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My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

theguardian.com

61–70 of 99 posts

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#61
Each time I'm reading stories like these, I'm glad I avoided both sides of what's described here. Clueless students that takes everything for granted and will put the minimum amount of effort learning anything. And, the boring teacher who thinks classes are only an unimportant part of the mandatory stuff he has to do to continue doing what he likes.

Where I've been studying, they removed the teachers, the classes and the grades (kind of). Learning is stimulated by peers and projects; correction and 'exams' are done by a computer (no negotiations with "unjust" grades, you failed == you failed); classes are optional and you usually don't need them to succeed on the projects. In results, you get interested people in classes when you explain something, and if you do your job well, they won't come to bother you after that. And from the students' side, you get motivated teammates that won't complain and try to help each others when you are crashing on a crazy deadline on a Sunday night at 11:42pm.

Damn that was great. I wish it could be easily done with other fields and not only in software engineering.

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#62
post #29
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be happy to sell you a chance to eat, or a chance for medial care, or a chance for housing. Education is as necessary as a public utility. To charge any price for a chance to learn while billing as a product (actually knowing things about the world) is a pure example of fraud.

So teachers should work for free?

Typical annual fees: 9k Typical class size: 25 x 3 years = 75 undergrads per course Typical income for the university: 675k per course per year Typical lecturer/researcher salary: 35k Number of lecturers: 6 Total income less salary: ~ 0.5 million/yr

More students means more money.

So it's not just students who feel entitled. There's been a trend for years now of bullshit fill-up-the-hall "academic" courses with limited job prospects which only exist to part students from their cash.

Of course the real picture is more complicated. On the minus side there are expenses, but on the plus side many departments hoover up astonishing sums in national and sometimes corporate research funding.

The bottom line is that universities sweat students and lecturers and researchers for cash, and could afford to be more generous with everyone.

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#63
post #10

I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at…

You seem to be confusing grade school and university. The lecturers and professors you will find at university are not experts in pedagogy, and the vast majority will never have claimed they were. They are experts and leading active researchers in their chosen field. They have devoted their professional life to studying and extending the state of the art of knowledge in their chosen field. If you want to study a subj…

I seem to have missed the part of university where we were learning things not yet in published books. If you think that undergraduates are reaching the cutting edge of research as part of their reguarly scheduled syllabus, I don't know what to say to correct this impression.

You seem to forget that not every university is Stanford, where there are true leading experts that students can engage with beyond the context of class. There is no global university level. The trope of students conducting cutting edge research as undergrads is based on a few outliers who are widely publisied. The experience for the vast majority of us down in the trenches however is limited to the simplified model of physics that is safe for undergrads. Basing your expectations for a university education on the behavior of the top %0.001 of students is like expeciting your minivan to handle as well as a Grand-Prix racecar.

My question to you is then "Why the hell did society decide to co-opt researches into passing on the information, rather than create a new class of specialists like society has done for every other field of human endevor?"

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#64
post #51
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go to your doctor and say "I have a cold, fix it" then you are going to be disappointed no matter how good your doctor is. ("With proper treatment, a cold will clear up in a week. Without, it may take as much as seven days.") If you go to your teacher (at whatever level) and say "I want to become expert in your field without either working very hard or having a great deal of natural talent" then you are again…

> A student who does nothing beyond turning up to most of the lectures Then adjust the cost of the course to reflect that reality. If the teacher is admittely doing zero work to help this student, then why does it cost so much. Teachers in this case are QQing all the way to the bank. This is just a smoke screen thrown up to distract from the fact that these students that don't work hard are being defrauded left and r…

So, to be fair, that £9,000 per student is clearly not going to the faculty. Do you think a lecturer teaching a 300-person class is making some £2.7M/year?

> “Hey student – all I’m asking for is a little respect, seeing as how much you pay makes no difference to my wages, yet the level of support I am forced to offer you takes up 80% of my time despite the fact that teaching still only equates to 33% of my workload. But I’ll be in the office until 9pm anyway because if I don’t publish two papers by the end of the year, I’ll be fired”.

