Stanford Turns To Pair Programming: 1 CS Education For the Price of 2? 121
theodp writes: Stanford students may pay $44,184 in tuition, but that may not even entitle them to individually graded homework. The Stanford Daily reports that this quarter, Stanford's Computer Science Department will implement 'pair programming' in the introductory computer science courses CS 106A: Programming Methodology and CS 106B: Programming Abstractions. "The purpose of this change," reports the paper, "is to reduce the increasingly demanding workload for section leaders due to high enrollment and also help students to develop important collaboration skills." The CS 106A Pair Programming Q&A page further explains, "Our enrollments have grown rapidly, and we are trying to explore creative new ways to manage student work that will also reduce the heavy workload on our section leaders," adding that students who don't get with the Pair Programming program and elect to go solo will not be awarded "late days" that can be used to avoid penalties on overdue assignments, unlike their paired classmates. Google in November put out an RFP to universities for its invite-only 3X in 3 Years: CS Capacity Award program, which aimed "to support faculty in finding innovative ways to address the capacity problem in their CS courses," which included a suggestion that "students that have some CS background" should not be allowed to attend in-person intro CS courses. Coincidentally, Google Director of Education and University Relations Maggie Johnson, whose name appeared on the CS Capacity RFP, was Director of Undergraduate Studies in Stanford's CS Department before joining Google.
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and Apprentices do real work not theory based (Score:2)
and Apprentices do real work not theory based book work also that system costs less with much less skill gaps as well.
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Re:Group work (Score:4, Informative)
We did this "pair programming" at Rice in the late 80s and early 90s, long before the eXtreme! Programming! "two tards in a box" approach was invented. It seemed to work fine, as long as your goal was education instead of pretending grades matter. There were times when we actually worked together, and the one who "got it" explained to the other, and there were times when the sober one just did his best, but we never learned less because of it.
pay more, get less, an education in corruption (Score:1)
a corrupt system just gets more corrupt as time goes on
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Less Supervsion for More Money (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes sense, right?
Students go to school to learn.
I always did better with personal access to my teachers and I never knew more than the teacher/instructor/professor (that is, Not Graduate "Assistants").
I always did better with personal attention. Some concepts are not easy to grasp.
But Standford, refusing to hire more "Educational Helpers" gets the students to teach each other.
And they wrap this dismal plan in teaching the student how to work together. (I always liked linking my fate to ignorant classmates.)
More money for less education.
Bunch of turds.
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"You have to remember, Stanford considers Computer Science to be just a branch of the Philosophy Department in the first place.."
In that case you might as well go to the University of Wooloomooloo , I hear they have an excellent Philosophy Department - just ask for Bruce
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In that case you might as well go to the University of Wooloomooloo
Not true. Stanford is highly selective. Only the best of the best get in. So a Stanford degree shows a potential employer that you passed that admissions filter. What you actually learned while you were there is much less important.
Elite schools don't necessary produce elite devs (Score:2)
In that case you might as well go to the University of Wooloomooloo
Not true. Stanford is highly selective. Only the best of the best get in. So a Stanford degree shows a potential employer that you passed that admissions filter. What you actually learned while you were there is much less important.
For a small project I was paired with a UC Berkeley grad, 4.0 GPA even according to the project manager. The project manager was so f'n thrilled to have this guy on board. He was a nice guy and all but wow, a classic case of someone who should have probably stayed in academia. Our target environment was constrained in terms of CPU and RAM but he could not write code for such an environment. His head was just stuck in his school environment of a big expensive fast box with lots of RAM plus sizable VM.
Some
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a classic case of someone who should have probably stayed in academia. Our target environment was constrained in terms of CPU and RAM but he could not write code for such an environment
He wouldn't be good there either. If he can't understand limited resources, he won't be able to help other programmers understand it. If you can't apply knowledge, you're only as good as a search engine. Access to knowledge is trivial in this age.
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a classic case of someone who should have probably stayed in academia. Our target environment was constrained in terms of CPU and RAM but he could not write code for such an environment
He wouldn't be good there either. If he can't understand limited resources, he won't be able to help other programmers understand it. If you can't apply knowledge, you're only as good as a search engine. Access to knowledge is trivial in this age.
I don't know. I think academia is an area where one can stick with what one knows. One professor of mine was a well regarded computer vision researcher. He wrote his computer vision code in LISP back when he was a grad student. Decades later he was still using LISP.
