Professor: today's students vs his memories

February 1, 2012 7:45 AM

The Beatles and the Bolsheviks. An excellent essay on the decline of the college student. How much of the professor's frustration can be linked to selective memory?
posted by TreeRooster (96 comments total)

Moscow girls make me sing and shout.
posted by Fizz at 7:49 AM on February 1 [2 favorites]

If society were declining as quickly as old people have been insisting (for the last bazillion years) that it is, we'd all be running around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland drinking . . . some kid of ludicrously branded energy drink that we also use to irrigate crops.

Having said that, I have taught composition.
I have been a student of composition.
The kids I experienced as a teacher were nothing like the kids I experienced as a student.
Unlike the writer, I'm going to bet that the difference might have more to do with the population than the State of Society. (And also a bit of "damn society changes and leaves us Oldies behind.")
posted by Seamus at 7:59 AM on February 1 [4 favorites]

I am too intimidated to comment and thereby reveal the depths of my ignorance. (Wasn't Ringo the Olympic mascot for Moscow 1980?)
posted by Nomyte at 7:59 AM on February 1

Wasn't Ringo the Olympic mascot for Moscow 1980?

I think so. And we all remember the reign of Mad King George
posted by holdkris99 at 8:01 AM on February 1

Inside Higher Ed's browser tab spells it "esssay"

Also, I gotta give the guy credit for having some personal insight about his own failings as a student.
posted by Seamus at 8:03 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Even Aristotle and Plato griped about the state of the youth in their time.

When teaching, one of the things I strive painfully to do is to break down the wall between my place (low as it might be as a grad student, hiding among the pigeons and bird shit) and the place of my undergrads. I have sat where they sat, walk where they walk, made the same mistakes they make. And I want them to know it is OK to make those mistakes once or twice. But they must learn from those mistakes.
posted by strixus at 8:03 AM on February 1 [5 favorites]

Confirmation bias gonna buy confirmation.
posted by erniepan at 8:08 AM on February 1 [4 favorites]

In grad school at a SUNY school I taught "discussion seminars" for History 1302 and 1302 where I would meet once week with about 30 students to discuss the assigned readings for the week and I would grade all of their papers and tests. I realize my experience was limited but from what I saw there were about 4 engaged students for every one disengaged students. So maybe 10-12 students who did the readings and did well on the tests and papers. 2-3 who would not show up, turn in plagiarized work, cause disturbances in class, etc. The other 15 or so would show up, not participate or cause any problems and turn in mediocre but passing work. Unfortunately the professor for whom I worked only allowed me to give two A's and two F's for the semester then the B's and C's had to be split evenly so bad work was rewarded and good work was punished. I hated it.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:08 AM on February 1

History 1301 and 1302...dammit.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:09 AM on February 1

So, though I respected their obvious intelligence and valued the insights they shared with me, my own admiration for them prevented me from asking them the questions I knew they could answer. My fear of looking foolish caused me to choose ignorance.

This is really insightful. I almost failed my intermediate-level Material Engineering class for two reasons (a) I was partying pretty hard and classes were at 8am, and (b) the professor was fiercely intelligent, intimidatingly so. I was completely floundering in that class, but I had never had to ask for help before, and I certainly wasn't going to reveal the 'weakness' of ignorance to such a person. (Of course, he could see by my test grades that I wasn't exactly grasping the material). I wish I could go back and get a mulligan, with the knowledge and experience I've gained. Or I wish they would tell every incoming freshman: "Ask for help once a day."
posted by muddgirl at 8:11 AM on February 1 [3 favorites]

See, I think there might be something else going on here. The people that go into academia are, more or less by definition, the people that are the most interested in their particular field. And generally have been for quite some time. So they probably were some of the more attentive and industrious students of their particular cohort, even allowing for a certain amount of youthful shenanigans. This can lead to a kind of selection bias, because the people evaluating the studiousness and diligence of students are mostly drawn from the more studious and diligent segment of the population.

I also think there's more going on here than just "kids these days". There are undeniably people in college now who wouldn't have been there ten years ago, let alone fifty. This is partly a good thing--Hi ladies!--but it's also partly a bad thing. I'd be comfortable saying that something like a majority of college students today, maybe even an overwhelming majority, don't actually need a college degree. "Business" is the largest major in the country, and there are plenty of people who get nondescript humanities degrees that wind up never using them. A BA now serves the functional equivalent of a high school diploma. So there are tons of people who are barely qualified to graduate from high school sitting in college classes that wouldn't have been there a generation ago. I have to think this has some effect on the quality of your average collegiate student body.

To make things worse, not all colleges are created equal. Let's assume for a second that the percentage of academically competitive students has stayed about the same over the last hundred years. But the number of students has gone up dramatically. The people who could have gotten into "good" schools are still going to go there, most of the time, because they know from diploma mills. But the kids who are just going to college to go to college are now filling up huge swaths of the middle-tier of schools and are solely responsible for the for-profit college phenomenon. So the distribution of academically interested students is probably less well distributed than it was before, simply because there's now so much more room on the bottom end.

So it's not that kids are actually worse than they used to be, it's just that the percentage of kids who are worth a damn as students has never been all that high, but we're now sending lots of kids who aren't to college. We're still in a point where most of the professoriate, even the younger cohorts, went to college before this phenomenon started, so it's not surprising that there's a sense that things are different. They are.
posted by valkyryn at 8:13 AM on February 1 [14 favorites]

One of the unexpected benefits of keeping a daily journal has been to counteract rose-colored memories. Whenever I start to reminisce about how great life was "back in the day," I can read what I was actually doing and all the unpleasant parts that my memory had washed away.
posted by wanderingstan at 8:13 AM on February 1 [5 favorites]

The idea of not asking for help resonated with me, too. I was one of those annoying kids in class that had no problem asking for clarification or help in class, but I'm painfully aware of how hard it is for most students to ask even for the most basic of help. Now that I teach university myself, I make a point of noting that I "don't bite" to the students, and encourage them to ask for clarification if they need it.
posted by LN at 8:14 AM on February 1

...and on the other side of the equation, maybe professors can make an attempt to open up to their students earlier. I know a lot of my friends report that, as they got to higher grades in their major, the walls between professors and students would start to crumble and they would see professors not as geniuses, but as real people. Ask questions of a real person is much harder. I don't know what professors can do to break down a little of that wall for younger students while still maintaining professionalism.

