The University is Broken: "Academically Adrift" Book Review.

about us yen I think it's fair to say if
you're looking at it in a student-centered way people are gonna learn when they want to learn and know sooner this is true this a treasurer type but the actual problems I deal with and the reason why I'm looking to this book for like moral support moral support as well as hard social science research research in statistics is that you know I look at a situation like ok so you have a university program that is ostensibly teaching people at a speech I needs and the end of the program the students can't speak Chinese and I have data to prove this and again I did get peer-reviewed articles looking at this they can't read they can't write you know you can test this so after four years and tens of thousands of dollars where you know whatever it is on a one to ten scale they're still in a one you know what I mean so that's a failure you know what I mean and I can't say I can't say in that more philosophical sense well people are gonna learn when they won't learn I want to move forward too hard social science evaluations of what works and what doesn't and when something doesn't work it's got to be treated like a crisis it's good because the stakes are so high the consequences for people's whole lives are so high I didn't go I'm gonna go out a limb here and use the word word prove in summing up this element of the book I think you could say this book proves that the students are garbage it proves that the professor's are garbage it proves that the system is garbage now I could go into more definitely those and it proves that the price is way too high that the price is way too high the cost where do I end that of course the student debt is is garbage and you know it is a problem right yeah yeah but you know and that's the of all those for I think the only one the public is comfortable talking about is the price you know that's in the mainstream newspapers people are very uncomfortable if you're actually bringing out statistics and evidence and you know you're doing evidence-based research you're doing real social science research proving that the professors are not competent that they are not reasonable proving that the students are not competent I mean you know it's it's strange to use the word competition but with that that's a good way to put it though is that the students are not competent as students that they are not learning that they are not doing the work etc that's a good play anyway even if that were in the news though I think at one point in the book the author whoever is writing at the time made this point that even if students knew the statistics of like how many students are actually learning like 10 percent of students at this College are really learning would it impact their decision to go to one school versus another bonus yen view is not a book review it's a discussion of issues raised by a book so I mean if you've already read the book you'll find this video more interesting because I mean I think it's kind of phony it's the same with album reviews these days anyone can download an album for free in 35 seconds anyway so why pretend the purpose of the review is to recommend whether or not someone buys it I recommend wasn't on someone listening to it anyone is looking for an album review today in the music world is looking for some deeper discussion of the album or the issues raised by the album in the same way this is a discussion of the book including why it matters to us why we read it what we got out of it and so on the book is called academically adrift so I am someone who's now spent a large percentage of my life in universities plural at the moment I am both a university professor and a university student with no PhD and I it looks like in the next 10 years I'm gonna be spending a lot of time universities to get a PhD which I'm not thrilled about like I'm not some you know first said who thinks this is gonna be great yeah I'm divorced this is my new girlfriend not divorced from her but you know uh you know my ex-wife was a university professor and hilariously I mean for one period of time my life actually we were breaking the university rules I was married I was married to a professor and I was a student at the same University so that was strictly speaking legal now what why do I mention this again it would be very vague for me to just say I've spent a lot of time in universities plural I've spent time in universities in Asia I've spent time universities in Europe I've spent time in quite a few different universities within Canada none in the United States just mentioned and I've spent time in universities that were elite like namely Cambridge and Oxford in in equines it's about as elite as it gets elite universities within Taiwan also for example but I've also spent time in and involved with not elite small local low status universities however you want to put it right so I've seen I've seen a lot of the diversity I've spent a lot of time with professors amongst professors eating dinner with professors you know not just when my wife was a professor was meeting them as friends but also just because now as an older student going back I go out to dinner with a lot of them talk to me as a friend a lot of them talk to me as an equal not all some of them hate me strokes but you know I see even the professor's perspective I also still am a student I still am very much struggling with the issues of student struggles with at this age so I came to this book I mean why did I read academically adrift in the first place I guess I can say now for decades the profound cracks in the edifice of Western academia have been very obvious to me and it's just astonishing that nobody seems to want to take one take it seriously nobody wants to recognize and address those problems let alone ameliorate them let alone solve them or improve them and again I have actually sat at meetings with professors the professor and a Dean and an ombudsman president we are trying to address what's broken you know sometimes I've actually been involved in the kind of bargaining and negotiating process as a student or as someone connected the professors or what have you and sometimes means that you have sat there just powerless a set third is feeling powerless and hopeless and unbelievably awful the actual content of education was in my country in Canada now melissa is much younger than I am right but I do but for your degree from an elite University right in the United States no but this is also what's interesting in terms of when we come together as I do we're at the same bridge because so we both completed a BA right yeah and we're both looking at going back and getting an MA another options like that right we're both at that bridge you know I have anyway my story's a lot longer you know to me I studied a number of different languages and a number of different universities all over the world etc and your experience is that one University United States and I think it is fair to call it an elite University and it's a prestigious university in any case now I've been just just to give one talking point from the book the book the statistics of course are complex in detail you can you can get the precise stats but broadly speaking one of the findings is that about 90% of the students learn nothing now you could how do you define nothing you know they learned they learned remarkably little but not I'm saying and they're about 10% of the students who really are learning who really are making progress who really are improving in the areas measured by what's called the CLA college learning assessment which is an image is their primary source of data their primary research instrument is the cervical the the CLA um I think for both you and I that basically rings true like you know obviously nine ninety percent versus ten percent again it's not exact and it's not going to be the same in your intro to German class and your intro to anthropology class and if you study architecture and if you study minutes a course it's gonna shift but still broadly speaking but for you at your