The U.S. educational model is very strong because of the emphasis of developing the whole person. At U.S. medical schools, students are increasingly taught about the importance “caring” for/listening to their patients. The liberal arts component of a U.S. education will create more empathetic, well-rounded graduates and this is extremely important in an era of outsourcing to Asia. One cannot outsource empathy, creativity and innovation.

Thanks cantab09. We’ve corrected the error in the post.

Ian Wilhelm
Associate editor — global 

As Perplexed indicated, summer courses are almost always available for college students, if not on their own campuses on others where they can take courses and transfer them to their main program.  I finished college in 3 years in 1963 without even thinking much about doing so.  One summer I stayed on campus and another summer I went home and took courses at a college nearby.  Perhaps faculty and administrators need to promote the advantages of finishing college in three years and getting jobs or internships after graduation to make up for losing the chance to gain work experience (or fun time) during the summers.  I will say, however, that when offered a teaching assistantship my final semester, I turned it down because I was tired of being a student.  Being a student (or a teacher) for 12 months a year is not easy.   

At my huge campus, many more of us want to teach in summers than is justified by enrollments.  Students work summers and/or want summers off more than we-the-faculty do.  Many of us also would wish to take advantage of our state system’s flexibility in having us teach a summer semester instead of fall or spring semesters, but again, enrollments do not allow that.  The economics of many of our locales do not allow that, as the tourism industry and others rely on our students.  Do your research to see that this is a systemic situation far larger than our higher education systems.

So why not talk about a truly three-year degree, as is offered at many fine campuses across the world?  I am familiar, for example, with the programs at Monash University and with the fine quality of its graduates.  We could achieve the three-year degree, with work done primarily in fall and spring semesters, if our colleges and universities only had to teach college and university-level courses.

Too many of our courses must be remedial high-school work.  And this is not so just now; it was so when I was a college student decades ago, required to spend much of my freshman year on courses that allowed many of my classmates to catch up.  They were less fortunate than I was, as I had an excellent high school education.

Have the high schools offer those courses to their graduates who still are not ready for college work, then send them to us when they’re ready for college, and we will graduate them in three years — with time for them to spend summers working and saving for only three years of college.  Imagine the reduction for them in financial aid debt as well, when not having to come up with college-level tuition for high school courses.  I look forward to your next article on a truly three-year degree.

“. . . the outside-of-the-classroom development that occurs during this period in a person’s life. ”

This is true. The period of 17 through the mid-20′s is often looked back upon as halcyon days. Additionally, I think we all see students whom we would advise to “slow down” if we thought they would (or could) listen to us.

However, it is self-centered of us to assume that being engaged in college courses at a leisurely pace — or even being in college classrooms at all — is a necessary condition to this phase of growing up. 

Additionally, you and most who have an interest in this topic ignore the highly relevant fact that half of the nation’s college students are adults. Most of these people work and have families. So far as we have evidence in any direction, these adult students are no better or worse citizens in the aggregate than is the professoriate.

Finally, building upon your concern for pace, I think the gains are even better for students who “drop in and out” of college, perhaps completing their degree in their early 30′s (close to the median age of college students today). Taking a degree in this fashion facilitates a greater appreciation of knowledge and a closer relationship between learning and application — in work and in life at-large.

However much fun it was way back when, we need to climb out of the “old box” in which college students were 17 years old and needed our help to become enlightened citizens. This model is increasingly inappropriate even for today’s 17 year-olds.

This proposal is collateral damage from the economy.

The two most important experiences of my undergraduate career involved  “fallow summers.” The first was in an industrial job – hot, boring work. Unfortunately, that’s not feasible these days, since there is so little industry.

The second was an undergraduate research program 1000 miles from home. I liked that one better, and not just because it had longer workdays. My university does the same thing with some hundreds of students per summer, and the faculty who take them into their labs do so without any increase in compensation. As many have pointed out, the fields are not really fallow in the summers.

All changes have tradeoffs – Vedder’s proposal is fine for “gas-station education” – fill the tank and send them on their way. Since the economy of the future will require people who can think and figure out stuff, we may lose important aspects of a small-l liberal undergraduate education if we adopt this model willy-nilly, and the consequences could be dire.

Indirectly, your point aligns with one I make frequently. We speak of higher education as if it had specific denotative meaning or at least a cluster of closely related denotations. In fact, it is a family resemblance construct with the full range of implications attached thereto. The Chronicle creates or at least facilitates this confusion in many of its headlines and narratives. 

Separately, to your comment:

“Vedder’s proposal is fine for “gas-station education” – fill the tank and send them on their way. Since the economy of the future will require people who can think and figure out stuff, we may lose important aspects of a small-l liberal undergraduate education if we adopt this model willy-nilly, and the consequences could be dire.”

You imply two empirically unsupportable claims. There is no evidence that a liberal arts education (I had one myself and enjoyed it) is a necessary condition to the development of critical thinking skills (your “think and figure out stuff”). Likewise, there is no evidence to support your idea that a compressed educational program, especially one that exploits modern learning and evaluation sciences, will produce inferior results in the area of critical thinking. 

