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I disagree with his anti-engineering and anti-research points. Attacking pseudo-technical degrees like undergraduate business, sure. Attacking humanities research, sure.

When I was at MIT, the best professors in lecture were actually top researchers (to the point of winning the Nobel). The best actual experiences I had were participating in faculty research (as an undergrad, you can actually contribute fairly meaningfully outside the core focus of the research; a CS/Math student can help out with data acquisition in a substantive way in Physics). Plus, undergraduate organizations like SIPB (which has developed KSplice, and which worked on many other interesting projects before)

I don't think most of this would happen at a small liberal arts college.

High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a high school or college educator).

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In general, this is a bad idea. It's like saying colleges should only teach for jobs that exist and not for what could be. No one is hiring buggy whip engineers and no one is teaching people to be computers (ie. the human kind in the 40s and 50s). The whole point of a university is to do advanced research and break off a little knowledge on the incoming students.

Also, there is no one true degree or one true job. Engineers ,and everyone else, are at the mercy of the market. You can't get paid if no one is buying your stuff. This applies to the CEO as well as the janitor. Ask aerospace engineers how they felt at the end of the coldwar. There used to be a joke about aerospace engineers being able to only get jobs that involved burgers. Now, Boeing can't hire enough, but that's it. The only place that hire those type of engineers, in quantity, are NASA and Boeing.

"I disagree with his anti-engineering and anti-research points. Attacking pseudo-technical degrees like undergraduate business, sure. Attacking humanities research, sure"

I think you're missing the point.

At Johns Hopkins I had a mix of good teachers and bad; most of the professors there did a lot of research, but that didn't have any bearing on whether or not they were any good at teaching.

Personally, I have no problem with professors doing research AND teaching, provided that they do a good job when it comes to teaching.

The problem arises when universities, and this included Johns Hopkins (which is why I refuse to give any money to the alumni fund when they all me), is that it was clear that so long as the professors were doing research and publishing papers, what they did in the classroom was inconsequential.

I had professors who clearly had no idea as to what they were teaching -- they were regurgitating what was in the text book. (It showed on exam questions like "Calculate the rate of this reaction at equilibrium".)

On the flip side of this, I audited a course on parallel computing taught by a professor who had worked with and IIRC helped develop IBM's Scalable Power 2. She was an excellent professor, and I ended up learning a lot from her. In the end, my only disappointment is that it was an audit, and therefore didn't affect my GPA.

Correlation is not causation.

OK, it's good to have a lecturer with real-world expertise in the subject they are teaching. And research does count.

You want a lecturer with the skills needed to publish, but the push towards more research can just result in lecturers spending more time gaming research metrics, which has little impact on teaching quality.