The presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges have decided to stop participating in the annual college rankings by U.S. News and World Report.

From the NY Times. I commented earlier on the contradiction between how college presidents think students should be judged — they believe it is fine to judge all students according to one standard that usually has little to do with their strengths and goals — and how they wish to be their colleges to be judged.

“Frankly, it had bubbled up to the point of, why should we do this work for them?” said Judith P. Shapiro, the president of Barnard College.

Yes, exactly: Why help prospective students? Lest there be any doubt for whom colleges exist.

A Harvard task force has concluded that Harvard undergraduate education needs improvement. One task force member is Eric Mazur, a professor of physics. He has presumably given the matter a lot of thought. Here is what he does and says:

As a model for innovative teaching, Professor Skocpol [head of the task force] pointed to Professor Mazur, the physicist.

He threw out his lectures in his introductory physics class when he realized his students were not absorbing the underlying principles, relying instead on memory to solve problems. His classes now focus on students working in small groups.

“When I asked them to apply their knowledge in a situation they had not seen before, they failed,” Professor Mazur said. “You have to be able to tackle the new and unfamiliar, not just the familiar, in everything. We have to give the students the skills to solve such problems. That’s the goal of education.”

The other faculty in Professor Mazur’s department are surely terrific at tackling “new and unfamiliar” physics problems, which is the skill Professor Mazur wants to teach his students. Yet these other faculty are obviously not good teachers. (When he lectured, Mazur was simply imitating those around him.) I conclude that the skills needed to (a) do good physics research and (b) teach physics well are quite different. So why is Mazur emphasizing the skills needed to do the former (research) and not the latter (teaching)? And what about all the other jobs in the world — what do “you have to be able to” do in those jobs? The goal of education is not as obvious as Mazur claims.

The electrical charge of a single electron was first determined by Robert Millikan, who made a mistake in his calculations (wrong value for the viscosity of air). It was several years before this mistake was noticed. In the meantime, other physicists calculated the charge on a single electron. They did not make Millikan’s mistake — yet they got nearly the same (wrong) answer! Over time, the answers gradually drifted toward the correct answer.

That is essentially what is happening here. Mazur realizes something is wrong with the current system, but he has twisted his thinking — just as post-Millikan scientists determining the charge of an electron tweaked their equipment and data analyses — until the discrepancy is small enough to live with. The notion that “the goal of education” is being able to solve new and unfamiliar physics problems (or new and unfamiliar problems in general) doesn’t survive even a little scrutiny, but that’s what a Harvard professor who cares about education has come to believe.

1. “I don’t teach passing, I teach teamwork,” says a Professor of Ball Handling at an elite university.

2. The more prestigious the school, the taller its students and professors.

3. The Bell Curve is about the advantages of being tall. Taller people have better life outcomes, the authors discover via analysis of a large data set. Curiously, the authors — both tall — conclude that tall people should be favored even more.

4. The better students say that at college they learned how to learn. They mean they learned how to learn to play a sport.

5. At “research” universities the professors spend more time playing basketball than teaching.

6. A Princeton, New Jersey company develops and sells a fast standardized way to measure basketball ability.

7. Sports Illustrated publishes an essay titled “What Every Educated Person Should Know.”

8. By graduation, students know very well how good at basketball they are but know almost nothing about their ability in other areas.

The excellent humorist Henry Alford wrote “What If” articles for Spy magazine and, more recently, for Vanity Fair, such as “What If Paris Hilton Were President of the United States?”

Generalization #1: Everyone likes to be listened to. Being a professor is being paid to be listened to. It’s like being a restaurant reviewer or a professional athlete — your job is doing what others do for fun. Generalization #2: American colleges are run more for the benefit of professors than for the benefit of students, as I have intimated earlier.

That’s why this complaint is noteworthy:

This has been an excruciating term, because for the first time I had students who resented having to think, to work, to meet expectations, who seemed to really believe that showing up was all it took . . . As hard as I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to salvage any time for my own research, so I feel as though — in addition to wasting my efforts and care and concern on students who wouldn’t even grasp that I was doing them some favors (yes, I’ll teach extra evening sessions to help you understand the material that was a prerequisite for the course, but, um, yes, you need to do the reading) — I made absolutely no progress toward tenure. . . . This term has taken too much out of me, and right now, the thought of teaching again — ever — makes me want to sob. So here’s my secret: I don’t want to go back. I never want to see these people again — colleagues or students — and I think I made a terrible mistake.

A comment was “AMEN!”

