One reason a lot of four year schools have issues with actual teaching is that Ph.D. programs do not teach you to, well, teach. With very few exception, they teach you to be a researcher. When you get a job at a college or university, often there’s a rude awakening. Unless you’re hired on tenure track at a R1 (big research institution) and are really hot stuff, you’re going to be teaching a lot more than you might have expected or wanted. This is especially true for the people who are considered the best prospects, because that evaluation too often ignores everything but scholarly ability and production. What it all amounts to, too often, is people in classrooms who don’t necessarily want to be there, and who don’t have any interest in or knowledge of the profession of teaching, of curriculum development, of standards or assessment.
Many of us over the years have had to learn these things, and for a lot of us it’s opened up a whole new and very welcome world of education at the college level, that is satisfying in ways that far exceed slaving over yet another article or monograph on some obscure bit of our discipline that, face it, no one is going to read or care about. But there are still lots of opportunities for students to wind up in classrooms with very ineffective, disengaged teachers. That happens less at two-year and community colleges, as often the people teaching there are actually in to teaching. Not always, but pretty often.
As an aside, I was watching a Wheel of Fortune with my wife (we DVR them and watch them over dinner often), and it was College Week, where they bring on college students as contestants. One of the puzzles was in their new “crossword” format, which has like four words connected crossword-fashion. The category was something like “college life,” and the words were “quad,” “dorm,” “major,” and “grade” I think In the popular mind, still, “college” is as much or more about that oasis in a young person’s life between high school and work, than it is about actual education. Hence the battle of the amenities discussed above. I mean, having a “quad,” or even dorms, really, has little to do with most education. Yes, there is a great benefit to learning how to interact with others, and in sharing time and space with people who are also trying to learn. But there are many ways to do that that do not entail massive expenditures of money. Time and again, though, people keep shelling out money they don’t have for the image of the fraternity sweater, ivy covered halls, and a marching band.