BUYER’S REMORSE: I Thought I’d Get an Elite Education.

One of the reasons why I was excited about college was that I imagined that the professors would be a different league of intellectual who could generate insightful ideas and lively discussion in their classrooms. Unfortunately, after my first quarter at UCLA, I realized that my idealization of college professors came from tidbits in movies and pop culture. It had no basis in reality.

The truth is very few of my professors took their teaching seriously. As a freshman, almost every lecture I went to seemed like a confusing and incoherent regurgitation of the textbook. Because of this, after the third or fourth week of class, many students started to skip class, including myself.

What makes big research universities such as UCLA different from your normal high school is that in UCLA there is absolutely no incentive to be a good teacher. I didn’t know this at the time, but faculty are engaged in both research and teaching, but only get promoted because of the former. It was disappointing for me to see that professors, in general, were not much engaged in their undergraduates, since that does not help their career prospects.