Comment by jt-hill
19 days ago
If you can bear with me while i attempt a synthesis here, I think this one line captures basically the entire dynamic, but the author seems to seriously underweight its explanatory value.
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this
It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.
As a student currently, I'll also throw in this perspective. The colleges themselves make it feel transactional and not about learning even if I'm interested in doing so.
For example, I'm taking a physics course right now (electricity and magnetism). The concepts are difficult for me and I was hoping that the homework would help. So, I go to do the homework, but the homework is online. With the online homework I get five chances to get the problem correct, but there is zero partial credit, zero feedback, and every time I get the answer wrong, it negatively impacts my grade.
I have no chance to make mistakes and learn. At least with homework that was handed out back in the day, there was at least the possibility of partial credit being handed out. So my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.
Additionally, since students have been cheating, I think it gives professors a skewed perspective on how much time is actually needed to get work done, so the deadlines get moved up. This means I get even more pressure put on me when I'm just trying to learn and be a good student.
In the 90s we had the "Plato" system for chemistry. It was a question/answer terminal in the library. Our Chemistry TA advised us to use it to study for exams as it had a lot of sample questions. It was really good because if you got it wrong, it actually gave you a detailed explanation of how to solve it. It was so helpful to have that. When I used the system, I made a bunch of mistakes but ended up learning from them, and it really helped for the exams.
1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994.
https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline
Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.
For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.
What I find extremely sad in the whole academic business, is that all the work that is put in creating those tools, curriculum, classes materials etc are just wasted. Systems are decomissioned, professors refuse to share their materials or to even update it when receiving students feedback or when there are new disoveries in the field. And copyright holders are threatening to bite when learning material is put online...
If you want to experience it again, they re-released the final version awhile back; they've got emulators for both the mainframe and terminals.
https://codex.retro1.org/plato:operation.r1:installing
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> We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.
Personally, I kind of pitied the non-STEM students.
My own problem was there were not enough slots in the schedule for all the classes I wanted to take. I figured the university knew what it was doing with the required classes, and they were right.
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Was it this system? I used these terminals at U of Illinois in the late 80's, but I only remember using them to take my physics tests. I don't remember ever using them for studying or interactive learning.
https://grainger.illinois.edu/news/magazine/plato
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I graduated (admittedly many-many years ago) from a good but not top-notch university. I remember a somehow similar situation: obviously learning was considered a good thing, but both the students and the professors realized that it's the diploma what brings most students there, not a pursuit of pure knowledge.
So I quickly realized that, unlike, say, elementary school, a university is not a push system, it's a pull system. If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source. There's still plenty, but nobody is going to force-feed it to you. I read quite a lot beside the required books. I practiced quite a lot beside the lab practice (fortunately wielding a soldering iron or writing programs was a marketable skill; still is, but used to be, too). I asked my professors questions that were not entirely in the books; often that was during a few minutes after a lecture / classes / labs, so I got from them ideas and pointers to new directions to learn by myself.
Was it helpful in my career? Certainly yes, I started doing contract jobs three years before graduation, and then joined a bunch of interesting companies where that knowledge was somehow useful, mostly as a foundation of more specific skills.
I was certainly not alone; I knew (and often was friends with) a bunch of other students who craved knowledge and skills, and we helped each other shake these out of the university, past the transactional bounds. It wasn't all that hard, but it required a conscious effort.
Very certainly a large number of other students did more coasting than knowledge-mining. They got their diplomas, got some white-collar jobs that did not require such deep knowledge of engineering, I suppose, or started unrelated businesses.
> If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source.
Oh I'm 100% aware of this, and actually think it's better than the push system that school prior to college follows. The issue is that the content is significantly worse now.
There ends up being a lot of guesswork today of finding resources that are good. I always have to question: "does this person actually know what they're talking about or am I wasting my time?" I'm sure you had to do this back in your day, but with the overwhelming amount of information available, it becomes difficult to parse.
I would kill for a class where the professor just said, "Everything you need is in that book." Now we get, "The book doesn't talk about this, but you should know..." It's infuriating.
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I started college at the CC level (having no HS diploma) to get into a State school. And from a series of poor choices and ignorance on my part needed to take a several years gap before returning to finish up.
I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.
CC students have always felt more motivated in my opinion. But good Lord the quality of the education at the State level is abysmal. I am not saying there aren't quality professors and classes. There are.
There is however an alarming high number of poorly designed classes, nearly broken technology, poorly edited and badly written assignments, and questionable instruction.
