I think what hurt me most in this article was the mention that the math graduate program cost just $600 to run (Edit: crit failed at reading comprehension, see comments below). It's just utter...
I think what hurt me most in this article was the mention that the math graduate program cost just $600 to run (Edit: crit failed at reading comprehension, see comments below).
It's just utter insanity. Where do they think new developments in vital computer technology and other sciences come from? Cryptography, data modeling, efficient algorithms, machine learning, basically the entirety of physics... It all comes from what at first was abstract mathematics research.
And all this so that they can wave the incompetent nursing student through a watered down math course with a C. Never mind that that student's now nonexistent ability to interpret data risks consequences to the public once they graduate.
Oh, wow. Yeah, failure on my part to read carefully. It was a extraordinairly low number, but I had assumed as I read it that that was after balancing the teaching and grading labor of graduate...
Oh, wow. Yeah, failure on my part to read carefully. It was a extraordinairly low number, but I had assumed as I read it that that was after balancing the teaching and grading labor of graduate students...
That said, $600,000 saved seems pretty small on the scope of a public university. I wonder what the recruiting costs for one of the new, teaching oriented faculty they're hiring is, and what their turnover will be.
I think a more charitable take here is that nurses don't really need to know very much maths to do their jobs effectively. A good command of arithmetic and a little algebra most likely suffices....
And all this so that they can wave the incompetent nursing student through a watered down math course with a C.
I think a more charitable take here is that nurses don't really need to know very much maths to do their jobs effectively. A good command of arithmetic and a little algebra most likely suffices. The university wants people to teach these courses, which mathematics professors are (generally) not interested in teaching.
I agree though that the university fails to recognise the value that mathematical research can bring to the table.
More and more nurses are eventually working as Nurse Practitioners. That sort of nurse absolutely needs to be able to read a study, evaluate its worth, and learn from it if the statistics are...
More and more nurses are eventually working as Nurse Practitioners. That sort of nurse absolutely needs to be able to read a study, evaluate its worth, and learn from it if the statistics are valid.
You could say that should be a requirement of NP school, but from what I've heard, many of those schools tend to be very much degree mills, so if the skill isn't there at all from undergrad, it may not appear at all.
Yeah, but those math people are always worrying about n dimensions, us physics people don't really need that many. 3-4 is often more than enough :'D. /noise
Yeah, but those math people are always worrying about n dimensions, us physics people don't really need that many. 3-4 is often more than enough :'D.
It's been interesting watching the culture shift over the last decade or so, since I got out of grad school. I studied number theory and was lucky enough to get a teaching professorship. Many of...
It's been interesting watching the culture shift over the last decade or so, since I got out of grad school. I studied number theory and was lucky enough to get a teaching professorship. Many of my colleagues ended up leaving academia all together due to job scarcity. One of the best number theorists I know captains a car ferry now.
The disdain for education is becoming less and less subtle in US politics and popular culture. Math is about more than silly useless abstraction and raw direct application. It's an effort to understand quantifiable truth as thoroughly as possible. If we as a culture lose that desire, what does it say about us collectively and our relationship with truth and critical thinking?
Truthfully, "we as a culture" never did care for understanding or critical thinking, and most who purported to only did so for their own profit (fiscal or otherwise). Now that knowledge is free,...
Truthfully, "we as a culture" never did care for understanding or critical thinking, and most who purported to only did so for their own profit (fiscal or otherwise). Now that knowledge is free, even as education fails, the emperor has no clothes: qualifications are now nothing except a method of advanced nepotism, and the opportunity offered by academics is all-but put out. What we look back and see as respect for understanding and thought was only ever sincerely shared among a narrow element, and the bulk was actually respect for power. And now that's gone, since academics has no funding and the demand for manual labor has crashed, flooding that specific market and also creating a lovely generation of rural people whose family "abandoned them" for college and the city and other such nonsense.
Oh, sorry, forgot the punchline. Something, no Hope, no Jobs, no Cash?
Knowledge isn't free. Especially in mathematics. Sure, you can self-study from the same textbooks as a university curriculum, freely available online, but it is very hard and takes up a lot of...
Knowledge isn't free. Especially in mathematics. Sure, you can self-study from the same textbooks as a university curriculum, freely available online, but it is very hard and takes up a lot of time. And time isn't free.
I somewhat share the sentiment, though. I've seen an unfortunate number of fully-qualified people without university credentials run into bureaucratic issues, despite being recognized as fully-qualified by their peers.
