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

theguardian.com

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

#81

Post by galfarragem »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #12

There is a clear misalignment in the actual goals of the three core groups in universities: Administrators, Professors, Students. Administrators want to grow the school budget and increase prestige for themselves and the university. Professors want to do research and make an impact in their field, and to their peers. Students want to be able to get a job and have an interesting experience. In theory all three groups…

Clearly the less biased analysis in this thread. Thank you.

tl;dr: Administration, students and professors are under high pressure and reacting accordingly.

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

#82

Post by sklogic »

Thriptic wrote: post #41
sklogic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are solely there to get a piece of paper And why should anybody care at all about this disgusting and lowly category? They wanted to game the system, they got what they deserved. > and many times taking on dangerous levels of debt Student loans are quite a peculiar form of a debt. They can be largely ignored quite for a while (or ignored at all). > College has become a barrier to entry to the job market, In most of…

> And why should anybody care at all about this disgusting and lowly category? Because that "disgusting and lowly category" is the dominant demographic of users; get off your high horse. > Student loans are quite a peculiar form of a debt. They can be largely ignored quite for a while (or ignored at all). Student loan debt is some of the hardest to escape debt in the world, and if you don't get a solid job when you g…

> Because that "disgusting and lowly category" is the dominant demographic of users; get off your high horse.

If so, this world is doomed, and within a generation will be ruled by hordes of ignorant retards. I can only hope you're exaggerating (well, I know you're exaggerating, the universities that matter still do vet their intake relatively rigorously).

> Student loan debt is some of the hardest to escape debt in the world,

I'm talking about the UK here.

> In pretty much every basic job they expect to see a college degree or you're not getting a callback.

Incorrect. For 9 out of 10 professions it is not true at all.

> most of what is learned in pre-med has nothing to do with practicing medicine

It is a filter. Doctors must conform to quite harsh endurance and resourcefulness requirements, and the more such filters applied - the better. This is not a profession for everyone (just like most other professions, really).

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

#83

Post by sofaofthedamned »

jarek91 wrote: post #79
geofft wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing to understand is that these students clearly don't inherently care for the class. The graduation requirements list it, and either they care about the subject matter and can learn it in better quality and better time on their own, or they don't and they're not paying to learn. Somehow in between the "younger generation" and the previous one, it became impossible to get a middle-class job without a college de…

I have no degree. I attended exactly two of the three semesters of college for which I paid. I make a very nice living running servers and writing code at my company. Before this, I have worked in construction and as the guy under your car in one of those quick oil change places. I've been an outboard mechanic. The world owed me nothing. I have made my own way and earned everything that I've gotten. I respect hard wo…

I'm similar to you - only went to University for 1 year when I was 20 just to get on a placement, where I showed enough aptitude in programming to get taken on permanently. That year was awful, being taught by professors who knew less than me, and would only teach COBOL as "that's what you'll be using for your entire career"

My partner is the most intelligent woman i've met, and she's very senior at a decent Uni in England - she teaches staff and PHDs how to teach, and gives keynote speeches around the world in this.

Even SHE knows the University system is fucked. For her, it won't be replaced by MOOCs, though they will be part of the mix.

Her Uni have got a (semi-secret) plan to amalgamate professional quals like a Cisco CCNA for example into the credit path for a 'normal' degree. The idea, long term, is to have learning as a lifelong thing, as opposed to something you do when you're young and can't be arsed. Eventually the government would give credits to people in work who've paid their dues so they can do courses relevant to them and universities would be open all hours.

I don't think it'll work out, but we can only dream...

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

#84

Post by sklogic »

mathieuh wrote: post #36
sklogic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are solely there to get a piece of paper And why should anybody care at all about this disgusting and lowly category? They wanted to game the system, they got what they deserved. > and many times taking on dangerous levels of debt Student loans are quite a peculiar form of a debt. They can be largely ignored quite for a while (or ignored at all). > College has become a barrier to entry to the job market, In most of…

> And why should anybody care at all about this disgusting and lowly category? They wanted to game the system, they got what they deserved. Because (at least for me (and everyone I've spoken to)) university is completely useless. I haven't learnt anything in uni I hadn't already taught myself. I am 100% paying for the letters after my name.