I’m sure we’re genetically wired to teach and learn but that doesn’t mean the process can’t go badly wrong. We’re genetically wired to eat, too, and lots of ways people eat are very unhealthy. I have compared formal education to agriculture. Sure, agriculture is more efficient than hunting and gathering but agriculture caused nutrient deficiencies that reduced human health for a very long time. (My weight-control research and omega-3 research suggest it is still doing so.) We barely know how to eat. This complaint suggests we know even less how to teach.

In the programming language R, ! is the negation function — !FALSE is TRUE, for example. The !Golden Rule, the opposite of the Golden Rule, is to treat others as you yourself do not wish to be treated.

An example comes from Colin Diver, the President of Reed College (my alma mater), who complains in an Atlantic Monthly piece about college rankings. Reed has opted out of the U.S. News and World Report rankings. President Diver explains why:

Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies.

That’s right: If different colleges have different goals, it is unfair and misleading to rank them on the same scale.

By far the most important consequence of sitting out the rankings game . . . is the freedom to pursue our own educational philosophy, not that of some newsmagazine.

Actually, you can pursue a singular educational philosophy in any case, rankings or no rankings. It’s just that the rankings punish you for doing so.

This is an example of the !Golden Rule because what President Diver complains about happens in every Reed classroom. All the students in a class are graded on the same scale with the same requirements. Perhaps different students have different goals, just as different colleges have different goals? Perhaps this system of grading punishes students with unusual goals, just as the U.S. News ranking system punishes colleges with unusual goals?

Speaking of giving students more power over what they learn, as I did recently, this article says it is working well at Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts.

On Book TV last weekend I saw a discussion of the terrific-sounding new book You Can Hear Me Now by Nicholas Sullivan, about how an ex-banker named Iqbal Quadir started GrameenPhone, which helps poor people in Bangladesh get cell phones. From the discussion:

Someone from the UN: I hear that the UN should spend $100 in a million places rather $100 million in one place. But what else?

Iqbal Quadir: The UN should empower the people, not empower their governments. And if they cannot empower the people they can just shut it off. My point is that helping the wrong side is harmful. So if they cannot help the right side they should at least not help the wrong side. I’m not trying to say anything radical here, frankly. The governments belong to their people. You must make sure you don’t disturb that relationship. If you change the incentive for the government, you are disturbing the emergence of democracy.

I had never heard it put so clearly. We can ask if governments exist: 1. To improve the lives of the governed. 2. To employ the governors. 3. To help other governments. Similarly, we can ask if colleges exist: 1. To teach the students. 2. To employ the teachers. 3. To help businesses who will eventually employ the students (the signalling function of college).

Suppose we believe that the main function of colleges is to teach the students. How, then, should we improve colleges? By giving mini-grants to teachers (as is done at UC Berkeley, where I teach)? By giving awards to the best teachers (as is done at UC Berkeley)? Or by doing something quite different?

Addendum: The growing disillusionment of a University of Michigan student.

According to Bryan Caplan, “our [higher] educational system is a big waste of time and money.” He is writing a book about this — yay! He attended college at the place I know the most about — UC Berkeley. Here is why it is a big waste of time. Professors can only teach what they know. All they truly know how to do is how to be a professor. At a research university, that mainly involves doing research. Berkeley professors can teach how to do research, sure, but that has little to do with what most Berkeley students will do after they graduate. So a lot of time is wasted. It is most unfortunate to (a) require all students to imitate professors and (b) to rank them according to how well they do so.

In response to Caplan, Catherine Johnson says her undergraduate education was useful. But she became a nonfiction writer — very close, in the big world of work, to what professors do. That’s one of those exceptions that prove the rule.

I think practically everyone learns well if any of three conditions are met:

Apprenticeship. You want to be good at doing X, you will learn by watching someone skillful do X. Effortlessly.

Guru. If you think of so-and-so as a guru, you will learn from him or her. Effortlessly.

Stories. Stories teach values. Things associated with the hero become considered good and desirable; things associated with the villain become considered bad and to be avoided. Effortlessly.

Most university classes, however, fulfill none of these conditions. On the face of it, university classes teach; but crucial details are missing. It’s like butter and margarine. Margarine is supposed to be as good as butter but it’s not. There is a superficial resemblance but margarine lacks crucial vitamins that butter contains. Because university classes lack crucial elements, they are forced to use grades, tests, and fear of failure as motivation. These motivators don’t work very well, as Alfie Kohn among others has pointed out. Sort of for the same reason Humpty-Dumpty couldn’t be put back together again.