For what? Unsubstantiated speculation? Overly biased looks at the issues--canned interviews? For example (i only looked at the tenure link), Sowell says most professors schedule their classes between 10 and 2 and students miss out because classes are limited and class space is limited, etc. However, he doesn't mention, or apparently consider the possibility, that this is when students want to take classes, and that many professors do teach earlier or later. Most students don't want to rise before 10 (or are athletes and have practice), and many may have work or practice after 2. To take what's most likely a natural phenomenon and blame it on the evil professors is utter garbage.

Scheduling classes between 10 and 2 is (or results from) a "natural phenomenon"? Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.

Sowell proceeds from the apparently unfashionable foundation that college exists to do something other than cater to the whims of its students.

Tom, it's called a free market. Look into it. Students are consumers. Professors are service providers. Increasingly, professors are part-time help.

If the consumer doesn't want to wake up before 10 am, the service provider will not be providing much of a service. His job will be terminated. This is called maximizing productivity.

This is a brave new world for educational service providers. Don't think of it as short, nasty, and brutish. Think of it as flexible, dynamic, and mobile. Educational service providers are no longer limited to one institution. They now can work at six or seven, with hundreds of students, and for less and less money. What times we live in.

Sure, Tom. Here's a newsflash for you: college students get to pick their classes--the classes they take, the times of those classes, etc. And guess what? 8:00 classes are not popular (i like to teach them)with students. You may want to praise students who realize that 8:00 classes aren't right for them because they work late or just don't want to get up. It's hardly a matter of student "whims."
You can refuse to believe it all you wish. Sowell proceeds from a narrow viewpoint that turns a blind eye to reality--fashionable has nothing to do with it.

If Sowell really said that it shows how out of it he is. In the first place, I (a professor) don't "schedule" my class(es), I am told when they will be by the registrar's office, which has little flexibility. Most often I'm speaking at 9:00 a.m. That gives me an hour ahead of time to prepare if I want or need to (and generally I want some or all of that time.)

Furthermore, most of the students I teach have at least one lab per week that runs between 2:00 and 6:00. So there is not a lot of flexibility to have lecture classes in the afternoon, even if there was space.

Which there is not, because the lecture rooms are largely being used at that time for research seminars. So both the space and time are occupied with other pursuits.

And then there are department meetings, service commitments, etc. etc.

Oh, and there's also preparation for the next day, talking with graduate students and postdocs about their research, working on research papers, writing grant proposals. Sort of like Saturday afternoon here.

Thomas Sowell, didn't he leave UCLA 30 years ago or so to go off to Hoover? Perhaps he can tell us how many classes he teaches before 10:00 and after 2:00. Where does he get his ideas? Perhaps he should chat with some real world professors. Even at Stanford.

I have some choice in when I teach classes, but if I ask for a class at a time when students aren't willing to show up, that class isn't going to make. And if the class doesn't make, then God only knows what class I'll be assigned to teach to fill my schedule--generally something that involves a lot of grading and students who are sullen and angry about having to take the course.

I can generally get myself a MWF or a TTh schedule, though when I teach graduate seminars they are usually one night a week, and those can mess up my plan for only teaching every other day (which makes me most efficient in terms of prep and grading, not to mention researching and publishing).

I'd expand this time span from 9:00AM to 3:00PM, though. Any undergraduate courses scheduled outside of that time span are less likely to make, and that's just the reality of the situation.

I'm a fan of Sowell, but I have to say he's really off target with his sweeping generalizations of faculty and universities in general in this video.

Like Mike above, I have very little choice in when I teach -- and I am a tenured faculty member with 10 years' experience! And I can assure anybody that, since I teach at a small liberal arts college which competes with not only other small liberal arts colleges but also large universities, we are keenly aware of student needs in any decision we make.

Sowell makes an unwarranted leap from the fact that tenure CAN cause a faculty body to make boneheaded, self-centered decisions to the notion that they DO. And that's just not always true, and the market -- God bless it -- bears it out, seeing as how we always end up in the Spring semester with refugees from the large universities whose profiles match the worst of what Dr. Sowell describes.

He does redeem himself at the end with a nice blurb about small liberal arts colleges, which is totally true.

I agree that Sowell oversimplifies the bit about class times. But what do you guys think about his other video segment on costs?

To Erin O'Connor: I don't have sound on my computer. Can you summarize what he says about costs? But another post coming from me on what I have heard him say elsewhere.

To Robert Talbert: I teach at a fairly large public university, not one of the behemoths. I do have some choice in what I teach, but not a whole lot about the time. Given space constraints and the highly structured program I'm in, there's not a whole lot of flexibility.

Another comment for Robert Talbert: I have nothing against the small liberal arts colleges, but the refugees go the other way, too. At the struggling "flagship" unversity where I teach, in a natural science field, we get a fair number of dropouts from some pretty tony liberal arts colleges. Many of them just don't like the small college. Others like doing the first two years there, but tire of it and find the science opportunities for the last two years to be much better at a bigger place.