So they probably were some of the more attentive and industrious students of their particular cohort, even allowing for a certain amount of youthful shenanigans.

I think we have to be careful in that someone who is studious in their major may completely blow off out-of-major courses - I saw this a lot at my technical college, where very smart, studious engineers would sleep through their (required) liberal arts courses, or turn in papers about Terminator II.
posted by muddgirl at 8:17 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Ask questions of a real person is much harder.

I mean, it's easier to ask questions of real people.
posted by muddgirl at 8:18 AM on February 1

A major factor behind these essays is that, with few exceptions, most academics teach at less selective institutions than the ones that granted their degrees.

Another big factor is that many colleges have a freshman composition requirement that students must fulfill regardless of their major.
posted by Nomyte at 8:19 AM on February 1 [5 favorites]

I'd be comfortable saying that something like a majority of college students today, maybe even an overwhelming majority, don't actually need a college degree.

If they don't need a college degree, what do they need?
posted by blucevalo at 8:22 AM on February 1

If they don't need a college degree, what do they need?

Either a vocational degree or on-the-job training. Again, most people who go to college wind up not using anything they learned in their degrees, and employers have to train them from scratch. Why make them go to a four-year school paying heaven only knows how much money?
posted by valkyryn at 8:25 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

"last year, I read a paper that advanced the idea that "back in the day" — by which the writer meant the 1990s — people didn’t commit adultery, and homosexuality didn't exist."

This is one of my top-ten least favorite student things and since I teach ethics I hear it all the time. My response has become sarcastic: "Yes, all of the advances in racial and gender equality in the 20th century are ENTIRELY UNDERMINED by boobs on television," which actually tends to work, and then we talk about children born out of wedlock in the 1800s. But I'm sort-of glad to know other profs have to listen to this too.

The most frustrating thing for me, actually, is students with NO knowledge of history whatsoever. Any history. Fourth-grade U.S. history. I know that history has been pushed out, more and more, by NCLB, and fewer and fewer of my students have had any meaningful exposure to it, but it's like teaching students who are totally untethered in time, space, and culture. When they're hazy on things like the existence of WWII and the Civil War and are unaware of in which century the U.S. was founded, it's hard to lecture on -- well, anything, because we have virtually no common base of knowledge.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:26 AM on February 1 [7 favorites]

I was a lazy, inattentive and apathetic college student as far back as 1982. I guess that I was some sort of pioneer. (along with most of my friends)
posted by octothorpe at 8:27 AM on February 1

A major factor behind these essays is that, with few exceptions, most academics teach at less selective institutions than the ones that granted their degrees.

Seriously. This guy went to St. Lawrence, and now he's teaching at Chowan University, a Baptist college in Murfreesbro with a US News "less selective" admissions rank and a 21% four year graduation rate. He should be grateful his freshman comp students are even functionally literate.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 8:28 AM on February 1 [7 favorites]

Again, most people who go to college wind up not using anything they learned in their degrees, and employers have to train them from scratch.

Well, yes, this has nearly always been true. That's why they're called "liberal arts" colleges. It's not like back in the past all those Art History majors were gettin' jobs, and now they're not.

But I would agree that the types of jobs which require a degree may have grown beyond what's necessary. In the past, 'middle managers' wouldn't necessarily have degrees - my father was an undegreed manager at a tech company.
posted by muddgirl at 8:30 AM on February 1

Seriously. This guy went to St. Lawrence, and now he's teaching at Chowan University, a Baptist college in Murfreesbro with a US News "less selective" admissions rank and a 21% four year graduation rate. He should be grateful his freshman comp students are even functionally literate.

Oh man, a couple kids from my high school went to Chowan. I am also surprised they are functionally literate.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 8:31 AM on February 1

I dated somebody for awhile who taught Watchmen. She had to use one of her class sessions to do remedial history because none of the kids knew what the Cold War, USSR, or Richard Nixon were.

they thought MLK, Jr. won the Civil War! in the 1950's!!
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:31 AM on February 1 [3 favorites]

I wish that students who were not academics could go into plumbing, construction and related fields. I know I'd like there to be more plumbers, electricians and so on out there. The Trades used to be where we sent the left gifted.

Turns out; as I found when giving training courses at a tech firm, that those left gifted students went into the trades, worked for 20 years, got laid off then got government training to get into the tech industry. They were barely literate enough to read a screen and follow basic steps.

sigh.
posted by NiteMayr at 8:34 AM on February 1

Older person opines that things were better when they were young. Film at 11.
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:35 AM on February 1

The Trades used to be where we sent the left gifted.

I want my plumber to be gifted as well. If I have a less gifted plumber there will either be no water in my house, or water all over my house. Or, if I am unlucky, things that smell worse than water.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:35 AM on February 1 [7 favorites]

I teach statistics. I told my students a few days ago that if you're a doctor, you're going to think that people tend to be very sick, because sick people come to the doctor's office more often than healthy people. This is true of teaching, too; the students who need a lot of attention, for whatever reason, are going to take up more time than their proportion in the population.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:36 AM on February 1 [4 favorites]

Older person opines that things were better when they were young. Film at 11.

Mefite only reads FPP and not article before commention. Nation mourns.
posted by muddgirl at 8:36 AM on February 1 [9 favorites]

...commenting.
posted by muddgirl at 8:36 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

It's not like back in the past all those Art History majors were gettin' jobs, and now they're not.

The difference is there are now a zillion more art history majors per capita than there were a century ago. The discipline itself has only existed in its own right for a hundred years or so. The people who got liberal arts degrees before the late twentieth century either didn't need to work, wound up in academia (sometimes both) or were sent there by wealthy parents as a precursor to joining the family business. People didn't go to college because it was the thing to do after high school unless they were quite wealthy.

