Interesting book about how academia works and what drives decision-making there (short answer: established incentive structure for faculty/administrators/students and rational self interest of senior faculty/administrators not to change these incentives).
The book is easy to read but highly repetitive and has too much filler (from Chapter 3 onwards). The same ideas and even examples are brought up again and again as if for the first time, sometimes almost verbatim. I do not remember another book where I felt compelled to turn pages that fast because it was mostly a reiteration of what was said before. Some phrases are overused too: “glut of (PhD’s / job seekers)” is used 13 times throughout the book. “Voodoo math/calculus” 4 times in 6 consecutive pages.
Multiple repetitions soon dull the attention, maybe that’s the reason why the editors soothed through the place where water is said to boil at 100 degrees _Fahrenheit_.
One random comment on where I remember I disagreed with the authors. To buttress the proposition that students are generally not good at applying what they learned in classroom to real-life situations, the authors write: “... if the majority of students needing psychological counseling have poor dietary habits, does it follow that these same students should eat better? This is a softball question. The correct answer is no, not necessarily. It could be that a poor diet causes psychological problems. But, alternatively, it could be that suffering from a psychological problem causes people to eat badly. It could be that psychological issues and poor eating habits have a common cause.” Then, mocking the typical student’s response, they write: “totally ignoring the need for comparison groups and control of third variables, subjects responded to the “diet” example with statements such as “It can’t hurt to eat well.”
Well, unlike the authors, I think that it’s a very reasonable answer to this question. Given that their dietary habits are _poor_, they _should_ eat better / it won’t hurt to eat better, whether it will help with psychological issues or not. If, instead of “should eat better” the question ended with “will get better psychologically if they improve their diet”, then it becomes a question on logic and not on morality, and I think that students' responses would have been very different indeed.
Probably the most interesting fact that I learned from this book is that ratings of instructors’ optimism by students show an impressive .84 correlation with end-of-term course evaluations by other students. In other words, lecturer’s optimism alone may explain up to 84% of the score the students gave him at the end of the course! (yes, yes, correlation is not causation, and there are other correlations mentioned too, thus "may explain" and not "explains").
Overall I liked the book, but the authors could have and should have made it shorter and tighter, saving thousands of hours for their readers without leaving out anything important. Would have given the book five stars had the authors resisted the temptation to go beyond the short book format. I found it somewhat ironic that while advocating for parsimony in higher education, the authors did not extend that same value to writing this book.
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