A link from Rajesh’s Emergic blog led me to an enlightening NYTimes writeup on the limitations of the “University” as we know it :

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

… The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

… If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

As a young student in India, there were few dreams I cherished more than the prospect of spending a few good years of my life on the campus of a Princeton or a Yale.  For a variety of reasons, mostly economic, I traded those dreams for others.

Today, I am a bit saddened to read the NYTimes piece on the dire need to restructure these hallowed campuses.  But, I am also encouraged by the author’s recommendations on what can be done about it :

• Restructuring the curriculum to make it cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural
• Abolishing permanent departments and creating problem-focused programs (e.g. Water!)
• Increasing collaboration among institutions to share students and faculty
• Transforming the traditional dissertation; Exploring alternative formats
• Expanding the range of professional options for graduate students
• Imposing mandatory retirement and abolishing tenure

In the author’s words, “My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.”

Here’s to a new world…