Education: Danish Universities Need to Learn from the International Competition

After the American Century

The Danish Ministry of Research, which funds university education, is determined to "reform." To do so, it has appointed a committee to make proposals about how to improve the universities. Unfortunately, while each member of this committee is probably a reasonable choice, the group as a whole lacks breadth and international perspective. The committee does not have a single humanist and even more remarkably, not a single scientist. One member of the committee comes from the University of Bergen, but given that Norwegian universities resemble those in Denmark, this does not make the committee very international.

According the the London Times' ranking, neither Norway nor Denmark has even one university in the world's top 116. The top Danish university is the engineering school, ranked 117, and the top Norwegian institution is Oslo, ranked 185. All such surveys in recent years have concluded that the best universities in the world are in the United States, Britain, and Australia, and there is a sharp difference between those in the top twenty or so and the next twenty. Universities ranked lower than 100 are all far behind the world's elite.

One might think the Danish government would put at least one person from the world's elite institutions on the committee. There are Danes abroad who work at these top institutions. There are also expatriates living in Denmark who received their education at such schools. But none of this expertise will be on the committee. Of course, members of the committee have visited some of these elite schools, but a visit, even one lasting a semester, will not provide the same kind of insight as studying for a degree in such a place, much less being a permanent part of the faculty.

The committee is narrow in yet another way: most of them are closely associated with Copenhagen University (currently ranked 150) and they live in the same part of Denmark. (There are some who view Copenhagen as a fossilized institution because it hires much of its faculty from its own graduates.) Three of the five Danish universities are not represented at all.

No one on this committee has the daily experience of being at one of the world's best universities, and as a group they are not likely to think outside the narrow, claustrophobic and insular box administered in Copenhagen. They will likely write a report to the liking of the Minister, who has strong views, but himself does not have enough education to be hired for an entry level position by any university. That said, he is streets ahead of the political clowns who preceded him.

If a major corporation wanted to research a problem, it would not create such a homogeneous group, with no scientists, no humanities, almost no one from outside Copenhagen, and no one from the world's best institutions.

Denmark invests  a good deal in education. However, it has a problem balancing quantity and quality. It wishes to educate a high proportion of people at university, and none of them charge tuition. This makes it quite expensive. At the same time, in these egalitarian societies there is a resistance to either establishing hierarchies or to rejecting candidates. The desire for democratization of higher education tends to water down quality, because no one likes to set up barriers to entry.

Denmark has five universities and one technical university. All are public institutions, all faculty work to the same wage scale, and students receive the same amount in scholarship funding. This egalitarian approach has much in its favor, of course, but it does not necessarily push either faculty or students to do their best. The state rewards universities for quantity production of candidates, that is to say, departments receive money each time a student passes an exam or completes a degree. Whether the student has a high or low grade point average makes no difference.

In almost all educational systems, the most talented students usually do well, and the occasional genius is not really produced by the system. Getting the other 90% of the students to learn is the challenge. And here, egalitarianism and the monetary incentives to admit and pass as many as possible have encouraged Danish institutions to lower standards.

For example, in Denmark receiving a BA, no matter how poor the grades, entitles a student to go on to an MA, regardless of talent, motivation, or achievement. Automatic admission to graduate studies is hardly the norm at the world's best universities. Admitting all BAs to study for the MA is a wasteful and pointlessly egalitarian approach to education. If students knew that they had to do well at the BA level in order to go on to the MA, both undergraduate and the graduate education would be improved. And this would not cost the state more money, but less.

At the level of individual courses the Danish system is also lax. There is no requirement that students attend classes, and they do not even need to be inside the country during term. I have had students go abroad for weeks in the middle of term or miss the first week to go skiing. Since class participation cannot be counted at all in determining grades, students need not give oral presentations, nor can teachers give mid-term exams that count toward the final grade. In most courses, grades are determined entirely by a paper or exam at the end of term.  Contrast this with any of the top universities in the United States, where class participation counts and teachers have considerable freedom in developing and using various means of assessment. In Denmark, if a student seldom comes and never says anything, it has no consequences.  Passivity is therefore widespread.

