I wonder whether increased rigor could actually be accompanied by increased approachability. One possibility along these lines is discussed in a really interesting Gerald Graff essay on what he calls "hidden intellectualism" (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/26320/pdf).
Even in the STEM area, you hear people say all the time, “Why do they make me take [insert math discipline]? I will never use it!” I believe that math is taught very poorly and could be made more interesting, but the key point is the one you’re making - you don’t learn math because it’s useful (though in some cases it may be), but because it’s a skill that helps you think better.
Let's be real... not many young folks are pursuing humanities degrees and careers today. Primary education has been pushing K-12 STEM/STEAM very hard for the past 30ish years - much more than business/finance, so much so that young folks are deterred and alienated when taking a humanities track in high school. Young adults are leaving high school with barely any financial literacy... with even less broad thinking around civics and the social sciences.
We wonder why the USA has a big problem around common sense and values? We are creating a cohort of young Americans that have incredible memorialization and fact finding skills, along with expertise in specialized STEM fields...leading to a chasm of lack in understanding how the broader world works and comprehensive problem solving.
Having two almost adult children facing this today - in public education on the North Shore of Massachusetts who are more interested in social sciences/humanities - feel as though they have no shot at attaining the high paying salaries that the STEM fields offer. My point being that the lack of rigor in the humanities just might begin in elementary school and this could be a good place to start in trying to make a shift.
I had a pretty rigorous undergrad, in spite of myself, but still, when I started graduate school, I had not yet taken Physical Chemistry. So that was the hoop I had to jump through. Fortunately, I cleared the bar. It was good training, as the two semesters were so hard that I teamed up with one of my department's best undergrads and we did all of the homework, half each, and mentored each other (the professor typically assigned a huge amount of homework). We both aced the quantum mechanics semester. Teamwork is important in the sciences.
It's not just the humanities that have the question of quality vs. quantity. Back when I was faculty in the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology of the U of Hawaii, my dean was called on the carpet because we didn't have enough B.S. majors. Prospective students hit the wall, so to speak, when having to master calculus, physics, and chemistry at a rigorous level. The university president wanted us to add a watered-down "environmental science" degree sans the hard stuff. Why? To boost enrollment and therefore get more state funds matching tuition and enrollment.
Hence the problem. Quality v quantity. More funds vs. a smaller footprint, which means fewer faculty lines. A STEM degree can be of limited usefulness if it is not hard enough to prepare students for difficult tasks in the real world, so like the humanities degrees in watered down programs, a watered down STEM degree is a mirage, not the real thing. I saw students bail out of our graduate programs when they found they couldn't master the work, as their undergrad degrees were inflated in importance. In the humanities as in STEM, a strong student can adapt to get a job because they were trained to think more rigorously, or as my Ph.D. advisor once quipped "I'm not training you to think about geology. I'm training you to think."
At a top school there end up being students who realize, hey I’m not academically as good as the 20th percentile student in here. I’m in trouble. And then those students swap into the easy majors. In your vision, do these students really flunk out?
I well remember—it’s the 70s and I’m getting a degree in Russian at UT Austin at the time—how one teacher disclosed on day one of the class that exams would be tough and the term paper would have to be of publishable quality. She promised/warned, that she would get us all stack passes to the graduates-only section of the library.
We were thirty on that first day and within a few days, so many drops had taken place that the course was cancelled.
I love this essay. However, the comments indicating students actually get into college without understanding the origin and purpose of rigor. How in the world?!
K - 12 Education should be appropriately challenging, to teach students cause and effect, the nuances of language, the cost and consequences of generating an answer grounded in irrelevant factors. In my experience, there are students who crave this.
Failing to teach it leaves a vacuum that is filled with nonsense related to improperly understood social and cultural factors. "The selfish people with the most money and the biggest sticks get to define "A" grade work." Or "The teacher doesn't like me." Those are hard lessons to unlearn.
I think there is more to consider here in terms of teaching. If it is very hard to teach STEM classes and professors who are great at STEM research are terrible at teaching STEM, is that the kind of “hard” you are looking for?
As an employer, I can no longer really put much stake in college grades as a mark of IQ horsepower. As imperfect as they are, standardized tests are much better. Humanities majors should just always put their GRE scores on their resume if they want to be taken seriously.