your University and me at mine yeah yeah and another thing that rang true is that people are going through university to get a degree to get a certificate yes they will do what they have to to pass the classes and go through it but they're not going to go out of their way to meet the professor outside of class to study other things that I mentioned not on the required readings but on the recommended readings you know the recommended readings are basically like thrown aside by most students yes so yeah that that's I think that rang true definitely like seeing that most students weren't weren't committed to learning they were committed to getting a degree and getting through college yeah and they put quite a lot of emphasis on socialization - yeah so I clipped that so I do want to come back to the issue you just raised but I clipped a pie chart out of the book here where they have of the students total total available hours they had 51% of those hours nice event socializing recreation etc 51 percent of the time and that's not 51 percent of waking hours that's 51 percent of all of the hours in the week because sleeping is 24 percent so 24 percent of sleeping 51 percent is socializing and an indeed at first I thought oh well what about working because the book also deals with the phenomenon of students having university students having part-time jobs only 9% of the time is working working and volunteering etc there's some other things in that but then 9% attending classes and 7% for studying so much much much more time socializing than any other category of activity mentioned for students and remarkable a little interested in actually doing this yeah I won't say that that was my experience but I think that was the experience of most of the friends that I had most of the other students that I talked with that was their experience and that's this is obviously looking at averages I mean yeah yeah but it is also interesting to note because I you know the four-year degree that I got was at a place where most people lived on campus it wasn't a commuter school I did take classes at a school in Detroit for on and off for like two and a half years and that was mostly a commuter school yeah and it is interesting to see how different the social lives are the students that go to that school versus yeah okay as a general philosophical principle I mean I don't really want to Center this on the student rather than the institution but it's true if you're taking a student-centered approach this analysis you have to say people learn when they want to learn and no sooner you know your students don't want to learn they're not going to learn and that's and part of it is motivating them to want to learn of course you can't you know you can lead somebody to water you can we towards the water if you can't make a drink but like I think a big part of that is having a professor that encourages students to want to be interested in a subject or like at least gives them some kind of like yeah I can I can flip that around though or just say but are the students in the right subject you know why you know like that that's another way to look at it so I mean the motivations is complex yeah well I was gonna say this is also why I don't want to approach it at a student centered way like what I'm really interested in looking at is the institution what's wrong with the institution how is the teaching done there are a lot of important questions about student motivation and do they do they want to learn and why are there are they taking the right course are they in pathways of learning that's the term used in the book are they on career paths that can even lead to the outcomes they want can this even lead to employment those those are student-centered questions that are really important but I think different they're they're very distinct from questions of institutional capacity professorial competence etc right right so yeah another thing that I wanted to mention is that you know by the based on the title you would think that it was going to be an exposition on how people start college without knowing what they want to go into and like you know they're adrift they can't choose they can't like you know put their thumb on what they actually want to pursue that wasn't the main point of it but I think for me that was my experience with you know I started off hoping to double major in biology in English with you know this was before I actually started college I you know I had vague aspirations of becoming a medical doctor or getting involved in the medical field in some way but once I actually got to university and saw all of the requirements and started to complete the requirements or try to complete the requirements became clear pretty quickly that I didn't I wasn't fully aware of what was required and what not even what was required but what was beneficial to getting into medical school like there's a lot of extracurricular things that you can do or that basically you have to do to get into elite schools and this book does mention that like students will like in in high school have these aspirations like oh I want to be a lawyer be a doctor and they don't really no how many years and like how much effort you have to put into it okay but just pause but that too is an area where these institutions are in the parlance of our times bullshitting yeah so we've just been through this even a little bit in this relationship but I have decades of service so you know you talk about extracurricular activities being required to do this so in the field of Buddhist philosophy would you do do I have sufficient or you know way more than sufficient extracurricular and volunteer experience to get into an elite school and put his philosophy so I just met you guys don't know my background or watch this video but I have more than a decade of experience I went to Sri Lanka I met bhikkhu bodhi I stayed in the same big Buddhist temple bhikkhu bodhi used to stay in Sri Lanka I met bhikkhu bodhi in the Unites States of America I've done this Buddhist philosophy thing in elite universities in Europe and in elite Buddhist temples in Asia I've traveled I've learned the languages I've even published peer-reviewed articles without having an MA or a PhD yet and when I'm looking to apply to a lowly MA so you just say it's also interesting this kind of thing well you can't me I've got all of these requirements and more and I can't I can't get ahead in that field now why there are a lot of reasons why I mean there's there's a lot of reasons but also there's this this haze which is a haze of academic freedom where academic freedom is a smokescreen for I think institutional incompetence you know you know now the reality is professors are deeply prejudicial people they're human beings American I can make excuses Oh extent but professors have religious beliefs Buddhist philosophy is a religious area you know like we could get Intel that there were religious and political business and I'm from the sir my first diplomas in political science you think it doesn't matter that I'm an anti-communist I'm basically pro-democracy and against communism you think that doesn't matter in a department political science if the professor making the decision is themselves afar left-wing or communist so so I'm doing politics of China and one of the professors at University of Victoria is an active communist party member now supporting the commerce power you think that doesn't matter like do you think what do you think that is more my record of volunteer and humanity in work or my political position in Carter's but so arts and the sciences so and what I was going to say about the maybe maybe these problems cut pretty deeply cut pretty much but go ahead yes that question I had mentioned you know it's partly falls on the professor to incur to motivate encourage students to actually care about the subject you know that's debatable but what I was going to say is that's a lot different verses between science versus liberal arts at least in my experience in science like how you know how passionate can you really be about physics at least when I was