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Makes sense, right?
Students go to school to learn.
I always did better with personal access to my teachers and I never knew more than the teacher/instructor/professor (that is, Not Graduate "Assistants").
I always did better with personal attention. Some concepts are not easy to grasp.
But Standford, refusing to hire more "Educational Helpers" gets the students to teach each other.
And they wrap this dismal plan in teaching the student how to work together. (I always liked linking my fate to ignorant classmates.)
More money for less education.
Bunch of turds.
As a Canadian living in Montreal, I was shocked at the $44,000 per year fee for an undergrad student. Here in my fine province, a one semester (Sept to May) course is around $400-500 plus text books. With 5 courses per year, even with half semester being Sept to December, the student would be out of pocket not more than $3000.00 That is the fee for residents of the province. What does the $3000 give you? a bachelor, masters or doctorate degree equivalent to any from Harvard, MIT, Univ of Chicago, UCLA
This... (Score:1)
has got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
You pay 41K+ tuition... oh, you've had basic programming in HighSchool due to STEM... um.... you cannot attend class in person. Oh, and you have to write your programs Mongo, And (in that bright, cheery voice) your grade is dependent on their grade. Have a nice day.
Sorry - this is just BS.. you are overworked - do what everyone else has to in the real world... hire more people. Project Management 101... time...resources...money.
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Nooo. Your grade is dependent on the maximum of either person's grade. Suppose you write version X of the assignment and your partner, version Y. You both decide X is the better version and submit that and get the same grade. But since it's pair programming, you both collaborate in writing the best version X interactively and parallely instead of developing X and Y separately and then choosing or combining both implementations.
My prob
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My experience in college was always that, in group projects (2-3 students), there was always one who was much stronger than the other(s). So for one students, getting an A depending on him doing most of the work, and for the other, it depended on him getting lucky with who he got partnered with. So the grades they received didn't reflect individual achievement at all, yet they still receive grades which reflect on them personally and are used to rate them personally by employers, the school (when deciding
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The problem is that the lousy lab partners are frequently very good at partnering up with the good ones, if they have social skills. The guys who have both lousy social skills and lousy academic skills end up dropping out and changing majors, so you end up graduating people in two groups, those with great academic skills and those with good social skills who know how to use the former.
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You could argue that's a good preparation for the world of work.
But if you want to stop it then don't let the students choose. The prof can draw up a rota, or just pull names out of a hat.
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The smart students will take the option to not pair up; they won't let some idiot drag their grade down. There is no penalty for doing so as long as you hand your work in on time.
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It certainly looks to me from a cursory look at the num
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Collaborate to Graduate inside the College Bubble! (Score:4, Insightful)
Another symptom of the college bubble - paying more and more for less and less. Even with TAs there is such a flood of students that the grading is overloading the system. Students now can't even get a unambiguous assessment of their capability in a subject.
OK, so now when an employer wants to see grades and transcripts, what should they make of those grades? Was that person riding the coat tails of a smarter partner? Yeah, I'm sure partners would change class to class, but some students are pretty savvy and will know to sit next to the smart kid in class for this reason.
it's XP all again (Score:3)
they used to call this EXTREME PROGRAMMING 12+ years ago and were pitting programming as pairs as the hottest thing since sliced bread.
just goes on to show that the teaching programming and how the programs should be structured and all that.. they don't know, so they just change whatever every year a little bit for sake of changing things and then when there's enough years it goes back in cycle, sometimes with a new name for the old thing. I think they were just calling it XP back then because there were at
Re:it's XP all again (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder; was there ever such a thing as "Pair architecture" or "Pair mathematics"?
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It's not all bad, though. "Pair hardcore pornography" did wonders for the industry.
Re: it's XP all again (Score:2)
Yes, we had numerous group projects in architecture and they sucked for the exact same reasons. And in the real world of architecture almost everything is effectively a group project.
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There is a difference between group projects, where each individual takes on a different part, which are then combined, and pairing, where two people work on exactly the same thing, at the same time, sitting next to each other.
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I think the name was inspired by Extreme Sports. Which is kind of funny because the guys who created XP weren't exactly young or athletic.
