Professor Elam

As one prof told me at Texas State, everyone wants to be something they are not. And so seven schools want to become Tier One Universities, you know like College Station and Austin. No not the football team silly, the research. This article notes that Univ of Houston awarded 239 PhD degrees last year. Perhaps so but I suspect a breakdown would reveal that half of those were in Education and Liberal Arts. Nothing wrong with that but these are not the fields that spawn computer chips and medical brfeakthroughs, that would be engineering and medical school. Meanwhile every school is bent on showing they do more research by requiring profs to publish in academic journals.

One student at Texas State who transferred from UT Austin told me it was the best decision she ever made. Her largest class at Tx State was smaller than her smallest class at UT, and there she was talking to her instructor, me, she said that never happened at UT Austin. My take is that UT and A M College Station should probably be graduate only, they have undergrad classes in accounting with 300 students. This is to get the undergrad tuition, certainly not to have good teaching. The desire for more and more money brings more and more enrollment and more large classes which as I point out in managerial accounting lowers fixed cost and increases contribution margin, the Proctor and Gamble approach to education. Happily that is not the case here at A & M San Antonio.

Just wondering, have any of you ever had a professor who required you to read an article in an academic journal?

Hmmmm…….