I have to compare the quality and price with what I experienced in CC and it just makes me sad and depressed.
The higher the level of education, the less attention paid to pedagogy. I had better teachers in high school than in college.
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> I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.
I'm actually somewhat inclined to agree with this. I also started at a community college first, so I got to see a lot of adults trying to do career switches into tech.
Many of them were frankly the same if not worse than many of the young students you see in college today. One could definitely attribute some of that to the fact that they have more responsibilities to handle impacting them, but even just overall demeanor was noticeably worse. I frequently had adults 15-20 years older than me throwing their hands up and asking me to just give them the answers to what were ultimately very simple programming problems.
It was great for me because I took it as an opportunity to reinforce the material we were learning, but I knew I was doing them a disservice, so at some point I would stop enabling the poor behavior.
Honestly, to me the biggest thing impacting everyone is the inundation of information from technology today. I know it sounds cliche, but it's making academics a billion times harder than it needs to be. It's also making it less enjoyable and satisfying, thus people take the shortcut to get the grade they're looking for.
What the college tuition debate overlooks is that for costs to go down, so does the quality of the experience. this means college is more barebones and less handholding, like in Europe.
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Costs have been increasingly hard to justify given the wealth of information the internet provides, for some time now. Often, a sufficiently motivated person can piece together a lot of material themselves, given a general "structure" of topics/material.
Lots of textbooks floating around out there too.
LLMs add another layer to this. In many cases, the whole thing is looking a bit silly (at least at the state level)
This is really unfortunate, and I think your instructor should read it.
It sounds like your instructor has confused homework with quizzes, and the cheating issue demands some rethinking of the course pace and assessment system.
In physics and related fields, I have found fully worked problems to be very valuable. If your textbook includes some of these, I recommend reviewing them and working similar practice problems if possible. I wonder if things like supplementary texts, khan academy, or tutorials on youtube might help as well.
As you note, systems like ChatGPT could be helpful for explaining or working through problems, but obviously you won't learn anything if you rely on them for doing your own problem sets.
Typically these online homework systems are pushed by the department much to the chagrin of the professors, but the students are required to pay ~$100/ea for the privilege of doing automated homework, and the department gets some nice kickbacks.
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Interesting. When I was an undegraduate we had textbooks which were at least 25% problems and solutions, allowing for near endless self practice.
I am currently holding my copy of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffiths in my hands; somehow it is rarely more than a metre from where I work!
Are such textbooks still popular and used (i.e. mandatory to purchase) in courses like this?
I've noticed specifically with undergraduate physics courses that the textbook will usually get bundled with the online homework service that the school is using, and that part you're required to purchase if you want to do your homework.
Nowadays though, if a professor states that a textbook is required and there's no online service involved, 80% of the time the professor is exaggerating and probably hasn't even read the book themselves. The other 20% of the time, students will generally just find the pdf for free online somewhere (As a CS student, I tend to find my books on GitHub).
I know I'm digressing from what you asked a bit here, but I just really need to take a moment to highlight that the textbooks that are "required" today are not nearly as good as the textbooks you likely went to school with (I'm making a bit of an assumption about the era of your schooling here, so correct me if you only just recently graduated). There are way to many instances of some no-name authors getting the shot at publishing with O'Reilly or Pearson. The content will be mostly correct, but they're never truly illuminating.
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The best homework system i ever experienced was high school calculus.
4 points per assignment. Pass the assignment to a peer for grading. If they wrote down the problem and attempted it: 3 points. One more point if the logic and steps were followable, even if wrong.
The answers were in the back of the book. The homework grade should reflect attempts and practice, not mastery as that is what exams are for.
My high school calculus teacher would assign homework every day, anywhere from a couple problems, to a dozen or more, depending on the work. 5 points for the homework, no matter how many problems. One point off for each problem missed. Sometimes broken down by steps if it was very-few problems (but still with way more opportunities to lose points, than there were points)
Assigned every. Fucking. Night.
You could spend two hours on it, get a majority of the problems right and get extremely close on the rest but make some identical mistake on each of them at the end, and still get not just an F, but a zero. It could be an insanely large assignment, and also you have other classes and other things happening in life, so you only get half of it done because these were not small assignments, but at least get all the ones you did right. Zero points, because you missed 5 or more.
To say it was demoralizing would be an understatement.
