So I take it you disagree with the central thesis that tuition is absurdly high for the value that students get?
Edit: from the article "There are many phenomenal teachers at universities. We at Top Hat Monocle have had the privilege to work with some of them. They should be treated like rock stars and paid accordingly - they generate literally millions in revenue for the universities and don't get nearly the recognition they deserve. They do their work out of benevolence and dedication to a job they love, mostly in spite of the system they operate in."
About five paragraphs in, by my count:
"what do students actually get for their money? They get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck. The classroom environment hasn't changed in nearly a century. If you brought someone from 1940 into today's classroom they'd hardly notice a difference, except perhaps for the fancier projector and massively increased class size. This is not due to lack of technology or lack of tools being available."
You're calling out the system for being outdated and broken. Just because you don't explicitly say that "most professors are lazy and incompetent (except for the ones I like)" doesn't mean that you can fling these sorts of casual, rhetorical stones without having to embrace the conclusion.
The system can be broken without attaching any blame to the workers in the system.
The real problem is of course the high-up administrators and board. The purpose of a university is not education. The purpose is to funnel money via inflated salaries and unneeded construction jobs to those that are politically well-connected.
If that was your thesis (it was well-buried), then yes, I disagree with it. And I can fairly conclusively prove my point with your own words: professors spend most of their time raising money to do their research. They don't do that because the school is showering them with cash (in point of fact, the school takes a substantial percentage cut from every grant dollar, too). So where is the tuition going? It sure isn't going to the research programs.
If you're going to make the claim that universities are squandering student tuition/fees (and that IS what you're doing here, even if you're doing it obliquely), you're going to have to defend that claim with more than just hand-waving assertions that students would gain just as much from private tutors. Because that's not a claim that stands up to casual scrutiny.
Honestly, I think you're succumbing to the fallacy of the university as a provider of first-year coursework. Yes, some students could probably learn calculus 101 from private tutors. But most of the people qualified to "tutor" students in anything more complex than first-year coursework are already doing so -- at universities.
I'm open to a frank discussion of inefficiencies in the university system (and I think there are tons -- what's the average student-contact-hour rating of a professor in comparative lit, versus a first-year professor in chemistry or math? How much does that new dorm cost? What about the Taj Mahal gym with the fancy climbing walls?), but it's wrong to suggest that the whole institution is "absurdly" overpriced from the teaching perspective. The numbers just don't bear out that hypothesis.
1. The typical student experience in higher-ed is poor
2. Students pay a lot of money for it
3. The experience is poor because incentives in higher-ed are mostly towards research and not teaching
As for whether students get value for their money, I'm not sure what to say other than I don't believe it should cost $12k to provide 250 hours of instruction, especially when it's done en mass.
I also strongly disagree that it takes anything extraordinary to teach calc 3 or intro real analysis. Everything up to 3rd year is relatively trivial, and I don't find it hard to believe that a bright PhD that loves teaching wouldn't be able to do a decent job at it.
If you want a school where the professor's highest priority is the classroom experience go to a small liberal arts school. But frankly, there's no reason a great professor can't do both so you may as well go somewhere with the resources to conduct interesting research.
1. This is an assertion. During 11+ years in academia, I saw no evidence that "typical" students were unhappy with quality of the education.
2. Yes, college costs a lot. We disagree on the reasons.
3. I agree that the incentives are biased toward research, but disagree that this leads to a poor student experience.
As for the $12k for 250 hours of instruction: yes, that's $50 an hour, per student. But you're not just paying the instructor of the course (believe me!) -- you're paying for the classroom, the building, the fancy new student center, the campus landscaping, the fountains, the climbing wall, the professors who are teaching dozens of other, very small courses, the laboratory space, the dormitories, the third-party software licenses, the women's softball team, etc.
Universities aren't cheap to run. The guy at the front of the classroom is only the start of the cost structure.
Also, I imagine you didn't go to a state school.
There are many reasons why schools have become more expensive over the years. The cost of health care, alone, is growing much faster than the rate of inflation.
But honestly, most universities went on a building spree over the last twenty years. Fancy dorms and labs and classrooms and athletic facilities really start to add up -- and grants rarely pay for them. As I said before, there are tons of inefficiencies in the university system. I just don't think they're in the classroom.
I spent about 5 years teaching college, and I have a hard time disagreeing. Teaching is a lot of work the first couple of times, but it gets easy very quickly. Calc 1 is no different the 10'th time you teach than the first, and at that point all you need to do is show up and repeat. Teaching is not a difficult job [1].
As for the students, they are mostly just there for the grade. Some of them may need to do a bit more than just cram for 2 weeks, and many attend class out of a sense of social obligation, but they are just there for the grade.
[1] Research is far more difficult, and I'll agree that most research professors are very hardworking. But teaching is just a minor task research profs are saddled with.
That's true if all you do is teach Calc 101, but most departments don't let professors do that (they do let staff instructors specialize in one course, however). Smaller courses are the preponderance of the teaching load for a professor, and those courses take a lot of effort. The first-year courses have huge staff infrastructures in place to handle the load, and they don't change quickly because of sheer institutional inertia.
The unstated myth here is that first-year courses are representative of the college experience. They're not. Even at big state schools, the bulk of the instructional effort goes into the higher-level courses, where class sizes are smaller, the students are more engaged, and the curriculum changes more frequently.
This is not true of anyplace I'm aware of. Every place that I've been to, unless you went out of your way to request it, you taught Calc 1-4, "Math for Non-Math Majors", or perhaps Linear Algebra/Complex Analysis for EE. If you want to teach primarily advanced courses, you need to make special arrangements and you probably need leverage.
Further, even the advanced courses don't change much. My first semester in grad school, I took Real/Complex/Functional Analysis and Algebra. Functional Analysis was the most modern topic - some of the material was developed in the 80's.
I really have no idea where you are getting your information from, but I don't think your college experience was typical.
If this wasn't your college experience then I think you're in the minority. If you look at a list of the top 10 most popular college majors, I'd be willing to be that the majority of classes in these majors are taught almost directly from McGraw Hill textbooks or whatever. It's not until you get into subjects that are both obscure and also in areas where the professors are likely to be intellectually curious that you start seeing more people creating their own lectures, e.g. a course on methodologies in religious studies or whatever.
In it, inflation adjusted prices of dental services are plotted against time, along with the price of higher education. Amazingly, they track each other extremely well, which would suggest that the price of services in general are increasing at a rate higher than inflation....It would be interesting to see the price for other services plotted on the same graph. If the curve is "universal", then it might be an indicator that we should look to causes in the broader economy...
Frankly, few people have the balls or sociopathic instincts to stand in front of dozens of people every day and tolerate looking like an incompetent, lazy ass.
Spoken like a person who has never actually taught a college course. There's a tremendous amount of work involved, from both students and faculty. Most students go to class, and most professors give lectures that aren't directly taken from the book. So can we please stop elevating the cartoon, straw-man portrayals of the incompetent lecturer and the lazy student? Please?
If this blog post weren't written by the CEO of a company that's trying to sell enhancement software to universities, I'd dismiss it as anti-intellectual trolling. I'm also trying hard not to dismiss it as the griping of a guy who's finding resistance selling his product to a somewhat conservative clientele (university staff), and interpreting their reluctance as the behavior of dinosaurs (rather than a sensible reaction to the generations of educational snake-oil salesmen who have come before).
Instead, I'll give the benefit of the doubt: there are certainly lazy, incompetent professors. There are also lazy students that have no business being in college. But if your only contact with the university system comes from when you're trying to sell or beta-test your products in the classroom...well, you don't have a very representative sample from which to draw conclusions.