At age 16, I was slightly intimidated by my community college general biology class. I had never taken a chemistry class before (it was highly recommended), my peers already had a high school diploma, and my professor was an old man who answered a question by asking a question.
It didn’t take long before I figured out how to play the mental game that is called the Socratic Method. A question from the pupil is always followed up by a question from a teacher. Just as you would not do your child’s homework for him, you would not give a direct answer to the pupil without making him find the answer. The simplest example of this I can give is this:
“How old are you?”
“If I was born in 1978, how old would I be?”
Teaching with the Socratic Method encourages dialogue, logic, and self-confidence. Large lecture halls discourage dialogue, spoon-feed materials, and students are unable to know for sure if they understand the material until an exam (and then it’s too late).
I love going to large lectures, but after thinking back over all the college classes I have taken so far, I’ve retained the most information from the professors who taught classes using the Socratic Method. And those class sizes have been 20 people or less.
Marty Nemko, an author, career counselor, and advisor to 15 college presidents, asks in a recent article, “How much do students at four-year institutions actually learn?”
Colleges and universities are businesses, and students are a cost item, while research is a profit center. As a result, many institutions tend to educate students in the cheapest way possible: large lecture classes, with necessary small classes staffed by rock-bottom-cost graduate students. At many colleges, only a small percentage of the typical student’s classroom hours will have been spent with fewer than 30 students taught by a professor, according to student-questionnaire data I used for my book How to Get an Ivy League Education at a State University. When students at 115 institutions were asked what percentage of their class time had been spent in classes of fewer than 30 students, the average response was 28 percent.
While art majors do have a reputation for being useless (art is basically a physically tangible form of philosophy), at least they are learning how to be a professional in their field. By the time they have a B.F.A., they also have a portfolio, an example of what they can and cannot do.
Okay, so what if you’re not an art major? What do you have to show for yourself?
In his article, Nemko lists things that he thinks should be included in recruitment materials. He argues that this would give people a better understanding of if their university of choice is worth the money that they’ll be spending on it.
The results of a national test with some parts in a career context
Unless there are at least 20 variations of this test, I disagree. The point of going to college is to specialize in something. English majors are not going to need to take a test that looks anything like what a physics major would take.
Retention data
The percentage of students returning for a second year would be an interesting statistic, but earlier in the article, Nemko states, “Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that’s terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.”
Four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates
I know a lot of students who are here for more than four years, simply because they cannot get into the classes that they need. Also, a lot of people double-major.
Employment data for graduates: the percentage of graduates who, within six months of graduation, are in graduate school, unemployed, or employed in a job requiring college-level skills, along with salary data
There are a couple problems with this. First, all science-related jobs require college-level skills. Second, even though a lot of people with B.A. degrees go on to do jobs that high school graduates could learn to do with ease, that doesn’t mean that companies hire high school graduates. While searching for jobs this summer, I found that a lot of job postings required a bachelor’s degree for something as simple as gathering legal records and organizing paperwork.
Results of the most-recent student-satisfaction survey
I’m a little eccentric, so I think that this data would be a little discouraging for me. I’ve stopped looking at sites like ratemyprofessors.com because I’ve always had different opinions of professors than the general student body has. Personal experience has shown me that a lot of my peers are unappreciative and lazy. “Hard graders” are usually just trying to eliminate errors from your work. “Unclear” professors use vocabulary words that are used in research journals. “Unhelpful” instructors just want you to go to office hours. Besides faculty, there lots of other reasons why a school could be unsatisfactory. Expectations are often higher than reality.
Large lecture halls and statistics aside, my friend Lauren (editor-in-chief of the Daily Wildcat) has always said that having a job during college is one of the most important parts of your education. Another friend, Jaclyn, said, “You need jobs to get jobs.” They’re right. You don’t need a national test when you have recommendations and a resume.
