Obama’s free community college tuition plan: Four questions – The Washington Post PLUS ONE FROM ME

Obama’s free community college tuition plan: Four questions – The Washington Post.

Here is what I wrote.

Here is the most important question: What will this do to quality? Will we start paying universities to mint new community college teachers, and just take their word that they are doing it honestly?

I am a retired professor. I have seen the shocking results of producing new college “teachers”, or whether it was staffing colleges all over the country, as we did in the 60’s and 70’s; or, it was producing American PhD’s, as we have recently done.

In the first case (staffing colleges), I have seen:

a professor who openly admitted that he, after five years of teaching an introductory math class, he could finally almost always tell when the homework was wrong, but couldn’t always tell what was wrong;

A professor of statistics who didn’t understand summation formulas or functions. He couldn’t write either. (A letter of his is own my website, inside-higher-ed.com .)

…and on and on and on.

More recently, I have seen a student who had little mathematical understanding get a PhD from a professor who had a multimillion dollar grant to meet a “national need” for American math PhD’s. If you wonder what happened in the above description of the 60’s and 70’s, look no further.

And here is what is worse: The professors I described above taught future high school teachers – and, of course, they didn’t have a chance to learn their subject well enough to teach it.

(The above stories can be found on my blog. For the first case look at the category about regional colleges. For the second one look at “No Jobs for Ph.D’s? Depends on what you mean by Ph.D.”…more