So you wasted years of your time and years of the other people time simply to get some stupid letters to add to your CV? Sorry, I ran out of sympathy.

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

#85

Post by sklogic »

relkor wrote: 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 am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy

Just in case you did not notice, this thread was about the universities, not the nurseries.

A university teacher can be a stuttering weirdo and a jerk, and still be very valuable. Actually, many of the best teachers I know were weirdos and jerks, and it took a lot of effort to extort the knowledge from them.

> If I just wanted a chance to learn, then I could go to the public library.

In many cases that's the best option anyway.

But you'd also need facilities, laboratory equipment, and, most importantly, an access to likely minded people who can share their learning experience with you and bully you into learning more.

> then I will take my money elsewhere

Please do. Stop bothering the university lecturers with your nursery expectations.

> Teacher blames student for failing to grasp their perfect explaination that works perfectly well for themselves.

This is where your argument falls apart. It might be something wrong with the teaching if all of the class is failing, but usually the most vocal complainers are exactly the slackers who are behind the rest of the class, who do not really deserve to be there at all, no matter how much they're paying for it.

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

#86

Post by sklogic »

relkor wrote: post #63
Karellen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contex…

> I seem to have missed the part of university where we were learning things not yet in published books.

You had an access to the teachers, who are all supposed to be active, well-connected, bleeding-edge researchers. You had a fair amount of their time allocated for you solely and more of that time for your class.

Now, it was 100% your responsibility to extort all the bleeding edge knowledge from them, to loiter around their laboratories, to get a summer job as a lab assistant, and all that. This is what universities are for.

> like society has done for every other field of human endevor?

What? When did it happen, exactly? The master-apprentice model is still alive and kicking in most of the professions. There are no alternatives to it. Dedicated pedagogues can teach you to read, write and count your fingers (on one hand). The rest must be passed on by the real professionals.

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

#87

Post by sklogic »

geofft wrote: post #39
sklogic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not idiots. They are indeed. > If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money. No. This is a blatant consumerism. It does not matter even a tiny bit how much do you pay - 1/2 of your income, 100x your income, whatever. > Schools should be free, Of course, in an ideal world. But we have to deal with what we have and to make sure it's not destroyed beyond a…

No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets . What we are really seeing here is market forces that make the current university structure -- with its emphasis on research over quality of teaching -- a terrible product, just like a lottery ticket is a terrible product. Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets. At the moment, the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college is propping up these i…

> No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets.

"Who Dares Wins"

Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you're paying for a lunch in a caffe it's sort of guaranteed that you'll get your calories.

When you're paying for tuition you're only getting a chance to learn something, and now it's entirely up to you to use this chance (and still fail even by trying as hard as you can).

> Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets.

Exactly. Smart consumers will first exhaust all the other options, and, most importantly, will gauge their chance to succeed in this race first before joining it.

> the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college

This is a myth. Stop spreading it.

> And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls.

Use it first. Go to the university only when all the other routes are exhausted. Otherwise universities are full of random people who do not really belong there.

> There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own.

It means that you failed miserably. Congratulations. You had a priceless opportunity to extort the knowledge from some of the best, most bleeding-edge researchers, who had hours of their precious time allocated for you alone.

But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures - exactly the most stupid kind of stuff to do in any university, not just MIT.

Btw., I failed too, far too often I'm reading an obituary for a top scientist and realising that years ago I lost a unique opportunity to interrogate him thoroughly.