Yeah, I was describing the broad cultural perspective, not my own. Obviously there's value to taking time to learn from experts beyond just reading. It's mostly splitting hairs to call "books are...
Yeah, I was describing the broad cultural perspective, not my own. Obviously there's value to taking time to learn from experts beyond just reading. It's mostly splitting hairs to call "books are available freely and broadly accessible" not knowledge though.
I am a big proponent of self study, and love the time I've spent reading and working from math (and other) books. A really well written text, eg Rudin, can feel like a classroom experience if you...
I am a big proponent of self study, and love the time I've spent reading and working from math (and other) books. A really well written text, eg Rudin, can feel like a classroom experience if you put in sufficient time.
The issue with the "learning is free" thing is more opportunity cost, as it always has been. It's a privilege to be able to invest time into developing any skill, because you are losing revenue. The beauty of the university system and cultures which value liberal arts education is that there's a phase of life where it's acceptable to invest a few years into discoving and developing your skills. The baby will go with the bathwater if the current trend of "making education more practical" continues. People will become less skilled and more pigeonholed into jobs for which they're not well suited, and general knowledge (grammar, foreign language, logic skills) will tank. That's bad news for politics especially, where we need people with breadth
You don't have to tell me that the cultural perception of education is screwed up in North America. My point was that only a slim number of people actually ever valued those things in and of...
You don't have to tell me that the cultural perception of education is screwed up in North America. My point was that only a slim number of people actually ever valued those things in and of themselves, not that they hold no purpose. The dangerous aspect is that the universities, over the past century, have allowed themselves to be coopted into jobs training programs, since nobody in the modern era was ever going to hand out strings-free grants for the equivalent of philosopher-monks. Not to say I know what their alternative was, but just that the impetus could only have come from them, since everyone else was either busy with their own shit or busy squeezing them.
Oof, what even? Admin clearly hasn't a clue what they're talking about. I can sympathize with shifting the undergrad curriculum to be more accessible to the students that enroll, perhaps by...
The department should emphasize national security and data science, he added
Oof, what even? Admin clearly hasn't a clue what they're talking about.
I can sympathize with shifting the undergrad curriculum to be more accessible to the students that enroll, perhaps by creating a class or two of remedial math to catch up and revise K-12 material or by focusing the major requirements to more directly applicable subjects. But we need to stop this madness at some point by doing the right thing and failing high school students. It's ridiculous that it's become common for schools to have infinite retakes and in some cases minimum grades that make it literally impossible to fail.
I understand, but don’t agree with, the drive to purge humanities from higher education in favour of “economically efficient” education designed to mass produce employable worker bees, but the...
I understand, but don’t agree with, the drive to purge humanities from higher education in favour of “economically efficient” education designed to mass produce employable worker bees, but the idea that mathematics, possibly the most valuable and cross-applicable of all the hard disciplines, could somehow get swept up in that same program is mind boggling.
This is a major reason why I dislike the term STEM. Technology and engineering are quite different from science and mathematics, and in many ways, science and mathematics have more similarities to...
This is a major reason why I dislike the term STEM. Technology and engineering are quite different from science and mathematics, and in many ways, science and mathematics have more similarities to the humanities in terms of the research and its impacts. Both involve research that has the potential for enormous impacts, but impacts that likely won't be known while doing or considering the research, might not happen for many years, and won't directly result in profit for the research institution; the humanities might be maligned as not having an impact, but over time scales similar to those for impacts from basic science, the ability of the humanities to develop ideas that effect profound shifts in the way people view the world, and consequently the way the world runs, should not be discounted. Both have applied counterparts that have more immediate and immediately knowable impacts, with the potential for profit from those impacts for those doing the research—engineering and technology for the sciences and mathematics, things like law and political science for the humanities, and for both.
Thus the drive to purge the humanities from higher education also applies to mathematics and the actual sciences. The sciences and mathematics have been a bit better able to resist it than the humanities by stringing along funding agencies and universities with fanciful potential near-term applications that the researchers themselves often don't believe in, convincing people that the side-effects of the research are sufficient near-term applications (a lot of space research and experimental high energy physics, and as you point out in another comment, the 'you should have us around' in mathematics) even if the core research doesn't have applications, or heavily focusing on marketing to convince the public that the research is 'cool' and should be supported (space, some parts of experimental high energy physics, astronomy, etc). But the drive is still there. And the attempts to resist it cause their own problems for research, or push people toward thinking of science and mathematics as essentially just engineering.
I mean, it's pretty clear if you think about the thing you've said -- full-on mathematics doesn't produce employable worker bees in the same way that other STEM disciplines do because of how...
