Most things in general are broken to a degree that the average reasonable person would find completely shocking. There are absolutely comic book levels of incompetence, grift, discrimination, and vice, within most bureaucratic organizations if you know where to look.
Other country, other situation, but I think this meta observation works for both:
If the educational system is broken too much, the society loses an ability to rationally discuss how to fix it, because the “unbelievable” facts you report are taken as an evidence against your sanity or honesty, not against the system. And of course there are some people who benefit from the system remaining as it is, and they are happy to confirm that you are wrong.
On some level, yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But people have their priors seriously wrong here—sanity waterline is generally low, incompetence is not so rare in the absence of feedback, and there are lot of money to make by abusing the school system. Also the prior probabilities are counted repeatedly. (If one teacher complains, he is probabably just an incompetent lunatic. If another teacher complains, she is also an incompetent lunatic. If thousands of teachers complain… well, by the same logic, they are all incompetent lunatics. There is never a point where there is enough evidence to start suspecting that they might actually be right. It also does not promote honest communication if it is widely known that a teacher who complains about the system will be considered incompetent.)
EDIT: I was a teacher for a few years, then I realized the system is so broken that my individual contribution as a teacher is unlikely to improve things. I talked to some people around me about what I have experienced. Later one of them told me that at the beginning they just considered me crazy, because obviously things can’t be that wrong. But they were curious whether the things I said could be at least partially true, so they cross-checked some of my stories with other teachers. And the other teachers confirmed my version. Even now the person tells me it is impossible to believe everything I said (only a few things could be cross-checked), but the confirmation from the other sources at least moved my credibility from “crazy” to “essentially correct, but probably exaggerating a lot” area. I asked whether they consider the other teachers (who have confirmed my stories) to be similarly untrustworthy as me, and the answer was negative. Apparently the greatest difference is that I spread the information actively, but the other ones were silent and only answered when they were asked. They have better social skills than me, and probably soon realized that speaking about their experience is only going to ruin their credibility. (If you are asked about an improbable thing and you confirm it, it does not have the same impact as when you contribute dozen improbable stories to an unprepared audience.)
I’m reading The Shadow Scholar, a book by a man who makes his living by writing papers for college students. There’s a root and branch attack on Rutgers, a university which is sort of an educational scam which loots the students for the benefit of the parking system and the athletics program.
Poking around online, the only people I’ve found who’ve said he’s unfair to Rutgers have been very marginal about it (they say it’s possible to get a good education at Rutgers), and a number who agree that it’s really that bad.
I attended Rutgers part time when I was a full time employee of bell labs. The graduate physics classes were excellent, rigorous, well taught, well designed, and hard. I have no particular recollection of any parking fees or atheletic activity. Since that time, I proceeded to get a PhD from Caltech and teach for 8 years at University of Rochester. In my opinion, informed by my experience, Rutgers is categorically NOT an educational scam.
The company I work for has hired many engineers who have been educated at Rutgers. There is no evidence that Rutgers is a scam, either in the interview process for these engineers, or their subsequent performance on the job.
The quality of undergraduate and graduate experiences at the same university can be dramatically different, since their funding sources (and thus their incentive structures) are separate. It’s possible that Rutgers is broken as an undergrad institution, but not as a graduate one.
(Rutgers also has a good reputation as a graduate math department.)
It’s also possible that there’s a division between STEM and everything else. Especially, there aren’t many term papers or essays being written for math-heavy courses, and so I can safely assume the Shadow Scholar wouldn’t have run across their students.
One data point of modest value—a friend of mine graduated from Rutgers as a history major, probably in the 80s. She didn’t know that life could be very hard for civilians in war zones. She isn’t my smartest friend, but she isn’t stupid and she’s pretty conscientious.
I attended in 1979. I did not matriculate, but I did take regular graduate Physics courses that I had to leave work during the day to attend.
My other exposure to Rutgers is through a very good friend who was a Bell Labs department head for years, who was then Professor at Rutgers for seems about 10 years until probably 2000. He started the Wireless Information Lab which has a superb national reputation for research, graduate, and postgraduate work. I visited him and Lab events many times over the years, and find it implausible that if the undergrad education was a scam he wouldn’t have mentioned it.
In fact I’ll email him about this, and if he answers post something here.
