COLUMN: Fostering a good learning environment?
Anybody else notice the hundreds of high school kids all over campus this past week? Apparently, our student ambassadors are just out doing their job.
And from recently released statistics, it looks like they are doing that job quite well.
USU reported a nearly 25 percent increase in freshmen enrollment this fall semester. Yet at the same time, overall enrollment declined slightly during the same time period. Does anyone else see a discrepancy here?
Well, part of the problem can be traced to the approximately one out of every four USU freshmen who drops out after their first year. Dorm residents, look around you. If you’re all freshmen, chances are at least one of you won’t make it back next year.
Several factors contribute to a student’s overall college experience, but one thing in particular needs to change if we ever expect our freshmen to stay in school.
The problem: oversized introductory courses.
Before coming to USU, I attended Parowan High School in southern Utah. Enrollment in the 7-12 middle/high school reached about 350 students.
But when I came to USU, things changed. Four of my six classes that fall semester had more than 100 students in them. One had more than 800.
Needless to say, I was a little shell-shocked. I rarely made a comment in class. Few of us could. There were just too many students in the classroom. I don’t find it coincidental that the majority of students who drop out at USU are enrolled in these introductory courses.
No university classroom should have more than 100 students in attendance. Parents shout and complain when public school classrooms hold more than 30 students at a time. But all of that suddenly disappears between a student’s senior year of high school and freshman year of college.
You start to feel like a number, and it becomes too easy for even the best students to fall through the cracks.
To fix the problem, three things must happen. First, ask professors to teach just one more class each semester.
We have a faculty-to-student ratio of about 20-to-one here at USU, yet introductory classes continue to balloon in size. We ask public school teachers to deal with six or seven different classes a day. Certainly, asking a professor to teach two or three different courses each week is not excessive. If that simple policy was adopted, USU could become a school where no student has to endure a class larger than 100 students.
Second, professor salaries should be increased substantially to better match the natural average.
Our tuition continues to skyrocket every semester. Certainly the majority of this funding could be used to directly better our education through increased faculty pay. I hope the State Legislature would also try and match our student-generated funds for improved employee compensation.
Third, fewer expectations should be placed on faculty to conduct research.
Coupling less research with more instructional time would roughly equal the same amount of work for our faculty. We don’t need them to be superheroes working 80 hours a week. We just need to reevaluate where our focus should be.
Sadly, research is considered to be more important than teaching, anyway. You can find a lot of unread university publications out there to prove my point.
All new professors know the saying, “publish or perish.” If you want to keep your job or get a promotion, you need to publish your research – the more the better. Quality teaching just doesn’t rank that high on the university’s expectations.
Maybe our current priorities are a little backwards.
We can work our fat faces off to recruit new students, but if they do come here and their university experience doesn’t live up to the hype, our work is in vain.
We can send each prospective student some sweet Chapstick and an Aggie wristband (we already do this, by the way), but all of the chapstick in the world can’t make up for a crummy classroom experience.
Reducing all class sizes to fewer than 100 students is a reasonable and attainable goal this university should undertake to correct a very real problem.
Otherwise, don’t be surprised to see a record-high number of incoming freshmen turn into a record-high number of college dropouts.
Jon Cox is a senior majoring in journalism. Comments can be sent to jcox@cc.usu.edu.