taking it was like okay I'm just doing this because this is a requirement to get into medical school like you you know and I had no you know I had no attachment to it it was just something that I had to complete whereas when I was taking certain literature classes I was like okay this is interesting to me and if the professor was interested in the subject as well like that motivated me to want to produce good work and you know be able to talk about something with other people in the class who are also interested in the subject and you know at least in my experience literature and science like this very different that way so this brings back to one comment before you use this term of basically how how high are the professor's expectations that the professor's having higher expectations is significant for the students performing that are learning more having better better test results now why is that a major issue in this book it's because the books line of reasoning begins from data so it is point us out it turns out when they look at the stats when they look at the data that higher expectations in the part of the professor actually does correlate to better outcomes for students sona's pointed it out it's not a philosophical argument it started now another example of that something you might not think it's significant or interesting is that the data indicates that more time studying alone emphasis on the word alone equates to higher outcomes higher performance on the CLA at the East quantitive may be more improvement more learning okay studying in groups does not group studying social studying what everyone's like studying whether the students actually equates to lower out comes to learning last surfer getting more but it was a negative learning so I just mentioned those are the kinds of issues this is the advantage and disadvantage of having a kind of data first approach you're starting from the data you're saying what does the data teach us and it does teach us for example that professors having high expectations is paused important now almost the only other thing in that list to have the list here but there aren't there aren't that many hard conclusions from from the data but yeah I think the only other thing on the list of what the data shows us is about the quantity of reading and writing that students do right yeah but what I was gonna say I I agree with what they with the results that they found that studying alone results in better learning and in the sciences particularly studying in groups was encouraged it was the it was the norm like you know when I was having difficulty in physics and organic chemistry I took I I went I joined study groups so this is like two hours after you know outside of class that you would sit down with a graduate student instructor and everybody would come in with like the questions that they had from the homework and yeah it was basically doing everything that a class should have done but because the lectures were enormous and like you know like 500 students or something like that how can you how can you address any of these problems so like study groups were really emphasized like if you want to do all in this class you should join a study group and coming from somebody that doesn't really want to be doing physics at all like yeah I needed even more like I needed even more than the study group I should have had a tutor or something but anyway turns out I just you know I didn't end up going into medical science but so yeah that was what I was gonna say like I did have the best results when I actually was able to study alone but the problem was with math and science sometimes like if you're studying the wrong thing you're screwed like but even more extreme with language education yeah can you can you learn Chinese alone can you learn Chinese without talking to someone who's a native speaker or at least much more advanced as a student that's also that's also a question so but I think proceeding from the data that way though you do get a cart before the horse or a chicken-and-egg problem sometimes I think one that's a totally vacuous stat that way in this question of studying alone like you know if you're competent enough in the subject then you can study alone productively right but if you're not it's like physics you may not be at a high enough level in physics that you can study alone yet so you need tutoring or some kind of social performance that you would so that's also you get a cart before the horse a bit of a change I think but another one for you it was for you it was if maybe if English is your second language is maybe for maybe if you're a Pakistani immigrant getting a degree in English literature you know wouldn't be so I think well you know but anyway I think another really striking example that where the stat is vacuous they make a big deal of the stats connected to how often you contact the professor outside of class but again to me it's like whoa okay so the implicitly this is you know you can't mix up the chicken of the egg or the cart before the horse here if you're a really strong student professors want to chitchat with you and maybe vice versa you want to chit chit chat with professors but this doesn't really mean that there's any education to the chit-chatting with professors or you know I mean so this is this is the kind of problem you get into with with an approach that that leads with the data but obviously the whole strength of this is that it brings to an ongoing political debate about what's wrong with American universities and Canadian universities I'm at a mad it brings to it quantitative measures brings to a real data point yeah I thought it was good when a class required actually meeting with your professor one-on-one but that was only the the smaller classes that I had like forty students was the smallest class I think in and I don't even think that the professor's who were teaching classes of 400 students had like regular office hours if you did like how could you how many how many students can you move it yeah anyway yeah you were saying like the one requirement they got to was forty hours of reading per week and twenty hours of writing per semester that was it was in pages I think writing was in pain yeah so so so many pages of reading and so many pages of writing per per course okay this proves it one of the top someone talked about though uh you know I'm deeply concerned about the readings being assigned being garbage that's marketer so you know it's one thing obviously this is a kind of very crude metric are you doing forty pages of reading in the whole course if you're doing less than that maybe it's a bad indication and that shows up as statistically significant yes in the early part of the book the first chapter or two is a bit more philosophical and then we just get into a kind of statistic by statistic exposition of what the what the study proves but in the early more philosophical part we do get reflections on the changing role of the professor himself or herself of the changing nature of the professor at and you and I have both encountered this and struggled with this many of these courses are designed to be self indulgent for the professors simply to indulge the narrow research interest of the professor with no concern for what would be useful to the students with no concern even of what's useful to the field or the discipline like what will prepare you so let's just stick with what is studies is one example I've been involved in a number of different fields but it's one thing to design a course and say look I'm gonna prepare these students so they can have a future as a researcher in the social sciences or I'm gonna design this course so that we really get a survey of the history of Asia so you know enough about the last 1,000 years in Japan Korea China India you know you make a list so this is the competence you're gonna gain so you're prepared to move forward in this field or you're prepared to move forward in several fields like maybe Asian Studies history etc what-have-you there's there's a there's a difference between that and so again I'm not the you know