In 1950, 34.3% of the population had a high school diploma and 6.2% had a college degree. In 2000, those figures were 84.1% and 26.7% respectively. So high school graduates are a bit less than three times as common, but college graduates are about four times as common. Even if were were to take that 6.2% figure and double it to account for women graduates, we'd still be at less than half the number of graduates we've got now. (figures)
posted by valkyryn at 8:40 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Whoops, less gifted. I should have written, less gifted academically. Mea Culpa.
posted by NiteMayr at 8:40 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Again, most people who go to college wind up not using anything they learned in their degrees, and employers have to train them from scratch.

Well, yes, this has nearly always been true. That's why they're called "liberal arts" colleges. It's not like back in the past all those Art History majors were gettin' jobs, and now they're not.

Not really, because the percentage of people who went to college was much much much lower. Now, having a BA is frequently a prerequisite for being a receptionist.

(on preview, what Valkyrn said)
posted by Jahaza at 8:42 AM on February 1

than there were a century ago.

It seems unnecessary to go back so far. My father isn't a century old, and 40 years ago both women and black people could vote and attend college. Significant changes have happened in the past 50 years, such that comparisons to 1910 seem almost meaningless.

Now, having a BA is frequently a prerequisite for being a receptionist.

That is exactly my point. It's not about the number of graduates, it's about the lack of white-collar jobs that don't require a degree and the lack of blue-collar jobs entirely.

By saying, "poor people and stupid people shouldn't go to college', we are relegating them not to good-paying factory and trade jobs, but low paying jobs in the service industry.
posted by muddgirl at 8:45 AM on February 1 [6 favorites]

If society were declining as quickly as old people have been insisting (for the last bazillion years) that it is, we'd all be running around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland drinking . . . some kid of ludicrously branded energy drink that we also use to irrigate crops.

I remember reading a quote from the purported 'first' instance of someone complaining about the decline of society, from something like 3000 years ago.

In 1950, 34.3% of the population had a high school diploma and 6.2% had a college degree. In 2000, those figures were 84.1% and 26.7% respectively. So high school graduates are a bit less than three times as common, but college graduates are about four times as common. Even if were were to take that 6.2% figure and double it to account for women graduates, we'd still be at less than half the number of graduates we've got now.

And only 24% had highschool diplomas in 1947.

We really need to move to a free college model like lots of countries in europe.
posted by delmoi at 8:45 AM on February 1

Taken as a whole, I think young people today are totally awesome. I think one of our major challenges going forward as a society is to learn to live together in a resource constrained world. Young people I've met and worked with are so much more in tune with the environment and society than I remember myself or my peers being at that age that I actually feel really good about those aspects of the future. And as the current higher ed academic world slowly yields to the pressures of reform, focusing on educating the masses rather than enforcing scarcity of knowledge, I'm not too worried about having an educated population either. The kids are alright, as they say.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 8:51 AM on February 1 [5 favorites]

There is no such thing as a poor or bad student ...there is only incompent teaching.
posted by Postroad at 8:56 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Did anybody actually read this article? He starts out with a little headfake towards the idea that he's going to say "kids today aren't prepared, don't care, why am I doing this" but by the end makes it clear that this attitude is something he has to fight against as a teacher, and that kids in college today are pretty much like kids in college when he was in college. And I think he's right about this. At least, it matches my own experience -- I've been teaching for 15 years now and the students have not noticeably changed in that span of time.

Re valkyryn's point: it is certainly true that vastly more kids go to college now than did in the 1950s. But it's not true that vastly more kids go to college now than did in the 1990s.
posted by escabeche at 8:58 AM on February 1 [8 favorites]

I remember in my college days - some 20 years ago - we were watching a film in an anthropology course and I took a moment to jot down something interesting from the film in my notebook. My friend sitting next to me said "That's not going to be on the test." It infuriated me at the time because it was an example of the lack of intellectual curiosity I found common among my peers. The whole attitude was that you only need to know what was on the test so that you can get the grades so you can get the degree so you can get the job. I think that the of college as merely granting the credentials for employment rather than being a place to learn and think and develop reasoning skills has only intensified in the past two decades. And I think that paradigm is at least part of the reason behind the minimal effort and fear of looking foolish among the author's students.
posted by Rarebit Fiend at 9:01 AM on February 1 [2 favorites]

There is no such thing as a poor or bad student ...there is only incompent teaching.

Receiving enough bad teaching can make a bad student. This is easily accomplished by the time kids get to college, so yes, there are bad students in college.
posted by Jpfed at 9:05 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

muddgirl : Mefite only reads FPP and not article before commention. Nation mourns.

I totally read the article. My takeaway from it wasn't that the writer is saying students are worse, but weirdly, that professors (with himself as the main example) are, for not being humble enough.
posted by eustacescrubb at 9:08 AM on February 1

I liked the essay.

To valkyryn's point that things are different nowadays than once - I share this feeling that an effectively mandatory college track for everyone who would like to stay in or above the middle class is not necessarily the healthiest trend, but I think a lot of the non-academic, coming-of-age aspects of the experience are hard to get any other way in American society. (Not impossible, just difficult, especially at an age where most people don't know what the hell they should want out of life anyway.)

Meeting new kinds of people, being exposed to a more diverse/tolerant culture, living for a time in a relatively communal arrangement, having a framework to approach adulthood while choosing elements of your own identity - these things are good for individuals, and even better for society as a whole. I'd really like it if there were more ways for kids coming out of highschool to have access to them without necessarily spending another 4-6 years in classrooms.
posted by brennen at 9:08 AM on February 1 [3 favorites]

My takeaway from it wasn't that the writer is saying students are worse, but weirdly, that professors (with himself as the main example) are, for not being humble enough.

But I don't see him making any historical argument. He talks about a former professor who was very cynical, and he sees the same cynicism in himself. It's not about "professors these days", it's just about professors.
posted by muddgirl at 9:13 AM on February 1

Meeting new kinds of people, being exposed to a more diverse/tolerant culture, living for a time in a relatively communal arrangement, having a framework to approach adulthood while choosing elements of your own identity

The military serves a similar role for lots of folks. Missionary work too, perhaps, or joining a kibbutz? Not a lot of other options, though, for sure.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:14 AM on February 1

This reminds me of that song that Mick Jagger of the Bowling Stones wrote: "Hey...hey...you...you...get off of my lawn."
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:16 AM on February 1

Except that's not what he's saying at all.
posted by blucevalo at 9:19 AM on February 1

Whoops, less gifted. I should have written, less gifted academically. Mea Culpa.

