I went to university back in the golden age. Our classes were small and many of our professors were creative and enthusiastic. They even marked our papers themselves. There was lots of scope for what is now known as “engagement,” which means that although we were undergraduates, some of them were happy to hang around with us drinking coffee, smoking dope and arguing about Blake and life.
No such luck today. Your kid will probably spend more time being taught by itinerant graduate students than by professors. Classes are held in giant amphitheatres, with multiple-choice tests instead of essay questions. Bull sessions with the prof? Not with 400 students in the course. Not surprisingly, student engagement is at an all-time low, according to numerous surveys.
Meantime, the dropout rate is at an all-time high. At the University of Manitoba, about 30 per cent of all students drop out in their first year. Only 56 per cent finish their degrees within six years. That's not unusual. Universities are rewarded for getting bums in seats, not for educating and graduating them.
The universities say the problem is money. If only they had more of it, they could do a better job of educating undergraduates. There's just one catch. Educating undergraduates is just about the last thing most professors want to do.
“My colleagues do everything they can to get out of teaching,” says Rod Clifton, who works in the faculty of education at the University of Manitoba. “They'd rather not have the students around, because they'd rather do research and stand around and sip sherry.”
Canadian universities now have about 800,000 undergraduates. But as enrolment soared, teaching loads – with the help of strong faculty unions – went down. In Mr. Clifton's department, for example, the teaching load is six hours a week for one semester of 13 weeks, and nine hours a week for another 13 weeks. That adds up to 195 hours spread over just 26 weeks a year – less, if someone has administrative duties. Of course there's prep time and marking and so on. But it's still not much.
Mr. Clifton's proposition is that universities are unaccountable for results, if, by results, you mean successfully educating students. That is because they are run for the benefit of professors. In the reward system of universities, it's research, not teaching, that matters. Professors are rewarded not for turning out high-quality graduates, but for turning out books and papers – even if they are unread. This perverse system stubbornly persists, despite the fact that everyone knows it's absurd.
Of course some research, especially in the sciences and medicine, matters a great deal to the advancement of society. But a vast amount of it – especially in the humanities and social sciences – does not. Richard Vedder, a leading U.S. critic, has argued that the higher education system has pawned off the responsibility of educating students “in favour of pursuing a whole lot of self-interested research (which the majority of undergraduates are not involved in) that for the most part, doesn't matter.”
Take my old stomping ground, English Lit. When last I looked, nobody was clamouring for another book on Moby-Dick . Yet as demand goes down, supply goes up. Over the past five decades, the “productivity” of scholars in the fields of languages and literature has increased from approximately 13,000 publications to 72,000 a year. Who reads them? For the most part, hardly anyone. “The system has reached absurd proportions,” writes Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University. “Productivity demands in language and literary studies levy a grave cost on higher education. Students need mentoring, and when they don't get it, many drift away permanently.”
