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This is so true.
The quality of teaching is absolutely unaddressed in college rankings--and Jonathan Zimmerman is entirely correct that the only current way to rate professors is to visit one of the "rate my professor" sites populated by student reviews. When I was teaching at William & Mary, I had my share of those reviews, and I can tell you that they are entirely useless. It's pretty easy to figure out who wrote them, and students who get good grades write positive reviews, students who are graded poorly shred your teaching skills.
Neither is useful.
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Trying to choose a college based on how well it teaches? Good luck. If you consult the rankings — such as the U.S. News & World Report survey that bills itself as a tool for “finding the right school” — you can learn about everything from how much a college costs to how much debt its students incur and how much they donate as alumni.
But one thing you can't find out: how well its professors teach.
In a recent survey asking respondents what makes the “best” college or university, the most popular answer was “it has professors who are excellent teachers” — far ahead of high graduation rates or good-paying jobs after college. Yet students and their families deciding where to shell out thousands of dollars have no way to determine which schools meet that standard. Their only resort might be anonymous posters on forums such as College Confidential or Reddit. That needs to change.
Sure, U.S. News records faculty salaries, student-professor ratios and the average amount of money spent on each student. But none are a good proxy for teaching quality. A high-salaried professor might prioritize research over teaching, which is the best route to getting a raise in academia. Even if that professor’s class size is small, their students aren’t guaranteed to learn very much.
If we wanted to get a more meaningful measure of how well professors are teaching, we would send trained observers into their classrooms. That’s what American University education scholar Corbin Campbell did in the most comprehensive study on college teaching to date.
Over a 10-year span, Campbell and her research team watched 732 instructors at nine schools to evaluate whether their teaching reflected academic rigor and active learning. Did the professors get students to think in complex ways? And did they engage in debates, role-plays and other hands-on exercises, instead of just sitting inert during a lecture?
Research bears out that rigor and active learning lead to improved student knowledge and understanding. And Campbell found that these practices were more likely to occur at regional state universities than at flagship state institutions or private research universities, both of which tend to get higher rankings from U.S. News & World Report.
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Opinion | College rankings are leaving out the most important factor
wapo.st
The quality that matters most to applicants gets overlooked by school rankings.16 hours ago
Coming at this from the student's perspective--rate my professors reviews are not totally useless. When you see the same specific observation mentioned again and again (and it can be positive, negative, or neutral), it is just about always right.
One reason my kid chose a SLAC was that you knew who would ne teaching classes long enough in advance to ask people about their experiences. At the schools they had taken classes at DE, you didn't, and by the time you realized an instructor was checked out, very disorganized or incompetent, drop/add was over.
I have an Associates degree from a community college along with a BA and an MA from two separate state universities. Hands down, my best teachers were at the community college level. Those instructors were accessible, humble, helpful and enthusiastic about imparting knowledge.
Ask this question: What percentage of your courses are taught by adjunct instructors?
As an adult learner, I attended college in my 30s and I gave negative reviews on rate my professor for an instructor who gave me A+ after A+. His teaching, if it could be called that, was atrocious. It would have been atrocious no matter what level he taught at. He lazily and almost illegibly scrawled exam questions and hastily threw them on a copy machine. He spent literal hours telling the class how to format a cover page. He instructed people to read his blog where he illustrated his lack of familiarity with the concept of paragraphs and punctuation. It made me angry that anyone had to pay for the time he wasted in that course.
Interesting article, but as a professional educator in higher Ed, I find it difficult to understand who these “trained observers” would be. What qualifications do they have? And what do they know about teaching? What is the list of criteria that they use to judge a good teacher? I just think there are too many nuances that go into good teaching to quantify this. What works for some students may not work for others. What works for some subject matter might not work for others.  And also, I bristle at the phrase, “active learning.” What does that even mean? I know what people believe it means, but I don’t understand why that term is used. I can’t think of any learning process that doesn’t require the activity of the mind. I believe all learning is active. They’re just different modes in which we learn or different applications of how to learn.
My daughter feels that rate my professor helps her avoid the teachers who don’t seem to like teaching. She’s an A student and actually looks for teachers who are challenging but fair. She feels like she’s able to sort through the reviewers to decide if they are legit reviews. When looking at where to apply for college though it would be helpful to have a better idea of professors. At OSU I had a Chem prof introduce himself as “only there to keep research credentials.” My best professors were summer classes at the community college.