Having read The Shadow Scholar also, I don’t think the author himself would stand behind a claim that Rutgers is an educational scam, although he certainly testified to it having an uncaring and incompetent administration which doesn’t show much care for the education of its students. The sort of lost purpose educational aimlessness that allows students to graduate without really learning anything exists in universities all over the country, as do the students who retained his services and those like his.
If you haven’t gotten that far in the book yet, it’s for-profit colleges which he really attacks as educational scams.
“Educational scam” was my language, and may have been too strong. The author does describe Rutgers as a place where it’s difficult to learn much (indifferent teaching, and a lot of institutional barriers to spending much time on learning).
Oddly, I haven’t seen any complaints about something which might plausibly discredit the author—spending much of his time drunk and/or drugged.
Oddly, I haven’t seen any complaints about something which might plausibly discredit the author—spending much of his time drunk and/or drugged.
Although he’s fairly open about that, I don’t think he particularly stands out in terms of substance use among college students. I had plenty of peers in college who graduated with good-to-reasonable grades who I suspect used alcohol and marijuana to similar degrees.
In fact, I would have to say that they probably got considerably more out of college than I did, having gotten a lot of valuable networking done socializing while high.
My impression is that heavy alcohol use tends to increase people’s level of anger, obsession, and resentment.
In other words, he might overestimate the pervasiveness of administrative abuse and neglect at Rutgers. It’s also conceivable that his life was going worse than it would have if he was sober more of the time.
However, I searched on “rutgers r-u screw” and found this. It looks like, at a minium, the administrative style at Rutgers is significantly unfriendly to students.
I was almost an RU Screw victim—some data entry clerk recorded my high school class rank as 20 instead of 2, which would have rendered me ineligible for a rather generous state scholarship if my parents hadn’t inadvertently discovered this.
It’s a combination of not enough parking, not enough buses, high parking tickets, and not letting people graduate unless their parking tickets are paid.
It’s also claimed that the department which handles parking tickets is literally the only part of the university the author dealt with where people seemed to be focused on doing their jobs.
For extra credit apply this insight to fast growing organisations that were initially founded or staffed by a group of unusual people, and don’t foreget the role of luck or reversion to the mean.
Most things in general are broken to a degree that the average reasonable person would find completely shocking. There are absolutely comic book levels of incompetence, grift, discrimination, and vice, within most bureaucratic organizations if you know where to look.
Other country, other situation, but I think this meta observation works for both:
If the educational system is broken too much, the society loses an ability to rationally discuss how to fix it, because the “unbelievable” facts you report are taken as an evidence against your sanity or honesty, not against the system. And of course there are some people who benefit from the system remaining as it is, and they are happy to confirm that you are wrong.
On some level, yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But people have their priors seriously wrong here—sanity waterline is generally low, incompetence is not so rare in the absence of feedback, and there are lot of money to make by abusing the school system. Also the prior probabilities are counted repeatedly. (If one teacher complains, he is probabably just an incompetent lunatic. If another teacher complains, she is also an incompetent lunatic. If thousands of teachers complain… well, by the same logic, they are all incompetent lunatics. There is never a point where there is enough evidence to start suspecting that they might actually be right. It also does not promote honest communication if it is widely known that a teacher who complains about the system will be considered incompetent.)
EDIT: I was a teacher for a few years, then I realized the system is so broken that my individual contribution as a teacher is unlikely to improve things. I talked to some people around me about what I have experienced. Later one of them told me that at the beginning they just considered me crazy, because obviously things can’t be that wrong. But they were curious whether the things I said could be at least partially true, so they cross-checked some of my stories with other teachers. And the other teachers confirmed my version. Even now the person tells me it is impossible to believe everything I said (only a few things could be cross-checked), but the confirmation from the other sources at least moved my credibility from “crazy” to “essentially correct, but probably exaggerating a lot” area. I asked whether they consider the other teachers (who have confirmed my stories) to be similarly untrustworthy as me, and the answer was negative. Apparently the greatest difference is that I spread the information actively, but the other ones were silent and only answered when they were asked. They have better social skills than me, and probably soon realized that speaking about their experience is only going to ruin their credibility. (If you are asked about an improbable thing and you confirm it, it does not have the same impact as when you contribute dozen improbable stories to an unprepared audience.)
I’m reading The Shadow Scholar, a book by a man who makes his living by writing papers for college students. There’s a root and branch attack on Rutgers, a university which is sort of an educational scam which loots the students for the benefit of the parking system and the athletics program.
