Universities have become Wal-Mart. “We put our courses on line”

 

Roger Schank.

He spied the current final exam on the professor’s desk and exclaimed: “But the questions are exactly the same as on our exam 20 years ago!” “Of course,” said the professor, “but the answers are different!”

From a letter in the FT, about economics degrees. And for medicine?

The worst-functioning part of the US educational market at the tertiary level is the private for-profit system,” he said. ”It is a disaster. It excels in one area, exploiting poor children.”

Joseph Stiglitz telling it to the Australians

Every day the scorecards went up, where they could be seen by all of the hospital’s emergency room doctors. Physicians hitting the target to admit at least half of the patients over 65 years old who entered the emergency department were color-coded green. The names of doctors who were close were yellow. Failing physicians were red.

The scorecards, according to one whistle-blower lawsuit, were just one of the many ways that Health Management Associates, a for-profit hospital chain based in Naples, Fla., kept tabs on an internal strategy that regulators and others say was intended to increase admissions, regardless of whether a patient needed hospital care, and pressure the doctors who worked at the hospital.

— Its business. In the UK the incentives would be the other way around.

What ties universities to the modern LMS’s is this link to the bureaucracy, first, and pedagogy last.

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There are some tremendous textbooks, Molecular Biology of the Cell, to quote an example, but many are dull. I understand a little about the business of textbook production, and change seems long overdue. My own efforts are of course very humble, but I am working on improving things. This graph does not attest to much innovation: more Eroom’s law than Moore’s law.

http://qz.com/225483/runaway-college-textbook-inflation-is-about-to-get-disrupted/

I don’t tire of the arguments around MOOCs. MOOCs are just the start of a process of examining how student teaching could be improved and made cheaper. There is a lot of room for both. The Economist this week has a leader entitled ‘Creative Destruction‘ (well, at least it wasn’t ‘disruption redux’) and a Briefing article: The future of universities: the digital degree. All well and good. What was missing however, was any consideration of how changes in teaching provision will feed through to research. Many —if not most— UK institutions use teaching moneys to cross subsidise research. Research buys kudos, but rarely do funders pay for the full cost of research (even with overheads added in). This is a particular problem for medicine, where much research is charity funded. Unit costs of research are going to rise.

According to the futuristic report, it was around 2010 when degrees began to lose their reliability for proving the bearer’s competence, knowledge or expertise. Until then, “doctors and engineers with degrees were considered safe” to practise and “even degrees in disciplines without any obviously useful knowledge at their core, such as English Literature, or Golf Studies, were treated as valid, and marketable, evidence of general competence”.

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Q:What made you decide to go from brewing as a hobby to brewmeister as a career?

A:Eventually, every postdoc has to decide, “What are you going to do?” Janelia Farm is a very prestigious institution, so people often get very good jobs afterward. But I wanted to do something else. I saw people around me who were all very stressed. It was just very hard for them to get these papers published, as it was for me. I had been scooped many times, competing with people outside and maybe even inside the institution. And I was like, “This is not something I would like to do forever.” I thought, “Maybe I can just take my success with yeast and get some experience at this brewery, and then take that experience and maybe move somewhere else in the future.”

Jasper Akerboom in  Science

“Many people think that doctors make their recommendations from a basis of scientific certainty, that the facts are very clear and there’s only one way to diagnose or treat an illness,” he told the review. “In reality, that’s not always the case. Many things are a matter of conjecture, tradition, convenience, habit. In this gray area, where the facts are not clear and one has to make certain assumptions, it is unfortunately very easy to do things primarily because they are economically attractive.”

From an obituary of Arnold Relman in the NYT. The way money influences decision making is incontrovertible. How do we describe and explain this to students? And would it alter things (I fear not).