I mean, it's pretty clear if you think about the thing you've said -- full-on mathematics doesn't produce employable worker bees in the same way that other STEM disciplines do because of how theoretical it is. Of course mathematics is hugely important to being able to read and conduct studies, but this is only a subset of what a mathematics department is interested in researching and teaching, so why not cull all that unnecessarily theoretical stuff (aka the stuff the actual professors give a shit about) and just have a teaching college instead? The only "economically efficient" output of a mathematics department is math teachers and a couple bare-minimum undergraduate courses.
Obviously this is horrible and there's tons of arguments about why that's a bad idea. But it's based on the same fundamental principles as purging the humanities.
It’s just that math “trickles down” to the applied sciences in a way that the humanities don’t. The applied sciences consult with the math departments in every university when they need the depth...
It’s just that math “trickles down” to the applied sciences in a way that the humanities don’t. The applied sciences consult with the math departments in every university when they need the depth of knowledge that only exists in a developed mathematics program. This seems shortsighted in a different way than purging the humanities — this isn’t just going to result in less well-rounded students (with all the associated effects on society as a whole), it’s going to result in crippling science and engineering faculties in this specific school.
Another way to look at it is that many 4 year universities are trying to basically become community college plus - it's not like WVA won't teach math, but they will not do any math research...
Another way to look at it is that many 4 year universities are trying to basically become community college plus - it's not like WVA won't teach math, but they will not do any math research anymore.
And honestly, maybe that's fine. To some extent, university applications have become much more nationalized (not in the comrade way, in the everyone applies to everywhere way), and some universities are having to reach for niches to compete.
I really doubt flagship universities are eliminating math grad programs anytime soon. If some of the smaller universities want to become community college plus, then perhaps there is a portion of students for whom that is what they want, and what they would be better served with.
A problem here is that there are teaching-oriented universities, and liberal arts colleges, where the focus is on teaching. But culturally, amongst many groups in the US, going to one of those is...
Exemplary
And honestly, maybe that's fine.
A problem here is that there are teaching-oriented universities, and liberal arts colleges, where the focus is on teaching. But culturally, amongst many groups in the US, going to one of those is seen as undesirable, and the only desirable university to go to is a top research university.
And so the result is that many, many students who would be far better suited to teaching universities go to research universities. They're then upset that the education isn't efficient, or cost effective, and that the teaching isn't well suited to them, and there is pressure put to refashion the research universities into teaching universities, which would then likely be undesirable as a result of being teaching universities. But research universities aren't made for those sorts of students. For example, having teaching done by tenured and tenure-track professors for whom teaching is a secondary consideration and teaching evaluations are unimportant makes sense if what your students want is to learn from people at the forefront of their fields, and they're willing to put in the effort of dealing with difficult teaching styles and developing connections with the professors to gain deeper insight into the material. It doesn't make sense if what your students want is just to understand the material to a sufficient degree: they would have a much better time with professors whose interest was primarily in being effective at imparting knowledge to that degree.
But very, very few students in the US, if they have the ability to get into a top R1, are going to choose to go to a teaching university or liberal arts college, even one that would formerly have been quite prestigious. It's dismayingly common to see vary capable students at good research universities who would just be much happier, and have a much better education, at something else, but are instead insistent on pushing through a research university education, while at the same time taking space that could have gone to students who would have benefited from it: whether a teaching or research focus makes sense is not entirely related to skill and capability.
Edit: I realize that perhaps R1 is not the best description here, and that more generally, my view on what universities are research universities and teaching universities is both a bit specific and a bit snobbish: there are many universities that in many classifications would be designated as high research output universities that I would consider teaching universities. I should note that my perspective here is as a researcher, and I've spent most of my life at research universities, though I have some perspective from others close to me with teaching university experience. The distinction, to me, is primarily one of focus and priorities, of both the administration and the faculty. Is teaching the priority, or research? This can change, too, and you can have universities that try to change: in this article, it sounds like the university is a research university that wants to become a teaching one, while, at least outside of the US, I have some experience with teaching universities trying to become research ones.
This distinction has influences, particularly on perspective, throughout the university; oddly enough, one of the primary ways I notice it is the way facilities and maintenance, IT, and other supports work, and what they focus on for things like planned outages, or regular emails, etc.
Most students have never heard of, let alone care much about, the R1 research university designation. Also, most students pick research universities over LACs because they're cheaper and have a...
