This essay by Philip Greenspun, about the trouble with American college education, is most notable for its description of a class lecture by Robert Schiller at Yale:
- 0-4:30: name of course, name of professor, names of TAs, pictures of TAs [all stuff that could easily have been on a handout or Web site]
- 4:30-5:15: bragging about how many important people on Wall Street took his course, bragging about how great the course is even for people who aren’t going on to Wall Street
- 5:15-6:20: talking about how every human endeavor involves finance, e.g., if you’re a poet it will help you get published to know how finance works [my haiku: AIG bankrupt; your taxes gone to Greenwich; no one hears your screams]
- 6:20-7: talking about an unrelated course, Econ 251, and who taught it in previous years [big excitement at a university: some guy other than the usual lecturer taught it because Kahuna #1 was on leave]
- 7-10: history of why two intro finance courses exist, glorious biography of teacher of the other course, [after several minutes, we learn that the other course has a bit more math]
- 10-11:30: show of hands for who is interested in organic chemistry, discussion of how Robert Shiller is reading about this because he has such broad intellectual interests [implicit comparison to finance wizards, though Shiller is not able to cite an example of how organic chemists managed to bankrupt their shareholders and wreck the world economy]
- 11:30-15:00: writes authors of textbook on blackboard, says it is “very detailed”, discusses reactions of previous classes of students to this book, talks about his vacation in the Bahamas with some other important guy, reading textbook by the pool unlike the other stupid tourists who were reading novels. Discussion of what number the current edition is. “I met a really prominent person on Wall Street” who told him that his son had dropped out of the course because the textbook was too hard. Apparently Yale students are too stupid/lazy to read this book intended for undergrads at schools with more motivated students.
- 15-16: discussion of how library is obsolete in the Internet age, how Franco Modigliani is 2nd author of primary textbook, a Nobel Prize winner, and “my teacher at MIT”
Funny! Spy had a similar article about 24 hours of an all-sports-talk radio show. Okay, Robert Shiller is full of himself. The most telling criticism of the modern university is in a comment by Mike Lin:
The first day of Statistics 100 at the University of Michigan, the professor said our final grade was either the average score of our midterm and final, or the score of the final — whichever was greater. Our labs and homework assignments did not impact our course grade. My roommate, also enrolled in the same course, didn’t make the first class. I told him about the grading system. Neither of us attended another class, nor took the midterm.
Before the final, we spent two days straight, reading the material and doing problem sets. I got a B+. He got an A-. [Shades of Tucker Max.]
I am ashamed to admit that I wasted all those lectures and labs that my family paid for. But what does it say about inadequacy and inefficiency of the lecture system when we arguably learned the practical application of our course material with 24 hours of self-study spread over two days and a $100 textbook?
It says a lot.
Via Aaron Swartz.
I was asked to review Robert Shiller’s recent ‘Animal Spirits’ for an Israel based magazine called Azure. I spent a fair bit of time on the job, but Azure declined to print the piece – presumably because I thought it was a bad book:
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2009/06/animal-spirits-akerlof-shiller-review.html
That aside, I think that psychometrics has shown that most educational claims are bogus since heritable intelligence and personality account for so much of the variation in educational outcomes.
https://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/07/replacing-education-with-psychometrics.html
Therefore, coverage of specific valuable content by formal lectures plus training in specific skills via personal apprenticeship are probably what most education ought to be about (education for its own sake being a real but small minority activity).
Heh. Well I could have gone my entire life without knowing that Shiller is a d*che. I have never been anywhere near Yale but his book has literally saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars. If enough people read “Irrational Exuberance” in high school (it’s easy enough for a high schooler) the tremendous suffering of the housing crisis could have been averted. The act of simply identifying the cliches that people start to believe in a bubble could go a long way to helping people avoid losing their money.
While I agree with the author that grades given by non-objective professors (human beings) are a complete joke, IT certifications are not the model you want to look at. They are just as un-objective because they are tests written by humans. The MCSE is the biggest joke in all of IT (I have one — years ago.) The purpose of the MCSE is for MS to be able to create a lot of admins by giving them a test that everyone cheats on so that they can say the TCO of their systems is low. Self-taught linux/unix admins make much more than an MCSE, but Linux is free and Unix is way better than Windows, so MS needs a reason for corporations to buy their products. Cheap admins are the answer. The MCSE asks arbitrary questions that reveal zero problem-solving skills, they are just canned, meaningless phrases from MS.