There are people getting rich off of the university scam, but it isn't the faculty. And the people who are getting rich are clever enough to stay hidden and let the students think they're overpaying the faculty.

http://www.bbc.com/news/education-31715020

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#65

I can see both sides of this argument. On one hand, when you pay £9,000 for an education, you expect to get exactly that - an education, not someone pointing you towards a bunch of information that you could have found yourself with half a dozen Google searches and the wherewithal to do dig through yourself... for free. It brings to mind a quote from Good Will Hunting: "you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education yo…

You express this better than I.

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#66
post #65

I can see both sides of this argument. On one hand, when you pay £9,000 for an education, you expect to get exactly that - an education, not someone pointing you towards a bunch of information that you could have found yourself with half a dozen Google searches and the wherewithal to do dig through yourself... for free. It brings to mind a quote from Good Will Hunting: "you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education yo…

You express this better than I.

It's because I'm procrastinating because one of my tests is failing and I can't figure out how to fix it :P

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#67
post #10

I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at…

You seem to be confusing grade school and university. The lecturers and professors you will find at university are not experts in pedagogy, and the vast majority will never have claimed they were. They are experts and leading active researchers in their chosen field. They have devoted their professional life to studying and extending the state of the art of knowledge in their chosen field. If you want to study a subj…

[deleted]

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#68
Giving a German view on that, where tuition is free: In Germany imho sometimes the problem is that professors don't really care much about the teaching, because they actually want to do research and teaching is just an nuisance for them. But that it is kind of okay, because you don't pay anything and you can always skip classes, as attendance is not mandatory. So basically if you don't learn shit in that lecture just go to the library or study at home (or do bbq in the park if you can afford it).

Now, I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition. If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money. I read somewhere that e. g. the MIT has a grades for their professors by the students and the professors get into trouble if their grades are bad.

So from my viewpoint, students have the right to demand good teaching if they pay money. But this doesn't give you a free ticket for a degree (if you just can pay money to get a degree, the degree is not worth anything). A degree comes with after you have a certain knowledge in a field (not fully accurate, but that's about it). Professors should have to care of their students. It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it. If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken. This is imho the cases for many universities (I'm especially talking about all the research paper print factories which call themselves universities).

The article with the posters of the students is a typical example of getting problems wrong (by going to extremes).

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#69
post #10

I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at…

You seem to be confusing grade school and university. The lecturers and professors you will find at university are not experts in pedagogy, and the vast majority will never have claimed they were. They are experts and leading active researchers in their chosen field. They have devoted their professional life to studying and extending the state of the art of knowledge in their chosen field. If you want to study a subj…

> If you want to study a subject at university level, it's likely that some of the material that you would learn at university is not yet in published books, because the only people who currently know the material are the researchers at your university who just discovered it, and are trying hard to find the time to write a book on it, around furthering their research, writing papers for journals (which they need to do, and which books do not count towards) and giving however many classes of lectures a week that they've been told to get on with, without a vast amount of training.

I'm curious what universities work this way. MIT's CS program very much does not, at the undergraduate level.

I can think of one graduate-level class by Adam Chlipala (the semester he was hired) where there was a bunch of material that was not yet in a published book, but was in an unpublished book freely available on his website. I didn't have time to learn it properly then, but I'll probably go back to the online book now, because it is one of the best places to learn this.

I can't think of any other classes, and certainly not any undergraduate classes, that were like that. All of them taught from well-worn textbooks, or from a curated set of published research papers. Maybe I just went to a poor-quality university?

Re: My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

#70
post #10

I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at…

I think I agree with your general sentiment even if I might disagree with how you're presenting it. I think too often professors view class as simply something standing between them and getting back to their research, much in the same vein as staff meetings or similar.

That being said, from the article, a student expecting a professor to meet with her at 8 PM is ludicrous. Office hours are office hours. If they are "inconvenient" (which, best case means she had class those two hours, or more likely she didn't want to wake up early enough to be there at 9), make an appointment and ask the professor when another reasonable time to meet would be.

And calculating that the professor "owes you" $160 in education is a great way to be told to either show up to office hours or figure it out on your own.

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