If you can bear with me while i attempt a synthesis here, I think this one line captures basically the entire dynamic, but the author seems to seriously underweight its explanatory value.
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this
It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.
As a student currently, I'll also throw in this perspective. The colleges themselves make it feel transactional and not about learning even if I'm interested in doing so.
For example, I'm taking a physics course right now (electricity and magnetism). The concepts are difficult for me and I was hoping that the homework would help. So, I go to do the homework, but the homework is online. With the online homework I get five chances to get the problem correct, but there is zero partial credit, zero feedback, and every time I get the answer wrong, it negatively impacts my grade.
I have no chance to make mistakes and learn. At least with homework that was handed out back in the day, there was at least the possibility of partial credit being handed out. So my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.
Additionally, since students have been cheating, I think it gives professors a skewed perspective on how much time is actually needed to get work done, so the deadlines get moved up. This means I get even more pressure put on me when I'm just trying to learn and be a good student.
In the 90s we had the "Plato" system for chemistry. It was a question/answer terminal in the library. Our Chemistry TA advised us to use it to study for exams as it had a lot of sample questions. It was really good because if you got it wrong, it actually gave you a detailed explanation of how to solve it. It was so helpful to have that. When I used the system, I made a bunch of mistakes but ended up learning from them, and it really helped for the exams.
1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994.
Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.
For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.
What I find extremely sad in the whole academic business, is that all the work that is put in creating those tools, curriculum, classes materials etc are just wasted.
Systems are decomissioned, professors refuse to share their materials or to even update it when receiving students feedback or when there are new disoveries in the field. And copyright holders are threatening to bite when learning material is put online...
> We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.
Personally, I kind of pitied the non-STEM students.
My own problem was there were not enough slots in the schedule for all the classes I wanted to take. I figured the university knew what it was doing with the required classes, and they were right.
> Personally, I kind of pitied the non-STEM students.
The only time I've had this opinion is when I was younger and conceited, holding onto an attitude that they're all wasting their money, probably fueled by envy.
Although there are moments—largely driven by other aspects of bureaucracy—where I wish I'd completed my bachelors, I'm quite happy in retrospect that I instead chose a bunch of random off-topic interesting humanities courses and non-cs-stem stuff, some of which I failed for inane reasons. Aside from a few moments in data structures and algorithms, I barely remember anything from the CS courses, they were unbelievably dull and poorly structured. In one case I believe I got nearly 100% on all the homework but failed both exams because I just kind of zoned out and wasn't driven to write java by hand for 2+ hours, which generally shocked the profs because I was typically the most engaged, personable, and probably older than everyone else by like 4 years.
>> Personally, I kind of pitied the non-STEM students.
Well, as a STEM university graduate myself I admit being guilty of this thought and I think it's just something "hard science" thinks of "humanities" in general. Mostly due to mercantilism, most non-STEM studies have very poor job perspectives.
But ... it all comes down to numbers. The elephant in the room is that THERE ARE TOO MANY COLLEGE SEATS FOR STUDENTS. This has multiple causes but it's a societal problem and a pretty dire one.
Take one of the universities in my city: https://www.ubbcluj.ro . In 1989 (at the fall of the communist regime in Romania) it had 5,619 students. Overall, in all specialties and all years, took 4 years in general to graduate.
Today just at the admission exam were accepted 16,800 new students. Taking all years that makes about 55,000 students. 50 fucking thousand! That's 10 times the level during commies.
And that's the problem. A lot of people who have no business being in the academic environment are now funneled through it. Reason is first, because "The West" had every man, women and their dog get a college degree so we had to play catch up. Problem, as the article states, they are getting that degree on paper only, de jure, not de facto.
But the even deeper problem is the dissolution of white collar jobs. That happened both in the West and the East. Agriculture used to employ 90, 50, 30% of the population, now there's 2 to 5% working there. Industry used to employ 90, 50, 30% of the population, now there's 5 to 10% working there. And the rest? God have mercy! We're all in "services". We're fucking servicing the shit of each other.
So in order to avoid fixing the hard problem (what the fuck to do with people who don't have the skill and intellect to do academic stuff but are good enough for plowing in agriculture or operating a CNC machine), the powers be have opened the gates of colleges. Get a college degree, that will compensate for the lack of activities to do with it!
I could write more.
Bottom line, what you expecting from peasants going to college? You can take the peasant out of the village but you can't take the village out of the peasant, they say.
> Well, as a STEM university graduate myself I admit being guilty of this thought and I think it's just something "hard science" thinks of "humanities" in general. Mostly due to mercantilism, most non-STEM studies have very poor job perspectives.
What does mercantilism have to do with that? The problem with the job perspectives of students of many non-STEM subject is rather that it is often not easy to find economic applications of the knowledge that is taught in the humanities courses (which is made even more complicated by the often "left", "woke" bias that many humanities faculties have).
So it's a natural progression. From agriculture (primary) to industrial (secondary) to services (tertiary). The AI revolution means services go the same way as industrial. Everybody goes to the 4th level.
The fourth level would be the capitalist class (I.E everyone becomes an entrepreneur/businessman), but we didn't really figure out a reliable way to convert the upper-middle to upper. Funnily enough, the problem isn't lending, money was pretty cheap for the last decade or so, and even China had that whole microloan thing happening, but that not enough of the upper-middle were capable of executing correctly.
Imo, we should go back to education and take a more serious look about the social utility of what we are teaching, not on an individual but a systemic level and whether this really is the best way to allocate subjects. How much of this after all is about actual training or just social signalling?
We tried that before the service revolution took off. That's exactly why we started pushing people into college, thinking that education could build entrepreneurship/businessmenship. We told the kids that if they become those entrepreneurs/businessmen they'd earn more money, live a better life, etc. in hopes to compel them in that direction.
At some point you’d think we’d learn that our economic system, and the way that we manage work, has stopped making the sense it made centuries ago when we developed it.
Was it this system? I used these terminals at U of Illinois in the late 80's, but I only remember using them to take my physics tests. I don't remember ever using them for studying or interactive learning.
I graduated (admittedly many-many years ago) from a good but not top-notch university. I remember a somehow similar situation: obviously learning was considered a good thing, but both the students and the professors realized that it's the diploma what brings most students there, not a pursuit of pure knowledge.
So I quickly realized that, unlike, say, elementary school, a university is not a push system, it's a pull system. If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source. There's still plenty, but nobody is going to force-feed it to you. I read quite a lot beside the required books. I practiced quite a lot beside the lab practice (fortunately wielding a soldering iron or writing programs was a marketable skill; still is, but used to be, too). I asked my professors questions that were not entirely in the books; often that was during a few minutes after a lecture / classes / labs, so I got from them ideas and pointers to new directions to learn by myself.
Was it helpful in my career? Certainly yes, I started doing contract jobs three years before graduation, and then joined a bunch of interesting companies where that knowledge was somehow useful, mostly as a foundation of more specific skills.
I was certainly not alone; I knew (and often was friends with) a bunch of other students who craved knowledge and skills, and we helped each other shake these out of the university, past the transactional bounds. It wasn't all that hard, but it required a conscious effort.
Very certainly a large number of other students did more coasting than knowledge-mining. They got their diplomas, got some white-collar jobs that did not require such deep knowledge of engineering, I suppose, or started unrelated businesses.
> If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source.
Oh I'm 100% aware of this, and actually think it's better than the push system that school prior to college follows. The issue is that the content is significantly worse now.
There ends up being a lot of guesswork today of finding resources that are good. I always have to question: "does this person actually know what they're talking about or am I wasting my time?" I'm sure you had to do this back in your day, but with the overwhelming amount of information available, it becomes difficult to parse.