Most students have never heard of, let alone care much about, the R1 research university designation. Also, most students pick research universities over LACs because they're cheaper and have a broader reputation (in the sense that people know it exists) on account of having a much larger alumni network and general societal footprint. Tbh, the teaching at most research universities is fine. If you're struggling, then that area is just not your area of aptitude, and that's perfectly okay.
I think that's too broad a brush to paint to really hold much value. Even reputable universities can have weak majors in some areas, and some of the best professiors (industry, research, teaching....
Tbh, the teaching at most research universities is fine. If you're struggling, then that area is just not your area of aptitude, and that's perfectly okay.
I think that's too broad a brush to paint to really hold much value. Even reputable universities can have weak majors in some areas, and some of the best professiors (industry, research, teaching. Take your pick of metric) are teaching at places that would fall under the radar of those top 50 schools. Your mileage will vary immensely even if you are an excellent student, simply due to what networks you can form at which university.
At the end of the day, there's a natural bell curve of ability that's useful and necessary for sorting people into different careers based on a mix of aptitude and motivation, so that certain jobs...
At the end of the day, there's a natural bell curve of ability that's useful and necessary for sorting people into different careers based on a mix of aptitude and motivation, so that certain jobs don't get oversaturated and other jobs don't go unexplored. I don't think teaching could be made much better short of handholding, and I don't see the value in undermining a very effective, flexible, and decentralized system of sorting.
This seems rather complacent and pessimistic, along with a large helping of just world fallacy: there’s no point in trying to improve teaching, because it’s close to optimal? People pretty much...
This seems rather complacent and pessimistic, along with a large helping of just world fallacy: there’s no point in trying to improve teaching, because it’s close to optimal? People pretty much end up where they deserve?
There might be some kinds of teaching that can’t be made much better (maybe some kinds of music instruction?) but I suspect most teaching falls well short of that, and the “sorting” has a large helping of randomness, along with a lot of people gaming the system.
It's not a function of pessimism. It would be shortsighted to ignore that there are limits to how many programmers, chemical engineers, lawyers, etc. there can and most importantly should be. It's...
It's not a function of pessimism. It would be shortsighted to ignore that there are limits to how many programmers, chemical engineers, lawyers, etc. there can and most importantly should be. It's not about deserving or not, because we shouldn't be framing it in the first place as a matter of achieving a more respectable and dignified station in life. We should be striving first and foremost to make any economically viable career path dignified and at least stable (by creating a solid social safety net and funding government run retirement programs, which the West is largely neglecting now).
It's not a function of just-world thinking since I'm not saying teaching should never be improved, just that it's counterproductive to improve it past a certain point. K-12 education in many parts of the country, and probably most certainly in WV, falls below and sometimes shockingly below this threshold. Research universities in this country good enough to be R1, on the other hand, typically do not.
Yes, there are limits on demand for workers in many fields. Actors, musicians, and professors are other examples. (It's common nowadays to discourage graduate students because the odds are very...
Yes, there are limits on demand for workers in many fields. Actors, musicians, and professors are other examples. (It's common nowadays to discourage graduate students because the odds are very long and many graduate students end up working in other fields. I think it's fair to say that universities are accepting too many graduate students.)
For some fields, like doctors in the US, it's artificially limited - there are only so many residencies. Probably related: doctors make a lot more in the US than other places. This should be concerning if you care about health care costs.
In other fields, the limits are fuzzy. Considering the high salaries many programmers make, it seems odd to think we're close to the limit?
The part I object to, though, is the idea that limited demand implies that schools are doing a good job of "sorting" and educating. This doesn't logically follow, and it seems like people often end up in a career due to random chance, like they happened to take a course with a good teacher who inspired them to change majors.
(I also think that very high and increasing prices many people pay for college shows that something is wrong.)
I think my main point was less about "teaching/teachers are bad" and more about students are not taught how to figure out their own learning style. It's not necessarily their fault if they get a...
I think my main point was less about "teaching/teachers are bad" and more about
students are not taught how to figure out their own learning style. It's not necessarily their fault if they get a teacher incompatible with their own style of learing. It's arguably society's fault for failing more often than not to realize this
University's value don't simply lie in teachers, and that's where the gap appears even in motivated students who may otherwise ace everything in their path.
If they cost 10 times less and weren't funding fancy gyms that may hold some weight. And even then most universities would be around 3-4x the cost of the average CC. But from their own mouths:...