You are right, what degraded is not simply the students attention and motivation, it is the whole institution. They keep pushing ineffective approaches all over. You are right to blame LMSes, they are absolute disasters, poorly designed and ineffective at anything except save time for professors (and let's be real here, they also do social media and unrelated to their work activities so they are trading their teaching opportunities for leisure). Those LMSes are probably as detrimental as PowerPoint has been for communicating to an audience. It is as if everyone is trying to avoid doing what they are here to do. They replace thought, exchanges and discovery with miserable tools just so they can go waste their time on something else.
> my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.
Have you considered trying to do the problems yourself, away from the computer, then checking your work with ChatGPT or the like?
I should probably do that more, however, one big issue is I can't always trust that I'm not being led astray with some of the posts on Chegg or the responses from ChatGPT and other AI model interfaces. I will frequently get responses from ChatGPT and/or Chegg that are just flat out wrong. So I could compare my answers against these services (which takes a long time), but I run the risk now of potentially learning the wrong approach when I go and find out that the walkthrough I was following was incorrect.
Which granted, that's just part of the work, but these weird hoops to jump through just shouldn't be there in the first place, and they used to not be there as well. So my gripe is why on Earth did we add them?
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I'm lucky enough to teach in a school that has small classes; I get to be very accessible to the students. There is some auto-grading, but most homework I grade by hand and give partial credit.
But if my classes were 300 people, I couldn't do that.
I also have relaxed deadlines so students can take more time if they need it, and request it in advance.
The object is to learn stuff. That's where I'm aiming.
Can I ask what school? I have kids that will be ready to start college in a few years and I’m always on the looking for places like what you’re describing
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I remember this frustration clearly. It's valuable to be challenged and struggle and overcome, but the value of a perfect GPA is a lot more salient.
From your numerous comments on this topic, it seems that you are remarkably self-aware (for a college student) about your own learning process. That is kind of amazing. I hope you really know just how broken the system that you're describing is and that it is absolutely worth fighting to figure out how to really learn something hard.
Also know that there's a yin and yang here. You're in a broken system--but the system used to be broken in other ways. Your point about there being too many resources strikes me as fascinating and true--and yet we have efforts like Three Blue One Brown taking teaching to a whole new level. People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.
First, I appreciate the kind words, they really do mean a lot.
I will say, part of the reason I'm likely more aware is because I am an older undergrad (currently 25), but additionally, I've seen all sides of the education system, so I've been exposed to quite a lot.
> People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.
100% agree on this. The ability to be able to pick anything up and just go with it opens life up to a wealth of opportunities.
i’m assuming this is a system that changes the numbers in the question each time? often there is a separate “practice” button where you can practice and (maybe) get feedback, figure out the process, and then do the questions?
even if not, try putting the textbook and the question into an AI (I use the paid version of gemini, the $20/ month is the best money you’ll ever spend at college), then as it to explain how to answer the question. Then ask it to generate a similar question, and then give you feedback to you as you try to answer it. Then try and answer it step by step, repeat as many times as you like until you understand and keep getting the right answer, then answer the actual homework question.Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss!
Using AI is risky since it's trained on data from sites like Chegg, StudySmarter (now known as Vaia), Brainly, etc.
Since those are user submitted answers, they sometimes get them wrong and so the AI models just regurgitate the wrong answer, especially if it's for a problem that's infrequently assigned by professors.
Nevertheless, I still use the AI models to try and aid in solving these problems, there's just always this gut feeling that I'm being guided in the wrong direction, but since I'm not versed in the subject I'm learning, I can't identify the hallucinations or inaccuracies.
I agree to some extent. A wild one to me is how schools will limit the number of classes you can take and/or pressure you to graduate on time even if it means choosing a major before you're really ready. That seems like a surefire way to kill any interest in exploring knowledge and replace it with a focus on mechanical box-checking.
They have to make room for incoming freshmen.
That homework setup sounds awful. I wonder how much it was shaped by educators, and how much by techbros.
Unfortunately, the setup I'm talking about is the norm these days. It's the MyLab and Mastering software offered by Pearson.
It doesn't just stop at physics. I've seen it used in math courses and economics courses as well.
Sometimes professors will setup the system so that you can redo the problem with different numerical inputs for the variables, and that approach is fine to me as it lets me learn through trial and error without negatively impacting my grade.
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It's on educators. It started well before tech.
They want kids to do homework, so they give a few free marks for doing it. Kids cheat and ignore anything not marked because that's how people respond to incentives. Then the lecturers wonder why no-one is doing stuff that isn't marked, and try to fill in the gaps by marking more things until they run out of capacity to police it all.