I would kill for a class where the professor just said, "Everything you need is in that book." Now we get, "The book doesn't talk about this, but you should know..." It's infuriating.
Yes, the first encounter with a professor not knowing well the thing he was teaching was a mild shock. But, thought I, that professor had been a student back in the day, he also knows how to quickly prepare to the basics, and then just wing it, hoping that nobody is going to dig deeper.
After that I just started believing books more than some professors, as long as the books cross-checked with one another.
Recently a friend of mine, herself a professor, watched how some other professor, invited to give a special lecture, was obviously out of their depth in certain questions that they should know like the back of their hand in order to give such lectures. She was pretty depressed by that, and especially by the fact that her students might be fed incomplete or even wrong information. So the problem is there, is known, and is not an illusion :(
While at it, no one book contains all that you should know about a subject, if you want to know it well. Not the Feynman Lectures. Not Code Complete. Not even the Mahabharata. You always get to read more. (I'm not talking about the formal exam questions here, of course.)
> While at it, no one book contains all that you should know about a subject, if you want to know it well. Not the Feynman Lectures. Not Code Complete. Not even the Mahabharata. You always get to read more. (I'm not talking about the formal exam questions here, of course.)
Absolutely, and I'd like to clarify, I'm not expecting a single physics book to cover all there is to know about electricity and magnetism. I just mean for a particular course (where the purpose of the course is to expose me to the topic) to be centered around a book properly, in which new topics that aren't in the book aren't introduced (within reason of course)
It depends on the subject, of course. By the time someone has written a book on "programming language du jour" (say, Rust right now), and gotten it published and printed, it will be 1-2 years out of date. And students will complain that "all the information is online for free". Except, it's really hard to point at a specific website that is not in your (the professor's) control to say "everything you need is in here" when it could be taken offline tomorrow. Or reorganized and re-written in such a way that content is added or removed.
The course I think I did the best in teaching was to say "here is the textbook" (on databases) and then when a specific solution / technique came up, to point out that "this is how mysql does it", or "this one is used by postgres", etc.
I started college at the CC level (having no HS diploma) to get into a State school. And from a series of poor choices and ignorance on my part needed to take a several years gap before returning to finish up.
I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.
CC students have always felt more motivated in my opinion. But good Lord the quality of the education at the State level is abysmal. I am not saying there aren't quality professors and classes. There are.
There is however an alarming high number of poorly designed classes, nearly broken technology, poorly edited and badly written assignments, and questionable instruction.
I have to compare the quality and price with what I experienced in CC and it just makes me sad and depressed.
This was my general experience as well. The very best quality education I ever received was in my 7th grade math class, followed closely by my 7th grade English class.
I did have some very excellent university classes (including ones that were so good that I audited them without receiving credit), but I also had a lot that were positively abysmal, taught by professors who were experiencing severe mental health issues (one who'd had a stroke and could no longer comprehend the material, another who was going through a mental break and stopped teaching us altogether, etc.) or extremely stressed grad students who were not fluent in English and spent class time trying to catch up with their PhD workload.
My best university-level education actually came after I graduated and got a job working in a lab at my university. During that time, I worked closely with the professor and grad students, and it was such an amazing learning opportunity that I will never forget for the rest of my life — sadly cut short by the 2008 financial crisis.
If you look at how most professors and adjuncts are rewarded and paid, it makes sense. You can't get quality instruction from a adjunct who is only a half-step away from sleeping in their car, especially when they know they might be gone mid-semester due to a budget cut. Even the full professors are trying to bring in enough grants, oversee enough RAs and TAs to do the work for the grants, get some of their own research done, and barely have time to teach. Teachers in high school have a high teaching load relative to colleges and universities, but they are doing a job and generally are paid at least middle class wages.
Didn't matter, one of the best courses I ever took. He made the math look beautiful on the old fashion chalk board. Absolutely wonderful and enlightening equations.
Better than the one who didn't speak much english and complained how chinese is so much easier because you don't have to learn a new word for beef, you just combine the symbols for "cow" and "meat", and still didn't know the material well.
> I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.
I'm actually somewhat inclined to agree with this. I also started at a community college first, so I got to see a lot of adults trying to do career switches into tech.
Many of them were frankly the same if not worse than many of the young students you see in college today. One could definitely attribute some of that to the fact that they have more responsibilities to handle impacting them, but even just overall demeanor was noticeably worse. I frequently had adults 15-20 years older than me throwing their hands up and asking me to just give them the answers to what were ultimately very simple programming problems.
It was great for me because I took it as an opportunity to reinforce the material we were learning, but I knew I was doing them a disservice, so at some point I would stop enabling the poor behavior.
Honestly, to me the biggest thing impacting everyone is the inundation of information from technology today. I know it sounds cliche, but it's making academics a billion times harder than it needs to be. It's also making it less enjoyable and satisfying, thus people take the shortcut to get the grade they're looking for.
What the college tuition debate overlooks is that for costs to go down, so does the quality of the experience. this means college is more barebones and less handholding, like in Europe.
Especially when you consider that it's gotten to the point where at many schools with the worst and most extreme administrative bloat, there is one non-teaching, bureaucratic administrator for every student.
There's plenty of ways for Universities to lower costs without hurting quality.
There are plenty of open resources nowadays. Many of the paid online only textbooks with inconsistent tooling and accessibility for starters could be eliminated.
Expensive corporate software contracts is another. Access to MS office is nice in theory but in practice many students rely on Google instead AND there are open alternatives that don't have unreliable authentication problems.
University tuition here is state sponsored, the difference is not that great (everything over 10k a year is a cashgrab anyway) You have the "institution rate" aka real cost + milk foreign students tax, and the European cost aka affordable. The university gets a yearly allowance per European student plus a lump sum on graduation (yes this brings graduation rates up and quality down).
The end result is that the average money received is about 60% (give or take 5-10 percent depending on left or right wing politics) of the institution rate so you now know the foreign "tax". If you are over 32 you should also pay the institution rate but it is almost fully tax deductible.
Costs have been increasingly hard to justify given the wealth of information the internet provides, for some time now. Often, a sufficiently motivated person can piece together a lot of material themselves, given a general "structure" of topics/material.
Lots of textbooks floating around out there too.
LLMs add another layer to this. In many cases, the whole thing is looking a bit silly (at least at the state level)
This is really unfortunate, and I think your instructor should read it.
It sounds like your instructor has confused homework with quizzes, and the cheating issue demands some rethinking of the course pace and assessment system.
In physics and related fields, I have found fully worked problems to be very valuable. If your textbook includes some of these, I recommend reviewing them and working similar practice problems if possible. I wonder if things like supplementary texts, khan academy, or tutorials on youtube might help as well.
As you note, systems like ChatGPT could be helpful for explaining or working through problems, but obviously you won't learn anything if you rely on them for doing your own problem sets.
Typically these online homework systems are pushed by the department much to the chagrin of the professors, but the students are required to pay ~$100/ea for the privilege of doing automated homework, and the department gets some nice kickbacks.
Interesting. When I was an undegraduate we had textbooks which were at least 25% problems and solutions, allowing for near endless self practice.
I am currently holding my copy of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffiths in my hands; somehow it is rarely more than a metre from where I work!
Are such textbooks still popular and used (i.e. mandatory to purchase) in courses like this?
I've noticed specifically with undergraduate physics courses that the textbook will usually get bundled with the online homework service that the school is using, and that part you're required to purchase if you want to do your homework.
Nowadays though, if a professor states that a textbook is required and there's no online service involved, 80% of the time the professor is exaggerating and probably hasn't even read the book themselves. The other 20% of the time, students will generally just find the pdf for free online somewhere (As a CS student, I tend to find my books on GitHub).
