a) I would advise you to never ever take anything seriously that you read in a blog, unless the Pope starts a blog or something. Our third most read post ever is titled “Boobies, Anyone?”

b) Since we’re going there, let me lay out my argument for reals. My anecdotal and qualitative feeling is that UH has been focused on Tier 1 to the exclusion of the quality of the education itself. I was a psych major, but I know many students in many majors that also felt the quality of their education was rubbish. This is anecdotal, but besides Bauer (which does a damn fine job) and maybe math and hard sciences (which I know little about), the education didn’t live up to our meager expectations. I only had 3 major classes taught by actual professors, and 2 of the 3 didn’t put any work into the class. I graduated with 130+ hours and can count on one hand the number of instructors who were worth a damn. Why? Publish or perish. There was little incentive in raises and promotion for quality instruction. Dr. Lence was the only counter-example I can think of, and he was an anomaly in many ways.

I’m not saying this is solely because of UH’s penis-envy obsession with Tier 1, but I feel the focus on research over education was and probably is the largest problem with UH. And even if we get Tier 1, we’ll be a low-level T1 school at best. Why not put resources and effort into doing what we can do better than anyone else? In my not-so-humble opinion, that is to be the best cost-effective, real-world education in Texas. Tier 1 and the emphasis on research has an opportunity cost, and that is the exclusion of everything else.

Here is a terrible metaphor. I’m not very good at sports – I’m not tall or fast or quick or coordinated. So I was usually picked close to last in most sports. But what I can do well is keep going all day long. So a few years ago I stopped playing basketball and started running and biking and now I do triathlons. I’m not great, but I’m also not terrible, and I’m a lot better at it than I was playing a ball sport.

Jim Collins argues in his book Good to Great (I know this is trite) that companies should focus on what they can be the best in the world at. That is fantastic grammar on my part. If we succeed with Tier 1, we’ll be bottom-rung in Tier 1. Why not spend our energies focusing on what we can do better than the UTs and the A&Ms?

There is a lot about the hard sciences and engineerings I don’t know, so I could be totally wrong. All I know is I would have had a crappy education had I not taken it upon myself to go above and beyond the turd platter that was given to me, and a lot of other people feel the same way. I say focus on the student as the customer.

Not to mention that this country is quickly falling behind in science and research, because most of our college graduates elect to take easier paths (HRM anyone?). The CEO of Boeing (or Lockeed I cant remember) recently testified before congress that the top 3 PhD programs providing engineers to their company he could not pronounce because they were all in China.

What happens to our economy when other countries are out innovating us, and only our larger companies, who can afford to outsource all their R&D to China and India, can survive? I can’t wait until all the Japanese/Chinese/and up and coming Indian companies have better products, instruments, and computers than us, so thats who we end up supporting by buying their products

If you went to UH as an undergrad, most of your major classes were probably taught by other (usually PhD) students or tenured professors who didn’t give a shit about teaching because they are incentivized mostly based on research publications. Don’t tell me this education couldn’t have been a lot better.

Tier 1 is a distraction of effort and resources, and the opportunity cost is that we can’t primarily focus on being the most cost-effective, real-world working education in the state and beyond.

That’s what I’m smoking, Jack.