I Weep For The Future - Part II

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about the inadequacies of our educational system, I'd like to expand on two points.

First, a short anecdote about how well prepared students are coming out of high school, or even the first two years of college. I was talking with a colleague who teaches statistical analysis for business majors. This is an upper level course (juniors and seniors), meaning that everyone who takes it has already taken college algebra and calculus. He says that on the first day of class he asks his students "What is 6 times 7?" Anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the class pulls out their phones and uses the calculator function, while the rest of the class figures it out in their heads. Regardless of the method, practically all the students get it right.

Then my colleague asks them "What is 7 times 6?" The same students who used a calculator to answer the first question do so again. They don't understand one of the basic principles of mathematics - the commutative property (a x b = b x a; 6 x 7 = 7 x 6; 2 x 3 x 4 = 4 x 3 x 2).

Sadly, we've reached the point where the use of a calculator to solve 6 x7 is not that remarkable. But the truly sad aspect of this story, and one of the points I made yesterday, is that students aren't understanding (and we're not making them understand) what they're being taught.They didn't need to recalculate 7 x 6, they just needed to understand that 6 x 7 = 7 x 6.

The second point I'd like to make today is the importance of incentives. Here in Texas public universities are subject to what is called formula funding. As the name implies, schools receive state funds according to a formula. Part of the formula includes measures of enrollment and graduation rates. Nothing in the formula measures the quality of the graduates. In other words, the more students a university accepts, and the more it graduates, the more money it receives from the state. So the school is rewarded for dragging in warm bodies off the street, dumbing down the curriculum and lowering standards (grade inflation, anyone?), and funneling the mouth-breathing masses across the stage at graduation time.

I exaggerate somewhat to make my point, but not much.

It's heresy to say this, but not everyone belongs in college. We as a nation would be better served by accepting that and providing quality alternatives - trade or vocational programs, for example.

We'd also benefit from a thorough evaluation of the incentive and reward system used not only to fund our institutions of higher learning, but the faculty and administrators residing therein. We're overrun with administrators, most of whose function is to satisfy some governmental fiat. Likewise, I've seen numerous egregious abuses of the tenure system. Name one other industry where, once people are comfortably ensconced in it, they are practically guaranteed a position for life. (Well, okay, I guess that applies to congress also. I should have said "one productive and worthwhile industry.")

Reward professors and universities on the quality, not the quantity, of graduates and watch American productivity and innovation skyrocket.

But like I said yesterday, that's easier said than done...