NAS Blog

The Regents of the University of California just voted to embrace a pilot program testing the efficacy of an online undergraduate degree.  Until now, like most research universities, UC has been leery of the online environment because of the thorny problems it poses:  questionable security, dubious academic integrity, loss of “voices around the table,” substantial and perpetual costs.

Conversely, online education does seem inevitable given our technological dependence, a Beltway “college-for-all” mindset, corporate customer service business models, and ruthless competition.  ”It’s the future,” gushed Regent Bonnie Reiss.

Despite teaching online for years and running an online program, I remain ambivalent about the marriage of technology and education.  Showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up “Young Goodman Brown” used to be stimulating; now it’s just disruptive.  Why jerk students back to the terrain they already inhabit, filled with insistent, continuous, cognitive shifts whose interruptions prevent learning?  Handling electronic information, Nicholas Carr says,

We become mere signal processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

As one online student just posted, “During the time it took me to read for this assignment, I received 1 phone call, 6 emails, 4 text messages and 1 Skype message.”

At the Young Rhetoricians’ Conference in June, the most instructive point about online education was made by Porsche, a young African-American college student, who said, “I don’t want to study organic chemistry on my computer.  My computer is where I go to have fun.”

The UC Regents would do well to heed her words because Porsche really is the future.

I’m pleased to introduce Jason Fertig as a new contributor at NAS.org. Dr. Fertig is an NAS member and assistant professor of management at the University of Southern Indiana. Dr. Fertig brings a depth of perception and lively anecdotes from his own experience in the classroom to speak to some of the  most real issues in higher education today.

He has written three articles for NAS so far:

More Millennials Need to Work at McDonalds advises recent college graduates: get a job, anywhere.

Real Sustainability: Saving Our Sense of Culture asks, “Are we failing to hand down our cultural legacy to the next generation?”

Dangers of Credentialing the College Degree: A Real-Life Example is a case study that illustrates the popular idea that students are entitled to get a passing grade – even if they don’t earn one.

I especially recommend the third article, which received attention from blogs such as Phi Beta Cons and Joanne Jacobs.

Also check out his essay at the Pope Center on the gap year, The Gift of Academic Maturity. Fertig spoke about the gap year this morning on Wisconsin Public Radio.

You can look forward to more NAS articles by Dr. Fertig in the weeks ahead.

The careful image campaign that the higher ed establishment has conducted for decades seems to be wearing off, if this Washington Examiner piece is any indication. The writer observes that lots of American students now get their high-cost college degrees, but can’t even do basic math. Many of them can (and will!) hector you about “sustainability,” their concerns about social justice, institutional racism and so on — but they can’t work out the simplest of numerical problems.

A large number of jobs now “require” college degrees, but that requirement rarely has anything to do with actual knowledge. It’s a screening device to keep out supposedly less prepared and trainable high school graduates, but it’s becoming clear that many college graduates are no better.

Of interest to law professors, lawyers, and curious individuals, NAS has recently published three articles about law schools:

“Conferring Privilege: DOJ, Law Schools, and the New Politics of Race” examines the Association of American Law Schools’ efforts to prevent racial colorblindness.

“’They So Despise Her Politics’ – Do Conservative Faculty Candidates Get a Fair Shake?” presents documents in the lawsuit of an unsuccessful faculty candidate for a position at the University of Iowa College of Law who believes she was denied the appointment because of her politics.

“Potemkin Admissions: Law Professors Propose to Hide LSAT Data” exposes a movement to persuade law schools to withhold LSAT scores from U.S. News and World Report. The idea is to make it harder for the public to see how much the pursuit of racial preferences drags down the quality of admissions.

“They So Despise Her Politics” has received attention from the Daily Iowan, Instapundit, TaxProf Blog, and One Minute Lawyer.

George, thanks for sharing the Pope Center piece on student evaluations. I thought this paragraph was especially poignant:

Today’s student-survey approach may tell us how students viewed the course, but the data tell us nothing about actual learning. It is not that questionnaire designers disdain knowledge; they just cannot measure it, and thus they exclude a key element of teaching. Ironically, universities can now hire or retain teachers who impart nothing of value but have superb ratings.

Incidentally, NAS published an article by Peter Cohee on student evaluations last week. Cohee concluded:

A decade spent writing evaluations of public school teachers has brought me to this disillusion: evaluations as they are don’t make teachers better, don’t get rid of bad teachers, aren’t needed by good teachers, and don’t improve schools or student learning. They tend to induce cynicism and to engender ill will between the teacher and the evaluator. They are an almost complete waste of the enormous time, energy, and money spent on them.

He argued that several factors render evaluations useless:

1. Pre-written forms are created by those who don’t teach and allow for mediocre teaching (“I’ve also seen altogether mediocre teaching that meets every formal requirement.”)
2. No meaningful consequences or rewards follow evaluation
3. Evaluation is not tied to what and how well students have learned

Cohee offers some concrete suggestions for making evaluation meaningful and effective.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Professor Robert Weissberg argues that they’re more likely to do the opposite. They tend to promote mediocrity and encourage at least some profs to pander to the students in order to get nice evaluations.

In a course where most of the students are actually there because they want to learn, a professor could certainly benefit from their feedback. On the other hand, where the typical student is disengaged, ill-prepared, and enrolled in college principally to have fun, evaluations are a waste of time at best.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting opinion piece by Seth Godin called “The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education (as Seen by a Marketer)” [subscription required]. Godin suggests alternatives to the four-year college, such as “gap years, research internships, and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school,” and believes that “There are tons of ways to get a cheap liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter, and teaches you to make a difference (see DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, by Anya Kamenetz)” without going to a mainstream college.

Godin argues that from a marketer’s point of view, the typical American college is headed for obscurity for these reasons:

• Most undergraduate college and university programs are organized to give an average education to average students. [See "Seven Imaginary Curricula"]
• College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
• The definition of “best” [college] is under siege.
• The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
• Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

Results-based accountability, for one thing, writes NAS board member Herbert London in his editorial, “Profit vs. Proselytizing: Business Lore and Academic Practice.”

It seems that some teachers and administrators, when offered incentives (within systems such as No Child Left Behind) for boosting students’ test scores, act unethically to inflate them.

The Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern recounts how two brave education officials are confronting assertions of “spectacular student progress” by forcing an outside audit of the tests.

Their efforts, he writes, should serve as a model for making all states “come clean” and (in education secretary Arne Duncan’s words) “‘stop lying to children.’”

The following column on George Orwell’s advice to free students from bad academic writing is worth reading:

http://chronicle.com/article/Bad-WritingBad-Thinking/65031/?sid=ja&utm_source=ja&utm_medium=en

In two decades of teaching, I’ve worked with exceptionally bright undergraduates. Once they enter graduate school, however, they conform to the “smelly little orthodoxies” of theory and the jargon-ridden writing of their discipline. I’ve always despised jargon that deadens prose and will be passé by the time these young conformists hit old age. Future generations will have to decipher why words and phrases such as “subaltern,” “post-structuralist,” “late capitalism” meant to the scribbling class of early 21st century academics.

The advice Orwell gives is very similar to advice Winston Churchill gave on good writing. This passage says it best (from Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”):

“Orwell leaves us with a list of simple rules:

* Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

* Never use a long word where a short one will do.

* If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

* Never use the passive where you can use the active.

* Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

* Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I am posting this for my own students and as a reminder to myself (fallen creature that I am).