Professors being selected for research is part of it. Another part is the tenure you mentioned—some professors feel like once they have tenure they don’t need to pay attention to how well they teach. But I think a big factor is another one you already mentioned: salaries. $150k might sound like a lot to a student, but to the kind of person who can become a math or econ professor at a top research university this is… not tiny but not close to optimal. They are not doing it for the money. They are bought in to a culture where the goal is building status in academic circles, and that’s based on research.
I also think you’ve had some bad luck. I had a lot of good professors and a handful of bad ones as an undergrad (good school but not a research university) and in grad school maybe a little more equal between good professors and those who didn’t care much. But even in the latter cases, I rarely felt like I didn’t learn anything. It just took a little more effort on my part to read the book if the lectures were a snooze (and yes, there were a few profs whose voices could literally put me to sleep in an instant).
some professors feel like once they have tenure they don’t need to pay attention to how well they teach.
I imagine that if they taught well before, they would still teach well by the sheer force of habit. Maybe slightly worse because they no longer bother to do it perfectly, but not “consistently present things in unclear or inconsistent ways”.
Those who are good teachers will continue to be good teachers. Example of this from a prof I know who won teaching awards and continues to teach basically the same way now that she’s gotten tenure. She likes teaching, that’s a big part of why she’s good at it, she’s not about to phone it in. I think what’s slipped a bit post-tenure is the amount of resources she devotes to publishing her research. I don’t think her actual research has slowed down any, because she also likes that part, she’s just not focused on getting papers out the door ASAP because her continued employment no longer depends on it.
There are universities with better teachers, but they tend to be those that focus on their undergrad programs, and not the big prestigious ones with massive endowments. They’ll hire people who aren’t as prestigious in their fields but are good at teaching (and get a nice discount on staffing costs). The prof above works at such a university; part of her job interview was giving a lecture to a room of students and faculty, and how well she did was IIRC part of the reason why she was hired in the first place. The same tiny university was a pioneer for major chunks of the current paradigm for undergrad engineering programs, and the program director spent a sabbatical at the University of Waterloo improving its undergrad engineering program. That being said, even at a more teaching-focused university like that one, there were still some real bad profs (and not necessarily people with tenure or who did a lot of good research, just inexplicably bad teachers).
I’m not fully convinced by the salary argument, especially with quality-of-life adjustment. As an example, let’s imagine I’m a skilled post-PhD ML engineer, deciding between:
Jane Street Senior ML Engineer: $700-750k, 50-55hrs/week, medium job security, low autonomy
[Harvard/Yale/MIT] Tenured ML Professor: $200-250k, 40-45hrs/week, ultra-high job security, high autonomy
A quick google search says that my university grants tenure to about 20 people per year. Especially as many professors have kids, side jobs, etc. it seems unlikely that a top university really can’t find 20 good people across all fields who are both good teachers and would take the second option (in fact, I would guess that being a good teacher predisposes you to taking the second option). Is there some part of the tradeoff I’m missing?
For a professor at a top university, this would be easily 60+ hrs/week. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-shows-professors-work-long-hours-and-spend-much-day-meetings claims 61hrs/week is average, and something like 65 for a full Professor. The primary currency is prestige, not salary, and prestige is generated by research (high-profile grants, high-profile publications, etc), not teaching. For teaching, they would likely care a lot more about advanced classes for students getting closer to potentially joining their research team, and a lot less about the intro classes (where many students might not even be from the right major) - those would often be seen as a chore to get out of the way, not as a meaningful task to invest actual effort into.
Yeah, the joke for professors is you can work any 60-70 hours of the week you want, so long as you show up for lectures, office hours, and meetings. It’s got different sorts of pressures to a corporate or industry position, but it’s not low-pressure. And if you’re not at the kind of university that has a big stable of TAs handling a lot of the grunt work, you’re gonna have a number of late nights marking exams and papers or projects every semester, unless you exclusively give students multiple-choice questions.
Also, getting to the point of being a tenured professor is a process in and of itself. Not getting tenure means you likely get laid off.
One other thing a lot of people are missing here is that most “professors” at universities today are not tenured, or even tenure-track. They’re adjuncts or sessional lecturers, who are paid more along the lines of $70k a year (often less) for what is in practice a similar workload with similar education requirements, except consisting entirely of teaching, with literal zero job security. Sessional lecturers sometimes find out only a couple of days or weeks in advance what they are being asked to teach for the semester, if anything.
Hm… I seem to have mistaken “flexibility” for low hours and underestimated how much professors work. Is “teaches math at Stanford” really viewed much lower than “researches math at Stanford” (or whatever college)? It seems like universities could drum up some prestige around being a good teacher if that’s really the main incentive.
Jane Street is a pretty extreme comparison. An easier one is that a good software engineer at Google can, in their late 20′s, make 2x what a tenured professor makes by the end of their career, with similar or better work/life balance. Tenure becomes irrelevant when you can retire by 40.
