What Princeton Can Do Better

My recent posts about Princeton have mentioned many of the University’s unique attributes and distinct advantages for undergraduate students.  I do believe that the best choice for an undergraduate education in the world is at Princeton.

However, I am concerned more broadly that Princeton—or its graduates—may not be serving our nation (or the world) to the best of its ability.  Indeed, during my admissions interview I was asked about how Princeton students would be expected to give back to the country.  I mentioned the usual—public service, entrepreneurship, etc.—but my interviewer prodded me to go further: “Isn’t working in the financial sector and improving the efficiency of banking, of getting more loans in the hands of people who need them, also serving the interests of the country?”  I stanched my disagreement; I was at best ambivalent about the notion because (as has been borne out) I did not believe that all finance was always good all the time.  But my admissions to Princeton was potentially on-the-line: “Of course, you’re right. ”

The Washington Monthly ranks Princeton #28 against our peers in terms of our “contribution to the public good.”  Berkeley is tops, Stanford #4.  We rank below such stalwarts of academia as Jackson State University.

In addition to my concerns about Princeton’s contribution to the public good, I have been bothered by certain policies and systems in place at the University, especially in regards to admissions and curriculum. Some of the issues I raise can be solved easily, but others require more concerted efforts.  In these regards, my point is not that Princeton is doing something wrong, per se, but moreso that I think Princeton can take steps to improve even more.  In particular, I think that Princeton’s student culture on campus lacks a certain vibrancy of intellectualism, which I think can be attributed to certain University policies.

In this wide-ranging post, I address these various concerns and, leaning on my experiences at Purdue University and the National University of Singapore, give my views on how they should be resolved.  Here is a short rundown of where I think Princeton can do better.

Center for Business Studies

Old Frick, former-home of the Chemistry Department, is a large building at the center of campus.  Once empty, we should convert the building into a new center for business studies.  An undergraduate liberal arts education is not incompatible with basic training in business.  Students still need to learn to think outside the box, to conceptualize the big ideas, to grapple with the big problems.  But the core courses in business—marketing, accounting, design, leadership, and project management—will give Princeton students the knowledge they need to succeed in the workforce.  I am not in favor of an undergraduate major in business, nor do I think that the University should offer MBAs.*  However, converting Frick into a “[DONOR’S NAME HERE] Center for Industry, Labor, and Entrepreneurship” will give undergraduates the broad-based education they need to succeed.

* Of course, in order to attract top faculty, we will have to have strong PhD programs at the center and extensive research collaboration between the new center and existing departments at Princeton.

Admissions Reform

I think that Princeton needs to reform admission in four key ways:

• Better representation of public high schools internationally;
• Better representation of public high schools in the United States;
• No special treatment for legacy students; and
• No special treatment for recruited athletes.

From many countries, the only students I know of at Princeton come from private high schools. Few international students, especially those from the developing world, come from public high schools. This again speaks to a paucity of diversity—these students may be “poor” on an absolute scale in US dollars, but they are well-off enough back home to attend private schools. This is certainly not true diversity. This gap may be due in part to the very few applications Princeton receives from students at public high schools abroad, but I think that Princeton needs to take an active approach and support more such applicants. Princeton needs to reach out to public high schools abroad (perhaps through its worldwide alumni associations), provide paper copies of applications, and provide information on how to obtain College Board fee waivers. Only by admitting more students from public school abroad will Princeton gain a truly diverse international student body.

I also believe that public high schools are underrepresented at Princeton, but this gap is not hugely significant. By increasing the number of students admitted from public schools vs. private schools, though, Princeton will increase diversity in terms of race, geography, and socio-economic status too.

My concerns on legacy students and recruited athletes are shared by many.  Of course, we should welcome legacy students to campus, but they should not be given any preference in the admissions cycle.  A recent Prince article brings up some of the many issues related to legacy students.  Moreover, though Princeton should not favor recruited students in the admissions process, Princeton should publicize our top sports programs and encourage athletes to apply.  But these athletes should be judged on the same basis as any other applicant, with academics as the first priority and athletics second.

