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Comment by MatthiasP | Hacker News Reader

It works, but it is hardly the silver bullet for higher education HN wants it to be. The biggest problem is the lack of incentive for staff to deliver quality in teaching.

Free college does not make the opportunity costs of bad and protracted education go away.

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I teach at a community college. Our funding per student has been declining for 15 years. We raise tuition as a result. We have become more like a business. We need students to pay the bills. Our focus is on passing students and retaining them. It’s all about passing rate. In such an environment standards go down. Instead of society and the ideal of knowledge being our client it is the student who is the client. I can no longer be a real teacher who gives real grades with real expectations. I need a job and this shift in focus is bad and degrades colleges.

>Our funding per student has been declining for 15 years. We raise tuition as a result. We have become more like a business

I thought the Obama administration did a lot to fund community colleges. Was that just all posturing and no actual substance?

There was talk of making community college free but that never passed. It would likely have been tied to success rate as defined by the Department of Education. One pernicious stat is that we are judged by graduation rate. This means a student who comes to us for two years and transfers to a 4 year university but does not formally get an AA is counted as a failure on our part. My experience is that most of the metrics used are useless but well intentioned and increasingly funding and whatnot are starting to get tied to these metrics. I'll optimize to satisfy whatever my employment is based on. In the old days we just taught our classes and pretty much everyone was expected to have high standards. Not anymore.

> One pernicious stat is that we are judged by graduation rate.

What were you judged on before this? How do you evaluate the quality of a teacher? My mom is an elementary school teacher and she talks about similar things that the schools are pushing hard to have the highest graduation rates.

That sounds like a dangerous stat to judge by, since as you and she are noting the teacher's jobs are now tied to how many kids pass (and that the number keeps going up), not how well they teach.

> It’s all about passing rate. In such an environment standards go down.

You would have thought that standards would go up, in order for them to get better grades. But I think you'd need standardised tests at the end of college for that, and I think outside some vocational professions nobody does that.

> The biggest problem is the lack of incentive for staff to deliver quality in teaching.

Not sure I follow you.

Does it mean that you believe that TAs/Professors teach better if they have a higher salary and that colleges need to be expensive for this to happen?

It does seem to be worded that way.

I disagree with that statement, but there is still a financial incentive issue. Having gained your first degree, you have a choice between starting to earn real money by leaving academia or starting a PhD (possibly via MA/MSc), which might be self funded or on a meagre stipend unless it is in something very marketable. Following that, probably 3 years in a postdoc position at the same salary you could have been paid 4 years ago. So now 7 years on, you might be able to get a lectureship, still only earning as much as those who have finished their 1 or 2 year milkround graduate training position.

As you approach 40, you might become a reader, at this point your salary might be at parity with your peers from your undergraduate days who are working in charities or government jobs, but all your private sector peers are earning way more.

As you enter your 50s, you might finally become a professor. At this point, your salary matches those old chums you had who went into business, but only because their income peaked about a decade ago, and you have now caught up.

At pretty much any point along this journey, you will have options to jump ship and earn more.

Why would American college staff be so hilariously bad, compared to European staff?

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