Troy Senik’s post Defining College Down deserves close attention – for it identifies a serious defect in American public policy very much in need of remedy. As the study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa to which Troy points – Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses – demonstrates, most of what goes on at institutions of higher education in this country is a terrible waste of time and resources. This is especially true at the larger public universities where next to nothing is learned by students in their first two years on campus. As that same study shows, however, this is far less likely to be the case at our more prestigious private universities and liberal arts colleges.
I do not think that the reforms suggested by Troy would change things much, however. Dormitories exist at the schools where serious learning is far more apt to take place, and nearly all freshman and sophomores at such schools live in dormitories. Moreover, teaching and research are no more separate functions at those institutions than they are at the larger public universities. The reports that Troy cites tell the tale. As CBS News puts it by way of summary:
Not much is asked of students . . . . Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.
If “45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years,” it is because, during their first two years in college, they have not been asked to do much critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their courses. That is the bottom line.
I do not doubt that the professoriate is, in part, at fault. The modern public university is a bit like the old Soviet Union. In the latter, the following slogan pertained: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. The modern public university is based on a tacit social contract quite similar in character: students pretend to study, and the professors pretend to teach.
There is more of a reason for this than you might at first think. The real problem is that something like half of the students who go off to college in this country are not prepared to do college-level work and have not the slightest desire to do so. So what happens is that our universities take their parents’ money or the money that the students themselves have borrowed and give the students what the majority of them want. Of course, a student at one of these universities can get an education if he wants to. All that he has to do is to seek out those professors who are really interested in teaching and are demanding (and they are, in fact, numerous). The university takes care of those who have no interest in getting an education as well. It is a country club and a brothel all rolled up into one. What more could a half-wit eighteen-year-old ask?
I teach now at Hillsdale College – where the students are made to work very hard and love it. That is what they come expecting, that is why they come, and every year applications jump dramatically (something like 40% last year). I have taught at Yale University and Cornell University, where the same thing is true. But for twenty-four years I taught at the University of Tulsa – a not too terribly selective private university that had its origins as a municipal private university attempting to make up for the absence in Tulsa of a public university. TU is far more rigorous than Oklahoma State University or the University of Oklahoma, but it is not all that demanding.
Every Fall while there, I taught a course in ancient history aimed at freshman. In my first few years there, in the pep talk I gave on the first day of class, I said the following: “I have sometimes heard it said that at this university there are some students who want a degree but not an education. I cannot believe that anyone would waste a large sum of money and four years on such a thing. But if there is any truth in the claim and if there is anyone here today who falls into this category, that person is in the wrong place – for I am here to give you an education or, at least, the beginning of an education, and this course is not a gut.” Every year, a third of my students self-identified and immediately dropped the course.
I profited from this – I had a class full of enthusiastic students who wanted to learn (a consummation devoutly to be wished), and the whiners and those apt to be resentful had taken flight – but my department lost out. Our universities are run by bean counters. In most places, no one asks whether the students are learning anything. The more students a department processes (teach is not the proper word), the more faculty lines it gets. In consequence, for those interested in building academic programs, all of the incentives militate against offering general education courses for freshmen and sophomores that are demanding in any way. A newly minted assistant professor who is demanding is apt to be quickly shown the door.
When I became department chairman and realized the consequences of what I had been doing, I stopped giving that pep talk. I still taught in the same way, however – and each year one-third of my students flunked the course. They took the first exam, flunked it, and did not write any of the papers subsequently due and did not show up for the second exam and the final. Had I really been cynical, I would have dumbed the course down, cut the reading load radically, and stopped requiring that the students write papers. I had colleagues who did just that.
There were, in fact, entire departments who did just that. It was said of the psychology department (which had a distinguished niche graduate program, let me add) that undergraduates who enrolled in the courses it offered could do the reading or attend the lectures but that they certainly did not have to do both, and more than half of those enrolled were awarded A’s. Psychology was, as a consequence, the largest major in the university.
The public universities in Oklahoma, I learned from transfer students, were even less demanding, and the same is true nearly everywhere. While I was at the University of Tulsa, the business school at the University of Arkansas added a math requirement. I guess that they had finally gotten around to thinking that businessmen might need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and track costs and sales. That semester, I was told by a friend who taught at Arkansas, one third of the students in the business school transferred to the school of communications, which did not have a math requirement. Guess which school then got more resources from the administration to do hires?
So what is amiss? And what can be done? In my judgment, all of this arises from the fact that too many young Americans go off to college. This was not always true. It is a product of public policy. Back in the 1950s, Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Nelson Rockefeller to chair a commission focused on America’s future, and that commission recommended that many more young Americans attend college. What happened in the aftermath is that our colleges and universities accommodated these students.
