- Admissions 101
- Trading tips with Jay Mathews on winning at college admissions.
We could eliminate tenure and not increase costs if we paid professors more.
The argument is that tenure forces colleges to keep professors who are not attracting many students. The cost per student in their classes is too high. If you eliminated tenure, but raised salaries, you would be able to dismiss professors who were not getting customers into the tent, or force them to retrain to teach something more useful. They could keep some worthy but unpopular subjects alive by forming consortia with other colleges. As Naomi Schaefer Riley says in her book “The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For”:
“Colleges could spend much less money subsidizing the kind of trivial research and publication that have become the central focus of the tenure process and spend more money to support good teaching.”
I think that holds true for the kind of work done at many education schools. Am I missing something?
- Jay Mathews
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