Jeremy S. pointed me to a "Room for Debate" series at the New York Times, which basically forgot the debate part. Seven college professors complain about those lazy-assed college students today and their helicopter parents. It's vaguely amusing. Worth reading.
Jeremy asked whether college freshmen have changed that much. I don't think so. I spent most of my college years drunk and coasted off my high school education, and they are, too.
So, why are these college professors so delightfully bitter?
Jeremy writes, " I suspect some academics are taking out their hostility at shrinking budgets and prestige, along with the near certainty that current academia will not exist in another couple of decades or so outside of some ever-shrinking contexts, on kids today." I don't think that's it. I think that academics, especially the young ones, are workaholics. In order to have a job today, you really have to work 60 hours per week for years with little financial compensation. (Grad school really fucks with your brain.) So, academics tend to think that everyone else is a lazy fool.
Apt. 11d 
But isn’t it the case that about twice as many people have bachelor’s degrees as did so a generation ago? This current batch of “college kids” that now suck include tons of kids who — 30 years ago — we would call “factory workers” or “apprentice carpenters.”
It may not be comparing apples to oranges, but it certainly seems like comparing apples to fruit.
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I thought the one valuable comment in that batch pinned changes in modern student and parents to the ridiculous increase in tuition costs. I’m already half-nuts as an alumnus considering my kindergartener’s likely college bills — I’ll probably be “now let me tell you one thing”-crazy by the time my daughter’s in college.
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I think that academics, especially the young ones, are workaholics. In order to have a job today, you really have to work 60 hours per week for years with little financial compensation.
With budget cuts, assessments everywhere, and the fact that we academics don’t have a worshipful staff to support us any longer, it’s possible that all the eccentric fun of academia has gone away
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I’m teaching a Sherry Turkle essay today, “How Computers Change the Way We Think,” and it’s really giving me pause. Here’s one statement that struck me:
“immersion in programmed worlds puts us in
reassuring environments where the rules are clear. For example, when you play a video game, you often go through a series of frightening situations that you escape by mastering the rules — you experience life as a reassuring dichotomy of scary and safe. Children grow up in a culture of video games, action films, fantasy epics, and computer programs that all rely on that familiar scenario of almost losing but then regaining total mastery: There is danger. It is mastered. A still-more powerful monster appears. It is subdued. Scary. Safe.”
This sounds so much like my students, and sometimes I am the scary monster to them.
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There is danger. It is mastered.
From preschool, my son has picked-up the “mastered” language. It’s pretty funny and I have to stop myself from teaching him to say ‘pwned’ when he wins.
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Oooh. Interesting essay, Wendy. I’ll have to check it out.
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Wendy,
Not that I’ve read Bruno Bettelheim myself, but that sounds exactly like what he says about the function of fairy tales.
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Way down on the lowest level of the college food chain, my dad is starting his second year of adjuncting for remedial community college math for 20 and 30-somethings. He notes a lack of feel for numbers, a difficulty in stopping and thinking about whether answers make sense, as well as a lot of trouble in the sort of math facts that should be learned by 4th grade. It’s apparently very difficult to learn those math facts when you’re 30 and have a job and family. With regard to number sense, my dad recently had a student add 1/2 to 1/3 and get 2/5 and another calculate that the circumference of a circle was smaller than its diameter.
Interestingly, even at this lowest level of academic life, there are still helicopter moms. Another instructor had a 30-something student who sent her mom to resolve some sort of grade issue (the student was going to lose a scholarship).
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I read that series. I don’t think that it’s a good sample of profs, frankly. All but one of them was a psychologist. (One was an economist and the only one to note the lack of a studying culture, rather than parentage.)
Most blamed parents almost entirely. My defensive parent hackles went up (before I rationalized to myself that I wouldn’t be one of THOSE parents).
But yeah, kids these days. It’s hard to know if there is indeed a problem — laura, your point on perspective of workaholics, or at least attention to certain types of details, is compelling to me. Although it does conflict with the common theme in today’s media that tenured professors are lazy deadwood. Food for thought.
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I just reread those remarks on the NYT. I’m not sure that these profs are typical. As Julie said, they are all psychology profs and authors. They make a living by telling us that we’re screwed up. I’ve never had a helicopter parent experience, though one friend on Facebook was just complaining about an incident.