All of these students had high school degrees; many were, however, only semi-literate. It is easy to separate the sheep from the goats. In class, I often ask students to read out loud a document, a paragraph from a political tract, a poem, or something or the sort. The literate can do so without difficulty; semi-literate freshmen read out loud less well than my elder daughter did when she was five: they stumble, skip words, and mispronounce other words because they do not comprehend what is on the page. The latter cannot be expected to read more than forty pages a week. If asked to do so, they will balk. Moreover, they cannot write to save their lives. Correcting their papers for errors in grammar and diction takes real labor and is ordinarily a waste of time – for they generally have no interest in improving and they pay no heed to the comments on their papers.
The word student comes from a Latin word meaning “he who is eager.” If the “students” discussed in the study Troy cites are eager for anything it is for entertainment and pleasure. The universities accommodate these desires. They do not properly police conduct in the dormitories. In the bathrooms, they sell condoms, instead. They provide luxurious sports facilities and golf courses. They sponsor sports programs that function as entertainment, and they bend all of the rules to accommodate athletes who are not even semi-literate. They provide bogus academic programs, and they reward those within the professoriate who cynically exploit the situation.
It is, moreover, likely to get far, far worse – for the bean counters are on the march, and they have the backing of many political conservatives. Back in October, The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled Putting a Price on Professors, which reported that the administration at Texas A&M had done a study evaluating its expenditures by way of a 265-page spreadsheet that “amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained.” Earlier this month, the editorial page of that newspaper celebrated the fact that Texas A&M was going to use “such metrics of value added as research dollars brought in by a professor and student evaluations of how well a teacher performs in the classroom” to determine the allocation of salaries, and it expressed the hope that “the school’s regents succeed in their efforts to spread pay-for-performance accountability to other public universities.”
On the face of it, this might seem to make sense. Who could object to linking pay and performance? And perhaps with regard to the sciences it really does make sense. In that field, research grants that include stipends for overhead may be an indication of the quality of the work that a particular scientist does (though there is a danger – witness climate science – that these grants are a sign of political correctness on the part of the researcher). There are no such grants – none that provide for overhead at the university – for the fields of philosophy, history, literature, music, and art. In those areas, Texas A&M will depend on two metrics – the number of students taught and student evaluations.
And guess what? At large public universities, large courses are nearly always a sign that the professor is entertaining and the course is a gut, and professors who conduct themselves in this fashion generally receive stellar student evaluations . I remember a geology course nicknamed Rocks for Jocks, a history course called Moonlight and Magnolias, a psychology course called Nuts and Sluts, and an astronomy course called Astrogut. Moreover, anyone who assigns more than forty pages a week to freshmen and sophomores and demands that they write anything like twenty pages in a semester will have fewer students to teach and will be punished in the student evaluations by the semi-literate.
What The Wall Street Journal, the administrators at Texas A&M, and administrators at a great many other academic institutions have forgotten is that the university is not a hotel and those who go there are not consumers. Hotels do not make demands on their guests. They do not grade them. And they have no interest in their improvement. It is appropriate that consumers evaluate the products they purchase and the service they receive. Freshmen and sophomores are not very good judges of the instruction they receive, and those in their numbers who are semi-literate (roughly half of the students at Texas A&M, I would guess) are apt to resent those who make demands on them.
What can be done? First, we need to stop pretending that we can educate everyone. A fair number of institutions should shut their doors. Others should become much smaller and more selective. All of them should become more demanding. Grade inflation should be replaced by grade deflation.
What would it take to produce such a result? Hard times would help. An end to federal and state aid to higher education would do no harm. The federal subsidy for student loans could be eliminated. And – here is the kicker – the accrediting agencies could start doing their job.
Think what it would mean if the accreditors paid close attention to the rigor and quality of the general education courses required of students in their freshmen and sophomore years. If they did so, presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs would find it in their interest to police the teaching of these courses – to make sure that ample reading of a high quality is assigned, that the students are made to do a great deal of writing; and that their examinations and papers are rigorously graded, marked up with an eye to errors in grammar and diction, and returned to the students in a timely fashion. They might even find it in their interest to punish departments for grade inflation by denying them new lines.
So let me sum up. The problem that Troy pointed out is rooted in the fact that the incentive structure at all but the highly selective colleges and universities is badly askew. The fault lies with the administrations at our colleges and universities – but, at a deeper level, it is a product of public policy. Almost everything being done with the purpose of improving things will make them worse. To get things right, we would have to admit what we are loath to admit – that something like half of the students in college do not belong there.
Let me add that the college guide published by what remains of US News & Report does more harm than good. Among other things, it downgrades colleges and universities for a high attrition rate. Back before the Rockefeller Commission Report, a high attrition rate at a public university was a sign that it was doing its job – offering a wide range of students the opportunity to get an education, and busting out freshmen who did not perform.