terms like student-centered can be misleading I'm not talking about amusing the student so that the light instance I'm not talking about designing the course in a way that's gonna that's gonna make students happy maybe students are miserable learning the history of India but you say look guess what guys if you want to do Buddhist studies you've got to know a thousand years mister yeah well actually you got to know two thousand five hundred years of history but 3000 would help anybody finish this degree you should have a competency right the last 1000 years of a sure whatever whatever is and again you can imagine very easily what I've said it could apply to English literature very easily - but this is completely different from this professor did his or her thesis on this this professor is doing his or her thesis in one specialized area that may be of no interest to the students may be of no utility students may not prepare them for any kind of work or research in the future it doesn't deliver any competence it's just what that professor is obsessed with or what that professor gets research running with what that professor deploys his or her graduate students to do for the research on now if this doesn't sound familiar to you you haven't been spending firsties lately because this is come this is completely endemic I had a course that was supposed to be a survey course it was something like you know Asian Studies 301 it's supposed to be interesting the field and it was a the assigned readings which I did and nobody else did I mean now because I talked to the other students and I really did talked and there weren't that many students in the class I talked to them about you know but they really just reflected the totally eccentric totally self-centered self-indulgent obsessions of that professor which included by the way some obscure islands in Polynesia now look I I you know some parts of Asia may not interest me like you know okay so for example if you're in Asian Studies and your real interest is Buddhism maybe you're not that interested in Saudi Arabia but Saudi Arabia is a really important country for understanding what's happening over Asia politically economically historically you got to know the history of Islam you can't know the history of Buddhism without knowing the history of Islam being a hundred percent sincere that if you want to have confidence in Buddhism you need a certain level of confidence in Islam that's completely justified however there are some islands in Polynesia that do not contribute to your knowledge of anything else in any useful way in this we're talking about remote islands in Polynesia like islands that had no contact with any other Society for centuries really you know I mean they only had con it with a couple of other remote Polynesian islands they don't help you with the history of China or the history of Japan India rennet and but just because it's this professor's obsession we're being handed the most ludicrously left-wing communists theses on agriculture on those islands so it's like an incoherent rants about how Lenin's theory of Agriculture isn't appreciated enough in the context of like how Polynesian islands first appropriated chicken raising technology I am not joking and you're paying tens of thousands of dollars to study this how so like I did the reading nobody else did how do you expect a student like you know maybe he's 19 years old maybe he's 21 what maybe it's 20 or whatever you expect a student to sit down and be like yeah I'm gonna read this this is about communism Lenin's theory of Agriculture and chickens in Polynesia it has no relevance to his interest as New Orleans to his life as a student and it does not in any way build confidence so again I'm saying this clear I'm not arguing that professors need to cater to to to to the amusing the students to the caterer cater for their interest in that sense but curriculum if you just think about the meaning of the word curriculum you know what is the curriculum here very often even if you're looking at a course that has 40 pages of a sign reading or 80 pages or 120 pages I I think many cases the students are justified in refusing to do that reading right yeah so when I was focusing mainly on getting the English degree I was taking 12 credits so it was basically like three classes before credits each and it was all literature classes so I had a lot of reading each week so you know in some ways I'm biased to think like this requirement is good forty pages of reading a week that seems definitely doable and like the minimum that a university student should be doing because you know I was doing like three times that at least per week so yeah but we were saying like I like two different examples of we were you're mentioning you're talking about like curriculum I get to it should prepare you it should have like you know for English literature yeah I should you know I have a competency about the history of English low-angle English literature and so like yes there was a rubric basically for what we had to do so like you know I had to take some classes pre sixteen hundred's English literature and then through the 1800s and then up through and there there was requirements for American literature and you know I did take two classes with this one professor because I was interested in what he was interested in but it was like you say a pet project of the professor and it was what he was basically obsessed with so one of them was but is about was about diaspora so like tales or you know story books that were about people of different races that had to move and like you know just like pretty depressing pretty depressing topics but to me it was really interesting like and the other one was about intergenerational memory so like the memories of this abuse that would happen you know to different different races and ethnicities in the past and like how this how this transformed literature in some way and to me like that the books are really interesting you know like I read go down Moses by William Faulkner and that was like a really interesting examination of African Americans and Native Americans in America throughout the late 18-hundreds and early 1900s one was like really brutal about a family that had been slaves and their their transformation to into a society that was not slave owning but was still you know dealing with all these repercussions of slavery that one was called Corregidora and then another one that is important to me is called love medicine and that's mostly about like Native American history throughout from like the 1950s up to like the 1990s so like those were all interesting to me and you know I was you know I liked what the professor was talking about and you know I was really motivated to like write interesting essays and but you can still recognize the design of the course is just the idiosyncratic researchers for the professor it has nothing to do with you and it's nothing academic excellence or prep or preparation for any kind of job or competence in a field right you know I could I could mention but I mean look deserves that even when the system works it doesn't work on the narrow issue of reading and we'll Godot well I guess I guess this is both reading and reading and writing you know I think there's also an assumption here that the reading you do was a university student is the assigned reading for the course so I just went through a couple years at University of Victoria and from the very first week of classes I was going to the library and getting at the books I needed to write the essays which are not the required readings so I would just say for some of my courses I was interested in the require readings I had no time for them all of the time I had was doing original research that was you know thematically related to what the course was about so to give an example history and politics of China but I could not spend the time reading the textbook even if I was interested in the day I could not spend that time because I had to go and read a bunch of different books to write an essay and your essay couldn't be based on the textbook you