But what were the numbers when a professor taught a class of twenty undergraduates? Tuition dollars totaled $15,000, a teaching assistant wasn't necessary, and upkeep and miscellaneous expenses dropped to about $1,500 on the smaller room. But because this course, like the lecture, was taught by a full-time professor, it still cost “$15,000 or more.” The bottom line on the faculty member's twenty-student class: New Siwash lost $1,500! But why not give this class to a part-timer and pay that person $2,500 for the course? The new bottom line: the school made $11,000. Hence the administrative decision to encourage Professor Mumble to do his lecture
course every year and drop other undergraduate courses from his schedule, giving them instead to part-timers and grad students. Multiply Mumble by tens of thousands of professors across America, and the result was an expansion in the number and size of lecture courses from the 1970s to the present, and no growth in small undergraduate classesâas well as a shift from faculty to part-timers and grad students in charge of many of the small classes.
In its 1980s study of undergraduate education, the Carnegie Foundation declared that a large percentage of undergraduate “students at research universities report that âmost' or âall' of their classes have more than one hundred students enrolled” in them. A Rutgers professor noted that at his school, “classes of three hundred and four hundred were quite common,” and only a minority of “students had even one class, out of the four to six they were carrying [per semester], with twenty-five or fewer students in it.” The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana was a typical Big Ten offender: U of I featured a panoply of huge lecture courses, often enrolling five hundred students or more, sometimes even exceeding one thousand. One Illinois political science professor taught an introductory course that enrolled almost twelve hundred and, during alternating years, he did a lecture course with six hundred studentsâhe called the latter his “lounge act.”
Some students saw lecturers in the same terms as this political scientist, but they rounded out the portrait. An undergrad at Ohio State remarked:
A good prof in a lecture course is an entertainerâvery far away and not a person to speak to one-on-one. A bad prof is a prison guardâdefinitely not a person to speak to one-on-one. Can you believe that I had a prof [last year] who took daily attendance by making us always sit in the same seat, and having his grad assistants walk up the aisles with the seating charts, marking off the absent students? And he was the world's worst lecturer. Talk about a captive audience. I know what the hostages in Beirut felt like.
The
Chicago Tribune
reported that at many research universities, “Students find themselves in lecture halls seating 1,200 ⦠. Many undergraduates leave college without having had a one-on-one conversation with a professor.” Not surprisingly, the combination of huge lecture halls, undergraduate anonymity, and bad teaching produced a stream of negative student comments. A University of Illinois junior condemned his mechanical engineering professor because the latter “faced the blackboard the entire time,”
almost never taking student questions, apparently contemptuous of the undergraduates. An aggressive Indiana University senior remarked:
Every semester here I have encountered a professor who uses an overhead projector and writes continuously on it for the whole class, every class. No questions allowed, no eye contact made. I always feel compelled to ask these profs why they do not simply hand out all the notes they're going to write on the overhead at the beginning of the semester, and just let the students show up for the tests? Not one of these instructors has ever answered this question. They just walk away from me.
(In the twenty-first century, some lecturers use computer projectors, furiously typing their notes to appear on the overhead screens. Technology advances; the lecture method remains as stagnant as ever.)
Sometimes these sarcastic and astute reviews of faculty lecturing appeared in student course evaluationsâif the school's scantron form also provided space for written comments. Anne Matthews, a writer on higher education, quoted a sample of student remarks that she found: “Never let this man near students again; his hobby is general condescension.” “Eurobore.” “Cancels lots of classes.” Matthews commented that “some reviews are deliberately mean, some pan performance and ignore content, some are heartfelt and perceptive notes tossed over a very high wall.” Many undergraduates realized that their university screwed them over in lecture courses. Nevertheless, students failed to understand that, to quote Matthews:
Few campus adults in power take [student] course comments seriously. Who cares what the students say? The greatest of all campus secrets is passing time. Wait them out. They leave eventually. We stay. [Faculty always say]
You can't allow students to dictate in the classroom. No one is going to tell me what I can or can't do in my own courses
(original emphasis).
