teaching and expertise
Measuring quality of education is very difficult. University rankings are biased towards research rather than teaching. They mainly focus on the easily measurable parameters like the number of papers, citations etc.
Harvard, for instance, is a horrible place to get educated. When I studied there, my best teachers were the teacher assistants. Professors who are hired on the basis of their research skills generally do not make good teachers:
- Researchers are not interested in teaching. They often see it as a burden.
- Researchers are cut off from the foundational material. They spend most of their time doing technical stuff that only a PhD level student can hope to understand.
- Researchers are quiet competitive. They generally do not care about others' learning difficulties and do not want to remember their own neither. They just want to march on.
On a related note, I think that all textbooks about the foundational subjects should be co-authored by young PhD students, not old professors.
“It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. […] The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t.”
- C. S. Lewis