I know I'm digressing from what you asked a bit here, but I just really need to take a moment to highlight that the textbooks that are "required" today are not nearly as good as the textbooks you likely went to school with (I'm making a bit of an assumption about the era of your schooling here, so correct me if you only just recently graduated). There are way to many instances of some no-name authors getting the shot at publishing with O'Reilly or Pearson. The content will be mostly correct, but they're never truly illuminating.
The best homework system i ever experienced was high school calculus.
4 points per assignment. Pass the assignment to a peer for grading. If they wrote down the problem and attempted it: 3 points. One more point if the logic and steps were followable, even if wrong.
The answers were in the back of the book. The homework grade should reflect attempts and practice, not mastery as that is what exams are for.
My high school calculus teacher would assign homework every day, anywhere from a couple problems, to a dozen or more, depending on the work. 5 points for the homework, no matter how many problems. One point off for each problem missed. Sometimes broken down by steps if it was very-few problems (but still with way more opportunities to lose points, than there were points)
Assigned every. Fucking. Night.
You could spend two hours on it, get a majority of the problems right and get extremely close on the rest but make some identical mistake on each of them at the end, and still get not just an F, but a zero. It could be an insanely large assignment, and also you have other classes and other things happening in life, so you only get half of it done because these were not small assignments, but at least get all the ones you did right. Zero points, because you missed 5 or more.
To say it was demoralizing would be an understatement.
You are right, what degraded is not simply the students attention and motivation, it is the whole institution. They keep pushing ineffective approaches all over. You are right to blame LMSes, they are absolute disasters, poorly designed and ineffective at anything except save time for professors (and let's be real here, they also do social media and unrelated to their work activities so they are trading their teaching opportunities for leisure). Those LMSes are probably as detrimental as PowerPoint has been for communicating to an audience.
It is as if everyone is trying to avoid doing what they are here to do. They replace thought, exchanges and discovery with miserable tools just so they can go waste their time on something else.
> my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.
Have you considered trying to do the problems yourself, away from the computer, then checking your work with ChatGPT or the like?
I should probably do that more, however, one big issue is I can't always trust that I'm not being led astray with some of the posts on Chegg or the responses from ChatGPT and other AI model interfaces. I will frequently get responses from ChatGPT and/or Chegg that are just flat out wrong. So I could compare my answers against these services (which takes a long time), but I run the risk now of potentially learning the wrong approach when I go and find out that the walkthrough I was following was incorrect.
Which granted, that's just part of the work, but these weird hoops to jump through just shouldn't be there in the first place, and they used to not be there as well. So my gripe is why on Earth did we add them?
I'm lucky enough to teach in a school that has small classes; I get to be very accessible to the students. There is some auto-grading, but most homework I grade by hand and give partial credit.
But if my classes were 300 people, I couldn't do that.
I also have relaxed deadlines so students can take more time if they need it, and request it in advance.
The object is to learn stuff. That's where I'm aiming.
Can I ask what school? I have kids that will be ready to start college in a few years and I’m always on the looking for places like what you’re describing
From your numerous comments on this topic, it seems that you are remarkably self-aware (for a college student) about your own learning process. That is kind of amazing. I hope you really know just how broken the system that you're describing is and that it is absolutely worth fighting to figure out how to really learn something hard.
Also know that there's a yin and yang here. You're in a broken system--but the system used to be broken in other ways. Your point about there being too many resources strikes me as fascinating and true--and yet we have efforts like Three Blue One Brown taking teaching to a whole new level. People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.
First, I appreciate the kind words, they really do mean a lot.
I will say, part of the reason I'm likely more aware is because I am an older undergrad (currently 25), but additionally, I've seen all sides of the education system, so I've been exposed to quite a lot.
> People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.
100% agree on this. The ability to be able to pick anything up and just go with it opens life up to a wealth of opportunities.
i’m assuming this is a system that changes the numbers in the question each time? often there is a separate “practice” button where you can practice and (maybe) get feedback, figure out the process, and then do the questions?
even if not, try putting the textbook and the question into an AI (I use the paid version of gemini, the $20/ month is the best money you’ll ever spend at college), then as it to explain how to answer the question. Then ask it to generate a similar question, and then give you feedback to you as you try to answer it. Then try and answer it step by step, repeat as many times as you like until you understand and keep getting the right answer, then answer the actual homework question.Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss!
Using AI is risky since it's trained on data from sites like Chegg, StudySmarter (now known as Vaia), Brainly, etc.
Since those are user submitted answers, they sometimes get them wrong and so the AI models just regurgitate the wrong answer, especially if it's for a problem that's infrequently assigned by professors.
Nevertheless, I still use the AI models to try and aid in solving these problems, there's just always this gut feeling that I'm being guided in the wrong direction, but since I'm not versed in the subject I'm learning, I can't identify the hallucinations or inaccuracies.
I agree to some extent. A wild one to me is how schools will limit the number of classes you can take and/or pressure you to graduate on time even if it means choosing a major before you're really ready. That seems like a surefire way to kill any interest in exploring knowledge and replace it with a focus on mechanical box-checking.
Unfortunately, the setup I'm talking about is the norm these days. It's the MyLab and Mastering software offered by Pearson.
It doesn't just stop at physics. I've seen it used in math courses and economics courses as well.
Sometimes professors will setup the system so that you can redo the problem with different numerical inputs for the variables, and that approach is fine to me as it lets me learn through trial and error without negatively impacting my grade.
They want kids to do homework, so they give a few free marks for doing it. Kids cheat and ignore anything not marked because that's how people respond to incentives. Then the lecturers wonder why no-one is doing stuff that isn't marked, and try to fill in the gaps by marking more things until they run out of capacity to police it all.
There are upsides to continuous assessment, but it's effectively micromanagement and has all the predictable downsides. "I applied hard incentives to make people give me X and Y, so why don't they they game the system, and why don't they also do Z, shocked picachu face."
I agree. I took linear algebra through an online course. I can't imagine a worse way to learn the topic. I happily cheated on tests to pass the class.
Mind you, I already apply linear algebra daily—I simply refuse to waste my time computing basic operations on matrices by hand when that's why we have computers and partial credit isn't available.
We don't really have to look for an explanation. The author says it, pure and clear.
"It’s the phones, stupid"
That's it. Every other variable, including the transactional nature of acquiring a middle class job, has stayed the same. People are just getting dumber [1], and the phones are causing this drop.
I am as tech forward as the next person. I think AI deserves the time to figure out what it is. But the phones have basically shown us where all their negatives and positives are. Time to regulate, get the phones out of the schools. If you're in one of these states [2] get behind the active legislation, if not, start it!
Nah. Humanities professors keep claiming it's phones because that's visible to them when they lecture but read what they're saying carefully and the actual cause is obvious: students don't take it seriously because the professors don't.
The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price.
It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.
It's easy to get caught up in negative judgments about another generation [1] and it can be hard to put one group's vices in context when they seem different from your own.
That said, I know for myself that my attention span has gotten shorter. I used to read more. Now I listen to audiobooks. When reading text, even engaging fiction can be a struggle. I read one or two pages and feel the urge to check something else or look at something else or get up and do something. I know this wasn't the case in middle school or high school (late 2000s).
I think it's because of first podcasts and then watching / listening to too thousands of YouTube videos at 2x speed. I've become much more "efficient" at consuming entertainment content - so "efficient" that I can get bored listening to someone telling an interesting story at 1x speed.
The only advantage I have is that I can tell that this has happened and I can work against it by forcing myself to read more. But if things were always like that, how would I know? When you're sleep deprived every day for years, you don't notice how much it is affecting you. It's the same with a short attention span.