Matthews tracked student reactions from the late 1980s into the 1990s, but, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the complaints about the lecture system continue. In a random, cross-country survey of a recent edition of
The Insider's Guide to the Colleges
(compiled and edited by the staff of the
Yale Daily News
), the reader finds that at SUNY-Buffalo, “Most required lecture classes for first-year students have enrollments as large as
200 to 500,” and many students “just kind of sit through them, gazing off into space.” At Michigan State University, one undergraduate noted that the huge size of lecture classes makes it “impossible for the professor to give anything but multiple choice tests, the professor and TAs would never have enough time to grade five hundred essays.'” At the University of Colorado at Boulder, “Class size averages two hundred to five hundred for introductory” courses and many other ones. And at Washington State University, “Introductory classes, especially those that meet the core requirements, can enroll as many as five hundred students, and the norm in the other introductory courses is one hundred to two hundred.” To be fair to these schoolsâall Upward Drift research universities and members of NCAA Division I-Aâundergraduates at similar institutions make the same complaints. In fact, the most astonishing note in this litany is the proclivity of universities to burden their least academically capable studentsâfreshmen and sophomoresâwith the largest and meanest lecture courses.
Â
Â
In contrast to the passive roles students are encouraged to play in lecture/discussion classes, individualized and collaborative teaching approaches require active student involvement and participation in the teaching-learning process. Such methods encourage students to take greater responsibility for their own learning; they learn from one another as well as the instructor. The research literature indicates active learning produces greater gains in academic content [acquisition] and skills.
âPatrick T. Terenzini and Ernest T. Pascarella,
education professors.
Significantly, these experts contrast “lecture/discussion classes” with “active learning” situations; they and others discovered that not only did professors lecture undergraduates in huge halls, but that graduate assistants continued to lecture them in so-called “discussion sections”âsmall subsets of lecture classes with about twenty-five students. The effect upon undergraduates was almost the same in both situationsâpassivity, lack of responsiveness, and frequent failure to comprehend the material. One study found “lecturing to be the mode of instruction of 89 percent of the physical scientists and mathematicians, 81 percent of the social scientists, and 61 percent of the humanities faculty.” Another study calculated that the number of questions from students per classroom hour in discussion sections and lecture halls averaged 3.3, moreover, most of the queries were
“procedural” (for example, Is the final exam in this room?), and did “not really get at the substance” of the course. Even good students with good questions complained about the lecture format, particularly its rigid structure; one undergraduate commented, “Lectures frustrate me because they whiz along, and when a prof brings up an interesting point, he never stops to allow students to delve into it and to really think about it.”
This student cried out for an “individualized instructional approach,” and Terenzini and Pascarella stress that “Long trails of research suggest that ⦠[these] approaches are consistently more effective in enhancing subject-matter learning than are the more traditional” techniques like lecturing. The student-centered methods “emphasize small, modularized units of content, [and] student mastery of one unit before moving on to the next”; whereas the premise of every lecture is that “all students learn at the same rate ⦠learn in the same way, and through the same set of activities”âlistening to the lecturer, taking notes, and taking multiple-choice tests and exams en masse.
A vast and growing body of scholarship supports the nonlecture position, one expert on “Interactive Methods” summing up the findings: “While students may sit passively in a lecture class, they are forced to assume active roles” in nonlecture situations. However, a key to the success of alternative methods is “frequent feedback to students on their progress” in a course, not simply with numerical grades on scantron tests, but through lengthy conferences with the instructor during which the teacher carefully goes over the student's work in the course. The phrase
individualized instructional approaches
means exactly that, and strikes fear into faculty who want to spend minimal time with undergraduates, as well as administrators who want to keep their universities as research-oriented and cost-efficient as possible. If a class of twenty students taught by a professor loses money, imagine the cost of a class of ten students working with a faculty member and doing individual and collaborative projects; one in which, in addition to class time, the ten students meet one-on-one with that professor in semester-long tutorials? The actual dollar loss is high, but the time spent by the professor goes from about five hours a week to at least twenty.
