"Ultimately, the public policy question is why the financially strapped federal government provides billions of dollars to subsidize students participating in the increasingly expensive and hedonistic experience we call ‘higher education?’
Why do states subsidize the institutions that are responsible for this decline, rather than directly supporting a modest number of serious, hard-working and financially needy students? Why is higher education so dysfunctional, and becoming more so daily? When is the bubble going to burst? Run; do not walk, to the store to get this
book."
—
Innovations (blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education), Richard Vedder: Academically Adrift: A Must-Read [Jan 20, 2011]
I’ve not read Adrift yet, but evidently it marshals evidence which clearly shows that a college degree is increasingly a distinction in bullshit. Students don’t spend very much time studying, don’t encounter trying intellectual challenge, aren’t required to write the sort of thing that anyone who attended college more than about 15 years ago would consider a “term paper,” and don’t learn very much.
There is a great comment on the post from commenter dboyles. Granted it verges on tl;dr territory but I am providing so much of it because all this commenter’s insights are valuable (emphasis added):
Students in content-oriented classes in particular (and that means STEM education) have increasingly put the responsibility on the talking head in front of the classroom to “tell them everything they are supposed to know.” Clearly, this shift of responsibility was to save the student the sheer time of work outside of class (homework = the work that a student is to do at home”) and cater to illusions of just how effortless a “good” teacher could make learning, rather than its opposite, namely, that good teachers are those who know how to put students to work. Many faculty were and are more than willing to comply with student demands for a variety of reasons, not the least being student opinion surveys that have shifted responsibility onto the faculty members with no mention on the surveys of the responsibility required or time spent by the student outside of class. This conspicuous absence of mention of the time spent outside of class studying or of the sweat equity required by the student in mastering the course content was a sign to many of us, as were comments “I follow your lectures just fine but do poorly on your exams.” Coupled with fads such as “just in time learning” where on-the-spot teaching supposedly could address everything a student could or was to know, traditional guidelines such as “two hours out of class for every hour in class” gradually disappeared from university catalogs and regents policy manuals with nothing to replace them other than pleasing the customer as the sine qua non of good teaching.
As an adjunct college faculty, I have certainly observed some students whose thinking falls into that extreme category, of thinking that the professor’s job is to make the course effortless. I’m not sure the exact conception they have of school, but it seems to be that even if they don’t take notes or do any homework, they should still score a C or higher on tests, just on the merits of having sat inside the classroom during lecture.
Louis Menand argues in The New Yorker that this is the effect of an expansion of higher education, notably of requiring that those picking up tech-oriented degrees in vocational fields, rack up a minimal catalog of humanities courses. I understand the argument to be that those who are not the type of student who would not traditionally be taking a college-level humanities class, are now enrolled in such courses in high volume. Since it reflects poorly at many institutes for the professor to fail these students in high numbers (the result if they held them to the same standards as they’d have been held 15+ years ago), the course is dumbed down. It’s like the dumbing down is an open secret, and everyone’s in on it.