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On the contrary, once upon a time (and perhaps still) the CS and engineering classes were one of the few places female students would have to do their own homework. Because the male students didn't even have the minimum level of suavity and othr social skills to convince a woman to spend time with him even with grades on the line. And to the non-nerdy girls, a choice of overachieving nerds was less appealing than the choices at the campus cafeteria. (the nerdy girls didn't need help with their homework a
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They can't afford TAs because they're busy building rec centers with tuition money... priorities!
So that looks like a very expensive MOOC (Score:2, Insightful)
- Not allowed to attend classes in-person?
- Lose privileges for daring to go solo?
- Evaluated for shared group work?
So they are making it look more and more pretty much like a very expensive MOOC.
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... which included a suggestion that "students that have some CS background" should not be allowed to attend in-person intro CS courses.
This sounds completely backwards to me. The students who are already interested in the program are the ones who don't get to attend?
Are we still in a race to the bottom here? I thought society decided at some point that we should be encouraging our best and brightest ... I see I am mistaken.
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i didn't even take intro CS courses at college because it wasn't required and i already knew the material. taking the course online basically means "do the tests and place in" but i guess they want to save face by not admitting that or something. the "best and brightest" programmers really shouldn't take intro CS at all since it just wastes everyone's time. instead they should give the spots to bright math or science folks who happen to not have spent years already doing this stuff for fun.
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It sounds perfectly logical to me. But then again, I saw the word intro, right there before CS.
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MOOC = massive open online course
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Not to be confused with mook:
The university system needs a reality check (Score:5, Interesting)
The education bubble has been something people have been talking about for years. It is coming. What am I getting from most of these classes that I couldn't get from a good online course? Or better yet an online course with some sort of proctor in a class room that managed the class? professor isn't going to grade my work anyway. So what is the difference?
That way at least you might get a top class lecturer.
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... or just put on your resume that you have gone through all the free CS video lectures.
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It's more or less true. A side effect of the oversupply of postdocs is that excellent professors are available everywhere. Given an ounce of initiative, a student can get an excellent education at a state school. There are still significant benefits to attending big-name universities, though, and they increasingly bend over backwards to help you pay if you're actually good. Stanford just announced zero tuition for families under $125K/yr (!!), and they're not alone. If someone said they dropped out of Stanf
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Part of the academic "crisis" is that people are catching on and mere attendance is no longer a golden ticket.
Part of the academic "crisis" is that people are catching on and a university education is no longer a golden ticket.
FTFY
And just like monetary inflation devalues money, grade inflation devalues the worth of a degree. So you're spending much more for something worth much less.
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right, mere attendance, as i said. if you're not merely attending, you don't have any time to sit there and prevaricate over your "investment".
if you use a university education correctly (collaborating with world-class professors or at least second-degree collaborators thereof, doing cutting edge research, etc.), it can be worth one hell of a lot. in fact it can be invaluable.
as for inflation, i agree. on the other hand, if you can't get a nearly-free ride through a state school, you probably shouldn't be g
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but, those schools have such competitive admissions
Patently false. Otherwise, they wouldn't have needed to bloat up their CS program so quickly the lat few years. It's not like all of a sudden people applying are 3x better than they were just a couple of years ago.
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I have a college education. Login so I can tell it is you. There's no point trolling me under the AC title, it is always really obvious who is doing it. You're very distinctive. *rolls eyes*
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Part of the college experience is maturing as an individual, which is made possible by interpersonal interactions that occur in a large community.
Or, for the folks who already did all the adolescent "maturing as an individual" stuff while in high school, the college experience instead becomes an expensive way to waste time for a few years.
When you have average talent, the draw of college is much greater as you want to set yourself apart in some way. Unfortunately, college is a really terrible way to do that, as you will still be average when you are done with college, just like everyone else that went. A society of people that think like you do are what create a world of people with average talent.
If you want to be above average, go do it differently, uniquely. Learn from your own experiences and share that knowledge with others who are average. They will look up to you, admire you, and want to work with you.
The only thing people learn by going to college is how to be just like everyone else.
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Part of the college experience is maturing as an individual, which is made possible by interpersonal interactions that occur in a large community.
Well I for one know I matured a lot more while working in the real world than I did in college. Most likely I would have been a more mature 21 year old if I had started working at 17 than if I went to college. This isn't an argument that college is worthless, just that the idea an 18 year old in a dorm will mature faster than an 18 year old who needs to work to put food on the table is suspect.