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Beyond the amount of faculty time and energy involved in nonlecture teaching, most professors will not accept “individualized instructional approaches” because they reject their basic premise: faculty can learn from all of their students; therefore, listening to each at length is a worthwhile endeavor. Every faculty member in America mouths the cliché about “how
much I learn from my students,” but when questioned about this, most professors respond with about as much clarity and detail as their lecture course students exhibit when confronted by an obscure exam question. In fact, in surveys of faculty opinion, professors at research universities continually complain about the “attitudes” of average undergraduates, particularly their passivity in class, their absence of intellectual curiosity, their lack of questions, and their reluctance to do the course readings and discuss them. Of course, almost all faculty contact with average undergraduates occurs in lecture classes, so these criticisms are self-fulfilling-lecturing produces student passivity, absence of intellectual curiosity, and so on. Finally, professors rebuking students for not being engaged by lectures is an exercise in blaming the victim.
The average undergraduate understands the situation better than most doctorate-holding professors; a University of Texas (Austin) junior commented, “The reason for the lack of student interest in most classes at my school is the fact that profs fail to engage their brains during lectures. They seem so bored, and they're always in a hurry to leave as soon as the class ends. We know that faculty are concerned about their research, and not in teaching us, and so, like the profs, we go essentially âbrain-dead' during class.”
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Ernest Boyer summed up the situation in
College: The Undergraduate Experience in America
:
If faculty and students do not see themselves as having important business to do together, prospects for effective learning are diminished. If students view teachers as distant and their material as irrelevant, what could be a time of exciting exploration is reduced to a series of uninspired routines.
Fortunately, some excellent small universities and colleges still exist, and faculty there usually provide their students with individual attention and a multitude of active learning situations. At these schools, students often see faculty outside of the classroom and office hours, an almost unheard of occurrence at most research universitiesâindeed, at the latter, with students constantly “cutting” class, and very few going to faculty office hours, many undergraduates rarely see their professors at all. This reality is the final refutation of the myth that “great researchers = great teachers.”
NEW SIWASH IN RED INK
A
s the quality of undergraduate education declined in the final decades of the twentieth century, the price of tuition increased dramatically. Universities claimed that their costs had grown enormously and that they had to pass on these expenses to their “customers,” their students. The public, particularly parents of undergraduates, complained, but they could not discover the real reasons for the increases. And the media mainly focused on the price tag for a year at various famous schools, rarely investigating the causes or the situation at large, public research universities.
For most schools, the source of their financial problems were the drastic cuts in public and private funding to higher education during the final three decades of the twentieth century. By the late 1990s, some experts began to use dramatic metaphors to describe the situation, including the sinking of the
Titanic:
All in all, our actions [in higher education] are akin to a boat hitting an iceberg and the captain announcing that his highest priority, as the boat sinks, is saving the crew. The next priority is avoiding any inconvenience by continuing all activitiesâthe midnight buffet, the bingo game, the shuffleboard tournament. The third priority is repairing the boat. And the fourth and final one, should time permit, is saving the passengers.
âArthur Levine,
president of Teachers College
at Columbia University
Dr. Levine's metaphor implied that while American higher education sank, college presidents mainly wanted to save the crewâthe faculty and staff. Presidents also continued all university auxiliary activities, including big-time intercollegiate athletics and the accompanying party scene; moreover, these officials not only failed to repair their schools but showed little concern for the soon-to-be-drowned passengers/students.
Dr. Levine defined the iceberg as the sharply reduced funding and public support for American colleges and universities. He argued that through much of the twentieth century, higher education had been a “growth industry,” generously supported by all levels of government and the public, but during the 1980s higher education became a “mature industry,” with major expansion no longer possible. The economic prosperity of the late 1990s did not alter this situation; however, universities ignored this reality, instead squandering their resources in a cutthroat competition for research prestige, money, and undergraduate enrollment. And when students matriculated, schools gave them fun “activities” instead of meaningful educations.