[1]: Aside: the omnipresent talk about generations these days is maybe not the best thing to begin with.
Maybe it'd help to have a new perspective on it? I think you're completely right that you're just a much more efficient consumer now than you once were. But what's wrong with that?
I'm in the same boat as you, except that I don't feel I have attention span problems. If what I'm reading is a bad use of time, I switch to something else. If it's not, I have no trouble reading a long article or paper. I frequently read a blog post and discover half an hour later that I just read what would be 30-40 pages if printed out. It doesn't feel like a lot of reading because there's no physical page turning, but it is.
If you can consume an interesting story at 2x speed, there's no moral or personal wrong in wanting to consume it at 2x speed. Just do it! Books are mere technology: they can and should be replaced with something better if it comes along.
The key word here (and this is something I fight personally) is consuming. You don’t learn anything by consuming it; you only learn by doing it. So being able to watch the lecture at 2X is only helping if it makes more time to do the exercises.
But doing the exercises is hard (much like physical exercise, that pain is in fact the signal that you’re making progress). And the more time we spend just consuming, the less natural it feels to work.
It’s so easy to blast through a lecture or speed read a text and feel like you accomplished “learning”. That illusion is destroyed as soon as you have to actually do something (in school, that’s usually write an essay or pass a test).
In other words, the bottleneck has never been how fast you can consume the text. It’s how fast you can do the work to internalize the knowledge.
I'm 34. In highschool I read long, difficult literary fiction for fun. Now I can just about manage good genre fiction (think something like Iain Bank's Culture series) if I put my mind to it and take breaks to look at my phone.
I wonder if I'll ever be able to fix my attention span.
It’s a practice thing. Start leaving your phone at home for short trips and get used to being a little bored again. I promise you if there’s an emergency, there are 500 cell phones within a hundred yards.
> Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.
It's not just humanities courses and it also affects "elite" universities.
For the graduate NLP course my advisor taught at UMass Amherst, despite allowing ChatGPT for a take home test (this was a couple years ago), 60% of the students broke into two separate collusion rings (one Chinese group and another South Asian) and copied off of each other. They got caught when the answers were wrong, but in a different way than ChatGPT. Despite the seriousness of the rampant cheating, students were not failed out of the course, mainly because it reflects badly on the University if they fail. My advisor had to go through a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy in the process.
Jump forward to Cornell University where I'm currently a postdoc and grade inflation is real. They had to get rid of reporting course-wide median grade beside a student's grade on their transcript [1] to help combat it.
That hasn't prevented the pressure to pass students with high marks despite abysmal performance. I supervised an undergrad's research one semester as an independent study course. That student did very little work and despite multiple promptings over several weeks, would fail to provide their code for me to help debug and provide code review. I ended up giving them a B+, which is somehow considered "failing". The student even reached out after grades were assigned to beg me to reconsider. None of the students I've worked with so far have had the skills I'm pretty sure I mastered by that time (this includes work with undergrads, master's students, and PhD students). I'm continually shocked by the caliber of students here compared to what I assumed before joining.
I trust professors who've been teaching for decades when they say something has qualitatively changed.
> Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money!
He did say it, but you have to keep reading after that. Fail too many students and you will get called in by the dean for a "discussion" where they basically tell you to stop doing that. For the non-tenured faculty this is not something they can reasonably fight. Maybe tenured faculty could, and they might not get outright fired, but their teaching load could be reduced or students will simply not sign up for their classes once they have a reputation for being a hardass.
Aside from that, nearly every student manages to have some "disability" that requires an accommodation. I had one professor friend tell me a student required an accommodation that they not receive any negative feedback. They literally weren't allowed to tell the student when they were wrong.
The university administration doesn’t discourage that. In some cases they encourage it.
They won’t get denied tenure for protesting the current thing. It’s more likely they could get denied tenure for not loudly protesting the current thing.
I did keep reading after that, but it didn't change anything.
As the sibling notes, academics have no problem suddenly finding their voice when they discover a colleague who's secretly harboring mildly right wing views. The open letters, protests, outrage and demands for resignations flow like water until the administration folds, usually about 0.25 seconds later.
The author describes a problem created by the policies of the university leadership, but refuses to lay the blame at their feet. Instead he/she says things like "This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem" and "It’s the phones, stupid." after describing a problem that is 100% caused by the faculty themselves. Because where do the deans come from? Why would they have leverage to dismiss a professor who upheld standards? They came from the faculty, and they have leverage because the faculty created this problem and are willing to propagate it.
The dean is like a middle manager. They are not the university leadership. The actual leadership is the president and board of trustees and the legions of administrators who create and enforce policies. They are not faculty or if they once were like the president and some other upper level positions, they left that path a long time ago.
They care about things like the US News and World Report rankings, and if students are failing classes and it starts hurting their graduation rate and hurting their ranking, they put a stop to it.
You are not engaging with the central issue- the education pipeline is depositing students with a far lower attention span and capability than ever before, in college classes, for all subjects, including Math.
You are banging on humanities as it is a ritualistic target. Math and science teachers, including comp sci teachers are pointing this out.
I disagree that's the central issue, that's why I didn't engage with it.
The belief that students are somehow now mentally broken in a way unique and never-before-seen is an enormous claim. These articles never manage to support this claim. Instead they just assert it as if it's so obvious it doesn't require any actual work to show.
Where you see some problem that starts pre-university, what I see is students acting rationally given the system they find themselves in. My own university experience was decades ago but no different except for the absence of smartphones and laptops in the lecture theatres. Bad lecturers, bad material, rampant cheating and fake marking schemes in which there was no connection between work and final grades: all the problems have been there for a very long time. Phones didn't create this problem, educators did. It's just easier for faculty to play pretend when students appear to be staring at the front of the auditorium because they have nothing else to stare at.
> the education pipeline is depositing students with a far lower attention span and capability than ever before, in college classes, for all subjects, including Math.
Unsurprisingly. In the past:
1. Those with lower attention spans generally didn't try to go to college in the first place. They often didn't even graduate from high school[1].
2. If they did try, colleges rejected their application long before they ever arrived on campus. Now colleges seek to accommodate them.
College used to be just for elites. At some point we decided it should be for everyone. When you try to shove more and more people into college, you're going to find out that most people don't have what it takes. It is like us deciding everyone should get to play in the NFL and then wonder why the talent is so poor...
We can't have it both ways.
[1] When I was in high school the graduation rate was only around 60%. Nowadays it is around 90%. That is a substantial shift in relatively few years. Did the students suddenly become better students out of the blue? Of course not.
As I recall, the author of the article looks at this at over a long enough time horizon to call out the difference.
I rechecked the article, and they’ve been teaching for 30 years. I went through the links (1) (2) and it looks like this has been accelerating since 2010, with one comment saying they noticed it starting in 2006.
> with one comment saying they noticed it starting in 2006.
Yup. This is exactly when high school graduation rates started to skyrocket – my cohort being from a few years earlier – and with virtually everyone (save those who are completely disabled) graduating by the time we were into the 2010s. That was a significant shift in the landscape, and it happened quickly to boot.
Shove a greater number of people with less ability into education and you are going to notice.
Nah, University is too late to fix this. But clearly kids aren’t fully “passing” their high school and probably middle school skills.
Mass failings while satisfying has an air of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. As a parent I can see the mass pull towards phones, practically impossible to disentangle save for simple surgical regulation.
No one should be allowed to have phones in class. That’s it.
My vibe is that phones have this bimodal effect on cognition, which further confuses the debate.