know what I mean of course you do it would be even if you did it would be terrible you know you can't you can't write the essay based on the textbook so that's also a question of what you're reading now I'm an older student this is I already had a bachelor's degree in political science so I was really prepared for that so why I did it from the first week I mean obviously other students probably wait a month and then get out of the books then but from the first week of class I was going to the library and taking of books that were not the assigned reading I was doing non assigned readings because I was looking at the syllabus and saying okay two months from now I got to produce an essay on this topic so on a topic of my choosing but the truth well am I though am I because what no but I'm pointing out I'm being so critically or I cuz I'm not doing the required reading I'm not you see I'm not doing the producing great essay I am producing great essays because that's why it's already what I'm good at you're going to have to do research and write an essay yeah you boy are so advanced in like most of the information that would be in the required readings that you know maybe further no no honestly still ice I regret that because like some of the courses you know about Mao Zedong Cultural Revolution modern communism trying to I wish now now that I have time I wish I could read the textbooks I wish I could even read my handwritten notes from class I wish I could do the required readings I couldn't do it I didn't have time that was partly because of the pressure of writing all the essays partly because I was in a special accelerated program I was doing all 400 level courses like everything was 400 thread level I'd know lower focus over the workload was really bad as probe because of language learning which is a subject for another video but because I was learning Chinese while I wasn't called and then I was learning Japanese while it was good I had no time for anything but that that was also good saying when I look at this pie chart of how much time students spend studying so basically so just to get the the so students spent an average of 15 hours per week in the class in class of any kind so classes labs tutorials about 15 hours per week in classes of any kind and then they spent less than that on all forms of study yet so studying here includes writing essays maybe so 15 hours a week and then less than that right there so then less than that with the reading and writing and studying because it's not necessarily studying for a test it could be writing writing an essay right now the thing is not only does that ring true for me in terms of what other students were doing like for every one hour in class they were spending less than one hour and outside of class work that I think is true of the majority of students did around me at all these different universities not not the exceptional elite but the majority I think that that's true of a sort of thing but I have to say that was even true of me as a ratio for my time for the classes other than the language class because I had a period of time I've talked about this in you before I was waking up at like 5:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. to study Chinese before I was just absolute so much weight I got fat I was absolutely killing myself trying to put in the hours to study Chinese at this impossible pace and it was it was killing me but that did not time for other classes so I just say like my point is not to say I'm a nice guy my point is when I'm looking at this I can really easily remember how I also managed my class time and got high grades with a similar amount of time being spent on classes even though it wasn't it wasn't in my case because I was going out and partying I didn't have I didn't have 50 no I wasn't spending 51 percent I mean I was fit spending 51 percent of my time studying Chinese or Japanese and applying for jobs and applying for internships you know and doing other crap like that you know related to university and looking for masters the reason ph.d program simply other other pious stuff yeah I mean that is based on averages of course no from from my experience on average just you know from the students that I know there was more time than what they you know suggest like 7% to get through the projects and through the sure sure sure but it's like you have to do like computing right you don't make a program right but but you you were at an above-average University yeah you know you were at an elite University and you were probably talking to above-average people yeah when I went to that others went to the school in downtown Detroit like I doubt yeah I think it is probably on par with it yeah so and well and there's a big difference reciting architecture and studying theater I mean oh so yeah it's an average but to me I think that this really - I I want to come back oh so this 90 90 versus 10 percent think 90 percent first Emerson the thing because I got to tell you I've I have been of course I've been in individual courses that were better than that where was more than 10% of students who were really making advances in there who were substantive lis learning and who were improving their their skills whether it's reading skills writing so I have been in classes that have been betting that but I have also been in a lot of classes that were worse than that where it's fewer than 10 percent or getting anything out of the course are learning anything whatsoever I've just come out of an Asian Studies department more very often in the class even in the Highland again there I was having to do all four under level classes you know with a few experiment was in this peculiar program even in the high level classes it's like yeah when I really think about it in that whole class are there two or three people who are learning something of any interest to have any engagement you know what I mean and and large number of students thanks to the laptop computer I can see for a fact they're on Facebook during class I can see for a fact they're doing clothes shopping during class like you you when you're doing clothes shopping on a laptop you got to think about will these jeans fit me like I know like that's a pretty high-stress activity actually buying clothes online you are paying zero attention I took a philosophy class on logic and in one of those classes like one student was checking the stock market every single time just playing the stock market it's obviously a business major or something yeah I thought that was a particularly funny example but yeah I saw that definitely Facebook Ennio social media shopping I think that's that's really common but you know it's hard to tell with the number of students I had in my class is like you know I felt like I learned a lot in the psychopathology class I took so I just was you know mostly out of just interest in the subject learning about the different kinds of mental disorders and you know I wasn't majoring in psychology and it wasn't a required course but there were like there wasn't like 500 student like sure it wasn't enormous but it was like probably 300 or maybe 250 and it's like how do you really know I don't know like okay so you're in a different position for me a class of 250 students even know but I would you say when I'm making these generalizations I'm often talking about a class of twenty students and I talk to eighteen of them at like you know what I mean like like but in many cases I talk to all twenty I just say no in many of my classes I really met and spoke with every single student so I I just met you because like when you walk in you know if the professor isn't there yet you can be like so would you think like did you read it very often those that's right that's exactly was it about right no that's those are exactly the sources of information I have as a student with that perspective and I say in other situations I've had the perspective of a professor I'm gonna go I'm gonna go out a limb here and use the word word prove in summing up this element of the book I think you could say this book proves that the students