Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities

Shortchanging Instruction at Research Universities, and Why Students Don’t Complain

26 the previous two chapters have described how research universities have been decreasing their spending on direct instructional activities, while they increase their expenditures in other areas. In order to examine how these reductions in instructional budgets affect the education provided by these institutions, this chapter will examine the changing nature of student learning and faculty teaching and will show how the defunding of undergraduate education has resulted in a loss of educational quality. Moreover, I will argue that students at selective research universities do not complain about the shortchanging of instruction because higher education has now become mostly a means to future advancement, rather than an end in itself. And the more tuition increases, the more students make educational decisions based on their need to achieve a high-paying career to finance their skyrocketing debt. Budget Cuts and Instruction To understand the educational effects of reduced spending on instruction at selective research universities, it is helpful to look at recent changes at the University of California. This ten-campus system is often regarded as the world’s greatest public university system, but constant state budget cuts and questionable administrative priorities have threatened to undermine the institution’s core mission. Some of the ways that instruction has been downsized in the UC system are presented in Scott 3 Shortchanging Instruction at Research Universities, and Why Students Don’t Complain SHoRtCHAngIng InStRUCtIon 27 Martindale’s article “UCI Faculty: Quality Eroding as Class Sizes Swell.” In focusing on specific classes and teachers at UC Irvine, Martindale catalogues many recent changes, both small and large: “Instead of two teaching assistants for a class of about  students, UC Irvine professor Mark LeVine now gets one.”1 Martindale goes on to point out that not only are there now more students per graduate student assistant, but many small, interactive classes have disappeared: “Instead of being able to lead intimate seminar classes of just a dozen or so, LeVine is under pressure to teach more large, lecture-style classes.” Professors are being pushed to teach more students for less money, and students are paying more to get a worse educational experience. In fact, the move to larger classes staffed with fewer graduate assistants means that “instead of assigning multiple, full-length research papers throughout the quarter, the history professor [LeVine] has modified class assignments for his students so they’re easier and quicker to grade.”2 These changes have a profound effect on how and what students are taught, and they also diminish students’ learning of important critical thinking and communication skills. According to LeVine, “we’re forced to really lower our demands so that we can actually get through all the work in terms of grading.”3 Although it is hard to come up with a single definition of instructional quality that everyone can accept, most experts agree that effective education in higher education involves teaching students how to engage in an active and critical relationship with knowledge. There is also general consensus that a high-quality education is one that gives students the opportunity—and the ability—to speak in their classes and provides them with extensive feedback on their writing. As we shall see, this type of learning and teaching is often hard to accomplish in large lecture classes that use multiple-choice exams to test students on their ability to memorize isolated bits of information. Yet one of the consequences of shortchanging instructional budgets at research universities is the move to larger classes and more standardized exams. For LeVine, this sacrifice of educational quality defines the fundamental crisis at our nation’s universities: “The whole idea in the humanities is to take seminars of  or  students, where we teach them to think critically, where we really create the scholars and doctors and lawyers. We 28 WHy PUBlIC HIgHER EDUCAtIon SHoUlD BE FREE can’t do nearly as many seminars because even  students isn’t cutting it anymore. . . . We’re talking about a university that is undergoing a profound crisis.”4 Central to this professor’s argument about the loss of educational quality due to budget cuts are the ideas that class size matters , and that it is very difficult to engage students in critical thinking and higher-level analysis in large lecture classes. Universities know that small classes are often the key to effective education , but they have moved to large classes in an attempt to save money. As I...