The smart kids use them as tools to complement and accelerate their learning but everyone else mostly just gets dumber from the infinite Oww my Balls adjacent content they're addicted to.
At this professor's Average U, everyone is mostly in the worse camp.
The transactional nature hasn’t always been the same, though. It hasn’t always been that way, or at least the nature of the transaction has changed. Decades ago, surveys showed the predominant reason people went to college was “to develop a philosophy for life”. Now the main reason is “to get a good job.”
It's because academia has, from antiquity to just vaguely recently, been a playground for the children of the rich to either pursue erudite passions or just to schmooze and make friends with other rich people's kids.
For normal people there wasn't a lot of point. Jobs didn't require these. My father, who just retired, had a high school education with no college, yet held what would nowadays require a bachelors in mechanical engineering, at a minimum. He himself considers himself quite lucky to have basically been the last person onto the no-degree train to the middle class.
I think to some degree this is a matter of capital formation not keeping pace with the general increase in education access for the rest of the workforce. We're educating people but our system struggles to produce companies that can gainfully employ them. And by "our system", I do think there's a nontrivial factor in bigcos conspiring to not ever run the labor market as hot as they did in the past decade. They'd rather grow slower than let employees have bargaining power.
I don't know why americans have this strange idea, but the first university in italy was created to learn law, which lead to a very well remunerated job.
I’d argue it’s not vague at all. In the US, I think it can be traced directly to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, starting in 1862. I think that’s when college focus began to move from a liberal arts focus to a vocational focus.
Then those surveys were only of privileged students who had the connections and the family backing to not worry about thier livelihood.
I can guarantee you that my mom went to college so she could get a job (retired teacher). My dad went to school because it was free as a veteran. But he made more as a factory worker.
I don’t know a single person who went to college with me for any other reason than a career.
I also bet those surveys didn’t go to the now Historically Black Colleges and Universities - the only ones that my mom could go to.
I disagree. Because starting in the 1940s, there were large masses of less privileged people going to college on account of the GI Bill. They still had different views about college than we see currently (anecdotes not withstanding).
Do you think people coming out of the military - many with no skills that they thought could help them get a job after they left - went to college to be better citizens of the world and not to get a job?
If you listen to military recruiters now, they emphasize the ability to be able to get a job after you leave through training.
Also the statistics show that lower income people statistically go into the military.
When you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I can guarantee you that most people’s first priority is to support their addictions to food and shelter and are most concerned with making money to do so. It’s only the privileged who have parents who can support them while they are getting launched who can afford to get degrees in areas like Ancient Chinese Art History or more realistically journalism and work for low pay in high cost of living areas.
>went to college to be better citizens of the world and not to get a job?
It depends on the era. The data says they likely did decades ago, and less likely to share that same view now. Around the 1980s the proportions switched: prior, the majority of freshman had a goal of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” compared to “being very well-off financially”. After the 1980s, that proportion inverted to the majority focused on material success.
Because the 1940s onward had a relatively high proportion of students from lower and middle class backgrounds, I don’t think the social class argument has as much explanatory power as you imply. In other words, the differences is that our cultural attitudes about college have likely changed due to other factors.
Edit: edited to soften tone and give more information. The data comes from UCLAs Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) surveys of incoming freshman. https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/
You can register to get it through the "Access Data" tab. If you don't want to do that Google "HERI freshman survey". If that's still too much work, click on "Images" to see slides people have put together to summarize the data. You can also search for "The American Freshman: 40 year trends" to get summary reports.
Instead of going through the scavenger hunt, quote the numbers you believe support your viewpoint.
But just looking at one source it says no community colleges were represented and 60 private colleges and 12 public colleges were represented.
That automatically skews the results to more privileged people who can consider it an outlet to “be a better person in the world and mommy and daddy can support me while I get my unpaid internship in NYC and then become a journalist who can’t support myself” over the people who will eventually have to depend on themselves to exchange enough labor for money to support their need for food and shelter.
Also notice that 80% went to college to get a job. Where is the related statistic that poorer people spent money and time to go to college without the expectations of getting a better job 50 years ago?
>quote the numbers you believe support your viewpoint.
HN guidelines expect intellectual curiosity, not spoon feeding (maybe that's also a change in cultural norms). I've already clearly described the trend and given you multiple avenues to look at the data, if you were curious enough to do so. If it's not apparent, the two goals are not mutually exclusive. Figure 14 of the previously mentioned paper gives you the numbers:
-In 1966,about 85% said developing a philosophy of life is a priority, while about 42% said being very well off financially was a priority
-By 2006, nearly 75% said being very well off financially was a priority while developing a philosophy of life dipped below 50%
In other words, priorities inverted.
>That automatically skews the results to more privileged people
The authors took measures to control for "more privileged" students when comparing public/private data. From the paper:
"By disaggregating CIRP median household income by public and private institutions and comparing each set of reporting students, we are able to tease out the
differences in parental income over time relative to each other and relative to the national median household income"
>Where is the related statistic that poorer people spent money and time to go to college without the expectations of getting a better job 50 years ago?
Note the paper also discusses how the relative wealth of parents of incoming freshman has increased. Implying poorer students were a larger share of the student body at the time when developing a philosophy of life was a more dominant priority.
You should read the report and look at the data. It's rare to find longitudinal data that spans so many decades.
I've already clearly described the trend and given you multiple avenues to look at the data
You have described the trend with no evidence that people have someone overcome their need for food and shelter with no concrete data and just to look it up.
HN guidelines expect intellectual curiosity, not spoon feeding (maybe that's also a change in cultural norms)
It’s also the norm to back up your assertions with citations and quotes.
And you are cherry picking something that doesn’t support your evidence of something obvious - most people need to work to eat. There is a difference between “building wealth” and not being homeless and hungry. Poor people without the support of mommy and daddy must focus on the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Notice that before the 60s, neither the poor or especially minorities had access to the schools that were populated (and surveyed) by people who saw college as a way to obtain “self actualization”
Also notice it was in the 60s when schools became accessible to people who weren’t in a high income household and had to stay at home. These students were also more interested in getting better jobs
It has always been people who knew that they weren’t going to be homeless or hungry that could afford to think about higher levels of needs like “self actualization” could focus on that over “I need to get a degree to make sure I’m
not homeless, hungry and naked”
You think people are going to get in tens of thousands of debt, without the support of affluent parents as a back stop aren’t mostly concerned about getting a job to pay off said debt?
Those opportunities simply weren’t available to poor people before the 60s. I bet you a paycheck they never surveyed HBCUs in the 60s in the south where attendance was by people trying to deal with and escape the limitations of the Jim Crow south.
And the entire purpose of the GI bill was retraining so that ex military could get a job.
And even then the survey was skewed because an entire class of people who would have gone to college to get a job were excluded
Of course if you exclude people who need college to get a job from going to college in the first place and then there is a big influx of people going to college to open of doors, you’re going to get more people saying they see college as a way to have a better life.
They aren’t going to get a Journalism degree and then do unpaid internships to “pursue their passions”
Decades ago college was for the people who were financially secure and could choose a life of the mind. Now it's a prerequisite for almost any real job. Guess what, the programmers grinding Leetcode aren't doing it for the thrill of solving a puzzle either.
This was true pre-GI-Bill, maybe, which puts it way out at the edge of living memory. It took a while for it to become a requirement for such a large proportion of jobs, but that's when the shift got going, and in a hurry.
I wonder how many people here (outside of college) spend lots of times on their phones (or their other types of screens)
It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention.
Yeah... There are exponentially more legacy applicants to colleges today than there were 30 years ago. By definition.
You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points?
But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.
You're not wrong, many students approach college as a vocational training facility. I'd say they do want to learn, but the focus is on "learning to get a job".
