"Your So-Called Education"

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"The first thing a great person does is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) (From Jinson Jose)

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The folks here at UT Dallas nominated me for the President's Outstanding Teaching Award (2010-2011) as the best undergraduate teacher for the university: I was the recipient of that award during a pre-graduation ceremony this past Friday. I am humbled by that recognition and I want to thank anyone who may be reading this for having inspired me if they were in any of my classes or worked with me here.

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Normally, I would attach an article that pertains to what I want to talk about in this post but I can't do that this time because I have been informed by the NY Times that I have reached my 20 article limit for the month so I can't access anything more unless I pay more. Now, I have paid for the NY Times on line for at least the last ten years that I can remember, so I'm already a paying customer but, I guess I'm not paying enough for my use rate. I'm guessing this new approach is part of a creative paradigm that the management of the Times has come up with to squeeze money out of customers who already pay. It's a shame that poor old retired guys like me have to get squeezed so that the Times can continue its work.

So, I will say that the article I am basing this post on is: Your So-Called Education, Arum and Roksa, NY Times, 5/14/2011.

Certainly I would agree with the authors that commencement is a special time on college campuses as it was here on Friday. And, I was glad to get the chance to congratulate those that I could reach out to while I was here on that day.

Sadly, the authors have come up with some data that raises doubts about the quality of undergraduate learning here in the U.S. Over four years, they followed the progress of several thousand students in more than two dozen universities. What they found were lots of "minuses." The one of greatest concern to me was "... no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning."

Here's some of their data from a typical semester:

(1) 32% of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week;
(2) 50% did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester;
(3) The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying (that would be about half the time those of us who went thru college and graduate school in the 60s spent).

So, why is the quality of undergraduate learning so poor?

According to Arum and Roksa, the answer lies in football stadiums and other non-academic expenditures. It also lies in a more subtle cultural change around handling the "student as customer" approach. Some colleges know what they're doing in this area and some don't. The ones that don't cater to the student that wants to get the college degree "effortlessly and comfortably." I see the students as customers and I want to see them get their money's worth: that's a good thing and it involves a lot of work. It's also not something a faculty does consistently. Arum and Roksa see life as a half empty glass and say that we are failing because we say "the customer (student) is always right."

They have some suggestions. They say too many institutions, for instance, rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates "perverse incentives" for professors to demand little and give out good grades (36% of the students in their study who reported spending 5 or fewer hours per week studying alone still had an average GPA of 3.16). To quote Arum and Roksa, "Distributing resources and rewards based on student learning instead of student satisfaction (ie. surveys) would help stop this race to the bottom."

The only problem I have here is that a professor that inspires gets students interested which causes them to learn by participating. What we probably have here is Arum and Roksa missing something: what comes first, the chicken or the egg? How many people teaching at the elementary, middle school, high school and college level are doing anything to inspire anybody? It could be the the dearth of inspiring (or even interesting) teachers is leading the "race to the bottom."

I am the son of a great teacher. And, the great teachers I've had in my life have been people who challenged me and interested me so much that I didn't even realize I was learning as much as I did.

Evidently Arum and Roksa are sociologists (which could explain a lot) so they are used to finding survey data that proves their point. So, as we pause during this commencement season to consider the state of undergraduate learning (as they suggest), why don't we consider the title of their new study: "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." Maybe the "limited learning" reflects the limited effort of those teaching at every level.