If they cost 10 times less and weren't funding fancy gyms that may hold some weight. And even then most universities would be around 3-4x the cost of the average CC. But from their own mouths:
He had to make “hard choices” to adapt West Virginia’s curriculum to a “changing marketplace,” he said. He cited a 2021 report that found that forty-six per cent of parents would prefer not to send their children to a four-year college. By cutting some programs, altering others, adding online-degree options, and “creating a path for those seeking microcredentials,” the university could “tailor relevant academic content to specific market needs,” Gee told me.
Yes, half the parent don't want to send their kids to university because of the math program. Surely. Clearly they need to invest more in their economics department if that's the conclusion reached from that study.
And I don't want to veer too far off, but I do share some sentiment with universities slowly being converted into job training programs. Aside from some historical academia spirit, many places complain about the quality of the candidates that they somehow expect to slot perfectly into their cogs.
The real question here should be: why did we abandon apprenticeships and then somehow expect college to provide that "free" training for locked down private firms? Oh wait. It's worse than free. How did we convince society that an 18yo student needs to go into unbankruptable debt to get training for jobs that complain about not having 4 years of experience in the office they weren't hired into?
The modern educational system and job market frustrates me so much.
The quote doesn't say that. I'm skeptical that there are parents who don't want their kids to go to university specifically because of the math program? It would be nice to have some actual data...
The quote doesn't say that. I'm skeptical that there are parents who don't want their kids to go to university specifically because of the math program?
It would be nice to have some actual data on this rather than a slippery quote by a manager.
yes, hence my sarcasm. The actions imply this even though this probably is not the contributing reason on why more parents are hesitant. These are all quotes from the president driving these...
I'm skeptical that there are parents who don't want their kids to go to university specifically because of the math program?
yes, hence my sarcasm. The actions imply this even though this probably is not the contributing reason on why more parents are hesitant.
It would be nice to have some actual data on this rather than a slippery quote by a manager.
These are all quotes from the president driving these decisions, not some PR person. But it is a confusing statement and action nonetheless.
The study cited (you can download the raw report from there, but they require a soft signup account) seems to suggest that this was asked even with all barriers removed. Of the most interest is that 22% seem to want "other pathways" which entail:
The remaining 22% of parents prefer that their child pursue a path that does not explicitly involve formal postsecondary education, such as starting a business, performing volunteer work, joining the military, securing a paid job or taking time off to pursue their interests.
so I guess it's a variety of "make money immediately" or "don't rush into anything immediately". This simply seems like a population not interested in college in any way, shape, or form though. Not one to try to appeal to unless you offer more paid work/internships somehow.
But when taking barriers into account: unsurprisingly, financial barriers are the overwhelming largest one. Almost matched by the number of parents who believe they have no barriers.
I think what hurt me most in this article was the mention that the math graduate program cost just $600 to run (Edit: crit failed at reading comprehension, see comments below).
It's just utter insanity. Where do they think new developments in vital computer technology and other sciences come from? Cryptography, data modeling, efficient algorithms, machine learning, basically the entirety of physics... It all comes from what at first was abstract mathematics research.
And all this so that they can wave the incompetent nursing student through a watered down math course with a C. Never mind that that student's now nonexistent ability to interpret data risks consequences to the public once they graduate.
I think you mean six hundred thousand dollars? Or do you mean per graduate?
Oh, wow. Yeah, failure on my part to read carefully. It was a extraordinairly low number, but I had assumed as I read it that that was after balancing the teaching and grading labor of graduate students...
That said, $600,000 saved seems pretty small on the scope of a public university. I wonder what the recruiting costs for one of the new, teaching oriented faculty they're hiring is, and what their turnover will be.
I think a more charitable take here is that nurses don't really need to know very much maths to do their jobs effectively. A good command of arithmetic and a little algebra most likely suffices. The university wants people to teach these courses, which mathematics professors are (generally) not interested in teaching.
I agree though that the university fails to recognise the value that mathematical research can bring to the table.
More and more nurses are eventually working as Nurse Practitioners. That sort of nurse absolutely needs to be able to read a study, evaluate its worth, and learn from it if the statistics are valid.
You could say that should be a requirement of NP school, but from what I've heard, many of those schools tend to be very much degree mills, so if the skill isn't there at all from undergrad, it may not appear at all.
Yeah, but those math people are always worrying about n dimensions, us physics people don't really need that many. 3-4 is often more than enough :'D.
/noise
It's been interesting watching the culture shift over the last decade or so, since I got out of grad school. I studied number theory and was lucky enough to get a teaching professorship. Many of my colleagues ended up leaving academia all together due to job scarcity. One of the best number theorists I know captains a car ferry now.
