http://chronicle.com/article/A-Perfect-Storm-in/126969/

By Thomas H. Benton

What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated
from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking
factors that have contributed to the problem.

In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming
data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift:
Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
in the context of President Obama's call for more students to attend
college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked,
should we send more students to college—at an ever greater cost—when
more
than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate "no
improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills"
after four years of education?

This month I want to speculate on why students (and, to a lesser extent,
their parents) are not making choices that support educational success.
What could they possibly be thinking?

The student as consumer. Surely adolescent expectations of Animal House
debaucheries have been with us since the decline of college as
preparation
for the ministry. But, in the past few generations, the imagery and
rhetoric of academic marketing have cultivated a belief that college
will
be, if not decadent, at least primarily recreational: social activities,
sporting events, and travel. Along the way, there may be some elective
cultural enrichment and surely some preprofessional training and
internships, the result of which will be access to middle-class careers.
College brochures and Web sites may mention academic rankings, but
students probably won't read anything about expectations of rigor and
hard
work: On the contrary, "world-renowned professors" will provide you with
a
"world-class education." Increasingly, students are buying an
"experience"
instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract
customers, that's what's colleges are selling.

Changing forms of literacy. A generational shift is taking place in
which
longer forms of writing are being replaced with shorter ones, and
sustained thought with shallower forms of multitasking. Those skills
have
value, but a growing percentage of students are arriving at college
without ever having written a research paper, read a novel, or taken an
essay examination. And those students do not perceive that they have
missed something in their education; after all, they have top grades. In
that context, the demands of professors for different kinds of work can
seem bewildering and unreasonable, and students naturally gravitate to
courses with more-familiar expectations. Without a carefully structured
curriculum with required courses and regulation of standards across
comparable courses, it's possible to graduate without acquiring
foundational skills. Lacking proper preparation for college-level work,
it's no wonder that so many students resort to plagiarism and paper
mills,
particularly since untenured college teachers—more than 70 percent of
the
faculty and growing—do not have the support needed to counter rampant
cheating. And students know it.

Declining academic engagement. Students increasingly are pressured to go
to college not because they want to learn (much less become prepared for
the duties of citizenship), but because they and their parents
believe—perhaps rightly—that not going will exclude them from
middle-class
jobs. At the same time, much of the academic program, particularly
general
education, seems disconnected from the practical skills needed to secure
those jobs. In order to maintain that Potemkin Village, faculty members
and students have entered into a "disengagement compact," in which they
place fewer demands on each other so that other interests—research for
the
professor and social activities for the students—can be pursued with
fewer
distractions. Professors pretend to teach, students pretend to learn.
That
results in the cultivation of students' instincts, guided by checklist
rubrics, for doing the least amount of work necessary to receive the
desired level of distinction, in a context in which the A- is the new C.
Even the brightest students have doubts about whether they should work
toward genuine accomplishment if they're getting the same A as someone
who
barely tries.

Alienation from professors. Many students cannot imagine going to speak
with a professor in his or her office. At most universities, a student
is
likely to be unknown to the professor and would expect to feel like a
nuisance, a distraction from more important work. In addition, many
students arrive believing that professors, especially in the humanities
and social sciences, are mostly political radicals who will try to
convert
them to some outlandish belief system from another era. (It doesn't help
that professors are now so much older, on average, than their students;
ironically, the baby boomers now preside over the widest generation gap
academe has ever seen.) It leads to the suspicion among students that
any
criticism of their work that is not objective (2+2=4) might be based on
some kind of political or personal bias. At the same time, students
recognize that most of the teachers with whom they have more personal
contact—graduate students, adjuncts, and other part-timers—are not well
regarded by their institutions. Their lack of income, benefits, and job
security are an insidious advertisement for the low status of some kinds
of learning. Moreover, transient faculty members can't help your career,
since they may not be around next year and their recommendations carry
little weight.

