mabinda.com Business, Education, Technology Commentary.

One of the drawbacks of the big research universities is that professors don’t teach undergraduate students. That is mostly, the undergraduate students are taught by teaching assistants, TAs, mostly PhD students that are on measly pay and who are also assisting the professors in their research work. One of the reasons why Princeton has often been ranked as America’s best college is it’s concentration on undergraduate teaching, that is as a professor at Princeton, you are at least required to devote a huge chunk of your time teaching undergraduates. In the other big research universities, professors are chasing big research dollars and their standing in the university and among colleagues is by how much they research and publish, and so they leave the teaching of undergraduates, marking and grading of quizzes to undergraduates and this just means the undergraduate doesn’t get to be taught by a world beating faculty as advertised in the university brochures.

And the unfortunate thing is that universities are filling their ranks with more staff as opposed to faculty, and there is a smaller staff to student ratio than faculty to student ratio, and that says something about the priorities of the university. It is a shame that many universities have shifted from their academic almost puritan roots to being country golf clubs where the student is pampered to no end. The number one goal of any university should be knowledge generation, teaching and research, but it seems the part about teaching is usually forgotten. It seems true scholarship at the big research universities begins at the graduate level, where you will meet with actual professors and not teaching assistants.

The universities could increase the office hour session between the professors and the students so the students get to meet their professors more often. Otherwise, graduate students fill in that time and given they are overloaded with lots of quizzes to mark, assignments to grade, and to assist the professor in the research work so at least they get published, the undergraduate student doesn’t get a fair deal. And the problem is going to get more acute as donors paused their funding given the universities recent altercation with the spread of antisemitism in campus, and with the top universities being accused of being centers of liberal indoctrination until the Trump campaign has said it plans to tax the endowment funds of the large research universities, nearly $700 billion dollars, so as to create a university where they’ll offer free tuition and one that will train true patriots, probably more right leaning, that will push America forward.