Professors being selected for research is part of it. Another part is the tenure you mentioned—some professors feel like once they have tenure they don’t need to pay attention to how well they teach. But I think a big factor is another one you already mentioned: salaries. $150k might sound like a lot to a student, but to the kind of person who can become a math or econ professor at a top research university this is… not tiny but not close to optimal. They are not doing it for the money. They are bought in to a culture where the goal is building status in academic circles, and that’s based on research. I also think you’ve had some bad luck. I had a lot of good professors and a handful of bad ones as an undergrad (good school but not a research university) and in grad school maybe a little more equal between good professors and those who didn’t care much. But even in the latter cases, I rarely felt like I didn’t learn anything. It just took a little more effort on my part to read the book if the lectures were a snooze (and yes, there were a few profs whose voices could literally put me to sleep in an instant).
I imagine that if they taught well before, they would still teach well by the sheer force of habit. Maybe slightly worse because they no longer bother to do it perfectly, but not “consistently present things in unclear or inconsistent ways”.
Those who are good teachers will continue to be good teachers. Example of this from a prof I know who won teaching awards and continues to teach basically the same way now that she’s gotten tenure. She likes teaching, that’s a big part of why she’s good at it, she’s not about to phone it in. I think what’s slipped a bit post-tenure is the amount of resources she devotes to publishing her research. I don’t think her actual research has slowed down any, because she also likes that part, she’s just not focused on getting papers out the door ASAP because her continued employment no longer depends on it.
There are universities with better teachers, but they tend to be those that focus on their undergrad programs, and not the big prestigious ones with massive endowments. They’ll hire people who aren’t as prestigious in their fields but are good at teaching (and get a nice discount on staffing costs). The prof above works at such a university; part of her job interview was giving a lecture to a room of students and faculty, and how well she did was IIRC part of the reason why she was hired in the first place. The same tiny university was a pioneer for major chunks of the current paradigm for undergrad engineering programs, and the program director spent a sabbatical at the University of Waterloo improving its undergrad engineering program. That being said, even at a more teaching-focused university like that one, there were still some real bad profs (and not necessarily people with tenure or who did a lot of good research, just inexplicably bad teachers).
That’s fair, most of them were probably never great teachers.
That’s not luck. Non-research universities do select faculty by teaching skill.
I’m not fully convinced by the salary argument, especially with quality-of-life adjustment. As an example, let’s imagine I’m a skilled post-PhD ML engineer, deciding between:
Jane Street Senior ML Engineer: $700-750k, 50-55hrs/week, medium job security, low autonomy
[Harvard/Yale/MIT] Tenured ML Professor: $200-250k, 40-45hrs/week, ultra-high job security, high autonomy
A quick google search says that my university grants tenure to about 20 people per year. Especially as many professors have kids, side jobs, etc. it seems unlikely that a top university really can’t find 20 good people across all fields who are both good teachers and would take the second option (in fact, I would guess that being a good teacher predisposes you to taking the second option). Is there some part of the tradeoff I’m missing?
For a professor at a top university, this would be easily 60+ hrs/week. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-shows-professors-work-long-hours-and-spend-much-day-meetings claims 61hrs/week is average, and something like 65 for a full Professor. The primary currency is prestige, not salary, and prestige is generated by research (high-profile grants, high-profile publications, etc), not teaching. For teaching, they would likely care a lot more about advanced classes for students getting closer to potentially joining their research team, and a lot less about the intro classes (where many students might not even be from the right major) - those would often be seen as a chore to get out of the way, not as a meaningful task to invest actual effort into.
Yeah, the joke for professors is you can work any 60-70 hours of the week you want, so long as you show up for lectures, office hours, and meetings. It’s got different sorts of pressures to a corporate or industry position, but it’s not low-pressure. And if you’re not at the kind of university that has a big stable of TAs handling a lot of the grunt work, you’re gonna have a number of late nights marking exams and papers or projects every semester, unless you exclusively give students multiple-choice questions.
Also, getting to the point of being a tenured professor is a process in and of itself. Not getting tenure means you likely get laid off.
One other thing a lot of people are missing here is that most “professors” at universities today are not tenured, or even tenure-track. They’re adjuncts or sessional lecturers, who are paid more along the lines of $70k a year (often less) for what is in practice a similar workload with similar education requirements, except consisting entirely of teaching, with literal zero job security. Sessional lecturers sometimes find out only a couple of days or weeks in advance what they are being asked to teach for the semester, if anything.
Hm… I seem to have mistaken “flexibility” for low hours and underestimated how much professors work. Is “teaches math at Stanford” really viewed much lower than “researches math at Stanford” (or whatever college)? It seems like universities could drum up some prestige around being a good teacher if that’s really the main incentive.
From where do you get the 40-45hrs/week number?
Jane Street is a pretty extreme comparison. An easier one is that a good software engineer at Google can, in their late 20′s, make 2x what a tenured professor makes by the end of their career, with similar or better work/life balance. Tenure becomes irrelevant when you can retire by 40.