There are upsides to continuous assessment, but it's effectively micromanagement and has all the predictable downsides. "I applied hard incentives to make people give me X and Y, so why don't they they game the system, and why don't they also do Z, shocked picachu face."
I agree. I took linear algebra through an online course. I can't imagine a worse way to learn the topic. I happily cheated on tests to pass the class.
Mind you, I already apply linear algebra daily—I simply refuse to waste my time computing basic operations on matrices by hand when that's why we have computers and partial credit isn't available.
We don't really have to look for an explanation. The author says it, pure and clear.
"It’s the phones, stupid"
That's it. Every other variable, including the transactional nature of acquiring a middle class job, has stayed the same. People are just getting dumber [1], and the phones are causing this drop.
I am as tech forward as the next person. I think AI deserves the time to figure out what it is. But the phones have basically shown us where all their negatives and positives are. Time to regulate, get the phones out of the schools. If you're in one of these states [2] get behind the active legislation, if not, start it!
[1]: https://theweek.com/science/have-we-reached-peak-cognition
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-bans-states-e6d...
Nah. Humanities professors keep claiming it's phones because that's visible to them when they lecture but read what they're saying carefully and the actual cause is obvious: students don't take it seriously because the professors don't.
The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price.
It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.
It's easy to get caught up in negative judgments about another generation [1] and it can be hard to put one group's vices in context when they seem different from your own.
That said, I know for myself that my attention span has gotten shorter. I used to read more. Now I listen to audiobooks. When reading text, even engaging fiction can be a struggle. I read one or two pages and feel the urge to check something else or look at something else or get up and do something. I know this wasn't the case in middle school or high school (late 2000s).
I think it's because of first podcasts and then watching / listening to too thousands of YouTube videos at 2x speed. I've become much more "efficient" at consuming entertainment content - so "efficient" that I can get bored listening to someone telling an interesting story at 1x speed.
The only advantage I have is that I can tell that this has happened and I can work against it by forcing myself to read more. But if things were always like that, how would I know? When you're sleep deprived every day for years, you don't notice how much it is affecting you. It's the same with a short attention span.
[1]: Aside: the omnipresent talk about generations these days is maybe not the best thing to begin with.
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> Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.
It's not just humanities courses and it also affects "elite" universities.
For the graduate NLP course my advisor taught at UMass Amherst, despite allowing ChatGPT for a take home test (this was a couple years ago), 60% of the students broke into two separate collusion rings (one Chinese group and another South Asian) and copied off of each other. They got caught when the answers were wrong, but in a different way than ChatGPT. Despite the seriousness of the rampant cheating, students were not failed out of the course, mainly because it reflects badly on the University if they fail. My advisor had to go through a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy in the process.
Jump forward to Cornell University where I'm currently a postdoc and grade inflation is real. They had to get rid of reporting course-wide median grade beside a student's grade on their transcript [1] to help combat it.
That hasn't prevented the pressure to pass students with high marks despite abysmal performance. I supervised an undergrad's research one semester as an independent study course. That student did very little work and despite multiple promptings over several weeks, would fail to provide their code for me to help debug and provide code review. I ended up giving them a B+, which is somehow considered "failing". The student even reached out after grades were assigned to beg me to reconsider. None of the students I've worked with so far have had the skills I'm pretty sure I mastered by that time (this includes work with undergrads, master's students, and PhD students). I'm continually shocked by the caliber of students here compared to what I assumed before joining.
I trust professors who've been teaching for decades when they say something has qualitatively changed.
[1]: https://registrar.cornell.edu/grades-transcripts/median-grad...
> Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money!
He did say it, but you have to keep reading after that. Fail too many students and you will get called in by the dean for a "discussion" where they basically tell you to stop doing that. For the non-tenured faculty this is not something they can reasonably fight. Maybe tenured faculty could, and they might not get outright fired, but their teaching load could be reduced or students will simply not sign up for their classes once they have a reputation for being a hardass.
Aside from that, nearly every student manages to have some "disability" that requires an accommodation. I had one professor friend tell me a student required an accommodation that they not receive any negative feedback. They literally weren't allowed to tell the student when they were wrong.
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Did you understand what was being said.
You are not engaging with the central issue- the education pipeline is depositing students with a far lower attention span and capability than ever before, in college classes, for all subjects, including Math.
You are banging on humanities as it is a ritualistic target. Math and science teachers, including comp sci teachers are pointing this out.
The trend exists.
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Nah, University is too late to fix this. But clearly kids aren’t fully “passing” their high school and probably middle school skills.