If you want to know how IT certifications work, google “brain dump.” IT certifications are worthless because you can’t measure the skills of a good sysadmin in a test where a person answers multiple-choice questions. Redhat has slightly better tests but they still need a LOT of work.
It may be the case that there aren’t easy, efficient ways to sort out who has the right skills for various careers. Universities aren’t the answer and superficial tests, even if graded by a computer, aren’t the answer.
BTW I’m in grad school at a supposedly good university and I have found that cheating and plagiarism are tacitly tolerated. If I didn’t like interacting with some of the other students and teachers I would quit. There are a few decent reasons for me being there but it certainly isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
PS are you really criticizing Shiller for being a name-dropper *cough*Feynman*cough*
Logic, as taught by your friendly neighborhood Philosophy department, in my opinion/experience, has a lot to do with problem-solving. But I am not sure who else agrees with me on that!
Great article. The current economic crisis is a real opportunity for big state universities to rethink what they do. I suspect that there are some “stages of grief” involved, but I’ll be curious to see what Berkeley does to reshape how it educates its students. I came to Michigan when it was already well along in dealing with a similar crisis, but I have to say that I’ve never been anywhere that has been more thoughtful and experimental in dealing with these issues, although there’s a lot of inertia.
Yale has always been in a league of its own, and the Schiller lecture reminds me of a history lecture I sat in on when I was looking at schools that convinced me not to go there. I went instead to a small and intense college, although I ended up having one experience very similar to the stats story cited above. I took a cognitive psychology course and because my girlfriend lived at a different school some distance away ended up missing a very large proportion of the classes. So that meant that I really had to learn the material on my own and make my own judgments about what was important and how the instructor would assess it. I ended up doing very well in the course (the instructor, who was a terrific teacher, didn’t hold a grudge), and it was a very useful experience.
I’ve found that it’s really hard to predict who will get what from an educational experience, and even hard to know what will resonate many years hence. The message I take from this is that our responsibility as faculty is to provide students with challenges and opportunities to think and learn about a broad range of important questions. In fields like psychology, that’s pretty easy to do, but it’s also pretty easy to forget that that’s the point of the enterprise.
One interpretation of Mike Lin’s anecdote is that the lectures are worthless. Another one is that the final just doesn’t do a good job testing what students know.
I think it’s common knowledge that tests are an imperfect measurement of knowledge, so that’s the explanation I would pick.
Of course that doesn’t change the fact that there are bad teachers out there, but at least my experience has been that most of them are good. Taking a university course is a great way to learn about a subject, especially if you take the time to ask questions.
Tim
Criticizing the first lecture of the semester for being mostly administrivia and posturing seems a bit weak.
CCS and Peter, I thought the report of Shiller’s lecture was funny. That’s why I quoted it. Peter, I agree it isn’t exactly incisive critiicism.
CCS, it would be name-dropping if I said something like: “the other day, I was talking to Feynman . . . “. I don’t think anything’s wrong with telling a story about how he helped me learn to think for myself.
Shiller’s entire course is available for download here: https://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial-markets/
My daily commute is about an hour long, and I recently finished listening to all of Shiller’s lectures. I can say that Greenspun’s criticism is unfair. Shiller may not be the most dynamic speaker, and it’s true that the introductory lecture was particularly weak. However, I learned a lot from the course, and I also found Shiller himself to be an intelligent and prescient economist. Rumor has it that he’s on the short-list for the Nobel prize in economics (for good reason, I think). Meanwhile, Greenspun is best known for heading up a dot-com company that crashed and burned in a most spectacular way. Last time I checked his blog, he seemed to have some sort of obsession with helicopters.
i agree with Alex Chernavsky; the online course is first rate and provides long-lasting useful insights into investing. The guest speakers were especially useful, since with hindsight they sounded a little silly. Overall, the lectures provided a framework to structure a portfolio. There was so much useful information it’s difficult to single out just one. But, for me, Shiller’s bemusement relative to “magical thinking” that is pervasive in the retail investing public was especially insightful.