The disdain for education is becoming less and less subtle in US politics and popular culture. Math is about more than silly useless abstraction and raw direct application. It's an effort to understand quantifiable truth as thoroughly as possible. If we as a culture lose that desire, what does it say about us collectively and our relationship with truth and critical thinking?
Truthfully, "we as a culture" never did care for understanding or critical thinking, and most who purported to only did so for their own profit (fiscal or otherwise). Now that knowledge is free, even as education fails, the emperor has no clothes: qualifications are now nothing except a method of advanced nepotism, and the opportunity offered by academics is all-but put out. What we look back and see as respect for understanding and thought was only ever sincerely shared among a narrow element, and the bulk was actually respect for power. And now that's gone, since academics has no funding and the demand for manual labor has crashed, flooding that specific market and also creating a lovely generation of rural people whose family "abandoned them" for college and the city and other such nonsense.
Oh, sorry, forgot the punchline. Something, no Hope, no Jobs, no Cash?
Knowledge isn't free. Especially in mathematics. Sure, you can self-study from the same textbooks as a university curriculum, freely available online, but it is very hard and takes up a lot of time. And time isn't free.
I somewhat share the sentiment, though. I've seen an unfortunate number of fully-qualified people without university credentials run into bureaucratic issues, despite being recognized as fully-qualified by their peers.
Yeah, I was describing the broad cultural perspective, not my own. Obviously there's value to taking time to learn from experts beyond just reading. It's mostly splitting hairs to call "books are available freely and broadly accessible" not knowledge though.
I am a big proponent of self study, and love the time I've spent reading and working from math (and other) books. A really well written text, eg Rudin, can feel like a classroom experience if you put in sufficient time.
The issue with the "learning is free" thing is more opportunity cost, as it always has been. It's a privilege to be able to invest time into developing any skill, because you are losing revenue. The beauty of the university system and cultures which value liberal arts education is that there's a phase of life where it's acceptable to invest a few years into discoving and developing your skills. The baby will go with the bathwater if the current trend of "making education more practical" continues. People will become less skilled and more pigeonholed into jobs for which they're not well suited, and general knowledge (grammar, foreign language, logic skills) will tank. That's bad news for politics especially, where we need people with breadth
You don't have to tell me that the cultural perception of education is screwed up in North America. My point was that only a slim number of people actually ever valued those things in and of themselves, not that they hold no purpose. The dangerous aspect is that the universities, over the past century, have allowed themselves to be coopted into jobs training programs, since nobody in the modern era was ever going to hand out strings-free grants for the equivalent of philosopher-monks. Not to say I know what their alternative was, but just that the impetus could only have come from them, since everyone else was either busy with their own shit or busy squeezing them.
Oof, what even? Admin clearly hasn't a clue what they're talking about.
I can sympathize with shifting the undergrad curriculum to be more accessible to the students that enroll, perhaps by creating a class or two of remedial math to catch up and revise K-12 material or by focusing the major requirements to more directly applicable subjects. But we need to stop this madness at some point by doing the right thing and failing high school students. It's ridiculous that it's become common for schools to have infinite retakes and in some cases minimum grades that make it literally impossible to fail.
I understand, but don’t agree with, the drive to purge humanities from higher education in favour of “economically efficient” education designed to mass produce employable worker bees, but the idea that mathematics, possibly the most valuable and cross-applicable of all the hard disciplines, could somehow get swept up in that same program is mind boggling.
This is a major reason why I dislike the term STEM. Technology and engineering are quite different from science and mathematics, and in many ways, science and mathematics have more similarities to the humanities in terms of the research and its impacts. Both involve research that has the potential for enormous impacts, but impacts that likely won't be known while doing or considering the research, might not happen for many years, and won't directly result in profit for the research institution; the humanities might be maligned as not having an impact, but over time scales similar to those for impacts from basic science, the ability of the humanities to develop ideas that effect profound shifts in the way people view the world, and consequently the way the world runs, should not be discounted. Both have applied counterparts that have more immediate and immediately knowable impacts, with the potential for profit from those impacts for those doing the research—engineering and technology for the sciences and mathematics, things like law and political science for the humanities, and for both.
Thus the drive to purge the humanities from higher education also applies to mathematics and the actual sciences. The sciences and mathematics have been a bit better able to resist it than the humanities by stringing along funding agencies and universities with fanciful potential near-term applications that the researchers themselves often don't believe in, convincing people that the side-effects of the research are sufficient near-term applications (a lot of space research and experimental high energy physics, and as you point out in another comment, the 'you should have us around' in mathematics) even if the core research doesn't have applications, or heavily focusing on marketing to convince the public that the research is 'cool' and should be supported (space, some parts of experimental high energy physics, astronomy, etc). But the drive is still there. And the attempts to resist it cause their own problems for research, or push people toward thinking of science and mathematics as essentially just engineering.
