So . . . working in a university provides me with lots of mental fodder for how we can be better educating our young (and not-so-young) people. And it has been clear (to me, as well as others) that our current university system is severly flawed.
I'm not going to go into all of the reasons why this is, or even the most-talked-about reason (people whose primary goal is specific research into largely esoteric topics teaching general theory and knowledge to people who need practical skills). Today I'm going to discuss how students are admitted into university and progress through.
As I've mentioned before (and will again), people are horrible predictors. We cannot accurately foretell what we will be doing in the near future, let alone others. But our entire post-secondary education system is predicated on prediction. In the admissions process, we heavily weight past scholastic achievement, and somewhat include other factors (e.g. extracurriculars, community-mindedness, etc.) and expect that this is predictive of future success. It may be predictive of future academic success (but even that is doubtful), but certainly not post-university success.
There are two other factors that further complicate the matter. One is that we expect people at the age of seventeen/eighteen (or thereabouts) to be able to decide what their future path looks like, career-wise (prediction again!) and choose a university major accordingly. In Canada, at least (probably elsewhere too), university has become an extension of high school - pretty much everyone goes, even if you don't know what you want to do with your life.
The other complicating factor is that hardly anyone fails out of university. It happens, but it is difficult - you really have to try to fail. So this all adds up to a situation where you have kids who don't know why they are there, staying there, when a lot of them should not have been admitted in the first place. I failed a student this year who was in the last semester of her degree, and there is no way she should have made it that far - she could not even speak English (which is not a character flaw, but is a requirement for success at an English-language university).
My solution? Simple. Admit more students. Let everyone come who wants to. But make it challenging. Any student who can't hack it fails out. Instead of predicting up front who will be successful and then being forced to keep them (more or less), start with everyone and only keep those who show they are capable. You want to be a doctor? Come to medical school. If you fail to meet the requirements, you're out. This would also address the motivation problem - if someone is there 'just cuz,' they are less likely to stay.
A couple of details to defuse potential questions:
1. A failure should not be based on only one (or even two) failed assignments/tests - it should be based on at least a block of courses or a semester. As a believer in the role of randomness, it is possible that a student could do poorly on a quiz or two, and this should not be cause for expulsion.
2. This system would probably result in huge first-year classes, especially in some subjects. Furthermore, it may encourage people who have failed to keep trying different schools or topics until they succeed. The solution for this is two-fold. First, if a student tries a topic and fails, he or she cannot try that topic again, at that school or anywhere else. Second, tuition fees could be skewed such that first year is the most expensive, and it becomes cheaper as the student progresses (or even becomes free in later years, subsidized by the first-year failures). This will pay for the system and keep cohort sizes reasonable, and have the added bonus of providing motivation for success as well as ensuring that students do not enrol unless they are serious (or have deep pockets, or have rich parents who don't care about results).
Ultimately all I am suggesting is that we evaluate students based on how they fare with regard to the topic they are learning at university, rather than based on how they did before they even got there. Less prediction, more results.
So who's up for overhauling a centuries-old institution?
The theory seems sound. However, I appeal to your marketing training: Your proposal may share the same systemic problems as health care, at least for first year subjects - demand would always outstrip supply.
ReplyDeleteIf everyone gained university entrance and a proportion of failed students continued to apply to other subject streams upon failure, it wouldn't take long for the system be bogged down. With some obvious exceptions :) the quality of teaching is questionable at many institutions as is, so finding decent teachers to service the volume of re-applications might be challenging.
Right now, while people don't tend to fail out, they do tend to drop out. In the absence of any empirical evidence, I would still argue the majority of drop outs stay out of the system, allowing it to keep clunking along.
A further comment is that both current and proposed systems reward people who are good at 'university' - in the same way IQ tests prove only how good one is at IQ tests. I wonder if the co-op system could be enhanced...given real teeth, so that success at university required academic achievement combined with practical skill. Maybe that way, students who could write exams, but not practice the profession, would be weeded out before Eric had to break their spirit personally.