Mass failings while satisfying has an air of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. As a parent I can see the mass pull towards phones, practically impossible to disentangle save for simple surgical regulation.
No one should be allowed to have phones in class. That’s it.
My vibe is that phones have this bimodal effect on cognition, which further confuses the debate.
The smart kids use them as tools to complement and accelerate their learning but everyone else mostly just gets dumber from the infinite Oww my Balls adjacent content they're addicted to.
At this professor's Average U, everyone is mostly in the worse camp.
The transactional nature hasn’t always been the same, though. It hasn’t always been that way, or at least the nature of the transaction has changed. Decades ago, surveys showed the predominant reason people went to college was “to develop a philosophy for life”. Now the main reason is “to get a good job.”
It's because academia has, from antiquity to just vaguely recently, been a playground for the children of the rich to either pursue erudite passions or just to schmooze and make friends with other rich people's kids.
For normal people there wasn't a lot of point. Jobs didn't require these. My father, who just retired, had a high school education with no college, yet held what would nowadays require a bachelors in mechanical engineering, at a minimum. He himself considers himself quite lucky to have basically been the last person onto the no-degree train to the middle class.
I think to some degree this is a matter of capital formation not keeping pace with the general increase in education access for the rest of the workforce. We're educating people but our system struggles to produce companies that can gainfully employ them. And by "our system", I do think there's a nontrivial factor in bigcos conspiring to not ever run the labor market as hot as they did in the past decade. They'd rather grow slower than let employees have bargaining power.
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Then those surveys were only of privileged students who had the connections and the family backing to not worry about thier livelihood.
I can guarantee you that my mom went to college so she could get a job (retired teacher). My dad went to school because it was free as a veteran. But he made more as a factory worker.
I don’t know a single person who went to college with me for any other reason than a career.
I also bet those surveys didn’t go to the now Historically Black Colleges and Universities - the only ones that my mom could go to.
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Decades ago college was for the people who were financially secure and could choose a life of the mind. Now it's a prerequisite for almost any real job. Guess what, the programmers grinding Leetcode aren't doing it for the thrill of solving a puzzle either.
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I wonder how many people here (outside of college) spend lots of times on their phones (or their other types of screens)
It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention.
Do people actually quit their addiction?
Yeah... There are exponentially more legacy applicants to colleges today than there were 30 years ago. By definition.
You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points?
But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.
You're not wrong, many students approach college as a vocational training facility. I'd say they do want to learn, but the focus is on "learning to get a job".
If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.
Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.
These skills, and the understanding of how to use them, are the real goal -the material is just there to keep your interest.
Yes, obviously, if you are going into chemistry then learn chemistry and so on. But round out your course with other things. Oceanography can give you insight to computer science, literature can promote better communication.
Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.
But if you are at college now, or perhaps going soon, try and see beyond the next assignment. Try and see the process which underlies it.
Most of all college is there to teach you to think. So stop doing for just a moment and start thinking.
Once you see behind the curtain you can't unsee it. And ironically even if I tell you it's there, I can't make you look. Experience doesn't work like that.
Do you think this might be tied to a person’s financial situation?
Grow up with a safety net, you’ll enjoy the process.
Grow up poor and/or with people depending on you and you focus on the end state?
I would argue the opposite.
Grow up with a safety net and you don't take it seriously.
Group poor and/or with people depending on you, you understand the task at hand.
I goofed off a lot in college until I was tired of partying and realized I was going nowhere; about end of Sophomore year. All the older folks who paid their own way sure took it seriously. For reference, I'm also GenX.
I'm sure motivations range from what I suggested to what you suggested.
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I think it plays a part. Just like personality does. And the college itself does. And the professors you get, and so on.
But really the insight is internal. And it's just insight, it doesn't dictate your response.
In other words I'm not saying this insight suddenly means you change career path. Most of us will go out and get jobs in an office, most will progress on similar lines.
The difference is in how you approach things. For example; if you see programming as vocational training then the language they teach you matters. If they taught you Java then you apply for a job doing Java.
If you see it as I did, then you see programming, not language. Language is easy to learn, and I've done serious work in at least 4 in my career. My first job was in a language I'd never seen before. Today I spend a lot of time in one that wasn't even invented.
If I had to go out and find work tomorrow I'm confident I can handle whatever language they prefer. I don't say that with arrogance- it'll take effort - but rather I'm confident I know how to learn.