Did you notice how many of them complained about students being on medication? They really didn’t like having THOSE kids in their classes. Deal with it.
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I *wish* I had students on meds. /jk
So I just taught the Turkle essay and started off by having the students list all the ways they use computers then having them imagine what it would be like not to have computers and to try to do those things. Let’s just say that there was a lively discussion about whether it’s 8-track or A-track. Jukeboxes were mentioned. “If you put a quarter in a jukebox while another song was playing, would it stop the song and play yours?” Student makes a gesture of a spinning circle: “What were those called again? How did the music play?”
I am feeling very very old right now.
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“I spent most of my college years drunk and coasted off my high school education, and they are, too.”
Me too! Plus, I would add, I also got very depressed and stopped going to classes for long periods as a result of romantic disappointments. So I don’t see any evidence that kids today are different. It’s just grumpy adults complaining, like they always have.
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Academics definitely don’t have a corner on the “I work too hard against my will and therefore view the rest of the world as lazy” market.
IMHO this is a major source of tension between modern parents and teachers. The teachers want respect. The parents often live in a world where respect is earned via very long, mandatory hours. The parents would LOVE to earn respect and a paycheck in some other way, but it’s routinely denied them. These same parents turn around and encounter teachers who insist upon respect even though they work the equivalent of part-time hours. It ends with anger. Not pretty.
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I was so lazy. I think there were three or four courses that I dropped because it was 2 am and I was tired of doing proofs or coding for a big assignment, and online registration made it so easy to make the problem just disappear. They should not let 19-year-olds make decisions like that in the middle of the night with a few keystrokes.
But college for me was just a decade ago, so I’m not sure if I count as Kids These Days or Back In My Day.
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They should not let 19-year-olds make decisions like that in the middle of the night with a few keystrokes.
To my Old-Before-My-Time-And-Happy-About-It mind, Siobhan, there are great many things that 19-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to do. But I’m authoritarian that way. I get my kicks my refusing to count anything online as an acceptable source in the papers handed in to me, forcing students to go to the library and turn actual physical pages. Bwahahahaha!
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” But I’m authoritarian that way. I get my kicks my refusing to count anything online as an acceptable source in the papers handed in to me, forcing students to go to the library and turn actual physical pages. Bwahahahaha!”
I would drop your class, Russell.
I think 19 year olds should be able to make those decisions. I also think they should be able to drink. And, I think it’s ridiculous that we even question it, when we’re willing to send 19 year olds armed with very expensive machinery to kill and die in Afghanistan.
I don’t think kids are different and I don’t think profs are different. I think profs complained about how students didn’t work hard enough 10 years ago and 20 years ago, too.
I do think there’s something different in the world today, that filters into school as well, and that’s the expectation of a clear path to reward of every action we take (which in turn, I blame on optimizing productivity in the workplace). It means people want to know exactly how reading Chaucer or learning Latin or doing a proof of the Pythagorean theorem will help them (and, the answer, for most of those things, is not really, except for the fact that it will make you a wiser person).
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I will have to dissent and say that I really do thinks kids are different these days. Not worse, but different. I have been teaching English for over 15 years, and in the last 5-6, I have seen a real difference in behavior.
My student population is very different from the profs in the NYT, however. I am teaching working-class kids mostly. I would say the difference is that my students have a hard time seeing any consequences to their academic behavior–didn’t turn in the paper? why is that a problem, can’t I just do make-up work? I didn’t feel like coming to class, etc. They are really shocked that there are often severe consequences to this. They are not very engaged with their own education, and just try making them read something of any length (a novel). They also will do very little work outside the classroom–they just don’t study very much.
They also have absolutely no filter. I have had students on the first day ask me if I was going to be tough on plagiarism because they failed this class last semester for plagiarizing. Or that they missed class because they were in jail. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that my students are not really socialized to school.
I don’t think it’s helicopter parents, though. My students aren’t middle-class enough for that. I think we are looking at the first group of students to completely come through K-12 high stakes testing. It’s no surprise that they are not really engaged with learning or school or that they think all work can be eventually made up or that studying is something that happens in school and not outside of it. Overall, they do not have independent minds or a great work ethic, and I haven’t seen any national trend in public education to inculcate independent thought in students or how to work outside of class. (I am definitely NOT slamming public ed; I think those teachers are doing the absolute best they can, but the system is not really set up to develop the intellectual habits that we have long associated with success in higher ed).
