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Purpose of a university is education, not research
March 6, 2013, Wednesday
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EDITOR'S note:
Is academic research really worth all the money that students are unwittingly paying for it? Not according to Larry Zicklin, former chairman of Neuberger Berman, and a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. In this opinion piece, he argues that if faculty members assumed larger teaching workloads, while doing less research, universities could deliver a college education at a fraction of its present cost.
WHEN I read academic literature, all too often by paragraph three I'm lost in a morass of quantitative analysis that is far beyond not only my abilities but those of almost every business person I've ever met.
In my view, the authors devote far too much of their time conducting research and writing about it in articles that only their peers understand and too little time actually teaching.
As a result, their students are getting progressively less for their money, a guarantee of future serious trouble for higher education.
As someone said about the North Pole, when you're there, every direction is down. I happen to think the American university system is on top of the North Pole now and the sides are steep. One solution? Maybe it's time to give our customers, the students, a choice in what they actually want to pay for, and possibly scholarly research isn't it.
Here's an example of the extent to which things are going wrong. A couple of years ago, a valued faculty member who was responsible for a prolific output of financial research at a well-known business school resigned. This caused great distress within the college, as the administration feared that the school's rankings would suffer. But while he was the school's most successful scholar, he certainly didn't teach anything related to his research. How practical was that research anyway?
I've worked in the financial area for 50 years and I didn't have a clue as to what his most recent articles were about - and nor did various business colleagues to whom I showed them. If we couldn't decipher his writings, for whom were they intended? My answer: The community of scholars who write for one another but not for their students and certainly not for business executives.
Are you kidding me?
By way of a second example, a faculty member at another college told me how she was reproached by her co-author for getting behind on their book. She tried to explain her lateness by pointing out the demands of her rigorous teaching load. "Are you kidding me?" the co-author said. "How can you teach that much and still get your work done?"
We are constantly reminded of the increasing cost of a college education and of the debt students take on to obtain a degree. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, about 20 million people attend college every year and 12 million of them take out loans to help pay for it. Outstanding student-loan debt now stands at nearly US$1 trillion, divided among 37 million people.
Of them, according to the Federal Reserve, 8.8 million are above the age of 50 and 2.2 million are over 60. Can you imagine being in your 50s or 60s and still owing on your student loan?
Double the inflation rate
As for how much students need to borrow, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder says that those attending four-year public universities in 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 paid up to 7.9 percent and 8.3 percent more, respectively, than in the previous 12 months, at least double the inflation rate over the same two years. This can't persist.
Resources from government funding, individuals, foundation grants and well-to-do parents are not as available as in the recent past. Eventually (I believe imminently) there will be an inflection point and colleges will be left with too much overhead, too few students and large budget deficits.
The top 50 or so schools may be temporarily exempt from the pain, but even they will suffer when the squeeze intensifies. Remember, in 2007 nobody could have forecast that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and AIG would get caught up in a financial tsunami and require government assistance in order to survive. Train wrecks happen in slow motion and I believe we are approaching just such a pile-up.
Along with health care, academia is one of the few industries that have enjoyed pricing power in a desultory business climate and it has certainly availed itself of that power. Higher education is also one of the few industries that has not improved its productivity despite a turbulent economic climate. But that will change. As we tell our students, the free market may sometimes work slowly, but work it ultimately will, even in academia.
There is no doubt that the technological change has already started, with distance or online learning rapidly increasing its share of the market. In the long run, traditional schools will have to cut their costs in order to meet this competition.
The article is adapted from Knowledge@Wharton, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. To read the original, please visit: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3187
Is academic research really worth all the money that students are unwittingly paying for it? Not according to Larry Zicklin, former chairman of Neuberger Berman, and a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. In this opinion piece, he argues that if faculty members assumed larger teaching workloads, while doing less research, universities could deliver a college education at a fraction of its present cost.
WHEN I read academic literature, all too often by paragraph three I'm lost in a morass of quantitative analysis that is far beyond not only my abilities but those of almost every business person I've ever met.
In my view, the authors devote far too much of their time conducting research and writing about it in articles that only their peers understand and too little time actually teaching.
As a result, their students are getting progressively less for their money, a guarantee of future serious trouble for higher education.
As someone said about the North Pole, when you're there, every direction is down. I happen to think the American university system is on top of the North Pole now and the sides are steep. One solution? Maybe it's time to give our customers, the students, a choice in what they actually want to pay for, and possibly scholarly research isn't it.
Here's an example of the extent to which things are going wrong. A couple of years ago, a valued faculty member who was responsible for a prolific output of financial research at a well-known business school resigned. This caused great distress within the college, as the administration feared that the school's rankings would suffer. But while he was the school's most successful scholar, he certainly didn't teach anything related to his research. How practical was that research anyway?
I've worked in the financial area for 50 years and I didn't have a clue as to what his most recent articles were about - and nor did various business colleagues to whom I showed them. If we couldn't decipher his writings, for whom were they intended? My answer: The community of scholars who write for one another but not for their students and certainly not for business executives.
Are you kidding me?
By way of a second example, a faculty member at another college told me how she was reproached by her co-author for getting behind on their book. She tried to explain her lateness by pointing out the demands of her rigorous teaching load. "Are you kidding me?" the co-author said. "How can you teach that much and still get your work done?"
We are constantly reminded of the increasing cost of a college education and of the debt students take on to obtain a degree. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, about 20 million people attend college every year and 12 million of them take out loans to help pay for it. Outstanding student-loan debt now stands at nearly US$1 trillion, divided among 37 million people.
Of them, according to the Federal Reserve, 8.8 million are above the age of 50 and 2.2 million are over 60. Can you imagine being in your 50s or 60s and still owing on your student loan?
Double the inflation rate
As for how much students need to borrow, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder says that those attending four-year public universities in 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 paid up to 7.9 percent and 8.3 percent more, respectively, than in the previous 12 months, at least double the inflation rate over the same two years. This can't persist.
Resources from government funding, individuals, foundation grants and well-to-do parents are not as available as in the recent past. Eventually (I believe imminently) there will be an inflection point and colleges will be left with too much overhead, too few students and large budget deficits.
The top 50 or so schools may be temporarily exempt from the pain, but even they will suffer when the squeeze intensifies. Remember, in 2007 nobody could have forecast that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and AIG would get caught up in a financial tsunami and require government assistance in order to survive. Train wrecks happen in slow motion and I believe we are approaching just such a pile-up.
Along with health care, academia is one of the few industries that have enjoyed pricing power in a desultory business climate and it has certainly availed itself of that power. Higher education is also one of the few industries that has not improved its productivity despite a turbulent economic climate. But that will change. As we tell our students, the free market may sometimes work slowly, but work it ultimately will, even in academia.
There is no doubt that the technological change has already started, with distance or online learning rapidly increasing its share of the market. In the long run, traditional schools will have to cut their costs in order to meet this competition.
The article is adapted from Knowledge@Wharton, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. To read the original, please visit: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3187
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