If I Could Reinvent Undergraduate Education

My previous posts and articles such as America's Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor's Degree document how little value added the average college student accrues for all the years and money spent.

Here, I allow myself the luxury of dreaming up Utopia College. Here would be its major components:

1. Faculty would not have PhDs. They'd have a masters in higher ed. teaching. Their training would focus on how to help typical undergraduates grow in those critical elements of an undergraduate education: writing, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, ethics, how to learn, and as Ralph Wolff, president of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges advocates, unlearning: We get very stuck in our ways, which will be ever more dysfunctional as the pace of new knowledge accelerates.

2. Courses would be problem-centered rather than discipline-centered. So they'd bear such titles as "What, if anything, should we do about climate change?" "The art of finding and nurturing a great romantic relationship" and, "Reducing the racial achievement gap."

3. Provide extensive opportunities for long-term, one-on-one relationships with faculty, peer mentors, etc. All faculty and students would receive training on how to be a mentor and protege.

4. Cost of attendance would be dramatically reduced. There are many ways to lower cost without reducing quality:

• Utilize faculty and student residences as classrooms. They lie vacant during the day.
• Using non-PhDs as faculty would be less expensive and more effective. The disparity between the way PhDs and undergraduates think is too great. Also, many PhDs’ primary interest is research, often arcane research that shouldn't be core to undergraduate education. Carefully selected holders of an M.A. in undergraduate instruction would be both less expensive and better.
• Forgo fancy administration buildings.
• Forgo country-club-like campuses with their arboretum-like lawns and shrubs and amenities such as swimming pools and golf courses. Instead, make deals with nearby swimming and golf facilities that enable students to participate at reasonable cost.
• Reduce the cost of marketing. By providing crucial data about Utopia College (see below) on its website, the college should be able to sell itself. And because Utopia would offer a superior undergraduate education at a very low price, the media will likely provide lots of marketing assistance of greater credibility than any brochures a college could create. What sorts of data would be provided?
  

-- Value added. How much do students grow at Utopia College in writing, critical thinking, problem solving, information literacy, etc. Separate data should be provided for students entering with low, medium, and high SAT scores.

-- Results of the most recent student-satisfaction survey, to be conducted by the institutions themselves.

-- The most recent accreditation report.

-- The average cash, loan, and work-study financial aid for varying levels of family income and assets. And because some colleges use the drug-dealer scam — give the first dose cheap and then jack up the price —Utopia College would list the typical financial aid packages, not just for the first year, but for years 2 through 6.

-- Retention data: the percentage of students returning for a second year, broken out by SAT score, race, and gender.

-- Safety data: the percentage of an institution's students who have been robbed or assaulted on or near the campus.

-- The four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates, broken out by SAT score, race, and gender.

-- Employment data for graduates: the percentage of graduates who, within six months of graduation, are in graduate school, unemployed, or employed in a job requiring college-level skills, along with salary data.

And so now, dear readers, what do you think? Have any suggestions for improving Utopia College?

I want to thank Ralph Wolff for the stimulating discussion that spawned this blog post. Of course, I take full responsibility for any and all weaknesses herein.

Canada's Single-Payer Health Care is Nothing to Emulate

Obama, before running for president, when he could be more candid, favored a Canadian-style single-payer, government-run health care system. Now, he's pulled back--at least until he's elected.

He might want to check on how the Canadian system is working. A new article reports that the chair of the committee that created Canada's single-payer system now says that the system has such serious deficiencies that no rationing of care or mass infusion of tax dollars can solve the problem. He now advocates replacing the system with a private one in which people have more choice. Another article presents another of those nightmare anecdotes in which a patient reports that the Canadian system is so overwhelmed that she couldn't get off the months-long waiting list even though she was losing her sight. And the average wait time to see a specialist is 18 weeks.

And that's in a country that is much easier to provide health care for than the U.S., which has many millions of new immigrants with extraordinary health care needs but with little money to pay into the system.

The Most Anti-Male Person in the World?

Following her book, "Are Men Necessary?" I shouldn't have been surprised at Maureen Dowd's most recent New York Times column.

Here are a couple of quotes from it:

"You simply operate on the assumption that no man matures after the age of 11."

