You are a student taking an important math course taught in large lecture sections by an adjunct (who dropped out of your elite school’s graduate program). That frees up some of the professorial staff to work with a few brilliant math students that your college recruited for their Putnam team. (The Putnam Math Competition is the most prestigious undergraduate contest in the country.) This Putnam team wins the competition and your school’s reputation makes a leap forward – certainly in math circles. Now, who wins and who loses?
If you need to understand the math for your future career, you probably lose. The school probably hired the adjunct for two reasons. The first reason is that the professors don’t want to teach your class because if they really teach it so that students learn, they will probably get poor evaluations, and, some students might drop the course just because they don’t want to work that hard. That could cost the school money. The other reason is that adjuncts are cheap. The school wins. Its reputation goes up. The professors win. In the long run, you lose. (You could argue that the reputation helps you get a better job. But keep in mind, skills are becoming important in keeping that job.) Finally, where did your tuition money go? It will be hard to trace, but didn’t it go to marketing the school? You paid for marketing, not education.
Disclaimer (sort of): Of course the adjunct might be good, even better than a full time professor. But, in general, adjuncts are more amenable to pressure from the administration to give out good grades and dumb down the course. And there are schools that, as a practice, use outstanding adjuncts and teaching professors. Unfortunately, this is not always true.
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