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Scriptorium Philosophia
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The average college student today
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The average college student today
How things have changed
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I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor
for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile
since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what
they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the
knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids
today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the
clouds, dude.”[15]1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because
people need to know.
First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our
students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations,
intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga
pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift.
That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves
a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All
I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of
the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.
As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy
majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA
Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman
for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to
every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students
at Average State U.
Scriptorium Philosophia is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts
and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Reading
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By
“functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by
people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked
those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an
objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all
and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking
about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or
Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or
whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult
novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it.
They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,[29]2
and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and
try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron
Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound
out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get
through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the
words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online
HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even
take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu
is a chore and to be avoided.
[30]
[https]
The Buffalo wings look good
They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach.
It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I
did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most
engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come
to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell
me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The
most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t
understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking
at TikTok.
This [31]study says that 65% of college students reported that they skipped
buying or renting a textbook because of cost. I believe they didn’t buy the
books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the
excuse they offer. Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are
expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for
one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. Why buy
what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it.
Even in upper-division courses that students supposedly take out of genuine
interest they won’t read. I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is
entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. The
reading ranges from accessible but challenging to extremely difficult but we’re
making a go of it anyway (looking at you, Being and Nothingness). This is a
close textual analysis course. My students come to class without the books,
which they probably do not own and definitely did not read.
Writing
Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar
is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse
is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission
of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man
towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his
concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?
Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the
destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things
becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he
contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think
something else later. It’s all relative.
You probably think that’s satire. Either that, or it looks like this:
Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man
towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his
concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?
Student: Dostoevsky’s Underground Man paradoxically rejects the idea that
people always act in their own self-interest, arguing instead that humans
often behave irrationally to assert their free will. He criticizes
rationalist philosophies like utilitarianism, which he sees as reducing
individuals to predictable mechanisms, and insists that people may choose
suffering just to prove their autonomy. However, his stance is
self-contradictory—while he champions free will, he is paralyzed by
inaction and self-loathing, trapped in a cycle of bitterness. Through this,
Dostoevsky explores the tension between reason, free will, and
self-interest, exposing the complexities of human motivation.
That’s right, ChatGPT. The students cheat. I’ve written about cheating in “[33]
Why AI is Destroying Academic Integrity,” so I won’t repeat it here, but the
cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give. I can’t assign
papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to
make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a
muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.
Arithmetic
I’m less informed to speak out on this one, but my math prof friends tell me
that their students are increasingly less capable and less willing to put in
the effort. As a result they have had to make their tests easier with fewer
hard problems. When I was a first semester freshman (at a private SLAC, yes,
but it wasn’t CalTech) I took Calculus 1. Second semester I took Calculus 2. I
don’t think pre-calculus was even a thing back then. Now apparently pre-calc
counts as an advanced content course. My psych prof friends who teach
statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.
Symbolic Logic was a requirement when I was a grad student. The course was a
cross-listed upper-division undergrad/grad class. Jaegwon Kim taught the
course, and our sole textbook was W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic, which we
worked through in its entirety. I think we spent two weeks on propositional
logic before moving on to the predicate calculus. We proved compactness,
soundness, and completeness, and probably some other theorems I forget. There
is no possible way our students, unless they were math or computer science
majors, would survive that class.
What’s changed?
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.
Things have changed. Ted Gioia [36]describes modern students as checked-out,
phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore [37]writes, “I once believed my students
and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That
faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a
[38]stunning level of disconnection.
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What has changed exactly?
• Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE
problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all
sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. Actually it was
more than that, since I’m not counting excused absences or students who
eventually withdrew. A friend in Mathematics told me, “Students are less
respectful of the university experience —attendance, lateness, e-mails to
me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility.”
• Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during
the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they
simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about
some problem. They just pull an Amelia Earhart. It’s gotten to the point
that on the first day of class, especially in lower-division, I tell the
students, “look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be
gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you.”
• They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a
50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m
supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the
reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call
them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I’ve even told them to
plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road
trip, but it has no effect. They can’t make it an hour without getting
their phone fix.
• They want me to do their work for them. During the Covid lockdown, faculty
bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during
an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that
as a matter of routine. 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. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate. Read
the book. Come to office hours for a conversation if you are still confused
after the preceding steps. Last week I had an email from a student who
essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material
for him prior to yesterday’s midterm. No, I’m not doing that. I’m not
writing you a 3000-word email. Try coming to class.
• Pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if
I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and
get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode
into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small
part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me,
“hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I
thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his
computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not
listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a
screen.
• Indifference. Like everyone else, I allow students to make up missed work
if they have an excused absence. No, you can’t make up the midterm because
you were hungover and slept through your alarm, but you can if you had
Covid. Then they just don’t show up. A missed quiz from a month ago might
as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make
it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.
• [51]It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones.
When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students
there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was
talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out
all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put
down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get
off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun.
Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their [52]goon caves at all.
I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is
a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them
all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their
jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a
while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down.
Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into
bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.
We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use
multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck
chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down. As if it is
somehow the fault of the faculty. It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we
can with what we’ve been given.
All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though,
not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the
students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we
have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics,
sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our
job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but
it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.
Thanks for reading Scriptorium Philosophia! This post is public so feel free to
share it.
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Careful about [55]bogus “ancient” quotations on this topic, though.
[56]2
Students often ask me the meaning of common words on exams, words like
“caricature.”
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[65]Matthew Lewis
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Liked by Hilarius Bookbinder
I was a nontraditional student who went to law school at 33. It wasn't much
better there.
I ended up graduating in the top 5% of my class. During the three year ride,
peers would ask how to get their GPA up. I only had a three step strategy: (1)
do all of the reading for each class the day before class or earlier; (2) in
class, take notes by hand without any devices nearby; and (3) outline the
course material before the (usually comprehensive) final exam. No one ever
mentioned following that advice but more than a few of the people I told that
to would ask me for my outlines at the end of the semester.
The scary thing for me was that I found myself explaining basic concepts we
learned in 1L--such as the three categories of torts--to peers who would be
graduating (two years later). They just could not retain the material. These
are practicing attorneys who I still sometimes field basic questions from.
I blame the K-12 system. Grade inflation and No Child Left Behind have resulted
in grades from American public schools being essentially worthless as a
representation of their academic ability. Parents know they can just throw a
fit if their child is ever on the cusp of being held back or even getting a
failing grade.
There is a much bigger societal issue under the surface, for sure. We're all
slaves to our addictions now. Work and school are things people do to
facilitate their video games, cell phone scrolling, gambling, etc. I don't know
how you teach discipline and restraint to people who have spent their entire
lives in the crosshairs of a legion of software developers who want to
weaponize our reward systems for a small increase in engagement.
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[71]Alexander j Pasha
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Liked by Hilarius Bookbinder
This intellectual regression is politically very frightening, what happens to
already eroding freedoms when illiterate addicts form a plurality of the
public?
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