Tuition, distance education, standards, and faculty hiring

After my identity crisis last week, I'm actually more interested in blogging than ever; I just can't think of anything to write about. :-) I refuse to blog about Return of the Sith until I watch it a second time; watching a two-and-a-half hour movie at 11.15pm was not, repeat not a good idea.

Well, let's make some observations about the changing face of the modern American university, from the perspective of a recent PhD in mathematics. All of the following remarks are based on my observations, not on real research, so you should take things with a grain of salt. Better yet, get out your canister of Morton's Iodized.

Enrollment
Enrollment at universities continues to increase. The new students are not only "traditional" young adults fresh out of high school; often enough they are adults who want a degree (or another degree). Sometimes they want a better job, and see the degree as a key to unlock that door; other times, they are just going back to learn things because, well, they like to learn things. In some cases, their employer pays for non-degree or even degree-related education: the employer values a more educated employee, and the employee values the higher salary that comes with additional education.

(From the teacher's perspective, by the way, the "non-traditional students" are far, far more enjoyable than the youngsters. Non-traditional students are better motivated, harder working, and they ask more interesting questions. I don't know of a single professor or grad student who has had a bad experience teaching non-traditional students.)

Tuition
As everyone has heard, tuition is increasing at a phenomenal rate. I have no idea why, but an uneducated guess would involve the explosion of non-academic, bureaucratic offices that are mandated either by political correctness (e.g., office of producing publications trumpeting the university's commitment to the latest fashions in social engineering and eradication of the mental illness underlying Red State Syndrome) or by law (Disability Services for Students, a godsend for students who are willing to work hard and study, but have genuine impediments). After all, the money for these salaries have to come from somewhere.

Faculty Salaries
A natural question is whether faculty salaries are a cause of rising tuition. The answer is: I don't know. I was doing some research on faculty salaries earlier today, and it doesn't appear to me that faculty salaries correspond to the rise in tuition. A newly-hired assistant professor mathematics earns (on average) in the mid-to-upper 40s. Salaries increase with promotion to associate and full professor, but even full professors aren't generally close to breaking the six-figure barrier, regardless of what some television and radio wags might say. Indeed, academic salaries (for mathematicians, anyway) are generally less than what one would receive in industry or government. For example: the National Security Agency — supposedly the largest single employer of mathematicians in the United States, maybe in the world — said that if they hired me, my starting salary would have been nearly twice what I will in fact make next year as an assistant professor of mathematics. Don't misunderstand: a professor's salary is comfortably higher than the average worker's salary; however, it is usually lower than a comparably-trained worker in industry. (At least, in mathematics and other science- and engineering-related fields. I can't speak for the fuzzy-minders.)

(Aside: I was quite interested in working at NSA; alas, I failed the security background check. Surprised? :-) It's not scandalous; they just have to be very, very careful.)

I also spent some time looking at salary trends. From what I could tell, professorial salaries have not been keeping pace with the inflation of tuition. In a few cases, they haven't kept up even with inflation in the economy. So again: I really don't know why tuition is increasing. Public universities can complain that state governments aren't giving them enough money, but private universities can't do that, and from what I can tell they're both in this game together.

Number of faculty
One might suggest that universities are hiring more faculty than ever before. My understanding is that this is not, generally, the case. I read earlier that faculty hiring has not kept up with the increase in student population. This was in a report from the American Federation of Teachers, and I'm not sure how far one can trust them. There is no denying, however, the explosion of adjunct faculty (part-timers with no benefits) and graduate students teaching courses. I've worked as an adjunct faculty, and I've joked that their status is at the bottom of the feeding chain. I've worked as a graduate student, and personally I think that it's a good thing for graduate students to teach certain lower-level (i.e., remedial) courses: they gain experience, and professors are freed to teach the courses that they should be teaching, rather than the courses the university has to provide because American high schools pride themselves on sending so many math illiterates to college.

Distance Education
We also have the phenomenon of distance education. I don't know much about how this works, and it troubles me that even reputable universities (such as mine) are advertising "mail-order degrees" online.

Okay: it might not be fair to call them "mail-order" degrees. For certain majors (especially "soft" majors), one could earn a bachelor's degree without necessarily attending a campus. However, both my Master's and my Doctoral degrees required an enormous amount of study and hard work. Based on that, I can't imagine how one could earn a Master's degree without both (a) substantial, intensive coursework, and (b) significant interaction with faculty. With a Doctoral degree, real research in most fields could be carried out away from the university; indeed, I carried out most of my research at home, because our grad student office is too busy.

However, the need for faculty interaction is much more important. In my case, the computer algebra professors at NC State see themselves less as degree-granting judges, and more as parents guiding children to adulthood. The result is an enormous investment of time and training, and I personally am a much better mathematician as a result. Contrast this to the older mathematicians, who almost all remark how they barely knew their professors, who directed small armies of PhD students and as a result had little or no time for any one of them.

I once tutored a very wealthy gentleman who was taking Calculus I through Virginia Tech's distance education program. He did well, but did he learn Calculus well? I am not sure. I was impressed by some of the presentations, and some of the questions that they asked were good questions. As I recall, they did not make the mistake of restricting calculus to a course on mechanics, but also asked some very good conceptual questions. However: the evaluations (exercises, tests, quizzes) were all multiple-choice. I'm sorry, but grading the final answer is not an adequate method for evaluating mathematical learning: in mathematics education, how the thought process is more important than the final answer, which can be wrong due to mechanical errors. These days, computers do the mechanics of mathematics, while we still require human beings to do the thinking. Math teachers should grade the work, not the answer. — Of course, that makes more work for us.

On the other hand, he definitely needed the interaction with me; I was there to help him & discuss it with him. He passed the course, and I think he even earned an A. (This, despite his joking that the goal was a "D" for "Degree".) However, he would not have done well on some of the material without me to correct and guide him. So: here he was, paying a substantial amount of money for tuition to a world-class university, and having to pay additional money to me — a substantial sum that probably outweighed his tuition for the class — because his tuition for distance education didn't cover any real interaction with a professor who would answer his questions.

Supply and demand
How many colleges and universites are there in the United States? One would think that the supply-and-demand equation would fit into this: with a higher demand for their products, universities would of course raise prices while out of equilibrium, but the number of universities should increase as new institutions are founded to grap a share of the pie.

So, I wondered, perhaps there hasn't been a corresponding increase in the number of universities? This would account for why the market fails to reach an equilibrium.

According to at least one web article I found, the number of universities more than doubled between 1950 and 2000: from 1800 to 3900. Hmm. On the other hand, the number of college degrees awarded quadrupled: from half a million in 1950 to two million in 2000. Hmm! Could be a factor.

(By the way, that article makes for an interesting read.)

In the end, I suspect that this increased number of students, along with the multiplication of non-academic, "special-interest bureacracies" in the universities, are the biggest factors behind higher tuition. Some of these bureacracies are of questionable value to a university's mission; others are indispensable. I doubt that faculty salaries are the cause.

However, there are too many factors involved for a casual reasoning process to explain what's going on.