "Why go to college if I can just read the book?" The value added is from faculty helping you understand concepts, or correlate the material to other disciplines, from having peers to spark discussions.
Sheesh

Can you describe generally where this college is ranked? Ie, top 50 public; top regional, directional, or USNews 20 - 250? This is exactly the type of school my DC, a late bloomer, is trying to avoid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This attitude seems to cut right to the heart of a very entitled generation.
The student is a paying customer for dorms and food, yes! The actual education, is NOT a commodity. "I paid 3k for this chemistry class and I still got a D, I should pass because I paid". I am former faulty, and I got so fed up with kids who expected to be spoon fed the answers and information, and won't open their BOOKS . Student: "You didn't tell me this would be on the exam." Me: "Is it in the assigned textbook? Is it in the syllabus?" Back in MY day, I read the entire assigned text! Imagine that! And if I didn't understand the assigned text, I read another text covering the same material. I went to lectures, and talked to TAs as needed.
I know some people may say "Why go to college if I can just read the book?" The value added is from faculty helping you understand concepts, or correlate the material to other disciplines, from having peers to spark discussions.
Sheesh

Sorry, professor. Long gone are the days where a year of college could be paid with some summer job. Undergrad is $28,000-78,000 per year. You Ivory Tower bureaucrats are living high on the hog in your bubble, most of you contribute literally nothing to society and just exist to exploit families. That's just the truth. College has become a very expensive racket.

Not true. Tenure-track professors in my field start off making 60-80K while being expected to publish prolifically and bring extramural funding to the university from NIH and elsewhere. Maybe it’s a racket for some higher-ups, but not for most of your kid’s professors.

That doesn't count the lifetime benefits most tenured professors get, and tenured salaries are much higher than 60-80k. It is a racket.

The average tenured professor salary is $84,470. Weird definition of "much higher," but okay.

Only about 1/4 of faculty positions are tenure-track, and tenure is being phased out.

- https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Tenure_Professor/Salary
- https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-quarters-all-faculty-positions-are-tenure-track-according-new-aaup ["About three-quarters of all faculty positions are off the tenure track, according to new AAUP analysis."]
- https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1482-how-hard-is-it-to-get-tenure

NP. Yes, it's kind of a racket, but definitely not for the professors. Tenure track or otherwise. And yes, students and their families are treating the college experience as a consumer good.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you do not like what universities are sell, then do not go.

There are low-cost ways to get an education. But families want the prestige. Part of what creates prestige is all of the extra, non-instructional things -- which cost money.

Yes, exactly.

Anonymous wrote:Or, if you want prestige, do not send your kid to a research university (these include Stanford, MIT, and all of the ivys). Pick a high quality SLAC - Carlton, Colorado College, Bryn Mawr, etc.

Also this.

[Anonymous]

I am a tenure professor at a research university, and I will strongly encourage my children to go to a SLAC for undergraduate. I have stated in other threads that 90% of my salary ($100K, btw) is based on research and publishing, not on teaching.

Students (and, sigh, their parents) who think that they should know exactly what is on an exam are being unrealistic. Class meets for 3 hours/week. An exam will cover that material plus the additional 10 hours of reading that they are supposed to do outside of class. Also, I would say that a good quarter of my students don't show up regularly to class, so their complaints about their poor grades on the exams fall on my deaf ears.

As for the costs--blame the huge rise in upper-level administrators. Have you seen the salaries of university presidents, provosts, and deans? Also, parents are demanding a lot of student services. The percentage of students requiring accommodations has tripled since I've started teaching.

[Anonymous]

I am faculty and I sent my kids to small liberal arts colleges where I know that the faculty actually wants to teach students and even use undergraduates as research assistants.

It's funny that when you talk to other faculty at conferences and such and they mention that their kids are in college, you generally don't hear them bragging about Ivy League schools. Rather, they have kids at places like Macalester and yes, even Middlebury.

Here's an interesting statistic. Macalester had the largest percentage of its students get NSF grants to go on for graduate study. This is because they have so many science majors who publish with faculty as undergraduates.

Sewanee - University of the South -- has one of the highest rates of students getting Rhodes Scholarships of any college.

Here's a really interesting list:
https://topproducing.fulbrightonline.org/top-producing-institutions-by-year

It's which schools have the most students get Fulbrights every year. Notice that they are all SLACS. These are the places where the faculty know the students well enough to write them great recommendation letters and where the students get great career advice, etc.

My neighbor recently described how her son had trouble with a math course at Virginia Tech and how he had to take a bus across campus for several miles to get to a math tutoring center where he knew no one and had no connection with the professor. I'm not paying for that!

Somewhere online there's a great series of videos about CS50 at Harvard, the intro computer science class. It's supposed to show how exciting and fun it is to take that class, but what always strikes me are the herds of students, the armies of TA's and the sense of chaos. Why have that when for the same price you can have a relationship with your instructor?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You have no idea how annoying it is to be teaching, and have a student raise their hand and ask, "Is this going to be on the test?"

The implication is that if it is not, they can stop listening (or go back to their iphone).

First class, first day: "If I say it in class, it might be on the test. If it's in an assigned reading, it might be on the test."

[Anonymous]

It’s why my father, a professor, retired. Never thought he would, he loved his job so much. This shift killed the joy though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s why my father, a professor, retired. Never thought he would, he loved his job so much. This shift killed the joy though.

what shift?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s why my father, a professor, retired. Never thought he would, he loved his job so much. This shift killed the joy though.

what shift?

The shift to "student as paying customer" mentality.