Furthermore, Danish students have the right to re-examination at no cost if they fail a course, and they  can take any exam three times, even if they did nothing but turn in a blank sheet of paper on the first and second attempts.  If they fail three times, they can petition for the right to retake the exam (or turn in the paper) a fourth time. Contrast this with top universities around the world, which often do not have re-examination at all but tell students to retake the course and pay the fees again, or in some cases charge a fee for a second (and usually final) attempt to pass a course.

When Danish students take a term abroad in Britain or the United States, they all come back saying that they had to work much harder there. Few fail their courses, because they know that they cannot take those exams over again.

Danish universities also have problems in the way faculty are recruited, retrained, and rewarded,  and they could learn much from the international competition. There are foreigners like myself who have been in Denmark for years, who understand alternative systems, and who could make constructive suggestions for improvements. However, my experience is that no one listens to such suggestions. Danes seem congenitally unable to hear comments from outsiders.

In short, if the Danes really want to improve their universities, they do not need to spend vast additional sums of money. But they do need to learn from the best practices at the best universities. They need to demand from students attendance, participation, and real attempts to complete courses. They need to set better norms for behavior and set higher standards for admission to the MA. They need to open the PhD to more students and learn how to make use of PhDs in the broader labor market.

These are just some of the things that Danish universities could change to raise their international ranking. It is unfortunate that their system is so centralized and so controlled by bureaucrats, especially since most of the staff of the Ministry itself do not have a PhD much less any teaching experience or academic publications. It seems unlikely that any worthwhile ideas will emerge from the Ministry.  One can only hope that somehow its homogeneous committee will develop an international perspective. 

Students Should Worry Less about their Careers

After the American Century

The academic year is beginning again, with more students than ever seeking university education. The immediate lack of jobs and worries about careers have become a constant refrain in the media, which at the same time tell us that there are not enough young people to do all the jobs that will be vacated by retirement.

Logically, the new students should not worry, because the demographics say that there have to be jobs for every one of them. Logically, they should just study what they love, and trust that a good position will be there for them later.

But we do not live in logical times, we live in panicky times, when politicians and economists say many contradictory things. Logically, the young will be desperately needed in the European and American job markets as the baby-boomers retire. But the megaphones, loud speakers and teleprompters belong not to the young but to the middle-aged, supervised by the generation about to retire. These people are worried about both the high rate of unemployment right now and the coming shortage of workers at all levels.

The students are all in a rush to find a practical career and a safe job, as though high unemployment were a permanent situation, as though job security will be difficult to attain in the future. But logically, this should not be the case. Logically, the young should not worry so much, and instead make sure they find a career that they really will enjoy.

When I look back at my own experience, it was just the opposite. I went to college at a time of prosperity and no one worried very much about what our education would be used for. We probably should have been more worried, because we were the baby-boomers, i.e. we were too many. Even so, for the most part it worked out.

Statistically, well over 90% of people with a university education do have jobs, and on average they make good money.  The problem is not getting a job, it is getting one you like.

On winning a book prize

After the American Century

Some readers of this blog already know that my 2006 book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, was selected as the winner of this year's Sally Hacker Prize by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). The award was handed over at the annual banquet of that association in Pittsburgh, October 17 amid what seemed to me to be wild cheering for at least 2 or 3 seconds.

In previous years the winners of various prizes each made a little speech, thanking friends, family, and fellow scholars for their support. We have all heard such speeches, and know why SHOT might think it a good idea not to have them. So I did not give a moving testimony or tell any humorous anecdotes, but simply stood to have my picture taken with the prize.

Getting rid of the other acceptance speeches was a good idea, but in my case, of course, it was not. I had many important ideas to communicate at just that time, and indeed the wine of the previous hours had enhanced my thinking considerably. I am only sorry that these deep insights into the nature and purpose of research and "the meaning of it all" did not get out, because these penetrating thoughts now seem to have evaporated.

Instead, I will merely note that the prize was given for a work published in the previous three years that best explains some aspects of the history of technology to a wider audience. The plaque abbreviates this to "the best popular book." While I was extremely pleased to have fooled the usually more alert jury and gotten this award, one now former friend dryly asserted that this was the prize for the "least unreadable academic book."