Most 22 year old kids are more mature than most 18 year old kids, regardless of college.
Spoon Programming (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYBjVTMUQY0
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Luckily pair programming is about more than just productivity.
Did those productivity assessments include TCO, including rework due to bugs discovered eight months later?
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But if that novice becomes a master quicker, it might still be worth it in the medium-to-long term, no?
Re:No! This isn't how pair programming works. (Score:4, Informative)
Pair programming works by having a more experienced coder working along side a less experienced coder. The fruits of that asymmetry is what it's all about.
If you wanted pair programming in an academic setting, it would mean giving a dedicated tutor to every student in that class.
This, however, is just working in pairs. Not the same at all.
The studies I've seen show that novice-novice is still pretty damn effective as a productivity and learning strategy.
Despite the summary I've TA'd 1st year courses and we had a great experience from having people work in groups. 1st year students can spend a lot of time stuck on really simple problems that are due to some weird misconceptions or simply a lack of familiarity. Having them work in pairs means instead of just giving up they start trouble shooting together, when they finally did get to asking a question it was at a much higher level, this meant I could spent more time assisting the individuals or groups who really needed it.
Most importantly the people who go into CS tend to be introverted and terrible collaborators, I know I'm personally far too ready to sludge through problems alone and ask for help far too late. If I'd had some pair-programming experience when I was in undergrad I think I would have benefited immensely.
Two Graduates for the same amount of work! (Score:2)
If this course goes the way of the intro-CS classes of old, then one person will do all of the work, and the other will be bewildered and lost. Once expanded to the entire curriculum, the graduates will be evenly split between the learned and the lost.
I often wonder if programming is an inate ability that can only be polished and improved. It is like fine art or music, it is immediately obvious who the great performers will be. The brilliant students eclipse the teacher in ability. As such, the rote of
The good and the bad (Score:2)
A lot of the early research on using it in an educational setting (see publications by Laurie Williams [ncsu.edu] or Charlie McDowell [ucsc.edu] ) found that it works best if you know the students who will be using it can already program individually. Otherwise you tend to get cases of severely mismatched abilities where one person does most of the work and the other just coasts by. So you also need
This is new? (Score:2)
Admittedly, it wasn't specifically a CompSci class, but when I took our engineering school's 'Intro to Programming' course, we were paired up for the assignments. The only rule was that I wasn't allowed to pair up with Sebastian, as we were the two who had significant programming experience before we got to college.
When I took Numerical Methods my sophomore year, we were paired up in class, but that was partially because the computer lab we worked from didn't have enough computers for all of us. When it c
Self Inflicted Pain (Score:3)
So everyone is pushing CS and STEM as hard as they can, but the schools don't have the manpower to support the influx of students? That's Brilliant.
So one learns and one leeches... (Score:2)
Except for a few, this will be how it turns out. The result are just more bad coders. As if the world were not already overflowing with them...
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I am familiar with the problem. I did several years as a (student) TA, correcting exercises and grading them. Copying was rampart and we were allowed to grade anybody caught down to zero points where it was obvious. (They had to get 50% to be allowed to take the exam.) What threw me most back then was the sheer stupidity. At one point students challenged me how I could know things were copied. I gave them a current example that involved an exponent becoming a factor, becoming an index. That was over several
Bright side (Score:1)
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You are implying the GP is objectively describing reality, rather than making things up.
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No, it'll massively decrease female enrollment, because they'll be afraid of getting stuck with some creeper for an assignment and being required to meet at his little apartment to do these assignments. It'll also mean that women who do enroll will be seen as having ridden on the coattails of her male study partners and not actually capable of the work themselves, so smart women will want to avoid this.
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Labs and libraries have limited hours. If you need to stay up til midnight to get an assignment done, the library won't be open that long. Plus it seems like they're cheaping out on a lot of those facilities, so there might not be enough space in them, or any labs at all that you have access to.
Plus, there's plain ol' social pressure. "Let's just meet up at my apartment! There's plenty of space there, they don't close early, and we can eat our food there." (Libraries and labs do not allow food, and if
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Hmm. The labs at my university were open around 355 days of the year, 24 hours.
There was a nominal "no eating" rule but that was generally acknowledged to mean "get the pizza delivered to the lobby and eat there". Snacks, up to and including takeaway sausage and chips were fine after hours, and there were so many drinks we'd help the cleaner gather up the empties when she arrived at 7am.