I have heard Sowell claim that colleges and universities claims for expenditures on undergraduate education are gretly inflated. I am skeptical of this, for a number of reasons. I can look at the total budgets of small liberal arts colleges and see the expenditure per student. Those places are spending the lion's share of their budgets on undergraduate education. I look at place like Williams or Amherst, where it works out to something under $100K and greater than $50K. And I look at what goes on at Harvard Princeton Caltech etc. and I can easily imagine they are spending as much per undergraduate. Whether all that money translates into that much better education, I don't know -- see my earlier post about dropouts from the tony colleges who come to my low-budget public university. But I can believe the rich universities are really spending the dough. Especially when I see how inefficiently some of them are run. I talk from having seen it up close at a few places.

Also, I know a fair bit about the budget at the place where I work. I don't know what they report as the expenditure per undergraduate, but from the way the accounting is done, by law, I don't think they can cook the figures beyond a certain point, if at all.

Again, I could take Sowell more seriously if he hadn't retired to Hoover in relatively early middle age.

Re costs:

Sowell begins with a rhetorically suspect "study" of the CEOs of America's top 50 companies as evidence that an Ivy League degree doesn't immediately translate into success. Not much evidence there. Let's see the degrees of the people the CEOs surround themselves with.

The dynamic duo then insinuates that, because tuition has risen faster than inflation, universities must be scamming American families. I wonder if that would hold true for every other service or commodity the price of which has risen faster than the rate of inflation.

Sowell then claims that professors are teaching half as many hours, causing universities to hire twice as many professors. But as Marc Bosquet has shown, at a place like GWU, 60% of the faculty are adjunct, teaching six courses for $18,000 per year. Administrator salaries have risen faster than the hiring of full time faculty.

Sowell makes a further error by severing research from education. Sure, some professors "teach their books," meaning that their courses are overly specialized. But many excellent teachers are excellent because they bring their research knowledge into the classroom -- having written that, it seems obvious that a brilliant professor is brilliant at least in large part because of her research, her knowledge, her wisdom.

Not impressed. I agree that higher education costs are too often out of hand. At the same time, the students at these elite institutions demand that their universities look and operate like five-star hotels.

In defense of Sowell, I will just remark that I once (as an adjunct) had all my classes between 4pm and 8pm. The university had decreed that half of all classes in every department would be after 2pm, so that classrooms would be fully utilized. The other two faculty in my subject were more senior and had small children, so they grabbed up all the classes before 4pm. I didn't mind: I like reading half the night, then sleeping 'til noon and still having plenty of time to prepare for class. But Sowell is not entirely wrong about the tendency of faculty to want to teach at times convenient to themselves. Nor are 10-2 classes preferred by all students. My 7pm Latin 101 class was just as full as the three daytime sections, but with a much higher percentage of older students with day jobs. Cancelling it would have damaged total enrollments.

As he often does, Sowell goes to far because he is pushing the ultra conservative message that universities are chock full of left-wing slackers. There is some truth, however, in what he has to say about classes being scheduled for the convenience of the faculty. Where I work, many faculty members have to be reminded that they are required to teach on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, not just on Tues. and Thurs. Pretty obvious what's going on there. It's a fairly common problem, I think, but I don't know how widespread it is, and neither does Sowell.

I always show up for class on Monday and Friday. Where are the students on Friday, I wonder?

Re the argument that tuition rising faster than inflation is a signal of a scam. This sounds like economic nonsense to me. The money in the economy grows roughly as inflation + real growth. Higher education is sharing in the real growth of the economy, is what I would bet. Professional positions certainly have compensation that is growing faster than inflation. (And I wonder about the budgets of places like Sowell's Hoover Institution).

In endeavors with productivity that is more or less fixed, prices (or at least budgets) are going to rise if the endeavor keeps up with the economy. Think symphony orchestras. Think universities, until the faculty are replaced with robots.

Costs rising faster than family incomes may be a problem. It isn't going to go away, though, for the reasons above. Something else will have to be done about it.

Regarding costs, see Fisking Fish's Fishy Financial Findings.

Well! I stand corrected -- in some respects, anyway. I suppose it's obvious I am not a denizen of the academic world.

Still, I stand by the original instinct which motivated my post -- that there is something fundamentally wrong when the time preferences of students are considered anything more than tangential to the service being rendered, much less as a "natural phenomenon."

As someone observed, the academic world is a free market. But the universal derision which greeted my post makes me wonder what it's a free market IN? Warehousing 18-22 year olds?

Ah, but Tom, the students are the consumers, and we are the providers of the product. If the consumers won't buy what we're selling, then we'll go out of business.

Higher education is a service industry, like Starbucks or truck stop massage parlors.

Which is why we feed the students pap, and stroke their fragile egos.

David Foster -- I looked at your blog on college costs and IBM -- you say IBM cut $3 billion from its budget -- that is out of very nearly $100 billion per year? Pretty small change. I've seen this and a good deal more done routinely in higher education, including where I work.

As I said above, there are good reasons to expect higher education costs to keep rising at a rate above "inflation". I would agree that how to handle that is an interesting question.