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

#88

Post by Thriptic »

sklogic wrote: post #82
Thriptic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why should anybody care at all about this disgusting and lowly category? Because that "disgusting and lowly category" is the dominant demographic of users; get off your high horse. > Student loans are quite a peculiar form of a debt. They can be largely ignored quite for a while (or ignored at all). Student loan debt is some of the hardest to escape debt in the world, and if you don't get a solid job when you g…

> Because that "disgusting and lowly category" is the dominant demographic of users; get off your high horse. If so, this world is doomed, and within a generation will be ruled by hordes of ignorant retards. I can only hope you're exaggerating (well, I know you're exaggerating, the universities that matter still do vet their intake relatively rigorously). > Student loan debt is some of the hardest to escape debt in t…

> If so, this world is doomed, and within a generation will be ruled by hordes of ignorant retards. I can only hope you're exaggerating (well, I know you're exaggerating, the universities that matter still do vet their intake relatively rigorously).

By very definition most people go to universities or institutions that "don't matter" in your eyes. You can't rule out the majority of the population in a discussion about the nature of higher education just because it doesn't fit your narrative about what college should be.

Moreover, to assume that everyone at top tier institutions is there or is trying hard because they are deeply passionate about learning is absolutely ridiculous. I am at a lab at MIT currently and interact with undergrads here all the time. The community has a HUGE problem with self-imposed stress over grades and course load to the point where individuals are committing suicide because they falsely believe that if they are not successful in college it will prevent them from being successful in the work place. Why do many people put themselves through this pressure? Because they know having the words MIT on their resume will get them a great job.

> Incorrect. For 9 out of 10 professions it is not true at all.

I don't know how they do things in the UK, but in the US employers want to see proof that you can do what you say you can do or that you are a serious worker when applying for a job. For a lot of industries, it's really hard to demonstrate this when applying for a first job because you have no relevant work experience. A relevant college degree (rightly or wrongly) serves as validation for employers. They feel safer taking a chance on employing you. Even having ANY college degree shows that someone has (theoretically) validated that you can work intelligently.

The problem with not having a degree is that it's very difficult to gain demonstrable domain expertise in most fields without being employed (as you lack access to resources), and most people won't employ you until you can demonstrate some competence, leading to a situation where it's very difficult to get your foot in the door. That's why it's important to have a degree; it gets your foot in the door so you can gain experience. Most people in the US who do not have college degrees or technical certifications are working poorly paid jobs. Most people go to college so that they do not have to do that, not so that they can seek enlightenment.

> It is a filter. Doctors must conform to quite harsh endurance and resourcefulness requirements, and the more such filters applied - the better. This is not a profession for everyone (just like most other professions, really)

Putting someone through a 4 year arbitrary filter is a ridiculous practice which should stop. Unqualified students would wash out during the first year of medical school anyway; that should serve as the filter. Making someone rack up 80-120K in additional student debt just to go through a filtering process is absurd. A friend of mine is currently a resident and has 320K dollars of student loan debt. How is that justifiable?

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

#89

Post by geofft »

sklogic wrote: post #87
geofft wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets . What we are really seeing here is market forces that make the current university structure -- with its emphasis on research over quality of teaching -- a terrible product, just like a lottery ticket is a terrible product. Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets. At the moment, the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college is propping up these i…

> No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets. "Who Dares Wins" Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you're paying for a lunch in a caffe it's sort of guaranteed that you'll get your calories. When you're paying for tuition you're only getting a chance to learn something, and now it's entirely up to you to use this chance (and still fail even by trying as hard as you can). >…

> Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything.

Yes, but there's such a thing as better odds and worse odds. These students aren't paying for a guaranteed education, but they are paying for an honest effort.

> But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures

Wow! I didn't know I did that! Some of my professors would be truly surprised to hear that.

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

#90

Post by mcphage »

relkor wrote: post #51
gjm11 wrote: 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…

> Then adjust the cost of the course to reflect that reality.

It's already built into the cost. If the teacher could get you to learn, without any further effort on your part, a class would cost way more than $9,000—probably closer to $90,000.

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