“Most marriages that founder do so because of money — she’s thrifty, he’s on his 10th credit card."

That flips the reality on its head. American Demographic reports that women control consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer category. An Inc.com article states that women make "over 85% of the consumer purchases (in the United States) and influence over 95% of total goods and services."

The column listed criteria for a good husband and concluded that no men met the criteria.

This column is currently the #1 most-emailed New York Times column or article.

Would a major publication such as the New York Times publish something equally anti-woman, let alone anti-Black?

A Letter from an Angry White Male

I just received this email. I'm X'ing out details to preserve his anonymity. I have requested his permission to use his name. If he grants it, I'll reinsert these details as well as his name.

"I went to the ??? Police Dept. to apply for a position. When I asked for an application, I was told by the human resources clerk that the police dept. was not accepting applications from white males and that I should come back in 2 years.

I explained to the clerk that I was a small percentage Native American. The clerk said, "If you can provide any proof of that bloodline then you're in." I thought to myself this is not fair and did not apply on that basis.

The awareness I was being discriminated against worsened when I watched a black acquaintance of mine get an job at the ??? Police Dept. with no education and who could care less if he got the job. Later in life I saw him again and he didn't even like being a cop. Yet I had a passion for law enforcement, a degree in police science, and had a slim to none chance at the job.

I eventually left the state and moved to ???? where I applied to be a police office in ???. To my surprise I was hired fairly quickly. It seemed that ??? didn't care about skin color.

I was wrong. I watched people get promoted because they threatened to pull the race card. I grew sick of hearing, "You just stopped me cuz im black" as he or she sits in a vehicle with blacked out windows not even being able to see what color or gender they are.

I found myself cutting minorities more breaks on crimes or traffic stops just so I wouldn't have to hear the race card played or have to let them slide to prove I wasn't a racist.

It is sad but true that you get calls from a fellow officer who just got into a shooting and he says, "Yeah, I'm OK. Thank God the suspect was a white male--the media wont care." Or I hear officers say things like, "If I ever am forced to shoot my gun, I hope its not a minority."

Once, I, with multiple other officers, had to shoot a young Hispanic male. The media loved it! It became a frenzy for months. According to the media, we shot not because he tried to stab an officer with a butcher knife but because he was a Hispanic teenager. The sad thing is people believe everything the media says. I personally was very hurt because I never wanted to pull my trigger but had no choice. Again, I always treated everyone with respect and never judged anyone because of color or gender. Yet the media called me a racist! Eventually I became so stressed out that my blood pressure got so high that my doctor became fearful that I could have a stroke.

I have soooh many true stories relating to my and other white males being discriminated against that I am going to write a book.

I will not, though, be racist myself. And I will teach my daughter to treat everyone with respect regardless! I will not complain or tell her about my experience. That would create another generation of haters.

I hope that, somehow, my daughter will grow up to live in a country/world where it doesn't matter what color you are and there is racial harmony. But I also want her not to feel guilty about being white and to stand up for herself if and when she is discriminated against.

A Cure for Perfectionism

A number of my clients are so perfectionistic that they make every task painful to complete. So, they procrastinate until they must get it done, when usually it's, ironically, too late to do a good job.

I suggest that for every major task, they set a timer for 3 minutes and, in that time, list all the steps needed to complete the task. Then tackle each step sloppily, perhaps in just three minutes each. Then keep revising each step until it's done well enough.

So, for example, today alone, I used a variation of that technique with two clients:

An epidemiologist at one of the nation's most prestigious universities had been procrastinating writing a megaproposal. I said, "You have three minutes to list all the steps to getting that proposal done." After the three minutes, he had a complete list of bite-size tasks and said he now feels more motivated to get the proposal done.

An architect has trouble creating designs in a timely manner. Indeed, the longer his deadline the more trouble he has getting it done. We set a timer for 3 minutes and I said, "Draw the most brilliant design for that home addition that you can sketch in 3 minutes." He said that his three-minute design was better and less painful to create than if he had taken a month.

The Most Defensive People in the World?

Following publication of my article, America's Most Overrated Product: a Bachelor's Degree, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to blog on its site about it for a month.