Administrative Streamlining

Princeton has multiple layers of bureaucracy at every administrative level.  A plethora of deans, vice-presidents, and administrative departments makes it nearly impossible to understand who does what.  For example, I doubt that ten students on campus know how the jobs of Malkiel, Eisgruber, and Dobkin are different.  I would encourage Princeton to first publish a comprehensive guide that lays out the University’s administrative structure, identifies each administrator, and clearly explains what role each administrator has.  Second, I would encourage the University to consider significantly streamlining the administrative ranks.  The University has taken a good first step in streamlining the Office of International Programs (the firing of Dean Ordiway, however, is a whole other issue), and this streamlining mentality should be applied across the board.

Calendar Reform

How is it that Princeton students spend so little time in the classroom?  Most universities have students in class 15 weeks per semester, with a 16^th for exams.  Princeton scrapes by with 12, plus three more for exams.  Moreover, at NUS students spend on average 5 hours per week per course in class, versus the 3 hours at Princeton.  By any measure, students at other universities have more time in class.  This extra time has measurable benefits.  This allows professors to spend more time showing examples, describing case studies, and to generally delve deeper into the material.  This also gives students some breathing room to absorb material at a more reasonable pace.  I suggest that Princeton increase both the numbers of weeks spent in class each semester, and the number of hours spent in class each week.  (Also, the semesters should be realigned so that fall semester finals are completed in December!)  I understand that previous calendar reform efforts have been vetoed by the faculty, but it is time that the Trustees and the University president take a hard stance and push through calendar reform by any means possible.

Revised Core Curriculum

The well-educated Princeton student must be versed in civics, current events, and rhetoric.  Indeed, these are subjects that high schools generally teach, but usually quite poorly.  Moreover, it’s regrettable that these subjects are not only not required, but that many are simply not offered. A core curriculum (yes, including for engineers) should include these three courses alongside the Writing Seminars.

Others have suggested that Princeton should require a bare minimum of courses in computer science and statistics. These subjects are highly sought by employers and are becoming ever more useful in a technologically-driven world. Add CS and statistics to the core curriculum is an idea worth pursuing.

Economics Majors

The economics department is the most popular on campus for undergraduates.  However, I’m worried that some students elect economics out of apathy rather than as an affirmative choice.  The department could institute an applications-based admissions system to select truly interested students (there are, of course, other alternatives to achieve this same end).  This would also support Princeton’s “Major Choices” initiatives by forcing some students to take a look at other departments. Similarly, the strain on the economics department (advising all those JPs and theses isn’t easy) would be eased.

* see advising reform, below

Advising Reform

Princeton’s advising system is in tatters.  Advising groups are far too large, and many advisers—who are all full-time professors—are too busy to provide the individual attention that students need.  Moreover, these professors are not particularly knowledgeable about the different academic resources that Princeton offers, simply because most professors are not themselves Princeton graduates.  The advising system needs to be overhauled, though there is perhaps no single best solution.  Students look to advisers for advice about courses, majors, internships, and everything in-between, so designing an effective advising system is quite difficult.

I would suggest that incoming students not be assigned advisers but instead be forced to look for advisers.  There would be a list of seniors and faculty members who have been trained as advisers, and students can choose one or more persons as their adviser(s).  In a system similar to course reviews in SCORE, advisers can be reviewed so that students have more information about who they would like to work with. * Incoming students will have to report who their adviser is to the University.

* see thesis reform, below

Thesis Reform

The senior thesis is a key factor in the Princeton academic curriculum, but the thesis is currently such a mysterious black box that many students instinctively fear them as they enter senior year.

First, departments need to establish clear grading standards for theses and must provide a system of check and balances for how theses are graded.  This includes having multiple graders—including at least one blind grader (a grader who does not know whose thesis he/she is grading)—and protocol for how grades can be challenged.  Departments must also publicly disclose their historical grade distributions for theses.

Second, thesis advisers should be reviewed in an online system so that other students know if they would like to work with that professor in future years.  This will give students an invaluable tool both for feedback and for choosing advisers.

Third, all professors should be required to provide information about their supervising preferences—are they hands on, hands off, how often will they meet with students, etc. Professors should also disclose what questions and topics they are interested in so that students can better match up their own preferences with a professor.  This information, of course, should be on a central website and not on departmental websites, because students may find thesis advisers in different departments from their own.

