Competition for the most enjoyable and least difficult four-year experience, culminating in a credential that is mostly a signifier of existing class positions

From A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I by Thomas H. Benton.

A compendium of the challenges that university professors face in educating the current crop of students. While it sounds like an exerciese in excuse making, I think he is actually putting a useful lassoe around some common root causes of indifferent student engagement.

But that raises the question: What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?

Arum and Roksa point out that students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.

My emphasis added. Sometimes it takes measuring things, as Arum and Roksa attempted to do in Academically Adrift, to make the self-apparent obvious - You get better at the things you spend more time practising. It would be rude to say "Well, duh" but the legions of excuse makers for students that don't achieve much seems to testify that the obvious isn't obvious to everyone - "They didn't try hard" takes a back seat to any number of improbable alternate explanations for poor performance.

Benton lists a number of the challenges which professors confront. With one in college and two on the way, I can see several of these as being well-founded issues. Benton dicusses each issue but I have included his commentary only on those that I suspect are the biggest factors.

Lack of student preparation. Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities. So college professors routinely encounter students who have never written anything more than short answers on exams, who do not read much at all, who lack foundational skills in math and science, yet are completely convinced of their abilities and resist any criticism of their work, to the point of tears and tantrums: "But I earned nothing but A's in high school," and "Your demands are unreasonable." Such a combination makes some students nearly unteachable.

Grade inflation. It has become difficult to give students honest feedback. The slightest criticisms have to be cushioned by a warm blanket of praise and encouragement to avoid provoking oppositional defiance or complete breakdowns. As a result, student progress is slowed, sharply. Rubric-driven approaches give the appearance of objectivity but make grading seem like a matter of checklists, which, if completed, must ensure an A. Increasingly, time-pressured college teachers ask themselves, "What grade will ensure no complaint from the student, or worse, a quasi-legal battle over whether the instructions for an assignment were clear enough?" So, the number of A-range grades keeps going up, and the motivation for students to excel keeps going down.

Student retention

Student evaluations of teachers

Enrollment minimums

Lack of uniform expectations. It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that. A course in which the professor assigns a 20-page paper and 200 pages of reading every week cannot compete with one that fills the same requirement with half of those assignments. Faculty members cannot raise expectations by themselves, nor can departments, since they, too, are competing with one another for enrollments.

Contingent teaching

Time constraints

Curricular chaos. Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses. Add to that a lack of consensus about what constitutes a given scholarly field and a lack of permanent faculty members to provide coverage of a discipline. As a result, some majors have become an almost incoherent grab bag of marketable topics combined with required courses that have no uniform standards. Students are now able to create a path through majors that allows them to avoid obtaining what were once considered essential skills and disciplinary knowledge.

Demoralized faculty members

Benton concludes:

If they are right about that—and I hope they are not—it means that our "failing" system of higher education actually is working the way it is supposed to, according to the dictates of the market. The patterns of selection and resource allocation—and the rising costs of college education—are not driven by educational needs so much as they are the result of competition for the most enjoyable and least difficult four-year experience, culminating in a credential that is mostly a signifier of existing class positions.

Ouch