No One Wants to Be Rated

This is in today’s Wash. Post.

Rating colleges is ‘like rating a blender’ — Education Department official

Even though I don’t know yet what the Obama’s rating system will be and I have serious qualms, we need something, as I expressed on today’s article.

“Rating, ranking, etc…is a problem. But the system we have now is corrupt; and that corruption sends its tentacles through all of education. I have seen it firsthand.. I taught for many years, first at a regional state school in Illinois, then at Washington University in St. Louis. Here, briefly, is an outline of what happens.

There are professors at places like Wash. U. who get “national need” grants. The university collects overhead from the government, and the professors grant a Phd even to students who can’t do a difficult, but standard, calculus problem, and worse. (One such student, nearing his PhD told me that he never could figure out a problem illustrating a basic idea, and even asked meabout others.) A very successful, careerist, professor had several such students.

When I taught at the regional school, I a professor told me, that after five years of teaching an introductory course, she could finally tell when the homework was wrong, but could not always what was wrong. She was not uncommon in her lack of understanding of math. She was produced by an earlier Sputnik, more colleges, unqestioning era.

Without going into the details here, there is an obvious connection between these two cases and the fact that high school teachers come out of regional schools without the education they need to do well. And then, of course, the college professors complain, saying, “look at what we get!”

It is much worse than I have just described. There is too much to describe in comments, so I have a blog www.inside-higher-ed.com There is much more there.

I think when people realize how much advantage can be taken of the public’s (false) impression of the word “university”, they will opt out for any honest ranking system over what we have. Never forget that professors are just as bad as the rest of us; except that they have more opportunity.”