Professor talking here. My particular bee in my bonnet that contributes to this is the required end of term teaching evaluations. Instead of judging quality of instruction by, say, measuring how much students learn in a class, departments judge me by how much my students say they like me. It's like a baking contest where instead of tasting the finished cake we ask whether the flour and eggs enjoyed the process. We do need feedback, but we never really judge whether the student actually learned what was on the syllabus. One of my colleagues had the lowest dept evals and students complained how boring he was, but as his class was a pre-req to mine, I noticed his students knew their stuff compared to the popular prof's.
The 60's spike in GPAs, at least at top schools, probably reflected a genuine increase in intellectual aptitude more than any change in values. Jerome Karabel discusses this at length in The Chosen (2005), about the history of standardized testing, but broadly speaking, this is when the Ivies consciously pivoted from catering to amiable well-connected old-money types (think G.W. Bush) to seeking out the strongest students (it's also about when 50 years of de facto Jewish quotas finally collapsed). Average SAT scores at H/Y/P went up something like 150 points in the course of the decade.
Really, really smart column, Matt. I especially liked the point about how a clearly stated and well-understood mission helps structure disagreements and manage diversity. Really good point.
Google appears to be relearning this lesson, as they recently fired 28 people for being confused about the mission of the organization, which is the fault of Google's leadership. Hopefully universities will act similarly when students (and, often, professors and staff) get confused about whether they are there for academics or activism.
It's important to bear in mind that disdaining meritocracy is in fact an EXPRESSION of meritocracy in 21st-century elite culture. You work insanely hard to get into the right college and secure your elite status, then you are enculturated into elite norms at college, norms which includes showily disdaining the very hard work you did to get there. This is particularly potent where we live, media; it's a culture of super-intense type-A people who have collectively decided that being straightforward about the effort you've expended to get where you are is somehow to bow down to the Man. This commitment is not actually anti-meritocracy as such. It's just a rational calculation about the importance of demonstrating fealty to the value of their peers. They keep climbing the ladder by pretending not to care about climbing it.
To the degree that there's philosophical justification of this stance, it's tied up in the witless "anti-work" thing. (The left is about labor, in multiple meanings of the word, for the record.) But it's lame to publicly care, the days.
Are we sure those time use numbers are right? That suggests six hours a week of classes which is far below what any college I know of requires to get a degree in 4 or even 6 years.
Maybe if you skip a bunch of lectures and never go to the discussion sections you’d get down to 6 hours a week, but it still seems awfully low.
And interestingly, the ratio of “2 hours of non-class work for every hour of class work” more or less holds in the data. So it’s not like students aren’t doing the assigned work, it just seems like they have a tiny courseload. Maybe they are averaging this with the 4 months per year when students aren’t in class (so that gets us up to 9 hours per week while school is in session)? Or maybe people claim to be full time students when they aren’t?
I don’t think it entirely invalidates the premise of this piece, but I just don’t believe it’s possible to graduate with only 6 hours a week of classes.
I would like to allocate some of the blame here to employers. Their current very strong preference, at least for the elite employers that drive cultural sentiment and student decisions, is to hire Harvard students who are undistinguished in what they did as undergrads vs IU students who accomplished a lot. If that doesn't change, the rest won't either.
So to square this essay with yesterday's, what should be done here? Seems like a collective action problem where if one college or department decides to become harder, students will go elsewhere.
I guess I’m a bit of an outlier on this topic (service academy grad) but I’ve seen lots of people who were smart and benefited from a strict and academically rigorous environment. Kids are malleable; it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them would like this sort of thing. Look how many volunteer for sports or fraternities to get the bonding that comes from shared difficulty.
If I were to change something, it would be the composition of admissions officers. Admissions officers are almost universally a bunch of mediocrities with a big soft spot for progressive activism. If they have kids, they probably practice gentle parenting. If they gave grades, they would all be As.
Students know that if they want to get into schools, they have to at least pretend that their goal in life is to start a charity for anxious whales or something. The scary part is that some of these kids aren’t pretending - they end up living in tents when they get a good excuse to do so. They have no interest in studying.
