education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
One rather sad fact about higher education is that it is one area where, as I heard a comedian say, the customer wants to get as little for her money as possible. This is demonstrated quite nicely by the relatively low attendance rates in many classes and the fact that students often fail to avail themselves of office hours. Being a professor, I have often thought about why this is the case. Part of it, obviously enough, seems to be the nature of the American education system-it seems almost intentionally designed to be a boredom factory. Another part is that professors are not trained to entertain and hence we are ill equipped to compete with the media smorgasbord offered by the internet and television. A third part is that students have found that they can get by without actually putting in much effort and they generally do not see much value in putting in the effort beyond what is needed to get by. In this students differ not at all from the rest of the population-try to think of how often you encounter excellence and people going above and beyond in their endeavors. While I could keep going with various factors, the last one I will present is that higher education is often a pretty good deal. This assertion might, on the face of it, seem insane on two grounds. First, it seems like madness to claim that students would be less inclined to get more out of education because it is a good deal. Second, it might seem beyond insanity to claim that education is actually a good deal-after all, the cost of higher education is supposed to be absurdly high these days. However, since I enjoy seeing people argue against my mad claims, I will endeavor to argue for both of these. On the face of it, people should be more attracted to good deals than inferior deals. After all, its seems eminently rational to want to get more for less. However, what seems rational and what people do tend to be two rather different things. To illustrate this, consider the matter of free stuff. On the face of it, people should be very drawn to what is free. After all, they are getting something for nothing. While this can hold true in some cases (for example, people grabbing free swag at expos or free samples at stores) the opposite often holds true. For example, free events often fail to attract as many people as the same sort of event that is not free would attract. A rather plausible explanation is that people value their time and hence that will always be a cost, even for free stuff. So, if an event takes time, a person will presumably consider if the event is worth their time. An event that is available for free can be thus seen as lacking value (after all, if it was a worthwhile event, surely people would charge for it). So, people will be less inclined to participate in a free event. In the case of higher education, it is not free. However, if it is seen as relatively low cost for the student, s/he might not see attending class or going to office hours as worth the cost in his/her time. After all, the loss of not attending class or office hours is seen as being less than the loss of attending class or going to office hours. To use a rather specific example, consider the case of a student who works. If she is in class or at my office hours talking about philosophy, then she is not working and getting her hourly wage. As such, attending my class or going to my office hours is a loss for her. Of course, if she fails the class, then this a loss-but this can be avoided by putting in just enough effort to pass. Thus, the student can have both-getting the credit hours to graduate and also getting as much time as possible for other things, such as work or Facebooking. If, however, the class or office hours were very costly, then students might thus be more inclined to attend. After all, missing the class or office hours would cost more than what would be gained by skipping class. Another point well worth considering is that although the class (and office hours) might have a high cost, this need not be paid by the student. So, if the student is attending college at the parents’ or states’ expense, then they do not “feel” that cost and hence they have less motivation to attend class since any alternative will tend to give them more perceived value for their time. Naturally this is not always the case-some students do value their class time even when they are not paying the majority of the educational bill. I now turn to the second point, that higher education is a rather good deal. Back in 2009 I fell from my roof and tore my quadriceps tendon. The repair surgery took about 40 minutes and I was in the hospital only a few hours (most of which was spent waiting). The bill was about $11,000. While this is an extreme example, people routinely pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour for experts such as psychiatrists, doctors, politicians, lawyers, mechanics, plumbers, and so on. People often wait a long time for appointments and the wait even more when the appointment time arrives. While folks complain, they do seem to value these services. In the case of higher education, a student typically is guaranteed about three hours of access to a professor per week in class and also there are office hours open to all students. These days students also expect email access to faculty-I get emails around the clock from students. While students sometimes have adjuncts or graduate students as professors, at my university the vast majority of classes are taught by professors with terminal degrees (usually a doctorate) who are experts in their fields. Since a semester is 16 weeks long, that means that a student gets access to a top professional for about 40 hours a semester (not including office hours, emails and phone calls). Even with the rising cost of education, this seems like a rather good deal for the students-perhaps so good that it causes students to undervalue education. After all, how many people pay a plumber, medical doctor or engineer and simply fail to avail themselves of the time they paid for? Of course, a viable alternative hypothesis is that educators like myself are, in fact, offering far less value than we believe. If so, perhaps students are wise to miss our classes and avoid our office hours because they could always be doing something far more valuable with their time, such as Facebooking about how useless their classes are.
University students are often very young. In addition, their parents or a scholarship pay
for their education.
Young people, especially young people who are not paying the bill themselves, tend not to value what they receive.
I’m retired and I often read books, especially classics, that I was supposed to read in the university and never did or which I read superficially, without paying any attention besides the attention needed to pass a final exam.