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I tried to earn street cred today by explaining that I’m not an “old-fashioned” professor who teaches the traditional research paper. I have them creating pages on our wiki that involve researching a topic, if that makes sense. But it’s blowing their minds. They can’t understand what I’m asking for. I want them to be curious, and they aren’t. I want them to experiment and explore, and I’ve set up my assignments to reward them for doing so, but they still can’t help doing what’s safe. Unlike RAB, I encourage them to cite online sources. (Not only is it realistic, but the more recent the topics, the less likely I am to get plagiarized papers!) I’m also telling them they don’t have to use MLA citation; they have to learn other ways to refer to their sources. They cannot handle this. They think it means I’m telling them not to cite. They can’t see the gray areas.
I think I want to reframe my intro comp course as being about “conversations” and how to have them with texts. They do not know how to do this. But then again, did I ever know how to do it? I don’t know. It’s so hard for me to remember myself at 18.
Ok, I have to go home and watch Glee with my daughter and stop thinking about work. 🙂
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I would say the difference is that my students have a hard time seeing any consequences to their academic behavior….They also have absolutely no filter….I think we are looking at the first group of students to completely come through K-12 high stakes testing. It’s no surprise that they are not really engaged with learning or school or that they think all work can be eventually made up or that studying is something that happens in school and not outside of it.
In all seriousness, I can sympathize with a lot of that. I don’t know how best to compare with what I saw and experienced as student and what I am seeing today, but there level of distraction and irresponsibility, combined with an end-all focus on jumping through hoops (usually meaning tests), just really doesn’t seem to comport with what I remember. I don’t know. Standardized testing is likely a contributing factor; I have come to believe the internet is a big one too. (Hence my jerkiness about requiring students to read books and not just websites, BJ.) And then of course you have capitalism, which is usually to blame for most things, anyway.
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even though they work the equivalent of part-time hours.
That’s rarely true, though. Parents may think it, but it’s not so.
Russell- would you really rule out a citation to, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or the Notre Dame Philosophy Review, or the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, or Philosopher’s Imprint, merely on the ground they are (only) on-line? If so, you may have identified the eccentricity you were looking for the other day.
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Matt, I can only speak from my personal experience. I am married to an employee of Chicago Public Schools, and have a sister who teaches in the greater Seattle area. And I can tell you that teachers do indeed work the equivalent of part-time hours, when compared to the corporate world. Key to this comparison is the fact that few people in the white collar world works a 40-hour week anymore; typical hours in the offices I know of are more like 60-hour weeks. And so a teacher who puts in extra hours grading papers, etc., in the evening is still working part-time, comparatively. I recently took a pay cut to go down to 75%, and I work about the same hours as my husband and sister (except all year round, no summer/spring break/long holiday break).
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Ugh, I’m sorry to sound so bitter about this stuff. I feel very caught; it feels like my family risks falling from the middle class if I give up my corporate job. And yet I can’t bring my hours down enough to make it tolerable. I’m trying to suck it up, really I am. And I know teachers experience a very special brand of stress; after all, I do not spend my day with children who are brazenly mistreated by the world. (Nor do I get vommited on.) Still, I have my own stresses, and sometimes hearing complaints from people who get 4 months’ vacation just sets me off.
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Jen- note that that’s a pretty narrow definition of white-collar, though. I know lots and lots of people who work white collar jobs who really do work 40 hours a week. And nearly all the people who do corporate or legal work that regularly requires 60 plus hours a week make a lot more than most teachers. So, people who work a lot and make a lot and then complain when people who work less (sometimes) make less, well, they can screw off for all I care. If they can’t give “respect” in such cases, they need to see a therapist.
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there level of distraction and irresponsibility, combined with an end-all focus on jumping through hoops (usually meaning tests), just really doesn’t seem to comport with what I remember.
You put it really well–they are very distracted (perhaps by the internet–they have a hard time reading anything remotely lengthy, perhaps by the demands of late-stage capitalism–they work more part-time jobs than people I knew in college) and they are very irresponsible. They are just huge flakes, essentially. They are nice and I like them, but you can’t depend on them to do what you ask of them or follow the simplest of directions. I’m not sure whether the internet or testing is to blame for their lack of intellectual curiousity. They just want a credential.