First, the entire area of critical thinking is scientifically murky. Current evidence suggests that the small part of it that can be taught is likely to be context dependent. Additionally, the application of modern learning theory suggests that the most robust learning occurs in the direction practice to theory and not other way around as generally believed and chanted by some in the professoriate since the time of Dewey. If so, applied programs that extend over time and application have, assuming the right content, the best chance of developing highly generalizable knowledge and, as you say, the ability to figure out stuff. The general approach implied by your comments works best only for high IQ learners who, by the way, can figure out how to learn no matter how badly or inefficiently we teach.

Reiterated from above, for Prof. Wilkins’s benefit:

* Faculty would need extra compensation to teach year-round. (Yes they
would. And the details of compensation, whether
two-semesters-on-and-one-off is the outside limit of a full-time
workload, whether different “off” semesters could be worked smoothly
into the curriculum, etc., would have to be worked out. But if every
obviously preponderantly beneficial major change were rejected because
details had to be worked out, nothing would ever change for the better.)

* Faculty need summers off for research. (What’s so bad about a faculty
member doing his or her research during the fall or spring semester, and
teaching during the summer? What’s wrong with London being less
cloggged with literature professors and Florence less overrun by art
historians in the summer, and those cities being more populated with
scholars during other times of the year?)

Yes, there would be some negotiating. But it wouldn’t be all that difficult, if the two-semesters-on-one-semester-off were maintained, to have faculty off-campus doing their research during semesters other than the summer. It might, in fact, make for more interesting (for the faculty) teaching duties, e.g., that senior professor who monopolizes the course you’d like to teach might be gone one semester when you’re around, so you’d get to teach it.

As for faculty “not compensated by the institution during those [summer] months,” my experience–both direct and indirect–is that professors get paychecks year-’round (i.e., their salaries are divided up into monthly or biweekly checks over the entire year), and only receive compensation from September through May exclusively if they deliberately opt for that.

I was curious about whether there were in fact studies examining atypical academic calendars at colleges/universities and their relationship with student learning. Put simply, I was wondering about any specific studies that abby12 might have at her/his fingertips. Innocent question, yes, and it remains so. I wasn’t expecting a response, just hoping for one. Instead, I got yours. I’m not naive, nor am I a jerk. Your post is tantamount to calling me one, the other, or both. In the time it took you to compose your message, you could have done, well, any number of things. Lucky me. 

If I am reading correctly, the only job currently on offer for Clark is the two year postdoc, so why all the angst about a choice that does not exist? (Does this perhaps suggest why the book is not finished, too much worrying about stuff that does not matter?)

If he has got a couple of interviews for tenure track jobs on tap, it would not be amiss to ask for a slight delay in accepting the postdoc. Otherwise, just take the temp position and full speed ahead, including staying on the market next year even though he’ll have another year in hand at the postdoc job.

(I actually had six years of such jobs before getting onto the tenure track, and several of my now tenured colleagues did as well. Experience is experience, and worthwhile.)

I hope it isn’t “angst” so much as a serious weighing of options. The folks behind the fellowship I have been offered have generously agreed to give me time to finish my other interviews, but my point is that, even with a TT offer, the right choice might still be the postdoc. For that “if” in my life and for other job seekers who may already be facing such a choice, can you think of other factors we should consider? Certainly, if the postdoc is our only option, it will be one we’re thrilled to accept.

You should have married a Canadian during your time at UBC?

On a more serious note, ouch!

 Completely depends on the TT job.  Back in my job search days, I was offered a TT position while in year three of my five year postdoc fellowship.  It had some real pluses, a great place to live and good colleagues but the salary was quite low compared to other schools, the lab space was literally a cleaned out janitor’s closet and the “start up package” (the money scientists get on hire to set up their research lab) was pathetically low.  I turned down that job that year and did not get another interview for nearly another year despite more than a hundred additional applications.  In the end though, year two saw two hundred more job applications and 14 interviews, one of which led to the job I hold now as a full prof.  In the end, turning down that first TT job was the best decision I ever made (I still keep contact with folks at the first place who tell me constantly that I made the best decision, they were embarrassed by how poor the offer was).  While this is anecdote, not data, I think in the end the answer to your question is “it depends” and no one can predict what the correct choice is ahead of time.

 Literally 200 more applications? If so, wow! you deserve the perfect job!

 Take the tenure track job and don’t look back, don’t second guess yourself, and don’t worry about competing with imaginary others – you should know by know academic hiring has more to do with “fit” than it does with being “the best”. I’m guessing if you applied to a tenure-track position and are considering their offer, you think you fit there.  If they think you fit too, then that’s that, take it and go. Remember, you have 20+ years to build your career and there’s only so many ducks you can get in a row.

Think about it this way, you can transform an imperfect tenure-track position into an excellent job, especially if you get your book out the door as part of the tenure process. Tenure committees will be much more impressed with a book that goes out your first year than they will be with one you published a year before you joined their institution.  On the other hand, you will *never* be able to turn a temporary position into the perfect job – not only are you not part of governance at that institution, you are also subject to internal politics, vulnerable to funding shortages and administrative struggles, as well as any number of other developments that can put you on the street, most of which are outside of your control.

PS, Reading your article and writing this response has helped me cement my thinking around my own standing in my career – thanks, and good luck.