I like left gifted. It gets around the idea that there is only one kind of intelligence. I'm gonna use it!
posted by ianhattwick at 9:20 AM on February 1

We really need to move to a free college model like lots of countries in europe.

Didn't we used to have some of this in the U.S.? I seem to recall that Hunter College in NYC was free.
posted by Melismata at 9:23 AM on February 1

"last year, I read a paper that advanced the idea that "back in the day" — by which the writer meant the 1990s — people didn’t commit adultery, and homosexuality didn't exist."

I just want to point out that I, a deeply nerdy person who actually read a ton of 19th century novels in their teens and who enjoyed almost everything assigned in high school lit classes with the exception of A Member of the Wedding, once flatly contradicted my senior year English teacher because I was convinced that the two main characters in Return of the Native could not possibly be having sex outside of marriage because in the 19th century no one could possibly have written openly about such a thing.

Honestly, while I'm sad that students don't know general history stuff, I'm also very sympathetic. I knew about the Cold War because I grew up at the tail end of it and it was a large presence in my life - that meant that I knew the difference between Lenin and Lennon as a matter of course. Kids today - the Cold War ended before they were born. It's just a hair farther away to them than the Viet Nam war is to me. John Lennon was shot when I was a little kid; I don't remember that, but I grew up around lots of people who do. And Nixon? Watergate happened maybe 25 years before the youth of today were even born. I wouldn't like to bet on my familiarity with the presidential scandals of the late forties and fifties - I feel pretty good that I can name the major players in McCarthyism, and repression of radicals is kind of a personal interest.

I had a conversation with a very smart young person the other day. They told me about reading an economics book which had obviously burst like a revelation on them and which they were clearly pretty proud of reading. It contained the notion that capitalism is a system which has to expand, and that crises in capitalism happen when expansion meets a limit. They clearly expected this to be a bit of a revelation to me, too, and when I was their age it would have been - I remember how "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" seemed like such an incredibly distillation of the economic wisdom of the ages, because it allowed me to explain all kinds of disparate things.

Learning is hard. I'm fairly bright, and I'm amazed at how little I've managed to learn in more than three decades of compulsive reading.
posted by Frowner at 9:23 AM on February 1 [7 favorites]

Nice piece. Clever the way he sets you up to think that it's going to be the same old "kids these days" rant and then flips it to a "plus ca change" piece. A pity more people didn't read the whole piece right through before commenting.

I think where he's really insightful is about students not asking for help. It's amazing how many times, as a professor, you find yourself repeating that old saw about there being "no such thing as a stupid question" and how completely your students refuse to buy it. The student I'm always most grateful for in my class is the utterly naive or shameless one who simply pipes up and says "I don't understand what you mean" or "what does X mean?" You can see the look of relief on a dozen faces that someone actually asked the question--but take that student out of the classroom and no one would have dared to admit to not understanding.
posted by yoink at 9:25 AM on February 1 [4 favorites]

The student I'm always most grateful for in my class is the utterly naive or shameless one who simply pipes up and says "I don't understand what you mean" or "what does X mean?"

Just repeating for emphasis, I wholeheartedly agree. I love those students.
posted by LooseFilter at 9:29 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Didn't we used to have some of this in the U.S.? I seem to recall that Hunter College in NYC was free.

The City University of New York, of which Hunter College is a part, was free until 1975. (Go to their about page, click on the first "read more".)

I seem to recall that the University of California, Berkeley didn't charge tuition up until approximately the same time, although I can't find a source for this. (I'm at Berkeley right now and there have been protests about tuition hikes on and off over the past couple years; every so often it's mentioned that the school used to be free.)
posted by madcaptenor at 9:32 AM on February 1

A commention is an internet shout out.
posted by adamdschneider at 9:33 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

My mom used to mock the arrogant attitudes of professors (and townies) towards the local college students, saying "they get younger and dumber every year." Of course the implication is that they are younger and dumber that US, as we grow older and wiser. That is quite an assumption.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:42 AM on February 1

When they're hazy on things like the existence of WWII and the Civil War and are unaware of in which century the U.S. was founded, it's hard to lecture on -- well, anything, because we have virtually no common base of knowledge.

One of my favorite "outrageous question from a student" stories comes from a playwright I know who also teaches English at a university. He was in the middle of a lecture on Thomas Paine's Common Sense when one of the students finally raised her hand, and asked, "Professor? Um....when he wrote this, was there a war going on?" He asked her a few other incredulous questions, and was able to ascertain that:

* She did not know what the Revolutionary War was.
* She did not know that what we know of as "the United States" had at one point been merely a series of colonies.
* She did not know that thirteen of these colonies were at one point the territory of Great Britain.

At one point he even asked her to take out her wallet and pull out a dollar bill. "See that guy's picture on the dollar bill?" She nodded. "You know who that is?"

"no."

"George Washington."

"Who's he?"

So he had to spend about five minutes giving her a remedial U.S. history lesson.

Now for the kicker: This professor I've just told you about teaches at Princeton.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:58 AM on February 1 [9 favorites]

EmpressCallipygos: I feel reasonably sure that I've heard this story before. Please tell me it's because you've told it before.
posted by madcaptenor at 10:02 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Now for the kicker: This professor I've just told you about teaches at Princeton.

Was the student from the United States? About 10 percent of Princeton undergrads are international students.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:05 AM on February 1

Madcap: yeah, I've told it before.

Mr_Roboto: I asked him that very question, and he said no, the student was from the U.S..
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:06 AM on February 1

There is no such thing as a poor or bad student

I've been both at different times. Sometimes the teaching was responsible. Sometimes the teaching was excellent and I just couldn't give a fuck.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 10:23 AM on February 1

Once I gave a single lecture to a group of first year students, because the head of department was worried no one was teaching them basic methodology. It was a short and simple thing, meant as a set of how-tos anyone could handle. First thing I said was please take notes, this is the last time you'll hear it for at least a year. At the end of the lecture, I asked for questions. Not a sound. Then I repeated: I'm impressed that you all understand this. This is the last time you'll hear this, and you will most certainly fail if you do not understand and apply the tools I've just given you.
A hand comes up: "Prof. mumimor, is it possible for you to repeat the whole lecture?"
(I did, for the record. I care about them. And everyone stayed on).

