Saturday, July 09, 2011

Nerd News: A Report from the Campus Trenches

Oh, my.

3 comments:

Brian J. Dunn said...

I remember quite a few years ago (OK, probably close to a few decades ago) talking to a professor, and he expressed astonishment that college was one of the few things people would buy at a high price and not try to get the most out of the purchase. That is, students don't put a high priority on going to class.

Even then--although I didn't say this to him--my reaction was that students aren't buying your knowledge as much as they are buying the degree. He confused the two.

People still do, it seems. Although the difference between learning and getting a credential is becoming more obvious these days.

Mad Minerva said...

I've told my students basically the same thing about wasting their tuition. One class-skipping kid actually came up to me at one point and shamefacedly confessed that he'd never thought about it until his furious tuition-paying parents gave him a good yelling-at about it. Well, at least the kid wised up. Not all of them do.

lumpy said...

Well, to be fair, we do spend 12 years teaching them to be bad students before they get to college. Most of them probably can't tell the difference unless they're working their way through and paying the tuition bill themselves.