Some critics compared higher education to corporate America, noting that many industries had downsized in the 1990s and, in lean-and-mean modes, prepared for the twenty-first century. But not higher education: university spending had continually outpaced revenue in the final decades of the century, also rising faster than the rate of inflation and the consumer price index. Then, when the stock market shot up and university endowment funds grew with it, this new source of money barely dented the escalating costs. The balance sheets of many universities mirrored those of their big-time athletic departments: no matter how many dollars came in, expenses exceeded income, resulting in year-end scrambles to balance the books. (Some research universities did downsize some departments, but invariably they moved the savings into other divisions. Moreover, the one unit that never shrank, and indeed grew faster and fatter than all other areas of the university, and lost greater sums of money every year, was the athletic department.)
The major cost for universities was the pursuit of research prestige. A U.S. government report noted that “research expenses at public colleges [and universities] increased 157% between 1981 and 1995,” most of it for salary raises for star professors and lesser research luminaries, as well as for equipment and other amenities to help academic departments try to move upward in the national rankings. Another huge and expanding cost was “bureaucratic bloat”: from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the number of nonresearch and nonteaching administrators and staff rose by 83 percent nationally and, at many schools, by well over 100 percent.
Administrators fueled “bureaucratic bloat” by employing more assistants, secretaries, receptionists, et cetera, and by encouraging academic departments to do the sameâoften to relieve research professors of contact with undergraduates. In addition, administrators allocated millions of dollars for buildings and grounds, in part to attract students to their schools (see Chapter 3), and also to keep them happy while on campus. George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, made a typical move by constructing a new $30 million student center, containing a state-of-the-art movie theater and food court. This school and many others also poured millions into their intercollegiate athletic facilities, but much less proportionally into undergraduate classrooms and libraries.
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Increasing expenses put college presidents and their assistants on fund-raising hamster wheels, engrossed in a never-ending search for dollars, primarily from the private sector. This obstructed long-range planning and attention to systemic problems, particularly undergraduate education. A former university official explained, “These days, all levels of university leadership are expected to devote ⦠[up] to 50 percent of their time to fund-raising.”
Traditionally, presidents and administrators of public colleges and universities gained the most amount of money for their schools from state legislatures and, to accomplish that task, they merged fund-raising with lobbying. In this endeavor, in the last decades of the twentieth century, they failed to avoid the iceberg that Arthur Levine described, and watched while state appropriations to their institutions plummeted.
States now typically supply much less than half the funding [for their public colleges and universities] and, in 1995, state funding had dropped to 11 percent of the budget of the University of California ⦠. A joke that circulates among [public] university presidents goes like this, “We've gone from being state-supported to state-assisted to state-located.”
âNancy J. Brucker, higher education consultant
Historically, public universities lived up to their namesâthe University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, and all other State U's were founded and supported by the people of their states, and, up to the 1970s, legislatures funded a large percentage of the financial needs of state schools, usually 75 percent or more. Then, taxpayer disenchantment with all government operations, especially universities, as well as difficult economic
times, slashed state contributions to higher education across the country, down to the twenty-percentile-or-lower range in many regions.
The boom times of the 1990s did not reverse this trend; in addition, in 1999, an important report on this topic predicted that “state spending on higher education will probably take a turn for the worse” in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The report also suggested that public colleges and universities would continue to compensate for meager state appropriations by extracting the missing and desperately needed dollars from their only dependable source of incomeâtheir undergraduate students.
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In the 1970s, when state legislatures first started cutting their funding for higher education, university administrators, searching for new revenue, decided that because tuition rates were generally low, schools could raise the price on this item and thus cover their budgetary shortfalls. As the tuition increases accelerated through the 1980s and beyondâthe U.S. General Accounting Office noted that from 1980 to 1995, the tuition fees of four-year public universities jumped
234 percent
âstudents and their families felt more than a monetary pinch; in fact, “the portion of household income needed to pay for college nearly doubled.” Adding to the average student's financial dilemma, the Reagan and Bush administrations severely cut federal loan programs subsidizing tuition for many undergraduates: thus, while tuition costs rose, federal money shrank, forcing many students to borrow privately and to assume massive debts.