And yeah - 12 years ago I had an art-history class where I was asked wether the middle ages or the baroque came first. We all start as beginners, and the grumpy old men who complain are idealizing their own youth.
posted by mumimor at 10:23 AM on February 1 [2 favorites]

Perhaps the more recent frustrations are grounded in a need for a paradigm shift in the way we educate? (opposed to what we've adopted from the industrial revolution and and age of enlightenment). Or perhaps the primary goal of education should instead be to ensure we're not dangerous to ourselves or others around us in whatever career paths we choose.
posted by samsara at 10:27 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

I empathize with the article. I remember all too well what I was like as an undergrad twenty-odd years ago and I see the same thing in the college students that I teach now. I consistently go back and forth between wondering if things really have gotten worse or if I'm just having a 'get off my lawn' moment. I'm with strixus though - make mistakes, learn from them and then don't make them again!
posted by Gronk at 10:28 AM on February 1

Teachers and academics have a tendency to forget that, by definition, they were the nerdy kids who wanted to please their teachers and professors. This puts them firmly in the minority of all students at all levels.

I've been teaching for about a decade now, and I've learned to not take any of it too personally. If a kid fucks up, you do what you can to help her and carry on. I also used to think in highly personal terms of "changing lives" and so on, but that's a trap.

Maybe you will change some lives for the better, but your job is to teach and to try and do more than that is setting yourself up for failure.

Also, in a former life when I taught English literature, I quickly learned that you're basically taking things you dearly love (poems, novels, plays) and spent lots of time studying, and then asking teenagers to vomit all over them with their sheer idiocy (and the occasional insightful comment from one of the nerdy ones, the ones you seem to think constitute _all_ students).

Honestly, teaching college and high school lit. did a lot of damage to pieces of art that I used to really feel connected to. Never again.
posted by bardic at 10:49 AM on February 1 [3 favorites]

I find it interesting to see current college enrollment rates compared to the 1950s. At least in the U.S., higher education saw a big jump in the 1960s and 70s, in no small part thanks to the war. First, there were those who attended as an alternative to the draft. Then there were those who (righfully) got a paid-for education as veterans, thanks to the G.I. bill.

My story is that I came of college age the last year of the draft, by that time in no danger of actually being drafted. All of my friends were going on to college, so I went as well. Tuition at my state four year school was $600 a year, about $3,200 in today's money.

My chosen area of study was journalism. My freshman professor made it clear how difficult it was to break into that profession and if you did how dismal the pay was. Three semesters in I decided to bail on school. I worked a few good-paying (no longer existing) blue collar jobs, and eventually self-learned software development. That's still how I make a comfortable living 30 years later.

My point for mentioning this is that it would be difficult if not impossible to take the same path today. Entry level jobs in IT demand at the very least a bachelor's degree, and a move up the ladder requires an advanced degree.
posted by Sir Cholmondeley at 11:18 AM on February 1

Entry level jobs in IT demand at the very least a bachelor's degree, and a move up the ladder requires an advanced degree.

I alway think IT/software development is another interesting 'new' field where, even if you have a computer science or computer engineering degree, you're not going to use 99% of what you learn in class. Someone with an art history degree and a passionate interest in programming or in IT can be as successful or even more successful than someone with a degree that is supposedly in-field (I guess the real bottom line is that computer science != software development).
posted by muddgirl at 11:30 AM on February 1

It does bother me that we use up a great slice of people's lives and vast amounts of money on having them learn things that they neither particularly want to learn nor will ever actually put to any use. You'd think there must be some better way.
posted by philipy at 11:31 AM on February 1

My point for mentioning this is that it would be difficult if not impossible to take the same path today. Entry level jobs in IT demand at the very least a bachelor's degree, and a move up the ladder requires an advanced degree.

I think there's truth to this narrative for a lot of fields. But I'm not sure IT is the best example. There's more formalism and credential mongering than there used to be, but it's still a field built to an overwhelming extent on self-education.

I'm 30. I had a bachelor's degree by the time I got the entry level tech jobs that eventually wound me up as a software developer, but it was in History, which is not exactly taken as prima facie evidence of great tech skills by most people. I run into a lot of professional nerd folks (and work with several) who either skipped out on higher ed altogether or never finished a degree. I certainly wouldn't hesitate to hire someone for an entry-level position based on lack of a degree.

(Yeah, yeah, the plural of anecdote is not data. But still.)
posted by brennen at 11:36 AM on February 1

muddgirl: "It seems unnecessary to go back so far. My father isn't a century old, and 40 years ago both women and black people could vote and attend college. Significant changes have happened in the past 50 years, such that comparisons to 1910 seem almost meaningless.

Now, having a BA is frequently a prerequisite for being a receptionist.

That is exactly my point. It's not about the number of graduates, it's about the lack of white-collar jobs that don't require a degree and the lack of blue-collar jobs entirely.

By saying, "poor people and stupid people shouldn't go to college', we are relegating them not to good-paying factory and trade jobs, but low paying jobs in the service industry."

After my grandfather ran off, my Grandmother became responsible for raising and providing for her 5 young children. Without a High School diploma, and starting from the bottom of the ladder with almost no relevant experience, she eventually climbed all the way up to being a successful regional bank manager, and sent all 5 of her children to college.

Apart from being in complete awe of the fact that she managed this incredible feat, I'm equally impressed by the fact that our society was able to offer those kinds of opportunities to a person who literally had nothing, and allowed her to build a pretty good life for herself and her family.

