Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable.
- teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs
- teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture
- Performing cutting edge research
- minor league sports teams
The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities.
If you have a physicist who's at the leading edge of research in their field, you want them doing that research, not teaching 18 year old's Newton's laws of motion. And they're mostly not doing that teaching, that gets farmed out to an adjunct paid starvation wages. So the kid who's paying through the nose to attend a top university with the best researchers doesn't get to interact with them much and gets an inferior education compared to one where they hired and properly compensated someone to actually focus on teaching.
If we want to train people for specific jobs - create institutions that do that. If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years before they get a jr. associate position at their Dad's investment bank, create a separate institution for that. Major league sports should create and manage their own feeder leagues to develop players, no reason to cram that into a university. We should create dedicated research institutions so researchers don't have to pretend to care about teaching.
If you have a physicist who's at the leading edge of research in their field, you want them doing that research, not teaching 18 year old's Newton's laws of motion. And they're mostly not doing that teaching, that gets farmed out to an adjunct paid starvation wages. So the kid who's paying through the nose to attend a top university with the best researchers doesn't get to interact with them much and gets an inferior education compared to one where they hired and properly compensated someone to actually focus on teaching.
If we want to train people for specific jobs - create institutions that do that. If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years before they get a jr. associate position at their Dad's investment bank, create a separate institution for that. Major league sports should create and manage their own feeder leagues to develop players, no reason to cram that into a university. We should create dedicated research institutions so researchers don't have to pretend to care about teaching.