The Dilemmas in Undergraduate Education

Please only have a look at this after you've finished for the semester.  It is still more about your education, broadly considered, but not about our specific course.  And this time it about something I wrote.

Five years ago, meaning when most of you were still in high school and I was in the middle of that semester where I had rotator cuff surgery, I wrote a very long post called Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?  If you do read it, you'll get a sense of two things:

(1) My view of the overall issues with undergraduate education at the U of I and like universities elsewhere.  Note that this is not something I came up with on my own.  But my experience in teaching largely supports those findings, as does my experience when I was involved with moving the corporate finance course in the College of Business to a blended format, where we did extensive evaluation of the students during the pilot phase, as well as prior evaluation work in a large course setting.

(2) An indirect diagnosis of the learning issues that many of you face, in my judgment.  This would be the reason for you to read the piece, to take a reflective look at your own education and see how well the diagnosis lines up with your own experience.

If you think the diagnosis is even in the ballpark - correct in general but errant in some particulars - the issue for you individually is what correctives you might take from here on out to redirect your learning in a better way.   There is also the issue from our course perspective, which is why the market or individual institutions don't correct these issues.  (Hint: a big part of the issue is that learning is unlike widgets.  You can count widgets.  It is very hard to measure real learning.)

You might then be amused about the suggested remedies in the piece.  I am far less confident those are right, or that they could possibly be implemented.  Know that I write pieces like this to promote discussion on the matter, not to make a planning document for implementation.

Finally, let me tie this to teaching our class.  In part I do that to see if some alternative might matter, even a little.  But in the last couple of years I've found my energy level is not what it was earlier, so I can't implement all the things I'd like to try.  Perhaps some of you might eventually get involved in undergraduate education on the supply side and then the baton can pass to you in doing this.