are garbage it proves that the professor's are garbage it proves that the system is garbage now I could go into more definitely those and it proves that the price is way too high that the price is way too high the cost where do I end that of course the student debt is is garbage and you know it's a problem right yeah yeah but you know and that's the of all those for I think the only one the public is comfortable talking about is the price you know that's in the mainstream newspapers people are very uncomfortable if you're actually bringing out statistics and evidence and you know you're doing evidence-based research you're doing real social science research proving that the professors are not competent that they are not reasonable proving that the students are not competent I mean you know it's it's strange to use the word competition but but that's a good way to put it though is that the students are not competent as students that they are not learning that they are not doing the work etc this is good we have even if that were in the news though I think at one point in the book the author whoever is writing at the time made this point that even if students knew the statistics of like how many students are actually learning like 10 percent of students at this College are really learning would it impact their decision to go to one school or versus another like what what really like for you I think yes definitely and for me yes definitely but like I think a lot of students are swayed by sports facilities like whether the team is good and so this this brings us I think to the the thesis or the meta thesis of the book as a whole which is that what do they blame for this fundamentally they blame a shift to a client holistic relationship that a free-market ideology has in a profound and subtle way changed the behavior of everyone especially the behavior of students maybe the behavior of students more than professors that you know this is a fee-for-service relationship between a client and yeah basically like an entertainment complex that I mean really that's that's a blunt but honest summary of it that that that the universities are offering a kind of lifestyle that is a great deal to do with sports and recreation and getting drunk and probably sex and they don't talk about sex that much actually there's actually very little about sex but you know it's offering a kind of for your vacation almost in a particular tip and a credential that's also then they talk about credential ization credentialism and that students approach that looking to do the minimum amount of effort in order to get that credential and then they also have these other agendas in terms or maybe a maximum amount of sports or well no no no but we're saying it about 90 percent of college students no no no but the whole point of data is to go beyond you're saying well this is only problem for some coaches it's a problem for the vast majority it is definitely a problem for more than 50 percent of coaches right and now the influence is on on professor's behavior again that's really early in the book for summers is the early more philosophical chapter where they deal with that but they look at what are the motivations for professors behavior and the fact that professors are not really concerned with helping students they're not concerned with outcomes they're not concerned with whether or not the students learn anything and what what they are concerned with includes their personal research you know they don't make up these professors as vampires or parasites you know they do kind of map out all the different cuz they have to deal with faculty meetings they have to deal with their own research definitions they care about students they care about right they care about student evaluations they care yeah we're getting positive reviews basically from students like right right my professors calm know right the professors have an interest in giving high grades to students who don't deserve them it gets into all of that too but this kind of behavior analysis but they're they're metathesis as I say is that this is a more than merely a commercialization this client'll ization this free market reform that happen almost invisibly within universities universities still have the same outward appearance of ancient institutions but they're not that's been undermined in a in a profound sentence yeah this is true in some ways and not others cuz I can still ask why can't I get a PhD in Buddhist philosophy why can't I get ahead in political science I mean there are actually still ideological go I mean just say even that little anecdote I gave or it's like well it matters more that the professor is a communist or it matters more that the professor is a true believer in some bizarre form of Buddhism from Japan or England I know examples of this you don't mean like you know their their ideological and religious beliefs may actually matter more than all these problems as as profound as they are yeah sorry I'm it's it's just an interesting problem like like yeah you know how to get and the recommendations are weak I mean where do we go from here yes the recommendation that we need more research is strong the recommendation that we need to bring into universities hard objective analysis of what's going right most measurements of outcomes it's the fundamental thing that we have to bring in tests like the CLA and I think it's worth mentioning briefly what the CLA does the CLA measures student competence you know it's not like an IQ test it includes things like presenting the students with a variety of short articles short source information having them read them in an analytical way and then come up with recommendations write up a short opinion piece or summary or cassette of conclusions and so on so your confidence in doing research and writing and so-called critical thinking if you want to use the term critical thinking analysis right right which is M you know it's not a specific job skill but this is something that students should be acquiring as an ability should be improving in during four years across all disciplines basically even if you like if you work in the sciences so one of their examples is doing this with aircraft safety where there's a report about the airplane crashes and then you read these different short articles so then you have to write up your recommendations you imagine you're working for a firm that has to decide what kind of aircraft to buy or what what the what the of this this this research is about aircraft safety so that's something someone in the sciences should be able to do someone in English literature should be able do and they should be able to do better and better during those four years and then at the end of their graduation they should be able to do much better at the beginning and basically what the study showed is no 90 percent of the students don't improve at all and that overall in the first two years there's almost zero appreciable growth in those so-called critical thinking abilities and now I don't I don't like this term critical thinking again I think it's a pitiful smokescreen in it you know what I mean but but but that description what I've just described is just more useful than crippling it that's the type of activity that's the type of research ability type of competence you're looking at evaluating yeah yeah I mean it's a fundamental problem with priorities that the priority is socialization and not really learning and I don't know where that starts it obviously doesn't start in college like you know throughout high school - I think that is right many students goals well yeah I don't know I don't know like if it's really just the fact that in general only 10% of people will get through college and really learn something if that's just a fact or if they you know what can be improved I don't know III said before you know people will learn what they want to learn and no sooner yeah and also think of like the general age bracket you know like I started college when I was 17 it's like you know I know like yeah are you like you and me and like like we care about