The fact that the “are kids are dumber today?” topic has come up 1000 times on this message board and not a shred of reliable, objective evidence has ever been presented to suggest that students are any different than they have ever been. “The kids today are no good” line has been babbled by old people since before the time of Jesus Christ. If it had been true all this time, civilization would no longer exist.
The “College students are not what they used to be” complaint, specifically, is at least a hundred years old, and possibly older than that. You can find dozens, hundreds of complaints about the college students of the 1980s, the 1970s, the 1960s, the 1950s, and so on; every single new wave of college students has been decried as being dumb, lazy, and having a sense of entitlement.
I noticed this trend several years back. Just sticking to one place, teaching the same classes over the bulk of the 1990s:
The students noticably became incapable of learning, remembering anything no matter how trivial and performing basic student functions (studying, reading the text, etc.).
The entire group of students, over the years, became this mass of “You expect us to remember Algebra? That was a high school topic!”
Their goal was to squeak by in a class and then immediately flush all they learned before the next class (which of course required that knowledge). Needless to say, they couldn’t come close to achieving their goal.
The US public school system is failing. All the steps taken the last 20 years have made things worse. Students are neither being taught how to learn or why learning is important.
And the “college is a time for getting drunk” attitude is a lot more prevalent.
This is been my experience as well, and my colleagues complain about this a lot more than we ever did. I have been teaching CC students for sixteen years, and there has been a drastic decline not only in performance but in attitude and attention span.
I’ve heard from other professors this semester telling me that nearly their entire classes were flunking, that people are still making the same errors and omissions they were making fourteen weeks ago, that the students are more interested in their iPods and camera phones than in doing even the minimum amount of work required for a passing grade. After a while, you just give up and stop nagging them because they obviously don’t care.
As for repeating a class, I believe it can only be done two or three times, and the third time has to be by petition…? This may vary from one campus to another. If the students keep getting C- or lower for a long enough time, they will end up on academic probation. However, I doubt that they realize this. Or care.
Personally, I favor the “brains have been poisoned by chemicals ingested from junk food since these people were old enough to eat solids” theory, but that may belong in a separate thread.
I TA for a large intro physics class which is a course that has the advantage of not really changing much since, oh, the beginning of time. The department has very good data for the last 10 years and there certainly haven’t been any significant changes over that time frame. This doesn’t stop the faculty from complaining that the performance is dropping, however.
As a TA, I deal with students in groups of ~15. It’s very easy to allow just a few students within that group to define the attitude of the class and shape my memory of the class. My initial answer to this would have been that my students seem to be getting stupider at jumping through the hoops of into classes - but really I just have about 3 that are particularly terrible at it this semester. Another semester and I would’ve stated that kids are getting stupider at math. Again, it would’ve really just been that my 3 students with the strongest personalities were terrible at math.
RickJay - I don’t really want to get into a big argument over this, and I am glad to hear your opinion that what my wife perceives may not represent a universal trend.
But I’m not sure the logic of your response necessarily holds up.
I’m not sure that the fact that folks may have made similar contentions in the past necessarily says anything about the validity of this particular proposition. You offer no evidence one way or the other as to whether these past assertions were correct or not. Even if all of the people in the past were wrong, does that make it impossible that the recent similar assertion is also incorrect? And, isn’t it possible that the people making those past assertions were correct? I’m not saying that they necessarily were and that kids/people across the board are “stupider” today (whatever that means). Just suggesting that your argument doesn’t seem to affirmatively prove or disprove the situation I described.
Moreover, I readily admit that I titled my thread in a somewhat provocative manner (tho I think the content of the OP rendered it other than trolling.) But I wasn’t intending to make a blanket assertion that “These kids are no good.” Instead, I was inquiring as to whether or not anyone else had experienced anything consistent with a phenomena my wife has experienced in a very limited environment over the past decade and a half.
Linked with that was my ongoing confusion as to exactly what kinds of jobs are going to exist in the future US economy, and how relatively unskilled and uneducated folks are going to participate in that economy. With 3 kids ranging from HS soph to college freshman, that kinda thing is frequently on my mind.
Admin assistants? Nobody I know started as an admin assistant, save my friend who dropped out in her fourth year of college. All the rest either went on immediately to graduate school, or into relatively high paying jobs (32,000 in 1996 dollars).
As to the OP, I think it’s more a consequence of what’s expected of young people. The way I understand things, until recently, college was only an expectation of the brightest students, not of the majority of students. Most high school graduates were generally expected to get a job in one of the trades, or something like that.
Nowadays, there’s a lot of media exposure of college spring break, etc… that most likely makes 18-19 year olds think that going to college is the thing to do, and concentrate on the partying aspects, to the detriment of the academics. Mix that with community/junior colleges being the lowest rung on the college ladder, and you get a bunch of people who probably shouldn’t be there in the first place. It’s not surprising that they will do poorly in the academic aspects.
In other words, it’s not cool to get a job straight out of high school, so many students go to community colleges, even though they should probably just get a job.
It couldn’t possibly be more prevalent than it was when I went to college, in 1977. I’m tempted to say that it was universal at that time, but that wouldn’t quite be accurate, because for some people, college was a time for getting high.