When I graduated from a small liberal arts college in 1969 & went to an almost Ivy grad school in English, I was shocked by how easy it was & how poorly prepared so many of my fellow students in both English & history, some from prestigious schools, were. It took me eight years to receive my PhD--including four years leave for military service. I'm retired from teaching full-time & part-time for decades at red brick & small liberal arts colleges. Over my career, English courses there increasingly became irrelevant. First, requirements to take lit courses disappeared from the curriculum. Second, lit courses ceased addressing much of anything students found interesting. There was a time early in my career when the legendary Stanley Fish explained that English lit was more popular than philosophy because it addressed "real" questions; philosophy didn't. As someone who's read a lot of philosophy, I think that's unfair but at the time not entirely mistaken. I think the solution to making humanities more popular, more interesting, & more challenging is to bring back requirements for taking humanity courses & focusing them on broader questions than whatever's fashionable in the discipline. I don't mean making courses "relevant"; there's no shortage of challenging questions poetry, drama, & fiction address.
The thing that makes science classes more rigorous from a grading perspective is that they're graded on a curve. It's the same reason why law school--which is essentially an applied humanities and social science course of study--tends to be more rigorous than undergraduate humanities programs. Law is not, in my experience, intrinsically more intellectually challenging than history. But it's a much more demanding course of study because you're not graded on subject matter mastery, but subject matter mastery relative to your peers.
Requiring the vast majority of college programs to be graded on a curve would solve a lot of the problems this article identifies.
One issue that Matt passes over quickly that could have been developed more is the lack of a “canon” in modern humanities courses. This tends to lead to highly idiosyncratic course design that often bleeds into professors teaching themselves (or to be fair their specific interests). This creates a feedback loop in which students doing well becomes a form of validation for the instructor’s interests and, often, sense of themselves. This creates an incentive to reward students whose approval rewards the professor quite apart from any pressure about enrollment etc. This problem, I think, becomes even more pronounced when the mission of the humanities becomes focused on promoting social justice in its various guises. If you want people to spread the gospel of systemic racism, settler colonialism, gender inequality, etc. it works better if you don’t give them a “C” on their papers that have been carefully constructed to reveal an awareness of those issues. The disclaimer, of course, is that rigorous courses can be taught at the same time as professors promote their idiosyncratic views of the discipline and social justice, but it should also be recognized that they can become a path of least resistance to less rigor and more affirmation.
At Carnegie Mellon, the school of Humanities and Social Sciences (H&SS) is nicknamed "H & Less Stress".
I wonder whether increased rigor could actually be accompanied by increased approachability. One possibility along these lines is discussed in a really interesting Gerald Graff essay on what he calls "hidden intellectualism" (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/26320/pdf).
Ab/a aZA
Even in the STEM area, you hear people say all the time, “Why do they make me take [insert math discipline]? I will never use it!” I believe that math is taught very poorly and could be made more interesting, but the key point is the one you’re making - you don’t learn math because it’s useful (though in some cases it may be), but because it’s a skill that helps you think better.
Let's be real... not many young folks are pursuing humanities degrees and careers today. Primary education has been pushing K-12 STEM/STEAM very hard for the past 30ish years - much more than business/finance, so much so that young folks are deterred and alienated when taking a humanities track in high school. Young adults are leaving high school with barely any financial literacy... with even less broad thinking around civics and the social sciences.
We wonder why the USA has a big problem around common sense and values? We are creating a cohort of young Americans that have incredible memorialization and fact finding skills, along with expertise in specialized STEM fields...leading to a chasm of lack in understanding how the broader world works and comprehensive problem solving.
Having two almost adult children facing this today - in public education on the North Shore of Massachusetts who are more interested in social sciences/humanities - feel as though they have no shot at attaining the high paying salaries that the STEM fields offer. My point being that the lack of rigor in the humanities just might begin in elementary school and this could be a good place to start in trying to make a shift.
I had a pretty rigorous undergrad, in spite of myself, but still, when I started graduate school, I had not yet taken Physical Chemistry. So that was the hoop I had to jump through. Fortunately, I cleared the bar. It was good training, as the two semesters were so hard that I teamed up with one of my department's best undergrads and we did all of the homework, half each, and mentored each other (the professor typically assigned a huge amount of homework). We both aced the quantum mechanics semester. Teamwork is important in the sciences.
It's not just the humanities that have the question of quality vs. quantity. Back when I was faculty in the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology of the U of Hawaii, my dean was called on the carpet because we didn't have enough B.S. majors. Prospective students hit the wall, so to speak, when having to master calculus, physics, and chemistry at a rigorous level. The university president wanted us to add a watered-down "environmental science" degree sans the hard stuff. Why? To boost enrollment and therefore get more state funds matching tuition and enrollment.