learning like and you know you more so than like when you when we first started University like comparing you know I think you really did care about more about learning than I did like you know I was going to college because that's just what you do and yeah it and it's it's it's also an interesting question like should everybody be going to college yes and that that is what that is what policy is leading towards you know like and everyone getting into $50,000 in debt apparently yeah yeah they mentioned like a policy that Obama was I don't know if it was a policy they did pass or something but they mentioned that he like now college is like the new high school degree in this that's totally true I feel like with an English degree you know I at the very base level yes getting getting a semi my professional job you know like not working at a Jimmy Don's or something like I I can but even that is a struggle a BA in English literature sort of entitles you to nothing in today's society which is a kind of a tragedy for a for several video I think it's fair to say if you're looking at it in a student-centered way people are gonna learn when they want to learn and know sooner this is true that's a tragedy over times but the actual problems I deal with and the reason why I'm looking to this book for like moral support moral support as well as hard social science research research in statistics is that you know I look at a situation like okay so you have a university program that is extensively teaching people how to speak Chinese and at the end of the program the students can't speak Chinese and I have data to prove this and again I did get peer-reviewed articles looking at this they can't read they can't write you know you can test this so after four years and tens of thousands of dollars where you know whatever it is on a one to ten scale they're still in a one you know what I mean so that's a failure you know what I mean and I can't say I can't say in that more philosophical sense well people are gonna learn when they want to learn know these students peed you money to have an organized program that would teach them the Chinese language and in an Asian Studies program they should also learn something about the history and politics and geography of Asia you know I mean like you got to learn some gr you got to know where things are in Asia you know what I mean there may be something about literature and culture you know what I mean there's a lot packaged into that beyond language but the core function of that of that education which maybe tens of thousands of dollars and years of your life you never get back was to learn Chinese and these students made that choice they made that commitment they put that trust in your hands they said mister you're the expert you teach me Chinese you decide how it's done I'm not gonna decide what are the educational methods that's your responsibility I'm giving you the money I'm sitting down in this chair I'm giving you the the some of those vital years of my life and at the end of it I'm supposed to be able to speak Chinese and they can't it's a failure and I have sat there in the boardroom again most students would never do that they wouldn't have the the confidence I've taken I've taken a complaint forward with the Ombudsman and the Dean and the head of the department and confronted with the fact your language program is a failure as an objective fact what are we gonna do now can't we do a little and I had practical suggestions for how to improve it when something's really a disaster you're there it's easy to improve you know there were there were things that wouldn't have costed any money it could have improved it and I saw the total paralysis of that department their inability to improve it that department is now in receivership all the professors hate each other they can't cooperate on anything you know there are other reasons why it's a disaster even beyond just the the language program right so I just say philosophically and include terms of advice I might give to my own daughter or my own cousins or somebody yes it's easy to put emphasis on the students say well people learn when they want to learn and maybe 90% of the students in college don't want to be in college or don't know why they're there or they're in the wrong major which is a great tragedy look you know cuz it [ __ ] up the whole rest of your life like maybe you were in English literature and you shouldn't have been in a merger and there are other people who you know either some of the trip and it's really the wrong subject for them but they didn't think it through or they didn't know what their options were you know that that whole story okay fine but I want to move forward too hard social science evaluations of what works and what doesn't and when something doesn't work it's got to be treated like a crisis it's good because the stakes are so high the consequences for people's whole lives are so high and you know maybe it's so ironic cuz at University of Victoria we had a great department of educational methods basically of educational philosophy you know they have their specialized people who do you know who do these really sophisticated things where they sit down and deal with the difference between tasks based learning and lecture based learning and stuff so yeah well guess what maybe having 40 students sit at little square desks in in a grid maybe that does not work for teaching Chinese maybe it works for teaching Latin and ancient Greek and not Chinese maybe our works relied and Greek maybe that's also you know really ineffective it's a separate question but you know it's like okay so I know this doesn't work you know how do you teach archery how do you teach someone how to play the guitar you know these are fundamentally different challenges you know but we just have a fetishized cultural notion of professors standing there and giving lectures on philosophy professor standing there giving lectures on their own research interests that's the poison at the heart of that system I'm sorry to say it but it is professor if professors want to give research on the tree if they want to present papers on their own researchers if they want to present their own philosophy do that at a conference with other specialists that's where you should do it is it academic conferences do that acolyte colloquia and symposia everywhere don't do it to a captive audience of eighteen year olds who can't question it who can't use it for whom it's wildly irrelevant to their interest even within the program where it doesn't confer any but that is the fetish probably can't make these complaints to write like you were in a position that you were older and more mature and to make these complaints yeah students that are 18 to 21 and even for me it was emotionally heart it was emotional facing up to authority figures and doing that it was hard it was hard for me for other reasons not that I was afraid of the professors but yeah it was emotional to be fair I do think that the program that I did gave me an overview of English literature I you know I think it was effective at that but it wasn't effective at preparing me for a career for anything that passed that other than an master's degree in English which huh okay right so let's it but okay English literature or for example journalism you know or Asian Studies or history I think what you need and this should be a legal requirement I would say in Canada I think this could be a federal law I think the department has to state what the competences are you will gain before you enroll that has to be defined and then that has to be objectively measured with standardized testing so if you know English literature you preferred as I was saying journalism so because journalism so journalism you could actually say journalist this is going to teach you and prepare you for career journalist we could have this this and this cop you know I mean now I don't know like with English literature it's way more debatable cuz it's so broad you probably that would be a huge to fight within the department that the professors would have to sit down and discuss