Poking around online, the only people I’ve found who’ve said he’s unfair to Rutgers have been very marginal about it (they say it’s possible to get a good education at Rutgers), and a number who agree that it’s really that bad.
I attended Rutgers part time when I was a full time employee of bell labs. The graduate physics classes were excellent, rigorous, well taught, well designed, and hard. I have no particular recollection of any parking fees or atheletic activity. Since that time, I proceeded to get a PhD from Caltech and teach for 8 years at University of Rochester. In my opinion, informed by my experience, Rutgers is categorically NOT an educational scam.
The company I work for has hired many engineers who have been educated at Rutgers. There is no evidence that Rutgers is a scam, either in the interview process for these engineers, or their subsequent performance on the job.
The quality of undergraduate and graduate experiences at the same university can be dramatically different, since their funding sources (and thus their incentive structures) are separate. It’s possible that Rutgers is broken as an undergrad institution, but not as a graduate one.
(Rutgers also has a good reputation as a graduate math department.)
It’s also possible that there’s a division between STEM and everything else. Especially, there aren’t many term papers or essays being written for math-heavy courses, and so I can safely assume the Shadow Scholar wouldn’t have run across their students.
Thanks. When did you attend Rutgers?
One data point of modest value—a friend of mine graduated from Rutgers as a history major, probably in the 80s. She didn’t know that life could be very hard for civilians in war zones. She isn’t my smartest friend, but she isn’t stupid and she’s pretty conscientious.
I attended in 1979. I did not matriculate, but I did take regular graduate Physics courses that I had to leave work during the day to attend.
My other exposure to Rutgers is through a very good friend who was a Bell Labs department head for years, who was then Professor at Rutgers for seems about 10 years until probably 2000. He started the Wireless Information Lab which has a superb national reputation for research, graduate, and postgraduate work. I visited him and Lab events many times over the years, and find it implausible that if the undergrad education was a scam he wouldn’t have mentioned it.
In fact I’ll email him about this, and if he answers post something here.
Having read The Shadow Scholar also, I don’t think the author himself would stand behind a claim that Rutgers is an educational scam, although he certainly testified to it having an uncaring and incompetent administration which doesn’t show much care for the education of its students. The sort of lost purpose educational aimlessness that allows students to graduate without really learning anything exists in universities all over the country, as do the students who retained his services and those like his.
If you haven’t gotten that far in the book yet, it’s for-profit colleges which he really attacks as educational scams.
“Educational scam” was my language, and may have been too strong. The author does describe Rutgers as a place where it’s difficult to learn much (indifferent teaching, and a lot of institutional barriers to spending much time on learning).
Oddly, I haven’t seen any complaints about something which might plausibly discredit the author—spending much of his time drunk and/or drugged.
Although he’s fairly open about that, I don’t think he particularly stands out in terms of substance use among college students. I had plenty of peers in college who graduated with good-to-reasonable grades who I suspect used alcohol and marijuana to similar degrees.
In fact, I would have to say that they probably got considerably more out of college than I did, having gotten a lot of valuable networking done socializing while high.
My impression is that heavy alcohol use tends to increase people’s level of anger, obsession, and resentment.
In other words, he might overestimate the pervasiveness of administrative abuse and neglect at Rutgers. It’s also conceivable that his life was going worse than it would have if he was sober more of the time.
However, I searched on “rutgers r-u screw” and found this. It looks like, at a minium, the administrative style at Rutgers is significantly unfriendly to students.
I was almost an RU Screw victim—some data entry clerk recorded my high school class rank as 20 instead of 2, which would have rendered me ineligible for a rather generous state scholarship if my parents hadn’t inadvertently discovered this.
I thought every college had something like this.
Conversely, I didn’t believe this was a thing until I saw it happen during grad school (to undergrads).
what does this mean?
It’s a combination of not enough parking, not enough buses, high parking tickets, and not letting people graduate unless their parking tickets are paid.
It’s also claimed that the department which handles parking tickets is literally the only part of the university the author dealt with where people seemed to be focused on doing their jobs.
I’m a Rutgers graduate...
Please, I beg of you, tell your story!
Now that I’ve asked, people will believe you, right? so you have no excuse to keep silent.
Incompetence is not what I find suspicious in this post.
For extra credit apply this insight to fast growing organisations that were initially founded or staffed by a group of unusual people, and don’t foreget the role of luck or reversion to the mean.