This article showed up in a tweet today. It is really discouraging when a university professor (and a well respected prof from a well respected school). This quote is directly from that post.
"He is not shy about admitting where teaching falls on the list of priorities for most of his peers: a distant third, after publishing articles and landing research grants"
Surely the students are job #1? Apparently not.
Universities don't like to be tagged with the soubriquet "trade school", but for many of the jobs that need to be performed, a trade school is exactly what is needed. I don't need research in statistics to be a better programmer. I need to learn programming (not computer languages, but actually what programming is about at some level).
Maybe we would have a more productive economy if we didn't bother with this university stuff - or at least as much of it as is required. But then hiring managers would actually have to look at skill, confidence, attitude to determine hiring and not irrelevant proxies like Grade Point Average.
"He is not shy about admitting where teaching falls on the list of priorities for most of his peers: a distant third, after publishing articles and landing research grants"
Surely the students are job #1? Apparently not.
Universities don't like to be tagged with the soubriquet "trade school", but for many of the jobs that need to be performed, a trade school is exactly what is needed. I don't need research in statistics to be a better programmer. I need to learn programming (not computer languages, but actually what programming is about at some level).
Maybe we would have a more productive economy if we didn't bother with this university stuff - or at least as much of it as is required. But then hiring managers would actually have to look at skill, confidence, attitude to determine hiring and not irrelevant proxies like Grade Point Average.
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