Hence the problem. Quality v quantity. More funds vs. a smaller footprint, which means fewer faculty lines. A STEM degree can be of limited usefulness if it is not hard enough to prepare students for difficult tasks in the real world, so like the humanities degrees in watered down programs, a watered down STEM degree is a mirage, not the real thing. I saw students bail out of our graduate programs when they found they couldn't master the work, as their undergrad degrees were inflated in importance. In the humanities as in STEM, a strong student can adapt to get a job because they were trained to think more rigorously, or as my Ph.D. advisor once quipped "I'm not training you to think about geology. I'm training you to think."
At a top school there end up being students who realize, hey I’m not academically as good as the 20th percentile student in here. I’m in trouble. And then those students swap into the easy majors. In your vision, do these students really flunk out?
Perhaps those are the ones who can't pay off their student loans?
Just a note that the beginning of this post reminded me of this old Michael Huemer post:
“Should I Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?”
https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/grad.htm
I well remember—it’s the 70s and I’m getting a degree in Russian at UT Austin at the time—how one teacher disclosed on day one of the class that exams would be tough and the term paper would have to be of publishable quality. She promised/warned, that she would get us all stack passes to the graduates-only section of the library.
We were thirty on that first day and within a few days, so many drops had taken place that the course was cancelled.
I love this essay. However, the comments indicating students actually get into college without understanding the origin and purpose of rigor. How in the world?!
K - 12 Education should be appropriately challenging, to teach students cause and effect, the nuances of language, the cost and consequences of generating an answer grounded in irrelevant factors. In my experience, there are students who crave this.
Failing to teach it leaves a vacuum that is filled with nonsense related to improperly understood social and cultural factors. "The selfish people with the most money and the biggest sticks get to define "A" grade work." Or "The teacher doesn't like me." Those are hard lessons to unlearn.
Grade inflation starts early. Students know it.
I think there is more to consider here in terms of teaching. If it is very hard to teach STEM classes and professors who are great at STEM research are terrible at teaching STEM, is that the kind of “hard” you are looking for?
Well this sure was a fan service article lol
Whoda thunk the sb commentariat would all have strong opinions about rigor in higher education?
🤣
As an employer, I can no longer really put much stake in college grades as a mark of IQ horsepower. As imperfect as they are, standardized tests are much better. Humanities majors should just always put their GRE scores on their resume if they want to be taken seriously.
When I graduated from a small liberal arts college in 1969 & went to an almost Ivy grad school in English, I was shocked by how easy it was & how poorly prepared so many of my fellow students in both English & history, some from prestigious schools, were. It took me eight years to receive my PhD--including four years leave for military service. I'm retired from teaching full-time & part-time for decades at red brick & small liberal arts colleges. Over my career, English courses there increasingly became irrelevant. First, requirements to take lit courses disappeared from the curriculum. Second, lit courses ceased addressing much of anything students found interesting. There was a time early in my career when the legendary Stanley Fish explained that English lit was more popular than philosophy because it addressed "real" questions; philosophy didn't. As someone who's read a lot of philosophy, I think that's unfair but at the time not entirely mistaken. I think the solution to making humanities more popular, more interesting, & more challenging is to bring back requirements for taking humanity courses & focusing them on broader questions than whatever's fashionable in the discipline. I don't mean making courses "relevant"; there's no shortage of challenging questions poetry, drama, & fiction address.
The thing that makes science classes more rigorous from a grading perspective is that they're graded on a curve. It's the same reason why law school--which is essentially an applied humanities and social science course of study--tends to be more rigorous than undergraduate humanities programs. Law is not, in my experience, intrinsically more intellectually challenging than history. But it's a much more demanding course of study because you're not graded on subject matter mastery, but subject matter mastery relative to your peers.
Requiring the vast majority of college programs to be graded on a curve would solve a lot of the problems this article identifies.
One issue that Matt passes over quickly that could have been developed more is the lack of a “canon” in modern humanities courses. This tends to lead to highly idiosyncratic course design that often bleeds into professors teaching themselves (or to be fair their specific interests). This creates a feedback loop in which students doing well becomes a form of validation for the instructor’s interests and, often, sense of themselves. This creates an incentive to reward students whose approval rewards the professor quite apart from any pressure about enrollment etc. This problem, I think, becomes even more pronounced when the mission of the humanities becomes focused on promoting social justice in its various guises. If you want people to spread the gospel of systemic racism, settler colonialism, gender inequality, etc. it works better if you don’t give them a “C” on their papers that have been carefully constructed to reveal an awareness of those issues. The disclaimer, of course, is that rigorous courses can be taught at the same time as professors promote their idiosyncratic views of the discipline and social justice, but it should also be recognized that they can become a path of least resistance to less rigor and more affirmation.