[Note: Thursday, June 26 at 2 PM New York time, I will be discussing with George Leef the book, Who Needs College Anymore? The event is free. Register here. ]
If you are a college professor, you want to teach students who are naturally excited by the subject matter you are covering. But the vast majority of students are not like that. As a result, many professors try to teach as little as possible. When they do teach a class, it too often degenerates into “I pretend to teach, and they pretend to learn.”
I think we have a fundamental mismatch. There is an excess supply of college professors. We deal with this by artificially boosting the demand for college.
Think of the students who are excited by academic subjects as the natural demand for college education. In the late 1960s, when the Baby Boom started to reach college age, their large numbers raised the natural demand for college. But the supply of college professors was not high. It was a great time to expand the supply of college professors by enlarging Ph.D programs.
By the late 1980s, the supply of professors had increased by more than enough. As the Baby Boom gave way to later generations, the natural demand for higher education leveled off and has been falling for quite some time. But the machinery for producing new Ph.D’s has not adjusted.
What has adjusted has been an increase in artificial demand for college, meaning students who are not excited by academic subjects. These students have a variety of motives for attending college. These include:
obtaining prerequisites for work in K-12 education, medicine, or other fields
signaling intelligence and conscientiousness to employers
doing what they think upper-middle class young people aged 18-22 are supposed to do
doing what their parents think upper-middle class young people aged 18-22 are supposed to do
enjoying the non-academic parts of college (sports, social life, experimenting with sex and drugs, etc.)
Bryan Caplan thinks that (2) is really important, arguing that it drives the higher salaries earned by college graduates. But I think that (1), (3), and (4) are the most important, because they enable colleges to attract a population that is more ambitious than the population that does not go to college.
In addition, there are many students on campus who just have no good reason for being there. You cannot force-feed these students multivariate calculus or analytic philosophy or English literature. Colleges adapt by offering dumbed-down courses and grade inflation.
A lot of the artificial demand for college comes from funding sources other than student-paid tuition. Alumni support and government funding enable colleges to build up their non-academic amenities. Many students are subsidized with government loans and grants, or with support from college endowments.
Higher education is one of the most effective lobbying forces in the United States. There are colleges in just about every Congressional district. The lobbyists have built up a number of myths about higher education. One myth is that funding for research must be funneled through universities to be effective. Another myth is that college is for everyone. Yet another myth is that not going to college dooms a person to a miserable life.
As far as public policy goes, act as if there is a huge natural demand for college. So we feed the artificial demand, wasting a lot of time and resources.
If the artificial demand were to go away, colleges would have to downsize. Other institutions would emerge to give young people aged 18-22 experiences that they would find interesting and useful.
I think the focus on teaching as the role of the university is a mistake in trying to understand it. In economics I heard from multiple people (professors and others) that even saying you like to teach is a bad idea when interviewing, because most schools only care about your research output/grant input, and admitting you like to teach suggests you will coast after tenure. Not just some people, but nearly everyone who touched on the subject said that.
So most big schools, and most smaller ones too probably, are actively selecting against good teachers and for researchers who will only teach if forced. As such, why would students respond well to the average or even above average teachers? They are awful by selection.
The service universities actually provide is research (really successful grant applications), and all the stuff about teaching is just what lets them maintain the nonprofit fig leaf and the subsidy heavy train, along with a steady stream of grad students to do the work.
I agree with the underlying assumptions in Caplan's case, but the interest level of students and professors can vary significantly depending on several factors. I graduated from college relatively recently (within the last decade) and my observation from taking many humanities classes from different departments is that the presence of the professor, dryness of the material, and the length of lectures does matter a lot.
For example, I had a 3 hour lecture on Plato's Republic delivered by a droning professor who did not care if you were listening and that was a very different experience from a 90 minute lecture on the Crusades delivered by a very passionate professor who had written books on that subject. However, I would concede that history majors in general probably have more interest in their major than philosophy majors do in theirs.