Eric Rasmusen has a nice post on student evaluations of professors. (Link via Cold Spring Shops.) Near the end there is an almost Swiftian proposal:
Why, indeed, do we have people with PhD's, or people who have scholarly credentials, teaching at all? If student satisfaction is the key, universities should hire cheaper teachers who know more about presentation than they do about substance. And, indeed, maybe teacher quality is unimportant, and this would work out fine.
I'm not sure that is Swiftian, in the sense that Irish babies will feed the British. Sounds more like common sense to me, someone with a degree in economics and a couple of years teaching experience is going to do better teaching Econ 101 to the Eng Lit first years than a PhD who really wants to be working on his tenure publications.
As an aside, I would love to be teaching basic economics as a part timer but am most certainly not going to put myself through a PhD programme to teach rudiments to 18 year olds.
Posted by: Tim Worstall | June 28, 2004 at 02:34 PM