Nevertheless, this isn’t kids drinking too much and goofing off; their behavior and demeanour are distinctly different from that of the many drunk layabouts I knew in college. It’s certainly a challenge as an educator.
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I’d like to hear from those of you who have been teaching for a number of years about whether the kids are different now than they were 5, 10, 20 years ago. I think we’re really bad at making the comparison of what we were like as students v what we think students are like now because our point of view is so different.
It’s not the right comparison, but my children certainly have the same intellectual curiosity I had as a child, and so do a number of their peers. I recently listened in on my son’s six year old friend do an accurate analyses to make a differential diagnosis of his sniffly nose. Now these kids might have that all driven out if them by the time they are in college, but they are intellectually adventuresome students now.
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Russell–would you really rule out a citation to, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or the Notre Dame Philosophy Review, or the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, or Philosopher’s Imprint, merely on the ground they are (only) on-line?
Very likely not. But I’ve generally failed in my ability to steer them towards reputable online sources, as opposed to just making use of whatever Google pops up first (Wikipedia, of course–which I use all the time, to be sure, but I know enough not to treat it as a crutch, not to mention being able to withstand the awesome temptations to plagiarism it presents, something my students often struggle with too). Hence, my general banning of it entirely.
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“It’s not the right comparison, but my children certainly have the same intellectual curiosity I had as a child, and so do a number of their peers.”
I’d hesitate to use my kids vs. me as a generational comparison, since I wasn’t around to see my husband as a kid. Personality-wise, I’m sure there are great similarities between the kids and us. However, one major difference between me and the 8-year-old is that she has had far 10X the exposure to non-fiction that I had.
I think my 5-year-old has more intellectual curiosity than my 8-year-old, but the thing is, the 8-year-old needs it less, since she knows a lot more already. The 5-year-old is in the process of acquiring a personal library of basic facts about the world, and it’s a very laborious business.
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The 5-year-old is in the process of acquiring a personal library of basic facts about the world, and it’s a very laborious business.
The most interesting part is that they sometimes feel the need to share what they’ve learned. A couple of Sundays ago, my son told the priest, “Superheros aren’t real, but God is.” I think that cheered the priest, also surpised him since it came from out of the blue.
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They are just huge flakes, essentially. They are nice and I like them, but you can’t depend on them to do what you ask of them or follow the simplest of directions. I’m not sure whether the internet or testing is to blame for their lack of intellectual curiousity. They just want a credential.
Except for the bit about the Internet, I definitely remember hearing this mid-80s.
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I was very reliable in the mid-80s. In fact, that is probably about as reliable as I have ever been, though I am currently much more reliable than I was in the mid-90s.
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“I’d hesitate to use my kids vs. me as a generational comparison, since I wasn’t around to see my husband as a kid.”
I can report that my father’s teenage diary contains, as the totality of its entry for V-E Day: “War over in Europe. School anyway.” Which would suggest that children 65 years ago were just as terse and just as self-centered as anyone says they are now.
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Professors probably aren’t great evaluators of this anyway, right? Because they represent a particular subset of college students, and probably many of their peers were in the same subset. Their students, however, represent a cross-section of a college or university as a whole.
My spouse is a university professor and reports some changes in student behavior and expectations over the past fifteen years. But he’s not sure his opinions are useful for real evaluation, since he’s changed over the past fifteen years, too.
I’m more interested in discussions about how technology, testing, or other material conditions have changed students than in discussions about their parents. It’s not that I think parenting has no effect, but it just doesn’t interest me that much. It seems as if every generation disparages the parenting styles of those who come before and after them.
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I wonder if a lot depends on the culture of the particular school or dorm or whatever too.
I attended two different universities and at one, basically a liberal arts institution in a small town, the extension was pretty much unheard of. The freshman class lost a lot of students to dropping out/some kind of probation, but the ones who stayed generally made their deadlines.
The second university gave out extensions and extra credit like candy, overall. It was a left-leaning campus in a huge urban university. People definitely fell into that habit, including me.
This was late 80s/early 90s tho’ 🙂
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