Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

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If you go to your doctor and say "I have a cold, fix it" then you are going to be disappointed no matter how good your doctor is. ("With proper treatment, a cold will clear up in a week. Without, it may take as much as seven days.")

If you go to your teacher (at whatever level) and say "I want to become expert in your field without either working very hard or having a great deal of natural talent" then you are again going to be disappointed no matter how good the teacher is. ("There is no royal road to mathematics.")

If you go to your doctor and she says "I know what's wrong, and you can fix it by taking these drugs and doing these exercises", and you don't take the drugs or do the exercises, it's hardly the doctor's fault if your condition doesn't improve the way you want it to.

If you go to your teacher (at whatever level) and say "I want good grades without actually mastering the ideas and facts" then yet again you will be disappointed.

In your little list of facts, you may notice that step 3 says "The teacher fails to significantly improve the student's understanding". But improving a student's understanding is a two-person job. A student who does nothing beyond turning up to most of the lectures is not likely to do well in their examinations (exception: in some fields, some outstandingly able students may be able to do this, but by definition most students are not outstandingly able). And if that's what the student does, it's not reasonable to say that the teacher is failing at their job.

> A student who does nothing beyond turning up to most of the lectures

Then adjust the cost of the course to reflect that reality. If the teacher is admittely doing zero work to help this student, then why does it cost so much. Teachers in this case are QQing all the way to the bank. This is just a smoke screen thrown up to distract from the fact that these students that don't work hard are being defrauded left and right.

Lecturing 30 students for 18 weeks at $9,000 per student would make me fanatically motivated to give them the knowledge that they requested. Give half to overhead, and that is almost half a million per year. That buys a lot of work from a single human.

9,000GBP, this article related specifically to English and Welsh universities. A lecture earns around 40k GBP annually, a senior lecturer might get up to about 60k GBP.

So, to be fair, that £9,000 per student is clearly not going to the faculty. Do you think a lecturer teaching a 300-person class is making some £2.7M/year?

> “Hey student – all I’m asking for is a little respect, seeing as how much you pay makes no difference to my wages, yet the level of support I am forced to offer you takes up 80% of my time despite the fact that teaching still only equates to 33% of my workload. But I’ll be in the office until 9pm anyway because if I don’t publish two papers by the end of the year, I’ll be fired”.

There are people getting rich off of the university scam, but it isn't the faculty. And the people who are getting rich are clever enough to stay hidden and let the students think they're overpaying the faculty.

http://www.bbc.com/news/education-31715020

You're radically overestimating how much teachers are paid. I lectured at a Canadian university and was paid $7k per semester long course with about 100 students. I could maybe handle 2 courses per semester (after some time to get my lectures dialed in), which works out to $42k/year for an engineer with a graduate degree.

If anyone is QQing to the bank it's not your lecturer.

> Then adjust the cost of the course to reflect that reality.

It's already built into the cost. If the teacher could get you to learn, without any further effort on your part, a class would cost way more than $9,000—probably closer to $90,000.

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