Paralleling the tuition increases at public universities were even more dramatic ones at private institutions, particularly in the Ivy League and at other prestigious private colleges. These schools noticed the success of public institutions in raising tuition, and they decided to follow and then trump them. For example, tuition at Penn went from $3,790 in 1976 to $24,230 in 1999; other Ivies and sub-Ivies had similar leaps, caused in part by increasing costs but even more by what economists term the
Chivas Regal Effect
âthe consumerist belief that price equals quality.
In the 1980s, Ivy League administrators discovered that many Americans believed that the higher the tuition price, the better the education product, and so the Ivies began to raise tuition at an extraordinary pace. Helping them sustain these increases was their selectivity in admissions, convincing many consumers that hard-to-obtain places in freshmen classes were another sign of quality undergraduate education. Often the Ivies delivered an excellent product, but, more important, they produced a “halo effect,” consumers believing that many other schools with escalating prices, including
some public ones, also offered first-class undergraduate education programs.
When experts studied this phenomenon, they quickly concluded that tuition was rising faster than educational quality. In fact, as the Carnegie Foundation and others proved in the 1980s and 1990s, general undergraduate education at some private schools and at most large, public research universities was usually mediocre and sometimes wretched. However, the media buried this reality under countless stories on the difficulties of “getting into” Harvard and other Ivies, as well as the necessity of high SAT/ ACT scores for admissionâthe latter topic was also hyped by the ubiquitous advertising of companies selling SAT/ACT tutorial programs.
From the 1990s on, as a result of the media misfocus and the desire for a Chivas Regal education, many college-bound students and their parents ignored the actual acceptance rates of most universities. They should have read the annual guidebooks carefully: those publications punctured the selectivity myth, revealing that the vast majority of America's colleges and universities rarely rejected applicants.
U.S. News
even listed the hundreds of schools who accepted over 90 percent of their applicants. That's nine-plus out of ten students who send in application forms! One wonders what disqualified an applicant to these schools? Perhaps the lack of a pulse.
Yet, despite a market heavily weighted in favor of student buyers, tuition prices continued to rise, and the quality of undergraduate education sank.
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Robert Rosenzweig, president of the Association of American Universities, an association of 58 major research universities, put it very bluntly when he charged: “For too long, universities, led by the best of them, dealt with their neglect of undergraduate education by asserting that simply being in the presence of faculty working at the frontiers of their fields was beneficial to students. That sometimes seems to mean little more than being in the same city with them.”
Compounding the neglect to which Rosenzweig refers is the unhappy truth that while students were being shortchanged in the classroom, they were shelling out more tuition dollars at the bursar's window.
â
U.S. News & World Report
college issue for 1990
Ten years later, the neglect of undergraduate education has become, at many research universities, the abandonment of undergraduate education. The recent Boyer Commission report,
Reinventing Undergraduate Education:
A Blueprint for America's Research Universities
(funded by the Carnegie Foundation), called for a total overhaul of the current system and a major commitment by research universities to educating their undergraduates. The report also contained a large number of specific proposalsâindeed, if implemented, undergraduate education at these universities would equal the product now provided by small colleges like Swarthmore. However, to achieve this result, large, public research universities would not only have to obtain and spend enormous sums of money on general undergraduate education, but also transform their internal culture. Therefore, even if the money miraculously appeared, the likelihood of these schools changing their value systems and privileging undergraduate education is extremely remote.
One writer on this topic explained that the primary value for administrators and faculty at research universities is “
prestige maximization
, a dedication to the goal of
institutional excellence
” (emphasis added), as gauged by the fame of the school's research programs and professors: “Being at the top of the heap is the quintessential
positional
good
” for these institutions, yet the top “is limited by its very nature to a few winnersâbut all can aspire.” However, “one of the by-products” for every school in this competition is the “declining state of [their] undergraduate education” programs.
Even
U.S. News
, generally an advocate for “the student consumer,” acknowledged the difficulty of emphasizing undergraduate education at large, public research institutions. The magazine's 1999 college issue discussed such “reforms” as “making faculty teach more and research less,” but admitted that these changes “would involve big trade-offs. Research can bring a college public notice and improve its reputation, which can boost enrollment and donations, which in turn can boost academic standing and help the [school's] bottom line.”