If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.
These skills, and the understanding of how to use them, are the real goal -the material is just there to keep your interest.
Yes, obviously, if you are going into chemistry then learn chemistry and so on. But round out your course with other things. Oceanography can give you insight to computer science, literature can promote better communication.
Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.
But if you are at college now, or perhaps going soon, try and see beyond the next assignment. Try and see the process which underlies it.
Most of all college is there to teach you to think. So stop doing for just a moment and start thinking.
Once you see behind the curtain you can't unsee it. And ironically even if I tell you it's there, I can't make you look. Experience doesn't work like that.
Grow up with a safety net and you don't take it seriously.
Group poor and/or with people depending on you, you understand the task at hand.
I goofed off a lot in college until I was tired of partying and realized I was going nowhere; about end of Sophomore year. All the older folks who paid their own way sure took it seriously. For reference, I'm also GenX.
I'm sure motivations range from what I suggested to what you suggested.
I think it plays a part. Just like personality does. And the college itself does. And the professors you get, and so on.
But really the insight is internal. And it's just insight, it doesn't dictate your response.
In other words I'm not saying this insight suddenly means you change career path. Most of us will go out and get jobs in an office, most will progress on similar lines.
The difference is in how you approach things. For example; if you see programming as vocational training then the language they teach you matters. If they taught you Java then you apply for a job doing Java.
If you see it as I did, then you see programming, not language. Language is easy to learn, and I've done serious work in at least 4 in my career. My first job was in a language I'd never seen before. Today I spend a lot of time in one that wasn't even invented.
If I had to go out and find work tomorrow I'm confident I can handle whatever language they prefer. I don't say that with arrogance- it'll take effort - but rather I'm confident I know how to learn.
Thus I'm not scared of AI. It's a tool, and I'm happy to learn it and use it. It won't replace me because I don't "write code", I program (and I understand the difference. )
So ultimately I'm not sure that financial status or whatever make a big difference. Ultimately it comes down to the person.
I really love this. I'll try and bear this in mind over the next few years.
I'm a mature-aged student going for their second degree (CS the first time, science this time). I am loving the subject but it's hard at the beginning because the amount of new stuff I have to absorb is overwhelming. At the times when I have a bit of a breather -- either when I'm "getting it" or during mid-semester break -- I find the subject (biology) wonderful.
Agreed. I always felt my computer engineering degree taught me how to approach a problem and logically solve it, weigh the pros and cons, etc. As well as introducing me to the hardware side of things - I already knew by high school that I could learn any programming language given enough time (already had Basic, C, SQL, a couple of DSLs and knew at least in part, 3 different human languages). I wanted to force myself to get a similar "baseline" for hardware.
Of course, it has impacted all parts of my life - I think differently than I did before studying engineering, and I sometimes try to apply this problem solving in non-technical parts of life with.. mixed results.
> Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.
Like... I guess it depends what precisely you mean by "workers" but in my mind at least, if we're thinking similarly, that would be white-collar office workers. And what you describe in the previous quoted section is, IMHO, a perfectly reasonable breakdown of what college is preparing them to do. But then the subsequent line feels like a criticism of the output of that.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's a legit question.
So, I think college can be different things to different people. Most will treat it as vocational training. And yes they'll end up being good office workers and we need those.
I refer to luck only because I perceive the other to be in the minority. Also because you can't make someone see it. Even if I tell you it's there (it's not a secret) doesn't mean you'll get it.
And again, my perception is that "getting it" leads to a better life. (For some definition of "better", usually not financial. )
Which doesn't make office workers bad. That's objectively a good life.
I agree that that is how many people see it. Possibly even your professors.
Fortunately I went to a place where the professors understood the real goals and made decisions as such.
For example (and this is my history, not advice) I took a couple electives for pure interest sake (I didn't need them to graduate. ) I went to all the lectures. I wrote all the exams and tests.
But I skipped all the prac work. I didn't do any of the weekly assignments. Nominally that meant I couldn't write the final exam. (They don't like people writing and failing, and prac work is correlated to that.)
But I went to see both professors. Both knew me (at least by sight, not name.) I explained why the prac work was not important to me (it covered the same process as I'd learned in other courses and the minutiae of the material was irrelevant to me.) My test scores showed I would pass. Both gave me an exemption snd let me write (and I passed.)
I don't recommend this. YMMV. But I hindsight I think maybe they understood I was there to learn process, not material. I was there to add to my big picture, not because I was going to be an oceanographer or astronomer.
I can't even say that I used anything from those courses in my career, although I did write a system for a marine company once, so maybe :)
Yep. I gave a similar speech on the first day of every English 101 class I ever taught. (Though, damn, I wish I'd had as concise a formulation as your list of skills. Nicely done.) In my case I largely hoped to head off the resentment that STEM majors frequently expressed about how come they were required to take something so irrelevant to their eventual careers as writing. It sometimes worked.
I didn't get to take English at college, but I've spent a lot of my career writing and training. I've written a couple text books, and more documentation than I care to remember.
Writing well is definitely a skill worth learning. Communication is the single most important thing to career advancement.
You and I both know that! Try explaining it to 18-year olds who hate writing° and think coding / maths / lab-work is all they'll ever need. It doesn't go well.
°The real problem was that they didn't read. Sadly, I could pretty much predict the grade-distribution on the first day of class with one question: "have you ever read anything for fun?"
The students who regularly read books and magazines (hell, even comic books) were going to get As, once they figured out how to put an argument together. The kids who'd maybe read Harry Potter a few years back (this was ten years ago) would end up with Bs, or Cs if they slacked off. The STEM folks who read technical manuals were solid Cs, and Bs if they worked at it. The at least half who'd literally never read anything outside the classroom were going to struggle to pass. I taught my ass off, and spent unlimited office hours with anyone who'd come to them, but there's only so much that class-work can do.
This article makes it sound like it's only got worse since.
I hear you. I can write docs, but I can't make you read them :)
I'd abstract this and say that communication is key, but the form of communication can vary. People who don't read don't value that form, and don't write. They may prefer the video approach (ie show and tell.) They consume video and these days with Zoom create video as well.
Of course video isn't always a good way to communicate. It lacks searchability unless well chaptered (and transcribed). AI is helping with that.
Writing is also easier to store, and consume, non digitally. So it's more "permanent".
Your insight though is useful. People who don't read don't value writing as important. And maybe in the future it won't matter. And yeah, you're getting them too young, before they've really come to grips with the real world and it's requirements.
If it's any consolation I read voraciously as a child, didn't take English at college, and got (my only) C for English in high school. So you never know what seeds you are planting or how they'll grow.
Wait, but the point of the piece is that although college has always been transactional, behavior has changed.
If so, why would transactional-ism be the cause?
Read on:
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.
And then, crucially:
> Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.
"Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids.
When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.
I don't think the author of the piece is saying there has been a cultural change among students, emanating from within. Rather the thesis is that smartphones are the culprit. "Things changed" can encompass the proliferation of smartphones.
Sure, but the argument is still that the smartphones aren’t the root cause. It’s the transactional nature of the thing. Can’t fail students because money would go down, so keep passing them as they get better equipped to ignore you and have reduced requirements to get a passing grade.
The thing that’s changed is how much the transactional nature favors the lazy students, not the smartphones specifically.
The reason the argument is so bad that “it’s the smartphones” is because that implies an easy solution that is external to the academic system, when the root cause is internal to the system.
Why would the transactional nature favor students now though? What’s the mechanism for that, that’s internal to the system?
In other words it sounds like you’re arguing that the root cause is “the transactional nature” but that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed. So why is it worse now?
