Excerpts from Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis
“Introduction”
[Unfortunately], the contemporary reality is that young people – the so-called millennial generation – are under tremendous pressure to go to university, and a certain percentage are pushed into university, rather than pulled by the allure of higher learning. [When this problem compounded with others like it occur the] student enters university unprepared, [so] he or she is less likely to be fully engaged while there, and to fully benefit from the university if he or she graduates. This sequence suggests that the roots of the crises of the university lie in part with factors outside of it and beyond its control. Accordingly, the crisis should not be blamed on the hapless students who are caught up in it. The more obvious factors creating the crisis are: a wider society that provides myriad hedonistic distractions that make book learning boring in comparison; high schools that push students through to graduation without attending to their skill levels; a corporate-driven youth culture that distracts young people from higher-order goals of self-improvement; government policies that have downloaded more of the costs of the university education to students; a workplace where a minimum wage does not allow young people to live independently or pay for their educations; a debt load in the twenty to thirty thousands of dollars upon graduation; job uncertainty; and a labour force that does not need the number of highly skilled workers that universities ostensibly produce.
“Troubles in Paradise”
The Disengaged Student
Although some professors are quite prepared to mentor undergraduate students and guide them step by step, they are by no means typical, especially at larger universities. This leaves increasing numbers of undergraduate students who are now pushed into unversities in a bind, because taking them under wing and individually leading them through higher education is not the top priority in most universities, especially larger, research-intensive ones. Students at the university level must be self-directed and self-motivated and cannot rely on the system to structure their education to the extent that high schools typically do, and as we shall see, the wider popular culture does not prepare the individual student to take ownership of his or her life’s decisions and personal responsibilities.
The sheer number of students now coming to Canadian universities puts pressure on the system . . . [and said universities] could handle these numbers if students were better prepared by their high school training, in the skills they bring with them and their willingness to work at their studies. However, there are serious problems in motivation and ability among a sizable proportion of students sent to universities from Canadian high schools. As a result of grade inflation, increasing numbers of students with inadequate learning skills do not feel they need to improve, primarily because they were told for years in high school that they were good or excellent students, when in fact many were not. Most professors can relate stories about indignant students who complain about a low mark claiming either that they always ‘did it this way’ and had no problems before, or that they are A or ‘honours’ students, so there must be a problem with the way the professor grades.
[Many] professors find teaching less gratifying and more annoying, as they must now deal with an increasing variety of tactics used by disengaged students to avoid doing the little work now required of them.
Giving students Cs can be a problem for the quality of working life for professors because of students’ sometimes aggressive or passive-aggressive responses to receiving the grade. Remember, most of these students were routinely given As and Bs in high school, and therefore developed views of themselves as outstanding or ‘special,’ rather than average. They are likely to say, ‘But I worked so hard on that,’ when awarded a grade of anything less than an A or B. The truth is likely that they worked hard the night before, cramming to study or pulling an all-nighter both to research and to write an essay that was supposed to involve intensive study, forethought, library time, and at least several weeks of preparation.
Credentialism and Academic Disengagement
However, the [problem with the] requirement to gain credentials undermines teachers’ efforts to get their students’ full attention in academic learning and skills development. Most students feel compelled to stay in school, but there is also a widespread sense that much of what goes on there is irrelevant to their futures. Certainly, many students feel that school activities are irrelevant to their immediate lives. Young people now have many more interesting and pleasurable distractions, against which book learning does not stand a chance except among a few outstanding students dismissed by the student culture as ‘brains’ or ‘nerds.’ Indeed, at the risk of homogenizing all students, mainstream student culture presents itself as a critical mass to secondary-school teachers – and increasingly university professors – in its general disinterest in content and passive resistance to scholastic effort.
When there are no standards defined by an administrative overseer . . . what sets in is the ‘disengagement compact,’ a term coined by George Kuh . . . . This tacit agreement between teachers and students is ‘I’ll leave you along if you leave me alone. That is, I won’t make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won’t have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well.’ In this compact, students get higher grades through pestering, or the threat of it, rather than by actually doing the required work or working at a level once required of university [level] students. Not all teachers engage in this compact, but it seems to be spreading, certainly through high schools, and increasingly at universities.
If they hope to avoid or combat the disengagement, teachers can react by ‘getting tough,’ but they will bear the consequences personally if they do not have administrative support in a commercialized setting where students are increasingly seen as ‘customers,’ who, in the logic of commercialism, are always right.
[Teachers who wish to] maintain the integrity of their courses . . . can develop reputations as being ‘unreasonable,’ . . . and have to deal with student misbehaviour ranging from passive-aggressiveness in class through to outright aggressiveness when students insist on higher grades. [Many] students simply refuse to incorporate new information into their assessments and understandings of the world. Change (of opinion) makes them uncomfortable, and those who challenge them to change their views are seen as ‘bad’ teachers. In the ‘feel good’ culture of the day, anything that demands change, even of ideas about how the world works, can produce discomfort, which is to be avoided.
