UCLA parents: Student services cut

proudUCLAbruin
Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:42:06 +0000

Hi all,
First, I would like to challenge the cause and effect argument regarding admitting poor or underqualified students to UCLA and needing peer learning. The vast majority of Covel students are not failing the class. The program in some cases may be remedial, but in many cases is not. Qualified students benefit from peer learning just as much as unqualified students and the program should exist regardless of the quality of the students. To support this assertion, consider schools like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, etc. . All of these private schools who admit supposedly elite candidates have even more comprehensive peer learning programs available to all undergraduates, not just disadvantaged minority students. This speaks to how much peer learning complements regular coursework and develops understanding past what attendance in a 300+ person lecture can do.

That is not to understate the importance of peer learning to students who are failing the class. But referring to the 4,000+ students who use this as mostly “not needing it” is not accurate. Learning concepts so that they can be applied across individual classes is not trivial. Hence Covel’s emphasis on classes that work in series- the idea being that help in the beginning builds on later understanding of the material.

Which begs the question- why pay for this service if it’s ‘nonessential’? Well, why would you pay for office hours, or for discussion sections, or for any kind of teaching for that matter? Why not learn directly from a book and omit the teacher entirely? It’s because peer learning works- there’s a vast body of research demonstrating that getting students actively involved in working with other students helps them to understand and learn the material in ways that are far more effective than lecture-based learning formats (see: the writings of Mike Rose, Alison King, David Boud, to name a few).

Is it expensive or spending more money than would be otherwise spent? Not exactly- student hire time is a lot cheaper than professor hire time or graduate student hire time. So we are looking at a service that may save the college money in the long run- whether or not it’s due to the ten students who fail and take a fifth year or drop out, or because it requires the departments to add an extra office hour for all TAs, etc. In the present scenario it definitely is saving the college money relative to the proposed new centers based on extra TA office hours.

I think it’s not an accurate idea to blame holistic admissions for the use of peer learning at the UC and private school level. For one thing, UCLA only started using holistic admissions two years ago- we’ve had peer learning programs since the 70’s which were in fact more enrolled than presently. But more damagingly, this equates “peer learning” with “remedial”- which as I’ve said earlier is not a true relationship.

Social scientists before me, or my colleagues at AAP have at least shown that peer learning provides a grade point jump. But most fundamentally, peer learning complements and builds on fundamentals in a way that lecture-based learning may or may not do. And here is the big ideological divide, I think. This kind of learning- the difference between getting an “A” in biochemistry but forgetting it after the exam and getting your “A” and truly understanding and internalizing the material- how do you measure that quantitatively? I’m a scientist. It drives me insane that I cannot provide you with statistics as to how much peer learning enhances undergraduate learning at UCLA or at other institutions. But nonetheless, it’s substantial enough that every other major state and private university that we called has its own program, and none of them were worse-funded than ours. It’s even integrated on the CC level where I would argue it is less necessary (eg. NY City College has a very famous program), since there is a high ratio of lecturers to students. But I think the larger the parent school and the bigger the lectures and discussion sections, the more important it is to have this kind of service.

Finally, many of you are arguing that students who are not prepared for UCLA should not be admitted to UCLA. I would like to urge you to think of the class and socioeconomic ramifications of that statement. If a student is nonminority and valedictorian and takes all of the highest level classes in that person’s school, who is to know if that student is qualified or not to enter UCLA? Should we base it on her SAT subject test scores? If the student’s scores are average, and the high school’s average in the 300-400s, can we conclude that the high school is failing this student by insufficiently engaging her? Should she be penalized for this on the college level as well?