What is it that makes students “better equipped to ignore you”?
Because the universities themselves have been constantly lowering standards. It was always a transaction but there was a price. That price is locked in a race to the bottom because administrations and professors don't care about standards.
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit.
Only so long as the college doesn't devalue the credential.
If I interview a few people with a CS degree from College A and I find they don't know the basics of programming - then the credential loses value; why would I bother interviewing people from such a college?
So colleges have to balance the needs of their stakeholders - employers/ graduates want the credential to be a sign of education; and current students who want good grades and less work.
The "implied terms of the transaction" have always been that current students have to learn enough that they're not devaluing the credential.
I have interviewed prospective employees who come in with no academic credentials all the way through to those who have completed degree programs at one of the top 50 universities. Regardless of university, students are individuals and shouldn’t be given more or less credit because of the name of the school they attended.
Full. Stop.
That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one.
As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it.
Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.
While I agree with you in practice, institution name (of their school, prior employer, ...) is, overall, a hard to escape filter when you're staring down the barrel of thousands of applications per open role.
There are other early-out filters you can use, but none of them are perfect in quickly reducing the application count to a tractable number for your HR/hiring managers/engineers to tackle.
I agree that the trend is not sustainable, but that's not the students' responsibility — they're just responding to incentives.
Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.
> or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential
Employers haven't recognized such signalling in my lifetime, if ever.
However, there are a sufficient number of professions (e.g. medicine) where it is legally required to attain accreditation through the college system to keep the aura of being job creators. The average teenager, with no life experience other than sitting in the classroom for the past 12 years of their life and playing soccer on the weekend, deciding what to do after high school doesn't know the difference.
To make matters more complex, said teenagers don't recognize that not all people are equal. They hear things like "high school dropouts make x% less than college graduates" and think that means they must go to college to not suffer the same fate, not realizing that the high school dropout cohort is dominated by those with disabilities and other life challenges that prevents them from earning more in industry. Surprising to many, handing a Harvard degree over on a silver platter to someone with severe autism will not cure what ails them.
So there is really no risk to the system. The incentives are by and large already based on misunderstandings with so much religion in place now to keep those misunderstanding alive and are otherwise driven by legal requirements that aren't apt to go away.
Besides, even if all that is destroyed, the primary reason one goes to college is still for the dating pool. Academic rigour remains necessary to keep the quality of potential partners up. Tinder and the like may have tried to encroach on that, but I suspect it has only made it more desirable to be on/near campus to increase the likelihood of a match. Users of those services aren't searching the world over to find "the one".
Yeah, and the nature of the transaction evolves over time in a way that makes aging professors uncomfortable.
I get the sense the author just doesn’t have the same rapport with students they likely once did. Students stop coming to class and don’t go to office hours and they don’t know why.
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.
I went to college 20 years ago and lots of professors distributed slides and lecture notes to students. I assume it’s even more common now. Yes, I wouldn’t ask a speaker to let me read their private notes, but that’s not how PowerPoint slides shown in class are generally perceived.
Agreed. A course that did not distribute slides / lecture notes 35 years ago when I studied (well known engineering school in Canada) was considered annoying / the prof trying to force students to attend.
That is a purely rational take, but people are seldom rational. My pet theory is that inertia is a huge reason why people choose college. Majority of people who go to college do it as a continuation of 10-12 years of continuous schooling (or partying). As they climb educational or social hierarchies they are constantly reminded that college is a next step. Thus going to college feels far more familiar and less scary than joining the workforce. Thus, going to college is a default choice for many.
After the gut decision is made it can be wrapped into whatever rational argument.
The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.
That's part of it, but the author acknowledges that college has been transactional for quite a while. What has exacerbated the issue was COVID and the rise of extremely potent, addictive social media. I wouldn't be surprised if we look back on social media as the digital equivalent of children drinking and smoking weed, i.e. something that causes permanent damage to one's brain.
>"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character.
Idk, it's totally possible that as COVID happened and they watched the government lock them in their homes away from each other and forced them to miss important moments in their lives (remote graduations for example), then they watched the rise of EZ-Cheat systems (ChatGPT) which made their creators extremely wealthy, combined with crypto frauds (that our own President does in his free time), they started to think that the way to get ahead in life was to lack character and be lazy...
Isn't it? I mean, the "work hard, save your pennies" method is being intentionally attacked and the "invest everything in crypto" is being rewarded. EVERYTHING is done for the next quarter - and you expect students to learn that "patience in savings and working your way up the ladder" is the way to success?
The transaction has changed a great deal though. GPA used to be more heavily weighted and professors used to be more essential for references. You might bring your transcript to an interview. Now, it seems to be all about projects. Coursework has dwindled in relevance.
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit.
It’s worth pointing out that this is a perception that has been cultivated. Position the degree as first and foremost a job credential, cut state support, and force students and their parents to directly bear the cost for this supposedly individualized benefit through higher tuition. “The customer is always right” and no learning need occur.
I can't respond to any specifics of the documentary, but it looks to me like the universities themselves are the biggest cultivators of this perception, with the goal of increased enrollment.
If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.
I see state funded education as making the problem worse. The market just reacts to what is available, and funding everyone to go to college, whether or not its useful or resourceful to do so means companies have a large enough pool of applicants to make it a requirement.
I could see even, that employers themselves would take up the cost to train if they lacked qualified applicants. Imagine for example there wasn't a billion CS students. All the company still need programmers, so what are they going to do?
IMO, instead of funding universities, simply give people a stipend to be used for some sort of educational purpose.
> My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.
They (the prof class) created this situation. They could have upheld their standards and seen the number of students go down but they preferred to fill their classrooms at the expense of quality.
This is like a manager who is complaining that no one can code while offering McDonalds hourly rates.
Professor here. We did not create it, we responded to administration prioritizing profit over performance and prestige. They passed the decision down to us instructors by threatening our employment if we failed too many students. Since tenure is heavily dependent on student outcomes, giving a student a lower grade than what they think they deserved will almost certainly result in negative feedback, which threatens your tenure. For non-tenured faculty it could result in a contract non-renewal.
I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role."
In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome?
At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts.
As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.
You are just going in circles to justify that you are the victim of all of this "non sense". That's like a guy saying "I didn't want to break the law but my employer forced me to it and he would have fired me, etc. etc. I am not saying you broke any laws but drawing a parallel here.
Professors are not (at least not supposed) to be a decoration in a University. They are what makes a University; or break it. You have all the leverage. You accepted the situation, went along with it and now it's backfiring.
When workers have leverage they unionize and can force management. If professors can't have a leverage in this society, then all hope is lost. We are talking about people who are supposed to be at the top echelon of society.
This is a very late response (I am overseas) but I do like your impassioned comments. That said, I think there might be some misunderstandings about US Labor Laws and operations as they relate to education and unionization.
> Professors are not (at least not supposed) to be a decoration in a University.
Our names and reputations are nothing more than an enticing line in a marketing pitch. A way to say "You could be taught by a Nobel prize winner!"
My college's pitch for me is "This person worked for Beyonce and made AAA games! They'll get you a job!"
As the article stated, college in the US is now transactional. Put money in, get degree out. Put lots of money in a famous-name college, get more opportunities in the US labor market. They are not students anymore, they are customers buying a product. The product they are paying for is a piece of paper that gives better access to the US labor market. The US labor market increasingly expects a college degree even for even the most asinine roles.
When you're spending 5-to-6 figures and 4 years of your life for access to the entry-level US labor market, you are a customer, and learning and integrity take a backseat. When an institution cares the most about growth and profit, they are a business focused on increasing their capital. This is not to say that capitalism is bad, just that the incentive structure shifts from educational outcomes to revenue-per-student. In fact there is an explicit term for this, Full-Time Equivalent, or FTE. More FTE = more money = institutional growth.