what are we preparing students to do are we preparing them to be high school English teachers you know maybe maybe that has to be as maybe up to split the department into two pieces maybe half of them are being prepared for are we preparing them to write book reviews for the New York Times which is also a legit competence to confer there wasn't a journalism degree at university much where I went to school so right yeah but I mean that first challenge is incredibly worthwhile because believe me I've been inside department's of anthropology where there is no agreement about what anthropology is like what what's the meaning of the term what's the meaning there's no agreement about what are the students supposed to be learning what are the outcomes supposed to be but then you have to measure are we or are we not living up there are we getting those look of the students are the students learning to be journalists as defined and itemised this way as quantified in a measurable test are they learning to speak Chinese that one's real easy to quantify because there's a very clear competence to measure and so on yeah I think there should have been a survey of the students like what are you what are you planning on becoming are you planning on becoming a journalist are you planning on becoming a professor you know like and actually seeing the results of you know 10 years down the line drink do these people actually pursue this do they become this and and maybe those need to be separate departments - or separate programs separate special yeah I agree with that because yeah it was just like if you wanted to go into any of those fields English the the program that I was in makes sense like that was that was what they had right so so I looked at one with you that's sure that's what I'm a major place that I was a major field or just a career path that I was looking into but maybe also there's training just to be an author yourself we said yeah I want to be a novelist you know what I mean you know who I want to be some kind of writer whatever it is maybe that also be a separate stream with separate requirements or separate separate outcomes that they get they get measured by I looked at a university program with you I was almost looking as a joke I already knew about it but I showed it to you on the Internet yeah I looked at a university program in Buddhism where they that they stated what you're going to learn was to do pastor Oh care and funeral ceremonies so this is preparing you for a career like a Buddhist monk or a Buddhist religious official of some kind this is what you're gonna do so you know talking to elderly people who are dying of incurable diseases and performing funeral service yeah I'm not you know but that is very different very specific career that's right no it's going to prepare you for that right right but that may be your your reconcilable with someone who's doing research on politics and history I you research on slavery like okay so I want to talk about the history of slavery within Buddhism and Buddhist monks making up excuses for slavers on that this is this is a type of incisive research into the history of the religion which is totally incompatible with a department where those the expectations of the professors of the students or what have you you know yeah but that that already like you know something I think certain types of services are inherently and ineluctably a scam because they are unclear about what the service is being offered if you don't have that fundamental clarity if you like you could show up and spend tens of thousand dollars it's it they say look bro we just train you to do funeral services or you know look bro we don't teach you how to be a journalist here we just we just talk to you about the professor's favorite poems look bro we don't actually teach the Chinese language you know you just you just get to hear this useless set of lectures on some remote Polynesian islands yeah because that happens to be what the professor you know did his thesis on it you know it's troubling so yeah just on that same note I think that there should be like a maybe at other universities there are but and you know there should be a pre-medicine degree you know like because sure you know on one way in and okay so in one way it allows you to have a degree in something completely unrelated and you just do the requirements to get into medical school but there are people that just want to become a doctor and like they just want to do the classes that they need to do but they have to take physics with engineers or people you know like or get a degree in biology when they really don't want to be a biologist they want to you know go pre-med and that can well if we don't have clarity on what the service is being offered if we don't have clarity on the competence the student is supposed to develop then we also can't hold the professor's to account we can't hold the system's okay and and vice versa that would empower professors to hold students to account to say hey look you enrolled in this pre-med degree so this is what you're you you enrolled in this you know journalism degree whatever is so this is what you've got to be able to do you know if you can't do that by year two or year three or something you'd have whatever benchmarks you better switch majors because this is what we're here to learn this we were in it that's not what you're to learn get out you know you it could it could cut both ways that's a wrap you know the book is not a masterpiece it is the product of writing by committee I have done similar research where you start with social science statistics and then try to pull out interesting observations I can sympathize the challenge the authors had that first chapter or two is well written and then I feel the quality rating falls apart however the book imperfect though it is will be remembered in the annals of history as a major landmark in philosophy of Education I think that's partly because it has an excellent survey at the literature it discusses everything else that's been published before it and a very you know concise and clear in a useful way and it brings empirical research methods to bear on one of the last sacred cows you know one of the last areas that's been held behind a veil of inscrutability in Western culture and it's it's a crucial area that impacts all of our lives that has such significance economically politically philosophically personally it's a problem we all must solve and until fundamentally we take it to Parliament until we take it to the Senate nothing is going to change there's no way you can expect you know the Fox to mind the chickens there's no way you can expect the professor's to act against their own fundamental interests there's no way you can expect a for-profit university you know which is how they operate even the ones that are not in theory on paper are try to earn less money that's right yeah that's right and that even comes down to these questions of 300 students in a classroom with a professor the the lecture format the theater format as opposed to other methods of Education and learning you know you can't teach guitar that way you can't teach guitar with one professor and 300 students sitting in theater sitting maybe you can't teach Chinese that way maybe you can't teach you know a whole bunch of different topics that way no no they're they're all these all these fundamental questions responsibility but yeah there are economic problems at the bottom right and yeah the one one interesting part was saying that there are problems but the system works you know like it is functioning it's not a crisis right so I think maybe not until it is a crisis will reform heaven until people treat it as a crisis you see how recklessly optimistic I am compared yeah I think that's the whole point of politics is try to recognize and address problems before they become a crisis and I for one you know if I'm elected I sink my teeth into this issue and never let go and when I was in Victoria I didn't just take my complaint to the Ombudsman I took it to Parliament that's a story for another time bonus Yin