Interesting. I’ve only been TAing (at a large state university) for a year and a half, but a friend of mine has been TAing and teaching (at two different large state universities) for 6 years, and he made the exact same comment to me as your wife made to you.
If nothing else, this seems to be a pretty widely made observation. I can only say that my kids are pretty darn apathetic without having anything to compare it to.
I’d venture a guess that the instructor mentioned upthread is not failing in her abilities nor is she burning out. She’s frustrated, and she has plenty of company. Just my observation.
Well, you can note that I said most people went on directly to graduate school.
a) I don’t consider 32,000 to be a high-paying job
b) You’re talking about a completely different economy. I graduated undergrad in 2000, 1 year ahead of schedule, and secured a decent job in the whole dot-com-IT-boom deal. 99% of the kids I graduated with from high school graduated in 2001 when the crash had already occurred. Your choices at that point were either to go directly to grad school or take what you could get in the private sector. Which wasn’t much. And it took a long time to get. My younger sister graduated around that time with a degree in biochem, close to a 4.0 from a very nice Canadian university and spent 6 months jobless and another 6 months working for 27K as a research assistant at UMass med school (with no health insurance) before taking off for medical school herself. If I had graduated when she did, I would have been screwed.
I just started teaching at a college that specializes in the arts.
For subjects the students like, they are really hard-working and do a great job.
The problem is, if they don’t like a class, their motivation is zip.
Trying to teach a class that is mandatory, but does not interest the students one iota - well, it isn’t easy. That is where the teacher has to figure out a way to make the class relevant. In the “old days”, the teacher didn’t care about your motivation and if you didn’t do your work, you failed; end of story.
Currently I am teaching a speech course. On the first day of class, not one student admitted to wanting to take the class. It was mandatory, and you could see it on their faces that this class was not a high priority.
I am happy to report that with a lot of effort on my part, 75% of my class is doing VERY well in this class. I have heard reports from other teachers that a few have even said they like the class a lot. The attendance is high, and they seem to really like giving speeches and listening to the others give speeches! Even the shy students have overcome their panic and are doing very well. Their final exam is to give a speech in front of another class at school (a room full of people they don’t know) and so far, they all seem to be looking forward to doing it! I feel like the class has been a success.
I will grant you one thing - the basic skills of the students are abysmal…most of them couldn’t write a single paragraph without multiple spelling and grammar errors, most are pretty clueless about history or even current events, and few have any grasp of the basics of math or science. It is, however, a school devoted to studying the arts, so it shouldn’t come as a total surprise to me that they are not exactly proficient in other fields.
I do see a general lack of interest in any sort of intellectual topic from American Teens in general.
They usually tend to mock, or not give a damn about history, science or anything related to somethig that does not have to do with Rap, Sports or getting drunk.
I don’t know what it is in American Society that makes these kids act this way.
Perhaps all the media and they things they promote is affecting the way these kids think.
I suspect a lot of kids in community colleges wouldn’t have been in any college at all 30 years ago. On California, the non-resident environment and the cheap tuition seem to help build apathy.
I know a kid who is going exactly because of insurance. He attends classes until just after the date where he stays registered, then stops going. He gets all Fs, but it is still cheaper.
My wife went to a community college writing class, in the evening. It was split between older students and those of college ages. Pretty much none of the younger students ever showed up.
I think it is different for the better schools. My daughter is in a state school, in the honors program, and she never talks about anyone in her dorm goofing off. As for MIT, an article in Technology Review by someone from the Admissions Office said that students today are smarter than students from my class - but we were more interesting. I think that meant we rioted and hacked more.
Yep. My guess is that as more and more higher education is expected, people who’d quit after getting a bachelor’s degree are going to grad school, people who formerly would go to CCs would go to four-year schools, and those who wouldn’t go to any college attend CCs (“13th grade”). So kids aren’t dumber, the bracket of CCs has just shifted down.
Is it even possible to flunk out of community college? My junior college handbook lists policies on academic warning/probation/suspension/dismisal (GPA 1.85 1st semester, 2.0 all others), but they’re not enforced (several of the profs are quite annoyed at this). My Intro to Lit class involves alot of reading aloud in class and it hurts to listen to some of my classmates. Just today there was a girls who didn’t understand “I acheived As and scored in the 90th percentile” because she read it as “I acheived as scored…” and still read is as “as” even after Prof. B explained it was about grades.
Sure there are stupid kids at all levels, but for the most part community college is the bottom of the academic barrel. Financial reasons aside, your more motivated students will strive to get into the best schools they can.
If anything, I would say the opposite of the OP is true. Kids now have much more access to much more career and college information than I ever did.
If the class concerns lit. and poetry, I can see it happening. Poetry in particular really needs to be heard as well as read.
I remember reading Chaucer aloud and even acting out portions of Shakespeare along with reading it aloud.
As for flunking out of CC…Well, if the academic probies don’t get it together, they do indeed get booted out, supposedly. Also, if students plagiarize, especially if they do it more than once, they are kicked out. I am speaking only of my own campus; YMMV.