Let's add other factors that are critical, but unmeasured, like access and quality of advising, mental health support services, or residence life staff that don't just throw up their hands when there are serious issues in dorms.
My one and only Rate My Professor rating essentially gave me a low rating because I was too particular in grading essays in freshman composition classes--graded absolutely according to the rubric given by my advisor. (It was a TA position during my masters program.) I will say that If I wasn't sure about taking a particular class I would read the reviews on ratemyprofessor as it at least gave me some sense of what to expect
Our sons all got into UMich which is considered a "public ivy". But after faculty interviews, sitting in on some classes and lectures, they were turned off by the huge classroom sizes and students reports of terrible instruction, mostly overworked TAs, professors so busy with research they never showed up for office hours, and many other horror stories they heard from within their intended majors Our 2 youngest chose smaller, regionally ranked state U's. The instruction at those schools was tippy top. Our daughter graduated from UM 6 years ahead of her next youngest brother and the change in instruction, the downgrading in those 6 years was astonishing. We found that the ranking systems did not match reality by 2015.
It’s so interesting to consider. I received top notch instruction at UMich, but had to be wise about what classes/sections I chose. If an instructor was poor, I found that there was always someone who would help. (Usually the TA assigned to my section! I found them all to be a wealth of information and readily available.) As I progressed in my studies, all of my instructors were exemplary, class sizes were small, the courses were rigorous. Is there an element of students needing to take more responsibility for their own education in larger university settings, or is it incumbent upon the university to ensure all instructors are top notch and keep class sizes small? I’m thinking less about higher level classes - I’d wholly expect subject matter experts to be able to competently teach these courses. But for a Chem 101 or Calc 1, is it feasible or necessary to ask a professor to actively engage 300 students? I might argue that those courses taught me the most about resourcefulness and tenacity, which served me extremely well. Could both types of instruction be meaningful and lead to good outcomes? I’m really curious to hear what you might think. (Again, I’m not saying it would be good for all classes to have less than stellar instructors in giant lecture halls. But I am wondering if it could be beneficial in some cases for a few classes.)
Yes, Susan, and one of the things I have learned teaching as a second career is how quality is only partially significant in accreditation, which seems much more focused on evidence that improvement is an institution priority.
My pet peeve is that teacher’s unions have no requirements for teaching excellence, or even accountability.
Renee Solomon
Terry Pratchett illuminates our world, once again.
1 week ago
YES! I cannot watch TV shows, movies, or read books (I'm looking at YOU Wuthering Heights) where there are NO characters that display goodness or choose redemption. I need at least one.
Reminds me of a Gaiman quote: "Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
While I Breathe I Hope - SC State Motto
This is good as far as it goes.
Sir Terry 💙
This is why Pratchett is a Knight and GRR Martin is not worth reading.
Tolkien’s eucatastrophe 💕
This Atlantic article has definitely been making the rounds amongst my online friends--both home educators and college professors.
It's worth noting that this trend has been accelerating for a very long time. If you were to check the earliest (1999) edition of The Well-Trained Mind, which was pre-smart phone and almost pre-internet (we HAD it, but we could only really use it by dialing up and tying up our landline phone in order to cruise text-based websites), you'll see our objections to literature textbooks, which teach students how to read small chunks of text, not entire books. So although Tiktok and Youtube (the favored villains of most of these types of pieces) have certainly changed the ways kids use their leisure time, we've been training them for DECADES not to read WHOLE texts.
Excerpted liberally.
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Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1988...Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester... This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said. And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot...
In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.
But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”
...In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.
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The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
www.theatlantic.com
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.1 week ago
In my 1980s AP/IB English class the standard was a 10 page research paper. I taught the same course in the same school 20 years later and the culminating experience was a five paragraph essay. Depth and breadth have been sacrificed on the altar of test skills.
This is all so true in my experience. I sent one of my kids to school in 6th grade and they read zero books that year. I started asking my high school-aged kids' friends about what they are reading in literature class, and they too are not reading whole books. Meanwhile, I teach middle and high school literature at homeschool tutorials and we get through eight whole books a year plus poetry and short story units.
"mimicking the format of... standardized tests" -- this is massive. I also wonder how much, as a culture, we value reading for pleasure or for information.