I mean, it's pretty clear if you think about the thing you've said -- full-on mathematics doesn't produce employable worker bees in the same way that other STEM disciplines do because of how theoretical it is. Of course mathematics is hugely important to being able to read and conduct studies, but this is only a subset of what a mathematics department is interested in researching and teaching, so why not cull all that unnecessarily theoretical stuff (aka the stuff the actual professors give a shit about) and just have a teaching college instead? The only "economically efficient" output of a mathematics department is math teachers and a couple bare-minimum undergraduate courses.
Obviously this is horrible and there's tons of arguments about why that's a bad idea. But it's based on the same fundamental principles as purging the humanities.
It’s just that math “trickles down” to the applied sciences in a way that the humanities don’t. The applied sciences consult with the math departments in every university when they need the depth of knowledge that only exists in a developed mathematics program. This seems shortsighted in a different way than purging the humanities — this isn’t just going to result in less well-rounded students (with all the associated effects on society as a whole), it’s going to result in crippling science and engineering faculties in this specific school.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/HeGe7
Another way to look at it is that many 4 year universities are trying to basically become community college plus - it's not like WVA won't teach math, but they will not do any math research anymore.
And honestly, maybe that's fine. To some extent, university applications have become much more nationalized (not in the comrade way, in the everyone applies to everywhere way), and some universities are having to reach for niches to compete.
I really doubt flagship universities are eliminating math grad programs anytime soon. If some of the smaller universities want to become community college plus, then perhaps there is a portion of students for whom that is what they want, and what they would be better served with.
A problem here is that there are teaching-oriented universities, and liberal arts colleges, where the focus is on teaching. But culturally, amongst many groups in the US, going to one of those is seen as undesirable, and the only desirable university to go to is a top research university.
And so the result is that many, many students who would be far better suited to teaching universities go to research universities. They're then upset that the education isn't efficient, or cost effective, and that the teaching isn't well suited to them, and there is pressure put to refashion the research universities into teaching universities, which would then likely be undesirable as a result of being teaching universities. But research universities aren't made for those sorts of students. For example, having teaching done by tenured and tenure-track professors for whom teaching is a secondary consideration and teaching evaluations are unimportant makes sense if what your students want is to learn from people at the forefront of their fields, and they're willing to put in the effort of dealing with difficult teaching styles and developing connections with the professors to gain deeper insight into the material. It doesn't make sense if what your students want is just to understand the material to a sufficient degree: they would have a much better time with professors whose interest was primarily in being effective at imparting knowledge to that degree.
But very, very few students in the US, if they have the ability to get into a top R1, are going to choose to go to a teaching university or liberal arts college, even one that would formerly have been quite prestigious. It's dismayingly common to see vary capable students at good research universities who would just be much happier, and have a much better education, at something else, but are instead insistent on pushing through a research university education, while at the same time taking space that could have gone to students who would have benefited from it: whether a teaching or research focus makes sense is not entirely related to skill and capability.
Edit: I realize that perhaps R1 is not the best description here, and that more generally, my view on what universities are research universities and teaching universities is both a bit specific and a bit snobbish: there are many universities that in many classifications would be designated as high research output universities that I would consider teaching universities. I should note that my perspective here is as a researcher, and I've spent most of my life at research universities, though I have some perspective from others close to me with teaching university experience. The distinction, to me, is primarily one of focus and priorities, of both the administration and the faculty. Is teaching the priority, or research? This can change, too, and you can have universities that try to change: in this article, it sounds like the university is a research university that wants to become a teaching one, while, at least outside of the US, I have some experience with teaching universities trying to become research ones.
This distinction has influences, particularly on perspective, throughout the university; oddly enough, one of the primary ways I notice it is the way facilities and maintenance, IT, and other supports work, and what they focus on for things like planned outages, or regular emails, etc.
Most students have never heard of, let alone care much about, the R1 research university designation. Also, most students pick research universities over LACs because they're cheaper and have a broader reputation (in the sense that people know it exists) on account of having a much larger alumni network and general societal footprint. Tbh, the teaching at most research universities is fine. If you're struggling, then that area is just not your area of aptitude, and that's perfectly okay.
