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Ritalin comments on A Gamification Of Education: a modest proposal based on the Universal Decimal Classification and RPG skill trees - Less Wrong
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Comments (80)
"Doctor in Physics from Former Soviet Union, current Taxi Driver in New York" is a problem only because "Doctor in Physics from Current United States, current Taxi Driver in New York" is also a problem. No one doubts the quality of physicists from the former Soviet Union as a group. It's just that there aren't enough jobs in physics for all the PhDs we graduate.
Sorry, my bad: I said Doctor when I meant ex-Professor, i.e. someone who used to teach and perhaps even have tenure.
That doesn't change anything. There are fewer academic physics jobs in the United States than there are qualified people to fill them. Increasing the supply of qualified candidates just makes the discrepancy worse.
I'm actually not sure that "Doctor in Physics, current Taxi Driver" is as much of an issue today as it was 20-30 years ago. Back then I certainly knew people in this or equivalent positions (e.g. Physics PhD working as taxi driver, auto mechanic, printshop worker, etc.) These days the common path is physics PhD, software developer.
And yet, in most schools and universities, classrooms are too crowded, and there are too few teachers. How does that work?
In the States? University enrollment grew 37 percent between 2000 and 2010. Student loan reforms increased demand for college education drastically. At the same time, federal and state education funding levels in most places either remained stagnant or dropped relative to inflation, reducing the amount of budget available for hiring faculty. Administrative costs have also skyrocketed in many places, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.
Most universities attempted to raise tuition and/or hire cheaper faculty (e.g., adjuncts) as stop-gap measures, further weakening the demand for Ph. D.-holding educators. These measures have more-or-less hit peak effectiveness.
Sounds like a great opportunity for problem-solving. Where to begin?