Private thread: Are Profpreneurs Good for Students?

Photo by Steve Gale on Unsplash

One of Michael D. Smith’s anecdotes in The Abundant University strikes me as eerily similar to current trends in college athletics. He tells a story about Steve Levitt’s popular “Economics of Crime” course at the University of Chicago. Like Oates’s “Advanced Fiction” course at Princeton, Levitt’s seminar draws a long wait list. Levitt’s course is usually capped at 80 students due to space limitations, so one year Levitt went rogue, booked a large lecture hall that could hold 300 students, and lifted the cap. The seats filled quickly.

The next year the department chair moved Levitt back to the smaller auditorium because his mega-section affected enrollments for other offerings in the Economics department. Levitt couldn’t believe it — why would a selective university deprive students of something they wanted? Shouldn’t the demand dictate the supply? Simple economics, right?

To Smith, the moral of this story was that Levitt’s colleagues were jealous and cut him down to size with little regard for what was best for students. And he extends this scarcity argument to higher ed more broadly.

What concerns me is how we allocate scarce teaching resources in our current system of higher education. Does it make sense to ask professors to become experts in niche areas of research and then share their expertise only with the small number of students on any given campus who might care about that niche subject? Does it make sense to determine class size based on faculty egos rather than student demand? Does it make sense for professors whose salary comes primarily from tuition dollars to have almost no incentives to deliver a quality education to their students?