[Many students feel just being present in class constitutes effort. However, as] American psychologist Laurence Steingberg [states in his work] Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do,
The stereotyped portrayals of disenfranchised teenagers
in the classroom that we have become so accustomed to
seeing in film and on television are not, it turns out,
exaggerations. True, most students report that they attend
classes regularly . . . But at the same time, it is clear that
when they are in school, a huge proportion of students are
physically present but psychologically absent . . . between
one third and 40 percent of students say that when they are
in class, they are neither trying very hard nor paying attention.
Two thirds say they have cheated on a test in the past year.
Nine out of ten report that they have copied someone else’s homework.
When a critical mass of students has a mindset established by an anti-school peer culture and apathetic parents, schools respond by trying to accommodate them in order to avoid widespread dropout.
Roots of Student Disengagement
Mandating such low levels of effort with inflated grades gives the message that students do not need to try harder to improve themselves intellectually, along with reading, writing, and verbal skills that underpin intellectual acuity. Instead of requiring high school students to exercise independent intellectual effort in digesting material, high schools typically engage in ‘spoon-feeding.’ [Unfortunately, this only leads to further disengagement and less motivation.]
Consequently, with the exception of fully engaged students, students tend to be more extrinsically motivated and instrumental in their approach to their studies. Because they do not see a direct link between their course materials, assignments, tests, and potential jobs, they are less likely to value the intrinsic worth and practical use of their courses, and instead to obsess more about the outcome of courses (grades) than about learning. In other words, partially engaged and disengaged students tend to be motivated more by the promise of high grades rather than the love of learning, and they see their university courses as stepping stones to something in the future, rather than deriving intrinsic satisfaction from the potential learning experiences of the moment.
Sorting, Weeding, and Cooling
[Many] students are . . . passed through high school with minimal preparation for the rigours of advanced, independent learning found in universities of the past, essentially eliminating high school’s sorting function. Consequently, instead of taking the time to properly prepare those students with ‘university potential’ to read, write, speak, and think at that level, teachers often give them inflated grades and a pat on the back, along with the rest who do not have that potential or ‘smarts.’ The inflated grades of those with university potential may still differentiate them for those who do not have it . . . but they have been over-rewarded for substandard work in the process. Many of our students confess to this fault and remark how easy – and unchallenging – high school was for them.
The result of this development is that universities now assume the same type of sorting, weeding, and cooling functions once carried out principally by high schools. These functions can be summarized as follows:
Sorting involves determining who is certified to go where, optimally done through assessments of ability and interest, and gauging of motivation and effort. High schools now pass on more people who are not sure what they are good at or what they want to do, rather than taking the time to help them figure those things out before they proceed to university. One culprit here is the middle-class notion that anything less than a white-collar professional career is a sign of personal failure, a notion that blinds students, teachers, and parents alike to alternatives like the trades.
Weeding involves reducing the sheer numbers of people who want to reach the highest levels, which are mainly professional and business schools that lead to lucrative careers. . .
Finally, cooling is the cruelest function of all, but necessary for educational systems to maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Cooling refers to dealing psychologically with the ‘over-promised’ students, easing them out of the system by diminishing their expectations, and it is a function especially necessary for students who have been promoted beyond the limits of their abilities and motivations . . . . [Moreover,] universities . . . bring many erstwhile A students down to a C average, from which they must now climb by increasing their effort and honing their abilities. Those who are unwilling to do this will not survive the university experience, especially those who are ‘unteachable’ – who have an unrealistically high assessment of themselves and their abilities, and who are therefore indignant when criticized in any way.
The Obsession with High Grades: Grade Inflation up Close
Comparing schools (or regions) with and without grade inflation helps bring a second problem into focus. Assigning higher grades simply for effort, or to motivate students to try harder, gives students false feedback about their ability. If we give high grades to all who try hard, but who do not improve their mastery of a subject, we are being dishonest and doing a disservice to them and the wider society. Their lack of mastery and learning will eventually show up . . . if they move on to a higher level of education or manage to land a job actually expecting a highly skilled worker.
“The Professor as a Reluctant Gatekeeper”
How the New Functions Have Affected the Interpersonal Dynamics of Teaching and Learning: Faculty Disengagement
[Many] students are now typically coached throughout high school to think of themselves as winners, making professors’ jobs that much more difficult than in the past, when students came in with lower (though realistic) grades and lower expectations about the return for their performance. Mediocre students especially have these expectations – no one wants to think of himself or herself as average, and most are told that they are ‘special’ – so professors must break the news to them. Some students have not had to face real challenges in the past, where failures are experienced along with successes, so they will find it especially difficult to face challenges in university, and to deal with the consequences when they are anything but positive.
[Many schools] give students false promises about how their educational efforts will pay off. These messages are given in an attempt to keep students in school, and to help universities keep enrolments growing, but they can do more harm than good in the long run. The implicit message is that the educational system leads to good jobs – even fantastic careers in law, medicine, and the professions commonly shown on popular television. But the message is false because fewer than 10 per cent of the workforce hold such jobs . . . yet some 90 per cent of grade 9 students assume that they will go to university en route to such careers. Some have said that the system is ‘over-promising’ students.