Cheaters, Cheaters Everywhere

This chapter discusses the issue of student cheating. Student cheating is widespread—most cheat a little, and some cheat a lot. Thanks to social desirability bias, surveys give a lower bound on how many and how often students cheat, so the truth is that more students cheat and more often than the surveys indicate. When cheating is this widespread, it is useless to blame character. What is needed is to change the environment in which students find themselves. This means reducing their incentive to cheat and structuring the classroom in such a way as to make cheating more difficult or less likely to pay off. The good news is that once a university develops a reputation for academic honesty among students, this behavior tends to become self-reinforcing. The bad news is that dishonesty is also self-reinforcing. Changing from the bad equilibrium (lots of cheating) to the good one (little cheating) is also difficult.

Grades: Communication Breakdown

This chapter assesses how professors grade students. It argues that the practice of grading is replete with problems. Grades are a kind of language. They are meant to be a form of communication. They are sometimes meant to communicate to students how well they’ve mastered a set of material. Most colleges calculate grade point averages (GPAs) and compare students to one another. Grades are also sometimes meant to communicate to outsiders something about how good a student is, and how he or she compares to other students from other universities. However, the grading and GPA systems are such a mess that they largely fail to accomplish these goals. In some cases, the mathematics used to calculate an average final grade in a class are incoherent. In nearly all cases, the mathematics used to calculate students’ GPAs are also incoherent.

Why Most Academic Advertising Is Immoral Bullshit

This chapter criticizes how universities and colleges market themselves to potential students. In particular, it examines how they promise (or at least strongly insinuate) that they will transform students, teach them to think, and turn them into leaders. The problem is that very little evidence exists that universities succeed in doing any of these things. Thus, universities engage in, if not quite false advertising, what might instead be called negligent advertising. They are not exactly lying, but selling snake oil. There is no proof that universities deliver, or are capable of making good, on most of their promises. Universities do not just engage in unethical marketing. Rather, they seem to not even do much educating.

On Reading Entrails and Student Evaluations

In the United States, most universities and colleges ask students to complete course evaluations at the end of each semester. They ask students how much they’ve learned, how much they studied, whether the instructor seemed well-prepared, and how valuable the class was overall. This chapter examines how colleges routinely make faculty hiring, retention, and promotion decisions on the basis of what they ought to know are invalid tests. It argues that student course evaluations do not track teacher effectiveness. Using these as the bases of determining hires, promotions, tenure, or raises for faculty is roughly on par with reading entrails or tea leaves to make such decisions. The chapter also explains why universities continue to use student course evaluations.

When Moral Language Disguises Self-Interest

This chapter considers academics’ use of moral language to cover their self-interest. For instance, when a college professor receives tenure, she enjoys tremendous job security. She can then only be fired “for cause” or in case of severe financial emergency. She can hang on to her job for years beyond what should have marked her retirement. At most R1 universities, she can cease publishing without losing her job, even though her primary work responsibility is to publish. In public, professors have to explain why tenure should exist, but need not extol all the benefits tenure grants to them. Instead, they offer high-minded, public-spirited, morally charged arguments, such that tenure protects academic freedom or enhances research productivity.

What Academics Really Want

This chapter discusses the basic incentives that faculty, students, and administrators face, especially at so-called R1 (doctoral-granting with the highest research activity) universities. Different people have somewhat different motivations. Some are more driven by fame and prestige, some by money, some by intellectual curiosity, some by love, and others by a desire to push their ideology. Different institutions also structure their incentives somewhat differently. The university is a political environment where different groups and individuals compete for power and resources. Thus, it is not that the university is full of gremlins or beset by poltergeists, but that individual professors, students, and administrators face incentives that put them in conflict with the core values of the university.

Answering Taxpayers

This chapter considers the many perks enjoyed by colleges at the expense of taxpayers. American colleges and universities spend about half a trillion dollars a year on direct operations. Federal, state, and local governments cover a large portion of these expenses. Overall, colleges get about 37 percent of their revenue from the government. This number does not include indirect spending, such as the public goods colleges consume without having to pay taxes. Colleges do not pay for roads, police, fire departments, military defense, and so on, in the communities where they operate. They also enjoy substantial tax benefits on everything from the property they own to the purchases they make to the way they invest money under their endowments. Thus, colleges receive other hidden subsidies and perks not reflected in those numbers.

Why Universities Produce Too Many PhDs

This chapter considers the current glut of underemployed PhDs, especially in fields like English or modern languages. It asks: Why do so many programs continue to pump out new PhDs despite bad employment prospects? It suggests the reason for a humanities PhD glut is not that jobs are going away. Rather, jobs are mostly remaining stable or growing relative to the overall college population, but humanities departments over the past few decades have overproduced PhDs at even faster rates—rates that far exceeded the ability of the academy to employ them. The humanities are not the victims here; they are responsible for their own plight.

Three Big Myths about What’s Plaguing Higher Ed

The past nine chapters examined all sorts of bad behavior from faculty, administrators, and students. Much of this bad behavior can be attributed to the perverse incentives individuals face because of the way universities are structured. Nevertheless, many commentators seem to believe that three powerful forces haunt academia. They are, supposedly: the corporatization of higher education; neoliberal ideology; and the threat of impending technological disruption. This chapter shows these three alleged threats are greatly exaggerated. It concludes that the problem with blaming all of them on poltergeists and gremlins is there is no real evidence they exist or are causing the current difficulties.

The Gen Ed Hustle

This chapter considers the question of why universities require general education or gen ed. If you ask them, they’ll offer a host of nice, public-spirited reasons. The purpose of gen eds is to ensure that students are well rounded, develop a wide breadth of knowledge and skills, and are exposed to multiple fields so they can make an informed decision about their major. However, the real reason for requiring gen eds is that it represents a way for certain faculty to capture students' tuition dollars. The chapter argues that faculty members exploit students for their own selfish benefit, although they disguise this practice with moralistic arguments.