Half baked idea: Replace admissions officers with volunteers who each take a small share of the job remotely. These would end up being partners at law firms or consulting firms or whatever who have capacity to review 50 resumes or so out of duty to the Alma mater. They also would have a good sense of who actually will become a good lawyer or consultant.
STEM faculty at an ivy here. My undergrad students spend all their time on bullshit, make-work "research" - which is mostly just a rebranding of independent study/reading courses with maybe a bit of data munging tacked on. Meanwhile, they struggle with basic stuff in their core courses...
I think there's more to the connection made between educational rigor and the shift in elite character. As Griffin mentioned, the expectation of effort has been left shifted to before secondary Ed, which seems to me like institutional capture by elite parents, a feedback loop whereby the ideal candidate requires experiences and a background that can really only be reliably had by the children of elites (with some lip service paid, of course, to the poors).
I think this stems from a pretty natural desire for your kids to have it as good or better than you had it, which is a high bar for those who already have it really good. They have worked to make it so their kids are taught the secret handshakes to get into the schools that still drive elite formation, and then once in, all they need is for their kid to do well enough to land a McKinsey internship and go from there.
To be fair, elites have always probably captured these institutions, and I'm not sure if there was ever a time where selection was more egalitarian and rigor more strenuous. Also, grade differentials only matter when attending an insitution isn't enough of a signal - if going to Harvard isn't enough to know whether someone is capable or not, then what grades you got at Harvard matter. My gut is that Ivy schools have very high quality undergrads, so admission is itself enough of a signal for most.
I saw a comment asking us to consider, per yesterday's column, what should be done about this. One solution that came to mind was to work on the admissions side, and adopt something like a UT Austin situation, where elite schools establish a high testing/high school GPA bar and then you lottery from there. This would start to solve the elite admissions problem, and focus the mission of universities on a certain level of academic excellence.
The elite character issue was one of the things about The Holdovers that really stuck with me. Our elites, generally, have lost any sense of noblesse oblige, and visualizing it in terms of military service was an accurate depiction and a striking one. I'm not sure how to reform elite character, but...civic virtue doesn't seem to live there these days.
I found a lot of assigned work in college to be largely useless.
Professors would sometimes say “read this entire book for next week” and then we would discuss very little of it, and also a lot of the book would be poorly written with way too much fluff.
Assignments such as problem sets, essays, projects, etc. really varied in quality. It was also really frustrating when writing assignments would get little feedback.
Quantity ≠ quality, and I think we should be demanding quality assignments before just saying “load on more work, the kids have too much free time!”
Unfortunately, there’s often very little quality control re: teaching, assignments, and course design.
A not insignificant percentage of my major (biochemistry) takes a knowledge based test (the mcat) at the end of undergrad. You can study for this test but it does create a baseline of “things you need to learn” that probably ensures classes stay somewhat rigorous.
Kids primarily hear two messages about the purpose of college: "go to college so you can have a good job" and "you can't miss the college experience." They listen, and think that the point of college is to increase job prospects and to have fun, not to learn. So many of my classmates (graduated 2020 in engineering at a big public university) saw the classes and learning as a game of how-little-can-I-learn-while-still-passing and the resume padding and networking as the real purpose. And like, I don't really blame them? I was annoyed because they whined about hard classes and teachers with high expectations and how "anything I need to know for a job they'll teach me anyway" but their incentives made sense - they wanted a good job and an engineering degree pretty much guarantees one for you
I wish there was a cheaper and easier path towards the credit that a college degree offers in the job market so those that want to demonstrate they would be capable employees had somewhere to go while leaving college for those that want to learn.
It seems like this will only get worse. Not only does every student have a high tech computer on them at all times, they will soon carry a brilliant intelligent alien with them that can solve almost any problem, answer any question and complete any assignment on their behalf.
I have strong feelings about this issue. I was a college professor at Illinois State University starting in 1977 (old man alert here too!). I taught first-generation students, and I LOVED AND RESPECTED THEM. They were grateful and not entitled. I taught in Psychology to primarily education majors---students who wanted to become teachers. I felt a great responsibility to them because they were all serious-of-purpose in becoming good teachers.
I was tough.