For all the spouting off that today's politicians do about hard work and perseverance, our society no longer seems to actually reward that behavior. Employees are not rewarded for being more productive, and the "ladder" doesn't even seem to exist any more. We might as well be born into our roles. You didn't think that George W Bush got into Yale because he was a good student and hard worker, did you?
posted by schmod at 11:39 AM on February 1 [2 favorites]

Postroad: "There is no such thing as a poor or bad student ...there is only incompent teaching"

Bullshit. I know this because I was a bad student.
posted by notsnot at 11:47 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

You didn't think that George W Bush got into Yale because he was a good student and hard worker, did you?

Yeah, while I admire the role of vocational schools and apprenticeship systems, the bottom line is that the George W. Bush's of the world will always go to Yale and get a job at daddy's friend's company, even if in a complete blind meritocracy they'd be just as suited for auto mechanic or McDonald's worker as Joe Sixpack.
posted by muddgirl at 11:47 AM on February 1

(And by 'blind meritocracy', I mean a world where every kid goes to the alternative pre-K/kindergarten of their choice, gets three square meals a day, and gets a private tutor whenever they're struggling).
posted by muddgirl at 11:55 AM on February 1

I took a moment to jot down something interesting from the film in my notebook. My friend sitting next to me said "That's not going to be on the test." It infuriated me at the time because it was an example of the lack of intellectual curiosity I found common among my peers.

This attitude doesn't cease to exist once people are out of school. It just becomes less visible because very little forces adults to think about things. Most human beings are remarkably incurious.
posted by winna at 12:02 PM on February 1 [4 favorites]

yoink: I think where he's really insightful is about students not asking for help. It's amazing how many times, as a professor, you find yourself repeating that old saw about there being "no such thing as a stupid question" and how completely your students refuse to buy it. The student I'm always most grateful for in my class is the utterly naive or shameless one who simply pipes up and says "I don't understand what you mean" or "what does X mean?" You can see the look of relief on a dozen faces that someone actually asked the question--but take that student out of the classroom and no one would have dared to admit to not understanding.

The saddest thing to me was all the kids who actually did understand the material but were convinced they didn't. I can't count the number of times I'd ask a question, be met with a sea of silence, and then finally have one kid tentatively raise their hands and say, "Well, I know I'm probably completely wrong, but, ummm, it's like, the speaker's talking about being in love, maybe?" And I'd be all, "Yeah, you're right, this sonnet is about love." And the student would give me a disbelieving, "Really?" and I'd hear someone in the back of the class mutter, "That's what I thought!" Forget asking a difficult question, the kids I taught were, at the beginning of the semester, so convinced they were incapable of understanding the material they wouldn't venture even the most obvious of observations. A few of the kids, talking to me one on one, told me straight out they thought they were "too stupid" to understand literature.

I couldn't figure out where they got that idea, until I started paying more attention to the ways my coworkers talked about their students. With a couple of exceptions, they seemed to be evenly divided between "They're stupid freshmen and there's no use expecting anything out of them" and, well, getting frustrated and thinking their students were idiots for not being able to read Canterbury Tales in the Middle English and then hold a prolonged discussion about the differences between a Structuralist and Post-Structuralist interpretation of the narrative forms or whatever*.

All of which is to say, I kind of clicked onto this article expecting to be mildly annoyed and found myself agreeing with the author. I had some "bad" students--they were lazy, didn't care, plagarised, were disrespectful, or were drunk or high for every single class (he was pretty freaking hilarious, though...) . But mostly, I had kids who were way too intimidated to take advantage of what I was offering.

*Some of them actually are capable of having that discussion, if you lead up to it right. We ended up having a lovely conversation about gender essentialism/gender performativity and queer and trans experiences in Twelfth Night, and one of the major participants was the girl who told me she was "too stupid to understand literature." But I also had to spend about twenty minutes diagramming the plot and translating some of the phrases into contemporary english for them at the beginning of the session to get to that point.
posted by kittenmarlowe at 12:03 PM on February 1 [3 favorites]

(high school teacher here) My favorite students are the ones who are always asking questions.

My favorite professors were those who didn't know everything and sometimes learned from us.

I realize, that at almost 60 (Dragon here) I am a Relic of the Twentieth Century, and I feel like a museum piece sometimes in a room full of people who can hardly conceive of a time before the Internet (and I'm getting old enough that I sometimes forget about those Good Old Days in which I couldn't retrieve forgotten information in 60 seconds on the computer).
posted by kozad at 12:31 PM on February 1

I can't count the number of times I'd ask a question, be met with a sea of silence, and then finally have one kid tentatively raise their hands and say, "Well, I know I'm probably completely wrong, but, ummm, it's like, the speaker's talking about being in love, maybe?"

No no, all poems are really about God or Death, as drilled into us by AP English. Love is clearly wrong.

But yes, I recognize there is a bit of intimidation. And a lot of peer influence--you don't want to be the guy who constantly answers the teachers's questions like it's a 1:1 tutoring session, or establish yourself as the only student who actually knows what's going on.

There is a solution to this, but it's not something you'd want to use in Freshmen Gen-Ed classes. When you want to ask a question, don't address this to at a particular person. Use something predictable like going down the roster. If you're particularly evil, just let em hang for a while before tossing the question to someone else.

Similar tricks work in organizations: if you send a question to a distribution list / listserv, nobody responds. If you send it to a specific person on that list, suddenly they know the answer or who to forward it to.
posted by pwnguin at 12:39 PM on February 1

pwnguin: There is a solution to this, but it's not something you'd want to use in Freshmen Gen-Ed classes. When you want to ask a question, don't address this to at a particular person. Use something predictable like going down the roster. If you're particularly evil, just let em hang for a while before tossing the question to someone else.

I broke mine into small groups and rotated from group to group--they were way more comfortable asking/answering questions when it was just two or three of their friends listening. Then when they had a bit more of a grasp on things we could bring the groups back together to have full-class discussions. The teacher has to be really active and engaged with the students to get that to work, though--otherwise they spend the time talking about homecoming or the lastest football game or whatever instead of God and death* like they're supposed to be ;)

*The one question I got really, really sick of hearing: "Is this about Jesus?" Goodness knows plenty of literary scholars spend way too much time finding christ-figures in various works, but it's still annoying.
posted by kittenmarlowe at 12:46 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Alright, here is the opinions of someone who understands the student perspective *very* well, still being one, though I'll get my B.Sc soon. Now my perspective is a bit different, since I'm in chemistry, which actually does teach you useful skills --My program has you in the lab for 100+ hours over the CSC requirements for a chem degree *before* you do your 4th year thesis-- but I've taken some history classes for fun.