I think that's too broad a brush to paint to really hold much value. Even reputable universities can have weak majors in some areas, and some of the best professiors (industry, research, teaching. Take your pick of metric) are teaching at places that would fall under the radar of those top 50 schools. Your mileage will vary immensely even if you are an excellent student, simply due to what networks you can form at which university.
At the end of the day, there's a natural bell curve of ability that's useful and necessary for sorting people into different careers based on a mix of aptitude and motivation, so that certain jobs don't get oversaturated and other jobs don't go unexplored. I don't think teaching could be made much better short of handholding, and I don't see the value in undermining a very effective, flexible, and decentralized system of sorting.
This seems rather complacent and pessimistic, along with a large helping of just world fallacy: there’s no point in trying to improve teaching, because it’s close to optimal? People pretty much end up where they deserve?
There might be some kinds of teaching that can’t be made much better (maybe some kinds of music instruction?) but I suspect most teaching falls well short of that, and the “sorting” has a large helping of randomness, along with a lot of people gaming the system.
It's not a function of pessimism. It would be shortsighted to ignore that there are limits to how many programmers, chemical engineers, lawyers, etc. there can and most importantly should be. It's not about deserving or not, because we shouldn't be framing it in the first place as a matter of achieving a more respectable and dignified station in life. We should be striving first and foremost to make any economically viable career path dignified and at least stable (by creating a solid social safety net and funding government run retirement programs, which the West is largely neglecting now).
It's not a function of just-world thinking since I'm not saying teaching should never be improved, just that it's counterproductive to improve it past a certain point. K-12 education in many parts of the country, and probably most certainly in WV, falls below and sometimes shockingly below this threshold. Research universities in this country good enough to be R1, on the other hand, typically do not.
Yes, there are limits on demand for workers in many fields. Actors, musicians, and professors are other examples. (It's common nowadays to discourage graduate students because the odds are very long and many graduate students end up working in other fields. I think it's fair to say that universities are accepting too many graduate students.)
For some fields, like doctors in the US, it's artificially limited - there are only so many residencies. Probably related: doctors make a lot more in the US than other places. This should be concerning if you care about health care costs.
In other fields, the limits are fuzzy. Considering the high salaries many programmers make, it seems odd to think we're close to the limit?
The part I object to, though, is the idea that limited demand implies that schools are doing a good job of "sorting" and educating. This doesn't logically follow, and it seems like people often end up in a career due to random chance, like they happened to take a course with a good teacher who inspired them to change majors.
(I also think that very high and increasing prices many people pay for college shows that something is wrong.)
I think my main point was less about "teaching/teachers are bad" and more about
students are not taught how to figure out their own learning style. It's not necessarily their fault if they get a teacher incompatible with their own style of learing. It's arguably society's fault for failing more often than not to realize this
University's value don't simply lie in teachers, and that's where the gap appears even in motivated students who may otherwise ace everything in their path.
If they cost 10 times less and weren't funding fancy gyms that may hold some weight. And even then most universities would be around 3-4x the cost of the average CC. But from their own mouths:
Yes, half the parent don't want to send their kids to university because of the math program. Surely. Clearly they need to invest more in their economics department if that's the conclusion reached from that study.
And I don't want to veer too far off, but I do share some sentiment with universities slowly being converted into job training programs. Aside from some historical academia spirit, many places complain about the quality of the candidates that they somehow expect to slot perfectly into their cogs.
The real question here should be: why did we abandon apprenticeships and then somehow expect college to provide that "free" training for locked down private firms? Oh wait. It's worse than free. How did we convince society that an 18yo student needs to go into unbankruptable debt to get training for jobs that complain about not having 4 years of experience in the office they weren't hired into?
The modern educational system and job market frustrates me so much.
The quote doesn't say that. I'm skeptical that there are parents who don't want their kids to go to university specifically because of the math program?
It would be nice to have some actual data on this rather than a slippery quote by a manager.
yes, hence my sarcasm. The actions imply this even though this probably is not the contributing reason on why more parents are hesitant.
These are all quotes from the president driving these decisions, not some PR person. But it is a confusing statement and action nonetheless.
The study cited (you can download the raw report from there, but they require a soft signup account) seems to suggest that this was asked even with all barriers removed. Of the most interest is that 22% seem to want "other pathways" which entail:
so I guess it's a variety of "make money immediately" or "don't rush into anything immediately". This simply seems like a population not interested in college in any way, shape, or form though. Not one to try to appeal to unless you offer more paid work/internships somehow.
But when taking barriers into account: unsurprisingly, financial barriers are the overwhelming largest one. Almost matched by the number of parents who believe they have no barriers.