Hi, Alex. I think you identify a problem that concerns many students. It doesn't seem that you clearly locate how it is that universities obtain their prestige medals. And maybe this is because you would agree with me that the current, irrational system of allocating reputation does not lend itself to much meaningful explanation. You mention "top of their fields," "best companies," and "Fortune 500 CEO's." In straining to track the common thread connecting these "standards" of prestige, it might be possible to ultimately conclude that prestige is based on what students end up doing after acquiring their degrees. But instead, the "REAL factors" that you reveal toward the end of your post are the criteria that should be the things that inform a university's real quality (and we shouldn't label it prestige).

I wonder, though, if any system that claims to be able to meaningfully grade universities is really meaningful at all, if not altogether self-deluded in its mission. Much like the possibly misinformed ritual of grading students, creating an "objective" bulletin that purportedly broadcasts in a very uniform and unifying way the big picture of "which schools are quality, and which are not" would be misguided. But just as a thought experiment, how might we do this? If we borrow from the current, flawed system, we could possibly identify more meaningful endpoints in students' careers (rather than using, for example, the number of CEO alumni as a determining factor). But maybe even this misses the point. In other words, using endpoints wouldn't get us to the REAL factors. And maybe REAL factors don't lend themselves to a workable formula that outputs hierarchy. This is because people's processes, not endpoints, of learning and application don't seem to be assessable on relative terms.

If this conclusion is reasonable, then an alternative is necessary. Reflecting on the quality of one's education is an individualized process that cannot be generalized into a "US News and World Report." This process requires self-evaluation on many criteria and should ideally also include input from the outside. That is, other students and professors should comment, qualitatively, on a particular student's changes and her own perceptions of these changes.

This must be one of the goals of the wiki.

-- JosephLu - 08 Mar 2009

Prof. Moglen said that in general, professors don't care about their students very much. Instead of learning about their students, they would rather sit around in a faculty lunch and discuss how intelligent they are. While as an undergraduate, I had sinking suspicions of this sentiment, it was only until I worked as a graduate student TA that I realized the pervasiveness of this truth. I pursued a PhD? in engineering in part because of my love for teaching, and I was shocked to realize how few professors truly care about it. As a TA, I have worked for professors who rehash each year's lecture on dull powerpoint presentations despite repeated critical evaluations of their ineffectiveness, delegating almost all aspects of evaluation (including all test writing, grading, and office hours) to me and almost all aspects of actual learning to the student himself. In fact, while conversing with fellow graduate students, I have heard of certain professors openly declaring that they cared nothing about their undergraduates, that they were a pain in the ass, and that they would rather do research. And this was at a university which was consistently ranked in the top 5 in the nation and liked to boast of the success of their graduates in that particular field.

A quick reflection of why this is the state of our higher education reveals that this is the obvious result of a higher education con. This con is not limited to law school, but rather all forms of higher education. This is a con that has been played by the universities and the industries in concert, which is why it is so effective and nearly impossible to defeat. It is the con that prestige makes a better individual, that prestige is a useful indicator of achievement, that prestige is what makes "success."

Allow me to briefly explain. No doubt prestige is an important factor in the impressionable minds of many students in choosing their universities and graduate schools. I ask, why is this intangible thing, "prestige," so important to many of us? The answer to me, is obvious: simply because it has been effectively marketed to us as such. We are constantly inundated by reports of how students from xxx school consistently work at the top of their fields, at the best companies, and are the highest proportion of Fortune 500 CEOs. The universities themselves work hard to emphasize these factors to influence us into attending. Industry reinforces this notion by consistently rewarding these choices by selecting students from xxx university, accelerating the positive feedback loop. And institutions like US News add fuel to the fire, by giving intangible prestige a tangibly quantitative number.

If we accept that prestige is a major driving force of our higher education system, then it is obvious as to why the state of our teaching is the way it is. Universities desire prestige to attract the best students, who desire prestige to land them the best jobs. Unfortunately, prestige is independent of REAL factors; for example, what the individual has learned or will learn from the university, or what he or she has learned to do with that knowledge after he or she graduates. Simply put, good teaching is not rewarded because it has nothing to do with prestige. Have you ever heard of a student boasting of the fact that he took a class with a professor who won a teaching award? It is far more likely to hear someone say, I had a Nobel Laureate teach me such and such, I had a Supreme Court clerk teach me etc., I had a guy who was cited 1,000 times last year and published 100 articles in abc journal teach me xyz. And more troubling is the fact that universities buy into this even more heavily than students do. At the university which I previously worked, a popular professor in our department was let go because he failed to pull in xxx amount of grant money, even though he was touted as one of the most excellent teachers.

Unfortunately, unless and until this con is broken, teaching will largely remain the same: purely optional. Universities hire the people that bring in the money, that publish in the most prestigious journals, that win the most awards, and that can lure the most students into attending. If they can teach, great. If not, keep them teaching until the students revolt, then relegate them to some smaller classes where the students are more passive and less likely to complain. I don't see this ever changing, and that makes me depressed.

-- AlexHu - 06 Mar 2009