When I retired 30 years later I summarized my years of student course ratings. The ratings of me on 'standards" was at the top. I took attendance every class, at the beginning of class. When I was going to lecture over a chapter in the text I gave a 5-point quiz BEFORE the lecture. My exams were hard....half of the exams were essays.
And, the students loved it. My 30-year average of my teaching was off the charts. And it was because of the fact that I set a structure for their courses where they had to be disciplined and study hard outside of class.
Students felt REALLY good getting a passing grade. They knew they had worked hard. It gave them confidence. They would sometimes remark on how structured and demanding I was, but rarely did they complain about it.
I know I prepared them for life as best I could, and I look back at that time with great satisfaction.
It's all about standards. Set them high. Make them study.
My absolute fondest memory was a woman who had a learning disability. She was struggling to get a C, which she needed in order to stay in her program---she wanted to teach learning disabled students. She sat outside my office and studied after class (students often did this). She popped into my office to ask me question after question. She read and read the text.
I happened (fortunately) to be sitting in my office right after final grades were posted, and she stopped by to see her grade. My whole career was worth it seeing the joy in her face when she saw she had earned her C.
(I used to think to myself that if I walked into one of children's classes the next fall and saw any of my students then I would go home and go "ahhhhh!" and know I can relax because I knew they would have a good year)
College is for learning. And students can't learn if they don't spend time. I'm sad to hear what has happened about grade inflation.
I don’t think it’s the availability of grant money that makes the STEM field more rigorous. It’s the fact that if you don’t learn your shit, people will actually die. My husband, who like me is a mechanical engineer, had a professor at his extremely middle-tier state university who refused to give partial credit, because there’s no partial credit if you fuck up a bridge and it collapses. Meanwhile I went to a top 20 private university that was rigorous but honestly I think less rigorous than his program, which was less concerned with keeping applications high so their selectivity would stay low and they could keep their Princeton Review slot.
Professor talking here. My particular bee in my bonnet that contributes to this is the required end of term teaching evaluations. Instead of judging quality of instruction by, say, measuring how much students learn in a class, departments judge me by how much my students say they like me. It's like a baking contest where instead of tasting the finished cake we ask whether the flour and eggs enjoyed the process. We do need feedback, but we never really judge whether the student actually learned what was on the syllabus. One of my colleagues had the lowest dept evals and students complained how boring he was, but as his class was a pre-req to mine, I noticed his students knew their stuff compared to the popular prof's.
The 60's spike in GPAs, at least at top schools, probably reflected a genuine increase in intellectual aptitude more than any change in values. Jerome Karabel discusses this at length in The Chosen (2005), about the history of standardized testing, but broadly speaking, this is when the Ivies consciously pivoted from catering to amiable well-connected old-money types (think G.W. Bush) to seeking out the strongest students (it's also about when 50 years of de facto Jewish quotas finally collapsed). Average SAT scores at H/Y/P went up something like 150 points in the course of the decade.
Really, really smart column, Matt. I especially liked the point about how a clearly stated and well-understood mission helps structure disagreements and manage diversity. Really good point.
Google appears to be relearning this lesson, as they recently fired 28 people for being confused about the mission of the organization, which is the fault of Google's leadership. Hopefully universities will act similarly when students (and, often, professors and staff) get confused about whether they are there for academics or activism.
It's important to bear in mind that disdaining meritocracy is in fact an EXPRESSION of meritocracy in 21st-century elite culture. You work insanely hard to get into the right college and secure your elite status, then you are enculturated into elite norms at college, norms which includes showily disdaining the very hard work you did to get there. This is particularly potent where we live, media; it's a culture of super-intense type-A people who have collectively decided that being straightforward about the effort you've expended to get where you are is somehow to bow down to the Man. This commitment is not actually anti-meritocracy as such. It's just a rational calculation about the importance of demonstrating fealty to the value of their peers. They keep climbing the ladder by pretending not to care about climbing it.
To the degree that there's philosophical justification of this stance, it's tied up in the witless "anti-work" thing. (The left is about labor, in multiple meanings of the word, for the record.) But it's lame to publicly care, the days.
Are we sure those time use numbers are right? That suggests six hours a week of classes which is far below what any college I know of requires to get a degree in 4 or even 6 years.
