College The Easy Way, Bob Herbert NYT, 5Mar2011

In this column Bob summarizes a book "Academically Adripft: Limited Learning on College Campuses" by Profs Richard Arum of NYU and Josipa Toksa of UV. He quotes the book, "Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but--moretroubling still--they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviours that are often at odds with academic commitment."

Wow.

I don't know that I agree with this dire assessment of the current student. Both as a new undergraduate oh so many years ago and teaching relatively new undergraduates this past year, I don't see this vast change in the youth of america. However I can see where these authors get their thesis. According to Bob, "the authors cite empirical work showing that the average amounts of time spent studying by college students has dropped by more than 50 percent since the early 1960s." The study is available at highered.ssrc.org. I am not going to take the time to verify it, but my suspicion is that some societal trends are reflected in these numbers, not some fundamental change in the students.

First, I believe that far more high school students aspire to attend college than in the 1960s. There has been a drumbeat for my entire life telling young people that the key to a better life is education. This has had an affect on student and parent alike with their willingness to dig deeper to afford the inexorably rising cost of education. So demand, I suspect, is much higher now than it was back then.

Second, the natural response of educational institutions to an increase in demand in a market that has been relatively inelastic is to increase supply. At least here in California, there is no shortage of educational options from community colleges to mediocre universities to some of the best schools in the world. They range from publicly financed state schools, to for-profit institutions to prestigious private universities. Let's not kid ourselves, these institutions compete against each other whether they want to admit it or not. And internally they are very concerned about how many they graduate. What student or parent will find a school attractive that graduates a very small percentage of their accepted students? Once you are in there is a lot of pressure to get the student out with a degree.

Has there been a diminishment of the critical reasoning skills of our students in this period? I confess to having a inclination to agree. For what I need to teach, critical reasoning and abstract thinking are vital. I can accept that not everyone will have those skills but I am already working with a class of students who have presumably already demonstrated this ability over many semesters of work. I am not sure I always see this demonstrated in their written product. I have attributed it more to the lack of the kind of deep intellectual writing that is required to succeed in academia or a profession tilted toward the liberal arts. I have always thought it was a reflection of the kind of oral tradition TV, radio and internet give us and away from the book, academic paper and dissertation that is the academic tradition.

But maybe their right and I'm wrong.