Expanding social and extracurricular commitments. As academic
expectations
have decreased, social programming and extracurricular activities have
expanded to fill more than the available time. That is particularly the
case for residential students, for whom the possibility of social
isolation is a source of great anxiety. Moreover, the status hierarchies
of college come primarily from nonacademic activities that often
translate
directly into career opportunities after graduation through the power of
alumni networks. For those reasons, it is not uncommon for students to
expect to be formally excused from a substantial portion of scheduled
classes in order to participate in some nonacademic activity. In some
respects, that is a positive sign, because much—perhaps most—of the
achievement to which students direct their energies is now in activities
(like sports) where competition is the norm, excuses are not accepted,
and
the authority of experts has been preserved. Excessive involvement with
academic pursuits—beyond what is required to earn unexceptionally high
grades—has become a marker of low status, social isolation, and lack of
orientation toward the most important way that postgraduation success is
achieved, via networking and connections in which professors do not
figure
prominently.

The escalating cost of education. Students' fears about unemployment
after
graduation are compounded by the awareness of the debt they are
accumulating in pursuit of their degrees. College has become
unaffordable
for most people without substantial loans; essentially they are
mortgaging
their future in the expectation of greater earnings. In order to reduce
borrowing, more and more students leave class early or arrive late or
neglect assignments, because they are working to provide money for
tuition
or living expenses. It is also true that many students are working
longer
hours in order to afford social activities, cars, and consumer goods,
and
shortchanging their education as a result. Whatever the reason, more
students are coming to classes exhausted and distracted by concerns
about
money, coupled with greater anxiety about whether their future earnings
will compensate for the cost of their education. It's a kind of vicious
circle: The more you have to borrow to attend college, the more likely
it
is that you lack social capital that, more than anything else,
determines
access to careers.

Anxiety about future employment. As students' anxiety about the future
increases, no amount of special pleading for general-education courses
on
history, literature, or philosophy—really anything that is not obviously
job-related—will convince most students that they should take those
courses seriously. The job market seems to demand increasing
specialization, leaving less time for intellectual exploration. As a
result, more students are majoring (or double majoring) from the
beginning
of college in subjects that do not especially interest them but seem to
offer some promise of employment. The trouble is, advance information
about the economy is often wrong; the curriculum can barely keep up with
technological changes, and faculty members are generally isolated from
the
job market. But it is hard for a young person to understand that higher-
order thinking skills—those most needed in a turbulent job market—can
come
from courses that are not obviously job-related: Shakespeare can be more
useful, in the long term, than a course about last year's software.
Students may be receptive to that possibility—and to the chance of
studying something that truly interests them—but uncertainties about the
future have ushered in an era of grim pragmatism and short-term
planning.

Students feeling disillusioned, bored, apathetic, scared, and trapped.
Perhaps the most memorable response I received to the previous column
was
from a college junior who recalled that she "really thought college
would
be an incredible experience. ... I expected a series of heated debates
in
class, and meeting for coffee to discuss classroom topics. But all I
hear
is 'I'm bored' and 'I just don't care.'" A lot of students have worked
extraordinarily hard to get into the "right" kind of college, only to
wonder what all the hype was about. The common experience is that
getting
admitted is the most exhausting part. After that, the struggle mainly is
financial. But at the major universities, most professors are too busy
to
care about individual students, and it is easy to become lost amid a sea
of equally disenchanted undergraduates looking for some kind of
purpose—and not finding it.

Academically Adrift ends on a depressing note: "A renewed commitment to
improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes
to
the organizational cultures of colleges and universities." Institutions
are inherently conservative; they do not change easily. Many leaps of
faith are necessary, and the people involved—teachers, students,
parents,
administrators, lawmakers, and others—have so many fundamental
disagreements about the purposes of higher education that it is hard to
know where to begin the conversation. It's far easier to make cuts to an
inherently broken system than to begin building something new.

One hopes for an emerging consensus—another Sputnik moment—that will
affirm Arum and Roksa's position that we need to make "rigorous and
high-
quality educational experiences a moral imperative." Whether that means
college in a traditional sense is a different question. But that's a
topic
for another column.



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Maxim 12: A soft answer turneth away wrath.
Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.