Harvard, for instance, says students spend between 14-20 hours a week in class: https://college.harvard.edu/student-life/student-stories/harvard-hard-and-other-commonly-asked-work-related-questions
Stanford suggests about 15 hours a week: https://advising.stanford.edu/current-students/advising-student-handbook/what-unit#:~:text=More%20About%20Units&text=A%20typical%204%2Dunit%20course,which%20may%20be%20class%20time.
Maybe if you skip a bunch of lectures and never go to the discussion sections you’d get down to 6 hours a week, but it still seems awfully low.
And interestingly, the ratio of “2 hours of non-class work for every hour of class work” more or less holds in the data. So it’s not like students aren’t doing the assigned work, it just seems like they have a tiny courseload. Maybe they are averaging this with the 4 months per year when students aren’t in class (so that gets us up to 9 hours per week while school is in session)? Or maybe people claim to be full time students when they aren’t?
I don’t think it entirely invalidates the premise of this piece, but I just don’t believe it’s possible to graduate with only 6 hours a week of classes.
I would like to allocate some of the blame here to employers. Their current very strong preference, at least for the elite employers that drive cultural sentiment and student decisions, is to hire Harvard students who are undistinguished in what they did as undergrads vs IU students who accomplished a lot. If that doesn't change, the rest won't either.
So to square this essay with yesterday's, what should be done here? Seems like a collective action problem where if one college or department decides to become harder, students will go elsewhere.
I guess I’m a bit of an outlier on this topic (service academy grad) but I’ve seen lots of people who were smart and benefited from a strict and academically rigorous environment. Kids are malleable; it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them would like this sort of thing. Look how many volunteer for sports or fraternities to get the bonding that comes from shared difficulty.
If I were to change something, it would be the composition of admissions officers. Admissions officers are almost universally a bunch of mediocrities with a big soft spot for progressive activism. If they have kids, they probably practice gentle parenting. If they gave grades, they would all be As.
Students know that if they want to get into schools, they have to at least pretend that their goal in life is to start a charity for anxious whales or something. The scary part is that some of these kids aren’t pretending - they end up living in tents when they get a good excuse to do so. They have no interest in studying.
Half baked idea: Replace admissions officers with volunteers who each take a small share of the job remotely. These would end up being partners at law firms or consulting firms or whatever who have capacity to review 50 resumes or so out of duty to the Alma mater. They also would have a good sense of who actually will become a good lawyer or consultant.
STEM faculty at an ivy here. My undergrad students spend all their time on bullshit, make-work "research" - which is mostly just a rebranding of independent study/reading courses with maybe a bit of data munging tacked on. Meanwhile, they struggle with basic stuff in their core courses...
I think there's more to the connection made between educational rigor and the shift in elite character. As Griffin mentioned, the expectation of effort has been left shifted to before secondary Ed, which seems to me like institutional capture by elite parents, a feedback loop whereby the ideal candidate requires experiences and a background that can really only be reliably had by the children of elites (with some lip service paid, of course, to the poors).
I think this stems from a pretty natural desire for your kids to have it as good or better than you had it, which is a high bar for those who already have it really good. They have worked to make it so their kids are taught the secret handshakes to get into the schools that still drive elite formation, and then once in, all they need is for their kid to do well enough to land a McKinsey internship and go from there.
To be fair, elites have always probably captured these institutions, and I'm not sure if there was ever a time where selection was more egalitarian and rigor more strenuous. Also, grade differentials only matter when attending an insitution isn't enough of a signal - if going to Harvard isn't enough to know whether someone is capable or not, then what grades you got at Harvard matter. My gut is that Ivy schools have very high quality undergrads, so admission is itself enough of a signal for most.
I saw a comment asking us to consider, per yesterday's column, what should be done about this. One solution that came to mind was to work on the admissions side, and adopt something like a UT Austin situation, where elite schools establish a high testing/high school GPA bar and then you lottery from there. This would start to solve the elite admissions problem, and focus the mission of universities on a certain level of academic excellence.
