Quote:
|
The only dept I'd say is 'weak' is the secondary/elementary education department.
|
Michigan doesn't have the chops that, say, MSU has in these areas, but I'm not sure I'd call it weak.
They just put something like $1.5 million into revamping the teacher training component, and it's pretty exciting to hear about the plans there. U-M Michigan students in education already take three terms of student teaching (this is not common) and have the second-highest passing rate in the state on the certification exam.
Quote:
|
One thing I don't exactly get is how we can have such huge classes of undergraduate students, charge them that much for tuition, and still be in need of money.
|
Education is an expensive business. It's true on just about every campus: tuition doesn't begin to cover the cost of instruction. There are a number of reasons, but one of the foremost reasons is that it's very labor-intensive. It also doesn't realize big cost benefits from humankind's great advancements in technology (that is, it benefits in many ways, but unlike widget-making, higher education doesn't see big increases in efficiency and cost savings) Also, universities are charged with not just teaching knowledge, but creating new knowledge AND cataloguing and preserving all the human knowledge up to this point.