This is so true! People are wringing their hands over why our students are increasingly unable to read on level. Many point to teachers and the methods used to teach reading. This is valid, as educators spent years following trends (promoted by curriculum companies) rather than scientific studies to plan their instruction. However, this downfall is only a small part of the story. Long before the smart phone captured the attention of students, cable TV and the vcr captured their time and attention. We fill their brains with junkfood entertainment and then ask why they are not hungry for something that is more beneficial. To become a proficient reader, one must practice and build endurance. The lack of literacy skills and endurance leaves middle and high school teachers (I taught grade 7) no choice but to choose shorter texts and/or read aloud to their students in order to teach grade level standards. Of course, this exacerbates the problem. I heard much talk about the science of Reading and how it will fix the problems education faces, but very little about the intellectual malnutrition we allow as a culture. It isn't OK. We must slow down and allow children the time and space to explore their world and good books.
Thank you for reminding people that this is not *just* a technology problem!
Not a comment about the state of education, I just cannot get past the idea of not reading books…for pleasure, for vicarious culture, for comfort, for expanding viewpoints. Will this educational trend translate to not reading as a part of daily life? I truly cannot imagine that.
This is why, in my intro philosophy course, we read full primary source texts. And students seem to get a lot out of a sustained close reading of texts, even though it is a new experience for many of them.
This is both fascinating and depressing. I did SO much full-book reading in school, although I started to notice a marked change by my senior year of high school (2002), where almost all of our reading was excerpts, in preparation for the AP test. Recently, my physical therapist asked if my homeschooled kids use textbooks. He told me that when he was in college, everyone he knew who had been homeschooled had never used a text book before college, and didn’t know what to do with it. Now, I find it hard to believe that *none* of them had ever used a single textbook (unless a large number unschoolers went to the same college together 😆), but my interest is piqued enough that I want to go back and reopen the conversation, and ask what his further thoughts were on the lack of textbook exposure…
Interestingly, we followed WTM for both my kids and now my 19 year old is majoring in Comparitive Literature at Columbia University. He read actual books in middle and high school, classics as well as contemporary, as prescribed by the WTM curriculum. Thank you for giving him an amazing foundation.
Even when full texts are covered in class, some teachers can ruin the reading experience. When we read To Kill a Mockingbird in middle school, the teacher required us to leave our copies in the classroom so that we couldn't read more than the handful of chapters she wanted us to cover each week. I wound up checking an extra copy out of the library so I could read at a pace I enjoyed...
The section about not reading the Iliad in college, over a whole class, cracked me up. My son just started at a classical high school, and the freshmen read the entire Iliad aloud in 24 hours during a lock in 😂 Now, I'm a Charlotte Mason homeschooler, and so we read MANY LONG BOOKS, but never fast like that (something like the Iliad we would read slowly, along with many other books, over a whole term or two), but still, if 9th graders can read The Iliad in 24 hours I'm pretty sure college students can.
Yep, and they have gotten away from using textbooks also!
Hard to even imagine this is true.
Until we change the way school districts USE standardized testing data this WILL. NOT. CHANGE. Teachers are teaching to the test because their students’ test scores drive a significant percentage of their yearly evaluations, and, when I was teaching, there was a push to tie those evaluations to pay. The standardized tests are comprised of short literature passages on random topics and because it’s anyone’s guess where those topics are coming from it’s a mad dash to April to get kids able to analyze quickly at best and to guess well at worst. The second part of this, of course, was the Fountas and Pinnell/Lucy Calkins guided reading mess. When I worked on my master’s I remember being baffled by how many of my classes were dominated by the pseudo-worship of guided reading and the sincerely held belief that kids would learn to read if they loved to read first. There is now a generation of teachers graduating who learned to read in the time of guided readers, and they truly do not know how to teach phonics, which the middle and high school teachers will spend their entire careers trying to bandage to no avail.
Rebekkah Smith Aren’t you glad we’re homeschooling and doing Omnibus?
Mark Keating all the history and lit teachers should read this.
Lydia Loveday
Zachary Sisk
Diane Thornbery
Drew Smith
Justin Wright
Joseph EC
Brennan Greenwood Dominic Drumheller
Full text available here: archive.ph/vcKiO
Darn straight.