I can assure you that if I had the opportunity to return to a good university today, I would utilize every chance to talk to good professors, to attend lectures and to make use of a university library, instead the public library which I now use.
You don’t miss your water until your well runs dry.
Value is relative. The finest champagne in France has no value to a man trying to buy a cement mixer. If, for some bizarre reason, local law and custom requires that he purchase some champagne before he purchases a cement mixer, he might have a slight preference for good champagne over poor champagne. But he’s going to want convenient champagne more than anything else.
I feel as though the university is losing relevance, necessity and usefulness in our society;
The Internet -above all- is the greatest enabler of my criticism -and of modes of learning which are not dependent on the hegemonic, extraneous and unnecessarily expensive institution that is the university. Despite this, I don’t feel that our concerns lie in criticising the institution, but rather in the formulation of alternate, accessible forms of education that do not require or generate the excessive accumulation of capital, privitisation and exclusionism, authorial influence and ability to produce narratives that the university does.
I feel a thorough examination of the educational possibilities of the Internet should be the primary interest for those seeking to make genuine educational improvement for the human race.
I also find that technology is sometimes overrates but at the same time needdd. I teach in a rural area but kids are still more tech savvy than most adults. Is there a fix to this. I think that the older generation needs to take stock in technology. It ia what keeps many people alive. I bet the older generation would mind if their medications were not invented or modified. My father is one of these people. He cant even turn on a computer. If asked, he says it is all bulls…t. So…how do we take that.
I teach high school. I think we need to integrate technology all the time. Wvery new piece that comes out , implement it.
There is actually quite a sizable economics literature on this. I am most familiar with the matched cotwin-control studies where one twin has ended up with a higher educational qualifications than their cotwin.
This paper claims that removing subsidies decreases individuals taking up education, and lead to a net fall in benefits to society outweighing the costs of the government subsidy saved.
s.wallerstein,
When I first started teaching, the state had a program which strongly encouraged state workers to take college classes, so I always had older “non-traditional” students in my night classes. They were generally very serious about their education. I remember one person telling me about how he screwed around in school as a kid, but realized that he had wasted a great opportunity and was glad to get a second chance to finish.
Damiaan,
I am with you on the matter of accessible education. In general, a better educated population is good for all of us (tyrants excepted, of course).
As you note, the university system does have some serious baggage. However, one thing it does have in its favor is that there is a system of accreditation-that is, if you go to a university that is properly accredited then you will most likely learn stuff that is correct/accurate. Honesty does compel me to admit that you’ll learn some crap and be told lies as well, but at least there is a system in place to address such matters.
One of my concerns with the net as a learning environment is the challenge of sorting out the lies, deceptions, wrong information, and so on from the good stuff. But, I do think this can be done.
One concern I have (and have expressed elsewhere) is that in the US we are seeing a strong push for the for-profit schools. While they do use the net, they do charge (a lot) and they have often proven to be rather problematic (to the degree that congress launched an investigation). As such, my worry is that education will become even more out of reach and of lower quality.
I am currently a student and I have a different explanation than has been proposed (and it warms my heart that no one here would think of it). As has been mentioned, a great deal can be learned on the internet with the same guarantee as university lectures (video lectures for example). A great deal can also be learned from simply auditing lectures, which of course have the same guarantee of quality as university lectures you pay for. If this is the case, why is it people would pay for university at all? Now, I agree with Mike that it is a good deal, but certainly not as good a deal as the same thing for free, so there must be some added value to justify the cost. I believe the answer is sadly and almost entirely economic. The majority of students care very little for their subjects per se, but more so as stepping stones to one career or another. This is at least the case in Canada according to last year’s Maclean’s University Survey.
From the perspective of these students, what they are gaining is not knowledge but accreditation. Therefore, the question of doing the bare minimum class is not because of any hidden misunderstanding on the student’s part (except perhaps that their lives would be enriched if they cared about knowledge), it is very simply that there’s no difference to an employer (on the face of it) if they learned anything at all, as long as the credentials are there. It is the sad fact that for most students, education is not a conversation with the teacher or with the texts or experiments they must handle, but with some abstract workplace.
As for accessible and for-profit education I am completely on Mike’s side. It is very problematic to put knowledge at the behest of economic incentive (this is true in the universities as well as the for profit schools). For-profit schools, benefit most when costs are kept as low as possible and that means streamlining what’s taught to the point that the individual and critical mind disappears as much as possible. There is also the problem of the class divide it creates (no pun intended). Education is the great equalizer so what happens when you make that private as well?
Benjamin Miller,
Thanks for adding those points. I think you are right-a student who is enrolled to get the degree so s/he can get a job is acting rationally (at least in a sense) by doing just what is needed to get the degree. It is sort of like the old joke: Q: “what do they call the person who graduates last in his/her class in medical school?” A: “Doctor.” Likewise, a person who graduates with a 2.0 still graduates, whether they learned anything or not.