I have never seen such defensiveness as I encountered in the readers' (mostly professors) responses. The focus of my blog was to document how little students grow in college, suggest a variety of approaches to improvement, and invite readers to agree, amplify, or disagree.

Instead, the large majority of responses were tangential and/or personal attacks. My 13 detailed posts in the month plus approximately 10 detailed rejoinders to their comments yielded little willingness to engage in the issue.

I believe the largest reason was defensiveness: If those professors looked inward, they'd have to realize they're the wrong people to be teaching undergraduates and are educating in a way that serves themselves far more than it serves their students. After all, they're hired and promoted based heavily on their research capabilities, attributes which often are inversely correlated with the ability to teach undergraduates.

I come away from my Guest Blogger stint at the Chronicle of Higher Education more convinced than ever that a bachelor's degree is America's most overrated product.

I'm confident that graduate instruction is not much better. I need search no further than my own family:

-- I look at the irrelevance of most of the courses my wife and I took in getting our Ph.D.s at Berkeley. For example, all the students in our programs were forced to take five five-unit graduate level statistics courses, even though the vast majority of us would never use any of it--If we needed advanced statistics, we'd hire a statistician. But one of the most powerful professors in the department was a statistician and he wanted to make sure that the courses he wanted to teach (Nonparametric Statistics anyone?) always had sufficient students enrolled.

-- Barbara and I had to write many long papers but rarely received much feedback on any of them, even though there were fewer than 10 students in her program and in mine.

-- My daughter went to Yale Law School, considered America's best. Yet when hired, she like most Yale Law School graduates, had to enter a training program on how to practice law. The Yale grads understood arcane and leftist legal theories but were clueless about what to do to prepare a case or succeed in the courtroom.

Many of my career counseling clients are physicians, attorneys, engineers, etc. Most of them believe their long, expensive education ill-equipped them to be competent in their profession. Or at minimum, it provided much too little learning of value for the time and money expended.

When I supervised student teachers at San Jose State University, despite their having nearly completed their teaching certification, most of them were bad teachers.

So, my summative message: I believe not only that the bachelor's degree is America's most overrated product, but that most higher education diplomas are.

Of course, alas, many professions require degrees, for example, doctor, lawyer, and teacher, although some school districts now allow alternative certification. But many careers don't require a degree. If not, a self-starter will learn more at far less cost at what I call You U: Learn, on a just-in-time basis, via self-study, workshops, mentors, etc. If you're worried about being unemployable because of your lack of a degree, write cover letters documenting how you've opted for substance over form.

If you want more formal education, even if you already have a degree, check out the offerings at community colleges. Because faculty is hired and promoted heavily on teaching ability, because the tuition is low, and community colleges offer a surprising array of programs, I believe they're among America's most underrated products.

America is Making a Risky Bet on its Entire Future

Since the 1960s, America has been placing ever more of its chips on replacing its culture with one that--as soon as possible--has no dominant culture, in which its residents (legal and illegal) have primary identification with their own race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

I am certainly not enamored of some aspects of American culture, for example, its worship of materialism and of celebrity, the too-great disparity between rich and poor, its failure to provide an adequate health care safety net, and the liberal bias of its most influential media and colleges. But America has spawned a generally good quality of life for most Americans and produced a remarkable array of accomplishments from the car to the computer, from stents to Spielberg.

I am amazed that America is betting its entire future on multiculturalism. Yes, the U.S. could end up a dynamic place in which "diversity is our greatest strength," but multiculturalism could, instead, accelerate America's descent into third-world status. After all, not one of the world's 200+ countries is a clear multicultural success story. Diversity, far from a strength, seems, in every country including the U.S., to perennially be more a source of strife than of strength.

Yet, without firing a shot, identity groups within the U.S. are replacing American culture with some yet evolving mixture in which pluribus drowns out unum, in which what's good for America (let alone the world) is replaced with what's good for Latinos, women, Blacks, fundamentalist Christians, etc.

As the decades go on, would you bet that most Americans will find the U.S. a more pleasant or less pleasant place to live? A more productive or less productive country? I'm not sure, but I am certain that we don't have sufficient basis for betting the whole country's future on multiculturalism.