A new model for post-secondary education, the Optimized University

I. Introductory caveats. This article is discussing the situation at North American universities in general, and not specifically those in BC. Some details may be slightly different in BC from the rest of the continent, as well as varying between different institutions of higher education in BC. However indications are that most of the general features are largely the same throughout North America. For example, the National Survey of Student Engagement is an extensive survey of students' college educational experience that covers institutions of higher education in both the US and Canada; the responses are quite similar in the two countries. Also, there is considerable movement of faculty and administrators between and throughout the two countries. My remarks will also be limited to discussing higher education in the natural and applied sciences at the undergraduate level. This is an important but intentionally quite limited aspect of higher education. Far too often, discussions of higher education attempt to deal with the entire vast subject, and as a result the conclusions are so general they can offer little useful guidance. I am limiting my remarks according to both discipline (pure and applied sciences), function (undergraduate education), and institutional type (research university) in the hope this can provide useful guidance for specific actions and changes at the level where actions can actually take place. Although I will focus on undergraduate science education, I do not mean to imply that there are not many other important roles and functions of higher education. In addition to other educational goals, there also are other major functions fulfilled by the modern university, most notably research and the closely linked graduate education, as well service to the communities and nation via support of the economy, hospitals connected with medical schools, etc. In this article, I will only touch on these other roles where they overlap my central theme. By undergraduate natural and applied science education, I mean not just the education of students specializing in those fields, but education of all students who take any courses in natural and applied sciences. This encompasses a major fraction of the entire undergraduate population. A meaningful exposure to these technical subjects is an increasingly important part of any educated person's background, because of the growing importance of science and technology in modern society. While I suspect that much of what I say applies more broadly than to only undergraduate education in …