If I’m pay­ing for it, each class ses­sion should be infor­ma­tive and stim­u­lat­ing, not a time when we’re por­tioned into teams to solve prob­lems as a group.

I’m not a fan of the price tag on group work. If it’s sup­ple­men­tary to the lec­ture and meant to be done out of class, that’s okay. It almost seems like part of the home­work. But when actual class lec­ture time is taken up to develop ideas as a group, that’s a mis­use of my $316 per credit hour and a cop out by the instructor.

I’m pay­ing a pre­mium price to receive pre­mium infor­ma­tion from some­one with extra let­ters at the end of his or her name from an advanced degree. I’m inter­ested in hear­ing what a per­son with decades of expe­ri­ence in the indus­try has to say about a case study, not what the peo­ple who have taken all of the same pre-requisites sit­ting next to me feel is correct.

The com­mon idea among some fac­ulty mem­bers is that stu­dents learn bet­ter from their peers than from the end­less dis­play of PowerPoint slides. That could be true. But, if that is the case, then the class shouldn’t be push­ing a $1,000 tab. I’ll spend $50, the cost of a few rounds of drinks for the group, and we’ll learn a lot from one another.

When a pro­fes­sor says those words “group work,” it’s dam­ag­ing to the ethos of a col­lege. Students begin resent­ing their classes and become less pro­duc­tive because the nature of group work is that labor is not often evenly spread among the mem­bers of the group. With the other demands of a healthy col­lege lifestyle, meet­ing times can also be dif­fi­cult to define.

Those times in class ded­i­cated to group work could be bet­ter baby sat by a grad­u­ate assis­tant than a tenure track Dr. So and So.

Sure, there is prob­a­bly some great empir­i­cal study that was recently per­formed stat­ing that stu­dents who are forced to work in groups in classes are more likely to retain knowl­edge or per­form bet­ter on exams, but stu­dents should be striv­ing to be suc­cess­ful, regard­less of the num­ber of team mem­bers they have.

When higher edu­ca­tion became a machine for pump­ing out degrees, it neglected to rec­og­nize that the qual­ity of the edu­ca­tion they pro­vide by chal­leng­ing stu­dents and putting those doc­tor­ate degrees to good use in the class­room is more impor­tant than the quan­tity of grad­u­ates with pass­ing marks.