Source: NYTimes: To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test
http://nyti.ms/gIZJud

A great article by The Economist on the fate of many of those who embark on the PhD journey...

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

and more...

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates.

And a staggering realization

In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment

Poor job prospects at the end of a PhD, leads to the question... what's next?

One OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts.

And a sad fact, that many of those with PhD's, will end up making little more than those with Master's degrees in certain areas

PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. 

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

The NYTimes "Room for debate" has a take on recent studies that show College as more of a waste of time, than actually advancing knowledge

First there was the news that students in American universities study a lot lessthan they used to. Now we hear, in a recent book titled"Academically Adrift," that 45 percent of the nation's undergraduates learn very little in their first two years of college.

The study, by two sociologists, Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, also found that half of the students surveyed did not take any classes requiring 20 pages of writing in their prior semester, and one-third did not take any courses requiring 40 pages of reading a week.

The research has come in for some criticism. But a larger question is: Have colleges, in their efforts to keep graduation rates high and students happy, dumbed down their curriculums? If they have, who is to blame? What should parents and federal taxpayers do?

Source: NYTimes

The Chronicle has an interesting article on Scientists' point of view on the Research vs Teaching debate. According to the article, Scientists fault Universities for favouring research over teaching

Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles.

One Scientist goes as far as calling a "Ponzi Scheme". This is a real problem in Europe and the US, where much of the funding for Universities comes from Research grants that are meant to keep facilities and staff. Most professors then find little time to invest in teacher training.

http://chronicle.com/article/Scientists-Fault-Universities/125944/

Interesting article by the Economist on how hard it is to "improve" teachers

http://www.economist.com/node/17851511?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/ar/improveteachers

In Singapore, which recently came second in an international ranking of 15-year-olds’ skill in maths (America was 31st), the teacher-training programme accepts only students in the top 30% of their academic cohort. In America, most teachers were mediocre students. Only 23% of new teachers were in the top third of college graduates.

and

A survey by the New Teacher Project, a non-profit organisation, found that school districts labelled more than 99% of their teachers “satisfactory”.

Most difficult, however, is finding ways to evaluate teachers, rewarding the good and dismissing the bad. In 2009 Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, outlined his reforms in a speech to the National Education Association (NEA), America’s biggest union. “When inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children,” Mr Duncan insisted, “then we are not only putting kids at risk, we’re also putting the entire education system at risk.” Some members of the audience booed