Jobs for Sale: Academic Standards and Career Gatekeeping

One way to think about higher education is that it is an investment.^[1] You spend money on tuition, books, room and board, etc., and in return, you get a degree that gives you access to the job that you want. You can estimate the expected return on your investment by looking at the salaries of people who do the job, multiplying them by the number of years that you anticipate working, discounting the expected lifetime earnings back to the present with a factor that accounts for both the time value of money and the riskiness of the job, comparing the resulting value to the near-term outflows required to obtain the necessary education, and seeing whether the trade makes sense.

This is a popular model for parents of graduating high-school students to use when advising their children on where to go to college and what to choose as their major field of study once they are there.^[2] Many of these parents start with the ultimate goal in mind and look for jobs that have both high expected earnings and low risk, and many of them arrive at the same answer for their child's ideal job – physician. They then look at the composition of medical schools' classes to see what themes characterize successful applicants, and a few big ones emerge - field of study (biology, chemistry, biomedical engineering, and their ilk being most common), prestige of undergraduate institution (roughly approximated by the U.S. New & World Report "Best Colleges" rankings, which some institutions consequently work hard to game), and undergraduate GPA.

For the parent as customer, then, evaluating a university is a straightforward proposition. The ideal institution will have a high U.S. News & World Report ranking and offer majors in biology, chemistry, biomedical engineering, and their ilk in which a student will have a strong likelihood of attaining a high GPA.  Universities, the generous remuneration of whose vast ranks of administrators must come from somewhere, understand that this is the decision calculus for many of their prospective customers.

And so we arrive at the latest news out of New York University's chemistry department, as the New York Times reports:

In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.’s coolest professors.


But last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him.


Students said the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores.


The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones’s contract.


The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department’s chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a “one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college.”


Marc A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, summed up the situation in an email to Dr. Jones, before his firing.


He said the plan would “extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills,” an apparent reference to parents.

Higher education being industry in which economic incentives are so often brushed under the rug, it is rather refreshing to see an administrator candidly acknowledge the role of parental tuition checks in this lowering of academic standards. One can be sure that there were more than a handful of aspiring parents-of-physicians who extended their own "gentle but firm hand" to the NYU administration when they saw the grades that their offspring had received in a course "notorious for ending many a dream of medical school."

Sadly, it seems that NYU's motto – "Perstare et Praestare" ("to persevere and to excel") - is less of a guiding light to the university these days than the complaints of students and parents who would like their desired outcome without the need for quite so much perseverance and excellence.

[1] It is possible for multiple models simultaneously to inform a single person's thinking on these matters. Personally, I prefer a model that balances economic realities with a hefty weighting for education's less tangible values like the pursuit of truth and the cultivation of human flourishing, but this model shapes at least part of the thinking of many consumers of higher education.

[2] Many students also use this model for their own decision-making.