I agree that high school teaching isn't good enough, doubly so in the US from what I hear. Fixing this would help at the uni level as you'd have to do less remedial stuff. I was in the last year where we learned any useful form of calculus in high school, and they cut out integration the year before I hit grade 12, and they cut out grade 13 (OAC) a couple of years before I got there. Stop butchering the high school system, stop giving days off for stupid sports events left, right and center and you'll have to do a *lot* less catch up in first year.

@holdkris99 And thus why I hate grade normalization, despite cries of mark inflation.
30 people is NOT enough to garentee a normal distribution: I was in a 150 person math class in first year where the prof outright told us that we had a bimodel distribution. Sure, in a class of 1600 students like my 1st year chem class you probably have a nice bellcurve, but 30? I'm in a class that has way more straight A students then normal: If our profs normalized our marks I'd be a low B student, despite having an A- average right now, since we've got more then our share of straight A+ students that do 14 hours a day of study and/or are just that smart. Why should my mark go down because other people in my year are smart?

What I don't get is why some schools in the US are so expensive. I'm at a good, mid-sized school in Canada, I pay....$5k/year in tuition. You can get more expensive then that at University of Toronto I think, and probably cheaper at some other schools, but I haven't heard any great claims about the level of education given by them. In fact a PhD Chemist my Dad knows advised us when I was looking at schools to just go to the one I liked the best, as an undergraduate science degree is an undergraduate science degree. What on EARTH are you getting that I'm not going to one of those $40k/year schools other then a giant debt?
posted by Canageek at 12:56 PM on February 1

What I don't get is why some schools in the US are so expensive.

Which is the $35,000 question. There are a variety of theories, ranging from schools becoming dependent upon Pentagon R&D money thrown around like confetti during the Cold War, to the near-universal availability of non-dischargeable student loans, to schools adopting the "corporate" rather than "education" model, to the withdrawal of significant state and federal subsidies, to whatever. There isn't a single obvious answer.
posted by valkyryn at 1:26 PM on February 1

It's the $15,000 question, if we're comparing apples to apples. University of Toronto is a public school with tuition around $10,000 a year for domestic students. UC Berkeley is a public school with tuition around $15,000 for in-state students.
posted by muddgirl at 1:31 PM on February 1

Also, in a former life when I taught English literature, I quickly learned that you're basically taking things you dearly love (poems, novels, plays) and spent lots of time studying, and then asking teenagers to vomit all over them with their sheer idiocy (and the occasional insightful comment from one of the nerdy ones, the ones you seem to think constitute _all_ students).

As a lover of mathematics, I would like to point out that there of bits of mathematics that I dearly love that my students have vomited over.
posted by madcaptenor at 1:54 PM on February 1

I never liked math, and didn't quite understand how a proof could be "elegant," having equated elegance with women wearing pearls, but I will never forget the incredible enthusiasm my geometry teacher displayed stepping back from the chalkboard admiring his equation. I got a B one semester that year, the highest grade in my math career. Ignore the vomit; it comes with the job: it's like raising a small child.
posted by kozad at 2:01 PM on February 1

madcaptenor: UC began charging incidental fees in 1921. By 1956, fees were $84 per year; by 1975, fees were approximately $500 per year. Not free, but close.
posted by doncoyote at 2:09 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]

Next question: If there are a lot of people using undergrad degrees to go into management and such why don't we have a 'management' degree? Wouldn't that be of more use to a manager then a fine arts degree? From what I can tell most students in history don't care about history, they just need a major, and history sounds easy (I didn't say IS easy, just that it sounds easy in the minds of most students compared to math, chem or physics)

Also: It makes a LOT of sense we have more students in uni now then X years ago. More jobs are white collar now then they were X years ago, as most of the manufacturing has moved overseas. I mean, I hate to bring up a 90s term, but people in the 90s were really proud of the "knowledge economy". That seems to have fallen by the wayside as people want to go back to working in factories and at well-paying blue collar jobs, but can't get over a love of cheap goods made by paying someone $1/day.
posted by Canageek at 2:14 PM on February 1

I'm glad to hear that teachers like people who ask questions though, as I tend to be the student that asks at least one a lecture, and quite often the "hmm, that is a good question, I'm not sure of the answer to that' type. I always figured that if I was teaching I'd like people to ask questions rather then zone out all lecture, so I figured the prof wouldn't mind even if a couple of students were staring daggers into my back some lectures.
posted by Canageek at 2:17 PM on February 1

Next question: If there are a lot of people using undergrad degrees to go into management and such why don't we have a 'management' degree?

Our college system is founded on the principle of 'liberal arts' - don't teach students how to do a job, teach students how to think, how to learn and how to be a good citizen. Job skills can only be taught on the job.

It's possible that the concept of a liberal arts education is no longer useful for our society.
posted by muddgirl at 2:18 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]

What on EARTH are you getting that I'm not going to one of those $40k/year schools other then a giant debt?

Welllllll. Ok, this depends a lot on the experience you're having, but at small, private, liberal arts colleges in the US, there is a very, very marked difference from what people get at larger public universities. I went to a fairly standard midwestern state land-grant institution and muddled my way along to a degree, accomplishing very little of distinction. My youngest sister and a long-term girlfriend both went to much smaller, pricier private colleges, and had tiny, seminar style classes, close relationships with faculty, travel opportunities, and a fairly strong sense of community. My sister studied abroad, did fieldwork in botany, and helped run organizations on campus.

These places aren't perfect - you see plenty of self-absorbed bullshit, they tend to be bastions of white privilege, and the cost is completely fucking absurd - but at the same time, there are reasons people pay the money.
posted by brennen at 4:07 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]

If there are a lot of people using undergrad degrees to go into management and such why don't we have a 'management' degree?