If any of my loyal readers are interested, Technology Matters is in paperback for only a few dollars more than it costs to download it in the format of Amazon's Kindle reader. There is also a strange French translation that eliminates most of the notes and some passages of the work, clearly in an attempt to make it even more popular and better suited for the general audience. A German translation has also appeared. This is much longer and seems more scholarly than my original. Indeed, it appears to be so much more profound and more heavily-footnoted in German that I am hoping it will win a prize as a work written not for the general public but for specialists.

Should it win in German, I will insist on giving the speech I have forgotten from the banquet in Pittsburgh.

Baby Boomers in American Academia

After the American Century

Yesterday the New York Times ran a long story about the coming change in American academia, as a large cohort of teachers begins to retire. (See it at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/arts/03camp.html.) There recently have been similar stories about Norway and Denmark, and indeed for much of the Western world, as the huge number of teachers hired in the 1960s and early 1970s starts to move out of their offices. As one who saw this transformation up-close-and-personal, I want to add a few observations.

It is not exactly the "baby boomers" who are retiring, at least not yet, for they are mostly too young to afford it. The baby boom began in 1946, when one million more children were born than during 1945. This means that all of the boomers are 62 and under. Anyone in this group who is retiring now got a BA, MA, and Ph.D. as quickly as possible, working steadily from kindergarden on up, with no breaks. The first boomers graduated from college in 1968, and the first to get Ph.D.s emerged perhaps as early as 1972 or 1973, but many more starting in 1974. For those who served in Vietnam, were conscientious objectors or worked after college, add several more years. The people who are retiring this year at 62 would be from the very start of that generation, which includes all those between 50 and 62. Any American retiring who is over the age of 62 is not a "boomer" but comes from the smaller cohort of babies conceived during World War II. They were over-represented on faculties, while the huge cohorts born from 1946-1957 ran into the terrible job market of the recession that lasted from c. 1973 until the early 1980s.

Any academic who lived through the 1970s can tell you that this generation had a hard time. Those just before them - who got PhDs between 1965 and 1970, still experienced a booming job market for their services, and they got tenure relatively easily. By the time the boomers were emerging from graduate school, however, the job market was shrinking. I know, because I was one of the job seekers. More than half the PhDs from my particular year never got academic appointments at all, and even those who did get jobs often saw them disappear due to the slumping economy. They were excellent scholars and teachers who deserved better, and the selection process was by no means an illustration of "the survival of the fittest." When reading about all the baby boomers who are retiring, remember, then, that a huge number of PhDs from that generation never got into academia in the first place. This does not mean they did poorly elsewhere. In general, these clever people made more money than those of us lucky enough to get tenure and the low salaries of the university.

So what? Given the actual hiring that went on, the idea that thousands of student radicals moved from protest to paper grading is a bit suspect. Indeed, I knew many who became disillusioned with academia during the turbulent anti-Vietnam years, and never finished at all. Those who stayed in the libraries and kept writing were not the most radical, and even the most radical PhDs were not always hired. Colleges and universities were not seeking to employ fire-breathing Marxist intellectuals calling for revolution. In short, only a few people shifted from the barracades to the faculty club.

However, after a generation passed, faculty who had been around during the turbulent decade were hardly averse to claiming a radical past. I know several people who seldom marched or sat in or attended anti-war rallies back then, who now talk nostalgically about those days of political engagement. When a reporter turns up looking for the last hippies and revolutionaries packing up their offices, many are only too happy to oblige with stories.

Don't be taken in. I "saw the best minds of my generation destroyed" by the contradictions of that time. They were drafted and sent off to Vietnam, went to Canada to avoid the draft, got drawn into fringe movements that took them forever away from the universities, or threw themselves full-time into the anti-war movement. The boomers who will retire from academic during the next 15 years were not the most radical. Rather, they had the perseverance to write their PhDs during that distracting time. They did so even though the job market was terrible, and they often spent years in short-term or part-time positions before landing in a tenured position. The few who succeeded, did so against great odds, through hard work and a bit of luck. Their story is not the one in the New York Times, which wants to paint a picture of retiring fire-breathing radicals being replaced by young moderates.

The new academics emerging now are not moderate compared to those actually hired in 1974. In fact, in many areas they probably have views that are at least as radical. The Times is right that they have not been embroiled in political struggles in the same way, but their dislike of George W. Bush is just as intense as ours was for Richard Nixon c. 1972.