The elite character issue was one of the things about The Holdovers that really stuck with me. Our elites, generally, have lost any sense of noblesse oblige, and visualizing it in terms of military service was an accurate depiction and a striking one. I'm not sure how to reform elite character, but...civic virtue doesn't seem to live there these days.
I found a lot of assigned work in college to be largely useless.
Professors would sometimes say “read this entire book for next week” and then we would discuss very little of it, and also a lot of the book would be poorly written with way too much fluff.
Assignments such as problem sets, essays, projects, etc. really varied in quality. It was also really frustrating when writing assignments would get little feedback.
Quantity ≠ quality, and I think we should be demanding quality assignments before just saying “load on more work, the kids have too much free time!”
Unfortunately, there’s often very little quality control re: teaching, assignments, and course design.
A not insignificant percentage of my major (biochemistry) takes a knowledge based test (the mcat) at the end of undergrad. You can study for this test but it does create a baseline of “things you need to learn” that probably ensures classes stay somewhat rigorous.
Kids primarily hear two messages about the purpose of college: "go to college so you can have a good job" and "you can't miss the college experience." They listen, and think that the point of college is to increase job prospects and to have fun, not to learn. So many of my classmates (graduated 2020 in engineering at a big public university) saw the classes and learning as a game of how-little-can-I-learn-while-still-passing and the resume padding and networking as the real purpose. And like, I don't really blame them? I was annoyed because they whined about hard classes and teachers with high expectations and how "anything I need to know for a job they'll teach me anyway" but their incentives made sense - they wanted a good job and an engineering degree pretty much guarantees one for you
I wish there was a cheaper and easier path towards the credit that a college degree offers in the job market so those that want to demonstrate they would be capable employees had somewhere to go while leaving college for those that want to learn.
It seems like this will only get worse. Not only does every student have a high tech computer on them at all times, they will soon carry a brilliant intelligent alien with them that can solve almost any problem, answer any question and complete any assignment on their behalf.
Our brains are in our pockets now.
I have strong feelings about this issue. I was a college professor at Illinois State University starting in 1977 (old man alert here too!). I taught first-generation students, and I LOVED AND RESPECTED THEM. They were grateful and not entitled. I taught in Psychology to primarily education majors---students who wanted to become teachers. I felt a great responsibility to them because they were all serious-of-purpose in becoming good teachers.
I was tough.
When I retired 30 years later I summarized my years of student course ratings. The ratings of me on 'standards" was at the top. I took attendance every class, at the beginning of class. When I was going to lecture over a chapter in the text I gave a 5-point quiz BEFORE the lecture. My exams were hard....half of the exams were essays.
And, the students loved it. My 30-year average of my teaching was off the charts. And it was because of the fact that I set a structure for their courses where they had to be disciplined and study hard outside of class.
Students felt REALLY good getting a passing grade. They knew they had worked hard. It gave them confidence. They would sometimes remark on how structured and demanding I was, but rarely did they complain about it.
I know I prepared them for life as best I could, and I look back at that time with great satisfaction.
It's all about standards. Set them high. Make them study.
My absolute fondest memory was a woman who had a learning disability. She was struggling to get a C, which she needed in order to stay in her program---she wanted to teach learning disabled students. She sat outside my office and studied after class (students often did this). She popped into my office to ask me question after question. She read and read the text.
I happened (fortunately) to be sitting in my office right after final grades were posted, and she stopped by to see her grade. My whole career was worth it seeing the joy in her face when she saw she had earned her C.
(I used to think to myself that if I walked into one of children's classes the next fall and saw any of my students then I would go home and go "ahhhhh!" and know I can relax because I knew they would have a good year)
College is for learning. And students can't learn if they don't spend time. I'm sad to hear what has happened about grade inflation.
I don’t think it’s the availability of grant money that makes the STEM field more rigorous. It’s the fact that if you don’t learn your shit, people will actually die. My husband, who like me is a mechanical engineer, had a professor at his extremely middle-tier state university who refused to give partial credit, because there’s no partial credit if you fuck up a bridge and it collapses. Meanwhile I went to a top 20 private university that was rigorous but honestly I think less rigorous than his program, which was less concerned with keeping applications high so their selectivity would stay low and they could keep their Princeton Review slot.