Exactly. Which begs the question, doesn't it-- why on earth do you need five new classroom buildings for classes that students cannot, apparently, get INTO in the first place?

Oh, right. That's because they are sooooooo impoverished that they can't afford to TEACH those classes. The new buildings are for the administrators. To solve the problem, see, and figure out how to staff more classes. Now that they have the space for them, of course. (The administrators, I mean.) AHEM.

It has been a bit of a rude awakening for me to see how very LITTLE in the way of day-to-day work faculty seem to be doing these days. Not to trash my daughter's professors, but, um-- they don't actually assign and grade much of anything themselves. Other than one or two midterms and the TA's who grade the lab reports, I mean. Everything else now is automated and run through Pearson webportals. Y'all can guess how lovely THAT is:

It isn't; there are errors galore, and this means that formatting inputs takes up a lot more bandwidth than learning the material at hand, and in some cases, even the faculty teaching the courses can't get the "right" answer for the system to accept it. Oh yes, this is much more "efficient" for students. Immediate feedback! New! Shiny! Always-on, and other buzzwords... except that instead of learning physics, they are learning that sometimes the speed of light should have 2 significant figures, and sometimes four, and you just have to guess to know which one to use for which problems. So if you get it wrong, check everything over and try different values for the constants, or try rounding differently and keep plugging in answers until something sticks. Good luck with that. It should be obvious to everyone on this board why this is TOXIC for a top-down gifted student, who learns best in a conceptual flow-state.

This is the basis of a course "homework" grade in the contemporary incarnation of higher education at a flagship institution. In honors coursework, no less-- that is, this IS the 'personal touch' that is lacking in the larger population of students. (WOW-- if that is true, I quail to consider what the general freshman coursework is truly like. Holy Toledo.)

So this is what astronomical college tuition is paying for these days, apparently. I'm underwhelmed, to be blunt. There are an awful lot of spa-like amenities on college campuses, and they have NOTHING to do with educating students. It irritates the hell out of me.

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.