> You have all the leverage
I do? Are you sure it's not the person who pays my paychecks, guarantees my health insurance, and can fire me at the end of the year since contract renewals are annual? Are you sure that the leverage and 'forcing management' that you say I can do isn't dependent on union support for an action I wish to take, since being unionized means I waived my right to individual actions?
It would be appropriate to say "The union should have all the leverage." This is because the union has an exclusivity agreement with the college, such that you cannot have non-union instructors teaching at the college. However our union is extremely weak, and struggles to take even the most basic opposition stances against the college. Our collective bargaining team gets weaker at negotiating every year; IT/CS professors took a $5000 pay cut this year because the union gave up our salaries during negotiation. Also worth noting that the college is hinting that they will not longer work with the union in the next contract negotiation, and move to individual instructor negotiations. This will enable them to lay off all tenured instructors and re-hire them as part-time adjuncts with a 70% pay cut. They just fired me, and they have told me they plan to extend that exact offer if I want to continue directing the program. I have already accepted a role elsewhere.
People who aren't in education generally read that tenure means "Job for life." and "They can't fire you". Maybe in the 20th century, but tenure doesn't work the way anymore, and hasn't since the 2000s. There's also a ton of politics. In the event of a union it is the union vs the college, not you vs the college. You have no individual leverage, you are dependent on union support.
> When workers have leverage they unionize and can force management.
Force them to do what? We ARE unionized; we are members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Since we are unionized we waive our right to individual arbitration, and individual protests or strikes (Wildcat Strikes) are explicitly illegal. We must go to the union, tell them the situation, and they decide if they wish to pursue action against the school in solidarity. If the union decides to not pursue action we cannot go alone. Conversely, if the school calls a 'state of emergency' they can take actions without union approval and with the union waiving their ability to object to actions, and eliminating their leverage.
And a state of emergency is exactly what they called this year. They did it in response to this https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/09/25/s... which is going to put them $5.5 million in debt in the next 3 years. They have told the union "We don't care, sue us. If we don't do this, we shut down, and everybody loses. If you sue us or strike, we shut down, and everybody loses."
The union has stated they do not plan to take action, but have sent many strongly worded emails ending in "In Solidarity" or "Union Strong". This isn't to say that unions are bad, in fact I'm very pro union. This is to say that not all unions are equal, and leverage is actually dependent on the union's overall strength and the overall power dynamic.
Your comments suggest that I am at fault here, and not my employer nor my union for taking inaction at the issues I've raised. I am proud to say that as a unionized public employee our collectively-bargained contract is publicly available for view online. If you are curious I am happy to send a link to you. You will quickly realize that it is two groups constantly speaking for you, you have very little recourse or individual agency, and the 'leverage' you claim I have or should have as a union does actually not exist.
> That’s like saying the workers have all the leverage.
...they do? You can shuffle money all you want, if nobody can write the fucking code then you don't have software. I imagine it works much the same in any other field.
Did you finish reading? The author said later on that holding the bar high wasn't an option since it would risk his job. The blame should be on the universities, not on the professors who don't have much power to fix the problem.
If the universities hold the bar high, they'll risk their funding from parents not wanting to enroll their child and the government not funding a failing school. The blame should be on society?
I think professors are in a good place to actually step up and say no. They're all highly educated individuals who can likely leave academia and get jobs in the private sector. They're best set up to break the cycle.
I don’t agree personally. I went to school about 10 ago to a private University (nearly full ride because universities used to care about PSAT performance for no clear reason). My school was heavy on co-ops meaning it was more job outcome focused than most.
In my opinion it was mostly a rite of passage thing. It was the first time I was granted independence including personal responsibility, a brand new social network, sex, etc.
It was just adulthood with training wheels. I’m not going to argue that sounds like an ideal social structure but it was very useful to me. The raw alternative of jumping into the workforce probably would have led to bad outcomes even if it all worked out economically.
The stepping stone to employment felt like it was just sort of assumed like finishing high school. I felt nothing getting either diploma.
I might feel some serious existential dread if the market I was entering resembled the one now though.
>The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero.
I was one of those 'rounds to zero' students, in the physical sciences, long ago. I wanted to learn how to verify a hypothesis by looking at the evidence. And after 4 years, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of significant lab exposure. What we did get was cookbook labs, mostly on the very basic stuff. What we also got after that was theory, theory and more theory. Usually from unenthused teachers, going through the motions. From my perspective, it was mostly a waste of time.
Years later I learned what Feynman meant when he said "Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." Maybe if I'd heard that, I've have dropped out after two years instead of hoping I'd get to the part where someone cared.
I think most teachers are not naive wrt the transactional perception of education in their students. However, what keeps a passionate teacher going is the belief that, if they do their job well, at least some significant subset of students will take genuine interest in the material. I don't think it's naive to hope for that, I've seen this happen a lot when I was a student.
What OOP is lamenting is that that's no longer possible.
I think plenty of students are there because they want to learn a subject, singular. Everything else is just the unrelated overhead they're stuck with for their white collar job permit.
Does that mean it would be better if the majority of people went to trade schools and left the universities for the minority who want an education for it's own sake?
The reason why I wanted to study CS in university was because I was curious, not because of possible job offers you get if you have a degree. When I applied I thought that this was the primary motivator for others as well. Turns out I was very wrong, although I did meet a few students who were studying mainly for their curiosity.
Sure, but not all degrees are equal. Institutions have reputations based on how smart / effective their graduates tend to be. So by making it harder for the careless ones to graduate, a university can enhance the value of the degree for those that do. Even with the transactional attitude, it would behoove students to want to be pushed.
Yet institutions don't do this so your reasoning is faulty. Particularly at the "value of the degree" line. There are few, if any, degrees that provide value and even fewer that provide employable skills.
Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.
This may be fake, but as somebody who went to a school that took academic rigor very seriously, I'm confident that my degree is the most valuable thing I own. Recruiters from both startups and entrenched companies are constantly reinforcing that belief.
The market for degrees may be pretty skewed, but that doesn't mean it's not a real market with supply/demand dynamics
That is true, but I don't think the students are the ones responsible for the second and third order effects of maintaining academic rigor. They're just playing the game they're given.
Ya, the current students do not, but future students do. They're the ones who will take their business elsewhere.
Schools with slipping standards may not see negative effects in the short term, but people are waking up to the fact that a lot of degrees are nowhere near worth the tuition, and the first schools to go bust will tend to be the ones with the worst cost/benefit ratio.
I agree that holding the line and failing the whole class if the whole class deserves it is the only hope universities have of breaking the feedback loop, but the author seems to think that represents an insurmountable coordination problem.
It's telling this sentence has the student as one to blame, when it's a structural issue and the weight of the blame rests more heavily on the shoulders of the universities.
> The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero.
Further - even if someone wants to learn these subjects, most don't see the value in paying for a college course to learn them. Close to no one, after receiving a college degree in a subject, says "I want to learn more about X, I'm going to go ahead and pay $4,000 to take a class in it at the nearby college."
Plenty of people learn things after they graduate. Just about everyone does so in a better manner than a college course. Colleges are only viable because they dangle degrees over students' heads, and then they complain that students are only coming for the degrees.
I can’t find the exact citation at the moment, but I believe that American students were described as viewing the education process as transactional in a wider sense by Max Weber in 1905 (Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism I think?)
And now the white-collar jobs are being replaced by vibe AI app-making. It seems most of college now isn't for most people. Maybe the kids can save their money and just make vibe apps.
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this
It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.