Of course, this was back when the university computers were seriously more powerful than anything people could afford at h
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My state university had computer labs (this was when students were now required to have their own computers, but some departments still had labs for equipment students weren't expected to have, like oscilloscopes), and that stuff sure as hell wasn't open 24 hours, since someone would probably walk away with the equipment. And the library closed before midnight too.
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Our uni had 4-6 computer labs. Most were 8086 with one lab having VT100 terminals for the VAX. Two labs were open 24 /365. It seems strange that a uni wouldn't have that now, even though I guess most students would have their own laptops these days. So many happy nights spent in those labs with the other strange denizens of the night. I played Ultima III from start to finish in one intensely long marathon session on one of those machines. Good times.
what, no woman tie-in? (Score:2)
(Aside: what, no woman-in-CS tie-in? What with women being more social, and all that? Just wondering.)
Pair programming is one of those ideas so awful that it could only come from a university.
Sure, if I want to bounce ideas off of someone for something specific, that's great; they're likely to see something that I don't. But I can hardly imagine anything worse than someone else having to have their fingers in the whole pie, all the time, just because we are supposed to be a "pair".
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Pair programming is one of those ideas so awful that it could only come from a university.
It came from highly experienced software engineers working professionally in the private sector.
Universities are great for advancing computer science, but software engineering develops in the workplace.
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Pair programming is one of those ideas so awful that it could only come from a university
Actually, people have been pairing for a long time. At least since the 1980's for Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck who, along with Ron Jeffries invented XP. Being lucky enough to work with Ward (who also invented CRC cards, the Wiki, and was seminal in the birth of the software pattern movement, as well as the Agile software movement) in two different companies (Tektronix - a once venerated electronic equipment manufactur
I've got a fun idea - pair with a Khan student (Score:2)
What would be really interesting is to offer to pair with anyone taking the same subject in Khan Academy. Then you could really contrast value of the education between the two systems.
I seriousness I had the opportunity to "pair" in one of my CS classes in college. It was a team of three on one project; the weekend before the project was due the third member took off for a road trip without telling us while the remaining two of us finished building a spreadsheet from scratch in C++. Fun times! It was VE
Education as an industry (Score:2)
So the problem here is that Stanford wants to enroll more students without spending more on the resources required to actually support those students.
They want to charge for two students, but pay for the faculty and staff of one.
In other words, much like the cable companies and Internet access to Netflix, they want to double dip.
I.E. This is bullshit and a good example of why if you think a stanford education makes you special, you're right. Special as in retarded to the point that you don't realize you'r
This reminds me of the indian driving test. (Score:2)
>> may not even entitle them to individually graded homework
Since Stanford aren't going to evaluate students work individually any more its clear that getting a Stanford degree is now just all about money.
Stanford should just take this thinking to its logical conclusion. Imagine the expenses they would save by ending the sham of keeping lecture halls and labs open, and just selling degree certificates on the internet.
Increased enrollment, why not increased staffing? (Score:2)
the basic problem they have is that they have three times the workload than a few years ago. shouldn't this mean they should have three times the staff to properly handle the workload? "O NOZ DAT COST MONIEZ!!!11" is not a valid excuse because the students are paying the university which in turn is paying for staff!
Bloated administration (Score:2)
Other commenters point out that instructors and TAs may be overwhelmed by the large number of students. Which begs the question: if you have more students, why isn't the tuition used to hire more teaching staff?
The answer is to be found in bloated administration. For most colleges and universities, there is kind of a "magic number" of 1, that being the maximum acceptable ratios of administrative staff to teaching staff. Colleges and universities with more administrators than teachers have "jumped the shark"
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A research university like Stanford has dual goals, educate the students and perform world-class research. What is the 405% professional/non-teaching staff for? Are they doing research? Are they doing it on grants that the professors/staff have won?
If so, then it's not fair to hold that against Stanford--the staff they have hired is to do research not teach students, and they are not using tuition to fund this staff.
I've seen cases like this at other universities: non-teaching "Research professors" are hire
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They've done it with nurses, teachers, truckers and pretty much any other profession. There is no shortage of workers in any field, there is a shortage of people willing to pay and/or train these people. I work with these kids on a frequent basis, I wouldn't want to hire them, they are morons that need at least two years of real world training.