We do. It's called "business". It's the most popular major in the country. It's, academically speaking, a load of complete hooey.
posted by valkyryn at 6:32 PM on February 1 [4 favorites]

@brennen: So the only upside I'm seeing vis-a-vis actual education is the smaller classes, which is pretty nice, but don't you normally get those once you hit upper years and have specialized? I mean, I've had classes of well under 30 students at a uni the size of Michigan State, and I am in an unusually large year.
posted by Canageek at 6:33 PM on February 1

I tend to think all that sitting around in giant lecture halls for lower-level courses is not one of the better features of the undergraduate experience at big research universities.

Beyond that, I guess I view the other stuff I mentioned as part of an actual education.
posted by brennen at 4:41 AM on February 2

Canageek: I mean, I've had classes of well under 30 students at a uni the size of Michigan State, and I am in an unusually large year.

Just as a data point, thirty would be a large class at the school I did my undergrad in. Anything that wasn't a straight up gen-ed was more around 15 students (and even some of my gen-eds were under 15). My Latin III class was me and my friend Leah, and I was technically auditing it. It existed because I went to the professor--who wasn't even in my department--and said, hey, we'd like to take this class at this time. And he said, "sure, I'll talk to the head and make it happen." I got a couple of courses added to the catalog/curriculum in our department pretty much the same way. It was really common for students to go over to profs' houses to eat or just hang out and watch movies, or to just crash in someone's office between classes and chat.

I did my master's at a medium sized state school, and while I liked and got along with my professors just fine, it wasn't nearly as personal.
posted by kittenmarlowe at 1:56 PM on February 2

@brennen: I view the actual skills you take away from it as the education. If I was thrown into a lab tomorrow would it help me be a better chemist?

Being at one of those large public unis: It isn't hard to get a relationship with the profs, you just have to be one of the 10 students in the class of 1600 that actually gives a damn about the class. (Note: This is more the 'occasionally sit around and talk about chemistry personal, not what kittenmarlowe talks about below)

For travel: My last three jobs have been on Montreal, North Ontario and Vancouver, all summer jobs. I know a number of people who have traveled even further (Germany for example), so I don't think that is an exclusive feature of rich unis.

I fail to see how leading a club teaches you anything, sounds more like the 'I joined three execs so that pharmacy school would take me' thing my freind is doing. She doesn't give a damn about the clubs, but you need to be on at least one or two for med school (or in her case, pharmacy school) to look at you since 'it shows leadership'. Nooo, it might have back before everyone KNEW that is what you did to get into med school....But I think I'm going into another rant there.

@kittenmarlowe That is crazy, and I wish we could do stuff like that. But still, it doesn't seem worth being in debt for the next 30 years to get! I have friends despairing about life because they have $30K of debt, which wouldn't even cover a *year* at a ivy league school. I can't imagine being stuck with a degree that isn't a 'there is a clear job path' degree (Say, English, philosophy) and $120k of debt!

I've been wishing we had a 4th year mass spec. class for a while, it would be lovely if there was some way of making that happen...but I can go buy textbooks for a lot less then that, and find a mass spec chemist and ask if I have questions!
posted by Canageek at 2:02 PM on February 2

Personally, I chose to go to a smaller college vs. going to an in-state university because of class flexibility in my major. Engineering majors at, say, UC Berkeley, are essentially handed a 4-year class schedule. If I had decided to be an engineer after Freshman year (which is what I did at my small school), I would have had to take a 5th year. That year wouldn't have been covered on any scholarship or grant, and I would have ended up more than $20,000 in debt.

At my smaller college, I had much more flexibility, was guaranteed a 4-year graduation, and graduated with $15,000 in loans thanks to grants and scholarships.

I also worked closely for three years in a lab with a professor, published a paper, and went to an international conference. Because I had an academic connection with an alumni, I was fast-track interviewed for my current job. And I'm not in the top 10 in any class (except, I suppose, the graduate seminar I took as a senior which had literally 10 students). It really is all about 'connections,' which are frankly harder for introverts like me to make in larger social groups.

The math is absolutely different for richer families who may not qualify for need-based scholarships. I would never say that a large university experience is worth less than a small college one - every student is different. I thrived at my college - some of my friends hated it and wished they had gone to UCLA.
posted by muddgirl at 2:11 PM on February 2

Oops, I published two papers.
posted by muddgirl at 2:11 PM on February 2

I don't want to be the guy who's all rah rah expensive private liberal arts colleges; all I'm trying to say is that the environment at these places is often such that things which might be available to really self-directed, cream-of-the-crop students at bigger, less undergrad-focused institutions is more likely to be just be a normal part of the experience. Also I suppose that skills (not to mention social networks etc.) don't just emerge from classrooms.

Yes, the money is kind of nuts, the potential debt is terrifying, and cheaper public schools have their own advantages. But if the question is "what are people paying for here", the answer is certainly not "nothing".
posted by brennen at 2:15 PM on February 2

Canageek: But still, it doesn't seem worth being in debt for the next 30 years to get! I have friends despairing about life because they have $30K of debt, which wouldn't even cover a *year* at a ivy league school. I can't imagine being stuck with a degree that isn't a 'there is a clear job path' degree (Say, English, philosophy) and $120k of debt!

Yeah--I got my degrees in English, and I'm working retail right now (the majority of my paycheck goes to my loans...) , so I can totally understand why it wouldn't be something everyone would want to do! And certainly you get get an equally good education at a larger state school. You often have more options, for example, and have more of a likelihood of having someone in your department with a focus on what you want to specialize in*, or who is an expert in their particular field. I don't regret it for a minute, but large state schools and/or practical majors can be a much better choice for some people.


*My thesis advisor at my grad school, for example, had a dual specialization in women's studies and fantastic/speculative fiction , which fit in exactly with what I wanted to do, whereas my small liberal arts school wouldn't have had anybody who had much experience publishing in either.
posted by kittenmarlowe at 2:20 PM on February 2

Also remember that in the US, anyone going to a state school that's not in their home state will be paying tuition equivalent to a private school. We don't have a nationalized university system. 25% of UC Berkeley freshman are from out-of-state and pay somewhat comparable rates to if they had gone to Stanford.
posted by muddgirl at 2:25 PM on February 2