Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution points to a post by The Angry Professor about a new budgetary system at LSU.
In essence the professor seems to be angry that departments are forced into competition with each other for students and therefore funding under the new scheme. His main complaint seems to be this:
The marginal departments, the ones with the lowest possible academic standards, are pulling in vast numbers of warm bodies and the tuition dollars associated with them. The departments that formerly only provided degrees to the football players are now thriving.
Well, aside from the obvious that paying customers are getting exactly what paying customers want, let’s go ahead and presume that this is a problem. A college wants to educate students, give them some skills, make them think, etc. Students want to pay a bit of cash for a piece of paper that signals some level of quality to potential employers. Students are looking at the ROI. Obviously, this can cause a bit of an incentives problem.
Colleges have tried to get around this by imposing moderately restrictive requirements on what students must take in order to obtain a degree. These mostly come in the form of long menus of options for “core” or “general education” requirements. LSU has such a schema. The local UT branch rationalizes requiring paying adults to take such things in this way:
The Core Curriculum reflects the educational goals of the University. It is designed to enable students to assess the perspectives and accomplishments of the past and to move to the future with an informed and flexible outlook. It promotes intellectual adaptability, ethical awareness, and transfer among diverse modes of thought.
An essential aim of the Core Curriculum is to cultivate the verbal, numerical, and visual skills necessary to analyze and synthesize information, construct arguments, and identify and solve problems. Another essential aim is to foster understanding of the intellectual and cultural pluralism of modern society as it is reflected in natural science and mathematics; behavioral, cultural, and social science; and literature and artistic expression. By encouraging interdisciplinary study, the Core Curriculum seeks to develop critical awareness of the continuities and discontinuities of human thought, history, and culture, thus helping prepare students to meet the demands of change.
The University reviews Core courses for their success in promoting the goals of the Core, and it encourages students to select Core courses that will best achieve these goals. Beyond the Core, each student must fulfill the requirements of a major.
The unfortunate truth of the matter is that everything encouraged by the Core requirements should have been learned in high school. I mentioned this in my last post on this topic. One of the commenters at Newmark’s Door brought up the old standard: well some high school students aren’t prepared and don’t know this stuff so we have to teach it to them in college! To which I say, bullshit. He also suggests that eliminating the university-wide general education requirements would cause students to gravitate toward easy courses for an easy reward.
If a student is woefully unprepared for success in college, that student has no business succeeding at college and no business being there. Forget the why for a minute, that’s a different topic for a different day, but it is not the job of higher education institutions to make up for the failings of those who came before them, or for the laziness of their entrants. If students can’t handle the classes, they should fail at them or take remedial studies. Forcing everyone into the same mold as the laziest or least-skilled members of the class bores everyone average or better to death.
As for gravitating toward easy classes, The Angry Professor demonstrates that is already happening. The incentive to take the easiest class that satisfies any of the general education requirements already exists,, most students persue it, and because GPA is a measurable result that people care about it’s a perfectly rational choice. And this is the reason that eliminating the menu of general education requirements all together would work, but only if individual departments are allowed to set whatever requirements they wish for graduation. This won’t solve all of the issues with modern collegiate education, but it will solve some (but not overnight). Here’s the proposal.
1) Institution keeps total hours, total graded hours (including a restriction on how many classes offered only for a pass/fail can be taken), minimum GPA and residency requirements. And, perhaps, the language & math requirements for the Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts distinction, although I think all of that could be left up to individual departments as well.
2) Institution eliminates “core” or “general education requirements”.
3) Individual departments keep the degree requirements they have, or tweak them as-needed for the new system. For instance, at Oregon the Journalism School already has breadth requirements in addition to the general education requirements of the school. Some departments may wish to keep some of the general education requirements for various reasons: [area] studies may want the multicultural crap, languages may require literature, history might require writing and composition, &c. Other departments may drop those in favor of requiring more of their own courses or more related courses: I doubt the physics department cares if you can explain why all of the Europeans ever are evil, but they might want you to take more astronomy or math.
4) Students fill up the rest of their time aside from their major taking basically whatever they want. Yes, there is still an incentive to take easy classes to pump up the GPA, but nobody who already knows plenty about the Napoleonic Wars is forced to sit through yet another four classes of world history. Further, you may see an increase in multiple majors because students won’t be wasting their time retaking high school if they don’t want to. Some students, obviously, will still choose this path but we don’t really know how many in equilibrium. And, if they want to take all Underwater Basket Weaving, well, they’ll have few skills and will fail at life, which leads to…
5) In the long-term, unrigorous departments will suffer. Those with lax degree requirements that already attract lazy, foolish students will produce useless, unemployable idiots. Eventually, everyone will know this, and those departments will suffer loss of enrollment that will not be propped-up by getting their introductory courses listed on the menu of general requirements. Nobody wants to take Women’s Studies 101: Why Men Are Evil or Sociology 105: Westerners Are A Blight. Okay, some people do, but when those courses meet some requirement and are easy to do well in so long as one sits down, shuts up, and regurgitates exactly what Professor Batshit wants they’ll have decent enrollment numbers. Allowing students to avoid classes they don’t want to take might actually cause the university system to become more like what it’s supposed to be: a job training and research system.
Aside from my handy numbered points above, my plan treats legal adults who are paying good money a whole lot more like adults than the current regime does. Either you’re a legal adult with full rights or you’re not, there’s too much infantilization of the college set and this would be one small step in correcting it.
