UC Berkeley is far better known than Tsinghua University, the best university in China. Of course, Berkeley’s prestige rests on research and graduate teaching. At the undergraduate level things are quite different. Tsinghua probably has the smartest undergraduates in the world (1 in 10,000 students who take a national test get in); Berkeley isn’t close.
At Tsinghua, every department is assigned a quota of undergraduate majors (e.g., 100) that is the maximum number of undergraduates in that major. The departments fight over this number: Every department wants to increase it. I use italics because the situation at Berkeley (and probably every other American research university) is the opposite: Everyone fights to do as little undergraduate teaching as possible.
I learned these facts from a visiting professor at Tsinghua. Why is the situation so different at Tsinghua than in America? “They’re fun to teach,” he said, meaning the undergraduates. “No one ever says that at Berkeley,” I said. Later I learned he was a visiting professor from Berkeley. Implicit in his comment was that both of us knew that the Berkeley undergraduates are not fun to teach.
That little comment — “They’re fun to teach,” which was said a bit ruefully, acknowledging that Berkeley, where he spends most of his time, was much different — expresses in a nutshell what’s wrong with all American higher education. Berkeley undergraduates would be fun for someone to teach. I liked many of them. They have many good qualities. But very few of them want to be professors; nor do their talents usually lie in that direction. Forcing them to be taught by people (professors) who really only know something (how to be professors) that their students don’t want to learn, and forcing Berkeley professors to teach students who don’t want to learn the only thing they really know, is just a recipe for unpleasantness and low-level misery on both sides (professor and student). That’s exactly what professors and students feel most of the time.
Just as drug companies hide the side effects of their drugs, both professors and students hide the side effects of this life-wasting situation. At Berkeley, few non-professors know the vast array of deals that are struck to reduce one’s undergraduate teaching. In Psychology, there has been long-lasting resentment that you can’t use grant money to buy your way out of teaching. Students hide how much cheating goes on. A Penn student told me: No student project at Penn is completely honest. At Berkeley, surveys have revealed high amounts of cheating. Few outsiders know the low level of lecture attendance at Berkeley.
A better system would be one that helped Berkeley undergraduates — not to mention the students at every other American college — be in contact with people who would enjoy teaching them. (And in that situation, I’m sure their many non-academic talents, which professors usually didn’t notice, would shine.) Simple as that. The current system hinders that contact. Columbia University has taken a step in the right direction by having no classes on Friday, making it easier for students to do internships. When I taught a class that helped Berkeley undergraduates learn what they wanted to learn, my colleagues complained. According to them, my students weren’t learning proper psychology. It’s true, they weren’t. My students were learning what they themselves wanted to learn instead of what some professors thought they should learn. My approach was about a thousand times more effective in producing learning but my colleagues had lived in darkness so long they could no longer see light.
Seth,
What makes the Tsinghua University undergraduates fun to teach? Are they for the most part future academics, and therefore want to learn what their professors want to teach?
Great post. Good on you.
When I taught a class that helped Berkeley undergraduates learn what they wanted to learn, my colleagues complained. According to them, my students weren’t learning proper psychology. It’s true, they weren’t. My students were learning what they themselves wanted to learn instead of what some professors thought they should learn.
Nothing like a little professional jealousy courtesy of colleagues mired in the status quo.
I have to say, one of the things I very, very much enjoy about this blog is your honesty regarding higher education.
Having suffered through nearly three years of college myself, your points are dead on. I particuarly like the idea of giving the students Friday’s for internships, which will help them far more in preparation for the real world than any amount of class lectures.
All so true. (Well, the parts about the Berkeley undergrad experience, anyway.) But even if we all agree, under the current system, who has an incentive to change the status quo? No one. The anomaly isn’t Berkeley – the anomaly, at least based on what I’ve seen of the US higher education system, is Tsinghua.
A more interesting comparison to Tsinghua might be with Caltech – are their undergrads all grade grubbers with disinterested research-focused profs? I’ve heard otherwise.
Why are Tsinghua undergraduates fun to teach? Nadav, I haven’t yet taught them, but I know enough to say you are exactly right: They have similar strengths and interests as the professors.
Tsinghua undergraduates are indeed like Caltech undergrads. I think that every day — I was a Caltech undergrads. That might be the American example closest to Tsinghua.
Who has incentive to change the current system? Well, the students do, obviously. Berkeley professors would like to teach much less. Which would happen if someone else — those who would enjoy teaching Berkeley students — did more of the teaching. The taxpayers would benefit from an economically less wasteful system (and the parents among them would like to see their children happier and better appreciated). I think all three sides have incentives to change. But I agree with your overall point, which is that the system is hard to change. Perhaps the big barriers to change are three: 1. Change would require acknowledgment of how bad the current system is, and that would mean acknowledgment of the self-serving lies that have been told about it (“we’re teaching them to think”). 2. The future system would probably contain fewer research professors. Maybe a lot fewer. 3. The biggest victims of the current system are students, who are relatively powerless.
Andrew, Columbia has nothing like this?
Precisely correct. That’s why the freshman-to-senior value added in reading, writing, thinking, quantitative reasoning, etc. is so low. See my article on the subject in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. chronicle.com/free/v54/i34/34b01701.htm
Marty, I thought of you as I wrote it.
How did I structure the class “so that students learned what they wanted to learn”? I let them do whatever they wanted — volunteer work of some sort — off campus. We met once a week and talked about it. In other classes, I let students do their term project on whatever they wanted so long as it was off campus and not library research (thus pushing them out of their comfort zone and requiring them to do something new). They inevitably did something they wanted to learn about.
Why did you retire so early from Berkeley? Is this why? You’re now at Tsinghua….isn’t there only a few faculty members in your department? I hope you like it better. Not use being unhappy in our life if we can get out of it…