Lastly, Princeton should consider whether students should be allowed to graduate without completing a thesis.  A thesis marks the pinnacle of academic achievement and is a strong finishing point for the liberal arts degree.  However, a thesis also marks a student’s deep immersion in a single field.  I argue that there should be ways for students to graduate without having to concentrate so much in a single department.  This kind of concentration is appropriate for students who wish to pursue academic careers in single fields; but for other students, especially those who go into business, immersion in a single department is less important than strong cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills.  This kind of knowledge and skills is largely crowded out by the thesis, prompting me to wonder about whether there is a better way.

Standardized Tests

Princeton is quite keen that incoming students perform well on a battery of standardized tests.  However, once students matriculate at Princeton, these tests magically stop.  This is a mistake.  Princeton should encourage standardized testing among its seniors.  These exams would provide aggregate data into how much Princeton students have learned.  Princeton can use this data to alter and tweak the curriculum.  Cross-comparative data from other universities can show where Princeton can improve, and Princeton can adopt best practices from other universities.

I believe that the Ivy League should coordinate a set of standardized exams to be administered to graduating seniors in their last semesters.  These exams would measure core subjects like writing, civics, current events, and rhetoric.  Other exams in math literacy, science literacy, computer literacy, and business skills would show how well schools are preparing students for the workplace.  Departments may go so far as to administer standardized tests to their students to gauge the department’s success in teaching undergraduate majors.  In any case, to prevent “teaching-to-the-test” and other ills, universities would be forbidden from releasing their aggregate data to the public.  This way, test data will help universities improve their own courses but will not be used to competitively compare universities against one another.

Standardized tests are not a cure-all, but they are a first step.  They provide the hard data that schools need to effectively evaluate and overhaul curricula.

Precept reform

See http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/04/27/26002/.

New Types of Seminar Courses

At Purdue, departments offer a number of one credit-hour seminar courses (most courses at Purdue are three credit-hours).  These seminar courses allow departments a lot more flexibility in what they can teach.  Instead of a full-blown course, students can be given a light introduction.  For example, students may want to learn more about social entrepreneurship—but instead of taking SE Lab (EGR 491), students can take a light one credit-hour introduction.  Having a system in place for such seminar courses (perhaps at Princeton they can be called “half-credit” classes) will give departments much more flexibility in the courses they can offer.  Students will also have the flexibility to take interesting classes that are not as academically challenging.

Moreover, there should be certain required seminar courses for incoming students.  These courses would be overviews of the different academic departments or schools (maybe one such seminar course each for engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the visual and performing arts).  Students would take one or more of these overview seminar courses.  At Purdue, for example, all incoming engineering students take such a one-credit seminar course.  That course gives an overview of the different branches of engineering and the active fields of research in the different fields.  Additionally, it gives students a full understanding of the prerequisites for the different fields and motivates why these prerequisites are important.

Such overview courses could work well at Princeton.  For example, incoming students don’t automatically know everything about the natural sciences, and such an overview class can show them which branch of the natural sciences might be best for them.  Moreover, students will gain an understanding of why certain prerequisite courses are required and what role these courses will play in their later coursework and research.

Only now, after having taken many math courses, am I starting to understand the full contours of modern mathematics.  An overview course in my freshman year would have helped a lot in that I would have had a better idea about all the different specialties in mathematics and which route I may have found most interesting to pursue.

More Grants for Student Initiatives

Princeton has a lot of money, and more of it should be going to students to pursue their own initiatives and extracurricular projects.  Funding for students should be increased from the current $1-3,000 grants to $10,000+ grants.

Required Public Service

Here is a controversial proposal—any student who attends Princeton should be required to spend at least one of the five years after graduation in some position of public service.  Graduate programs would only delay the service requirement, not fulfill it.  Students who spend a gap-year—either before matriculation or during their time at Princeton—would be able to fulfill the requirement in that manner (if, of course, the gap year included sufficient components of public service).

I’m not sure, though, what penalties Princeton could assess on students who fail the fulfill the requirement.  My model for this suggestion is the national service requirement in Ghana, where university graduates must spend 1-2 years working in public service, broadly defined, after graduation.  If Ghana can do it, certainly Princeton can too.

Career Services Reform

Career Services at Princeton is a disaster.

Career Services at NUS is much more active and engaging.  Firstly, the career counselors are much better at resume reviews.  My resume, which had been revised through multiple cycles at Princeton’s Career Services, was eviscerated in 15 minutes at NUS.  At NUS, I learned a lot about how resumes should be constructed, how employers review resumes, and what strategies I could employ to improve my resume.  All in 15 minutes.

But more generally, Career Services at NUS offers many more resources to students.  They offer a series of workshops and seminars to help students navigate the career cycle.  Resumes, interviews, and networking are all covered.  Students can also take workshops in etiquette, the case interview, workplace communication skills, and dress/the personal image.  These workshops are not one-off events but instead regular small-group meetings spread over several weeks.  NUS Career Services also helps students find out which industries or types of jobs might be good for them.  Providing this kind of help to Princeton students would be invaluable—instead of settling for finance, the Princeton student would have a much better understanding of his other options for employment.

Smarter Grade Deflation

I’ve written before about grade deflation at Princeton.  In general, I support our current policies.  But certainly some improvements can be made.  Perhaps the easiest is to remove the uncertainly and variability of grades that are assigned by individual preceptors (see “Precept Reform” above).

I think another valid concern is that certain classes attract students with higher GPA’s. If one class has students with average GPA’s of 3.8, and another has students of average GPA of 3.3, then those classes will be very different. In the former, students will be trying a lot harder just so that they can earn the A because they are competing against other strong students, while in the latter grading will be relatively easier. In the end, though, both courses will have similar grade distributions.

At NUS, the quota of grades for each course is extremely rigid (which has its downsides), but each quota is partly based on the average GPA on the students in that course. I’m not sure how exactly Princeton would implement this kind of system, but I think that there does need to be allowance made for the fact that many courses are catering to students of different calibers, but that in the end that all have similar grade distributions.

Perhaps one way to solve this problem is to publish the average GPAs of students for each class.  Thus, not only would my transcript say “B+”, but it would also say that the average GPA of students for the class was a 3.8, which shows that the B+ was a hard-earned grade (of course, if we go down this road, a lot of other issues would pop up. Just ask Cornell or Dartmouth).  Another possibility is that letter grades would not have fixed GPA point values, like a 3.3 for a B+.  Instead, the point values would be scaled in accordance to the percentage of each grade given out and the average GPA of the students enrolled in the course.

Team-based Coursework

Most courses at Princeton rely on individual-based assignments and projects.  This is usually okay—students may work together anyway on such assignments, and individual assignments force students to understand material at a deeper level.  But in my three years, I have had only one team-based project at Princeton (end-of-term project, not problem sets).  Just one.  I think that my experience is pretty average at Princeton, though at other universities it would be anomalous.

The lack of team-based coursework at Princeton leaves students at a disadvantage because team projects are good preparation for outside contexts like business and research teams.  I would encourage departments to work with professors and increase the number of collaborative, team-based assignments and projects.

More Math

Princeton subscribes to the unfortunate American belief that math is hard.  All students are expected to learn strong writing skills, but the same is not true for math.  This is even so in departments like economics and electrical engineering*—departments in which current research is heavily dependent on math.  Students only have to pass a relatively low bar in terms of math to major in these fields.  A true liberal arts education embraces mathematics, and I believe that math needs to be given a new focus at Princeton.

I would encourage departments at Princeton to review their mathematical course requirements and beef them up where necessary.  The goal should be that majors in any department should have the mathematical skills to enter a PhD program in that department.  A good place to start is to review the math requirements for majors at MIT and CalTech—these schools require high, but reasonable, amounts of math for majors in departments like economics.  Harder math requirements will produce more technically proficient graduates who will be in higher demand by industry and will perform better in graduate school.

* electrical engineering at Princeton requires some math courses but doesn’t go so far as to include real or complex analysis.  These math courses are essential, for example, to understanding the various transforms used in signals processing.

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