Thus I'm not scared of AI. It's a tool, and I'm happy to learn it and use it. It won't replace me because I don't "write code", I program (and I understand the difference. )
So ultimately I'm not sure that financial status or whatever make a big difference. Ultimately it comes down to the person.
> Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.
I really love this. I'll try and bear this in mind over the next few years.
I'm a mature-aged student going for their second degree (CS the first time, science this time). I am loving the subject but it's hard at the beginning because the amount of new stuff I have to absorb is overwhelming. At the times when I have a bit of a breather -- either when I'm "getting it" or during mid-semester break -- I find the subject (biology) wonderful.
Congratulations on going back. I've considered it from time to time, but honestly it just seems like too much work :)
And yes, especially the first couple years there's a lot of work. Especially if you "have a life" outside as well.
It helps that you enjoy it - indeed I suggest it's necessary to succeed. Well done.
Agreed. I always felt my computer engineering degree taught me how to approach a problem and logically solve it, weigh the pros and cons, etc. As well as introducing me to the hardware side of things - I already knew by high school that I could learn any programming language given enough time (already had Basic, C, SQL, a couple of DSLs and knew at least in part, 3 different human languages). I wanted to force myself to get a similar "baseline" for hardware.
Of course, it has impacted all parts of my life - I think differently than I did before studying engineering, and I sometimes try to apply this problem solving in non-technical parts of life with.. mixed results.
I'm confused with your comment, because you start here:
> If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.
> Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.
But then follow that with:
> Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.
Like... I guess it depends what precisely you mean by "workers" but in my mind at least, if we're thinking similarly, that would be white-collar office workers. And what you describe in the previous quoted section is, IMHO, a perfectly reasonable breakdown of what college is preparing them to do. But then the subsequent line feels like a criticism of the output of that.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's a legit question.
So, I think college can be different things to different people. Most will treat it as vocational training. And yes they'll end up being good office workers and we need those.
I refer to luck only because I perceive the other to be in the minority. Also because you can't make someone see it. Even if I tell you it's there (it's not a secret) doesn't mean you'll get it.
And again, my perception is that "getting it" leads to a better life. (For some definition of "better", usually not financial. )
Which doesn't make office workers bad. That's objectively a good life.
The process underneath is busy work to make some learning criteria milestone for accreditation
I agree that that is how many people see it. Possibly even your professors.
Fortunately I went to a place where the professors understood the real goals and made decisions as such.
For example (and this is my history, not advice) I took a couple electives for pure interest sake (I didn't need them to graduate. ) I went to all the lectures. I wrote all the exams and tests.
But I skipped all the prac work. I didn't do any of the weekly assignments. Nominally that meant I couldn't write the final exam. (They don't like people writing and failing, and prac work is correlated to that.)
But I went to see both professors. Both knew me (at least by sight, not name.) I explained why the prac work was not important to me (it covered the same process as I'd learned in other courses and the minutiae of the material was irrelevant to me.) My test scores showed I would pass. Both gave me an exemption snd let me write (and I passed.)
I don't recommend this. YMMV. But I hindsight I think maybe they understood I was there to learn process, not material. I was there to add to my big picture, not because I was going to be an oceanographer or astronomer.
I can't even say that I used anything from those courses in my career, although I did write a system for a marine company once, so maybe :)
Yep. I gave a similar speech on the first day of every English 101 class I ever taught. (Though, damn, I wish I'd had as concise a formulation as your list of skills. Nicely done.) In my case I largely hoped to head off the resentment that STEM majors frequently expressed about how come they were required to take something so irrelevant to their eventual careers as writing. It sometimes worked.
I didn't get to take English at college, but I've spent a lot of my career writing and training. I've written a couple text books, and more documentation than I care to remember.
Writing well is definitely a skill worth learning. Communication is the single most important thing to career advancement.
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Wait, but the point of the piece is that although college has always been transactional, behavior has changed.
If so, why would transactional-ism be the cause?
Read on:
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.
And then, crucially:
> Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.
"Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids.
When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.
Don't hate the player — hate the game.
I don't think the author of the piece is saying there has been a cultural change among students, emanating from within. Rather the thesis is that smartphones are the culprit. "Things changed" can encompass the proliferation of smartphones.
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Because the universities themselves have been constantly lowering standards. It was always a transaction but there was a price. That price is locked in a race to the bottom because administrations and professors don't care about standards.
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit.
Only so long as the college doesn't devalue the credential.
If I interview a few people with a CS degree from College A and I find they don't know the basics of programming - then the credential loses value; why would I bother interviewing people from such a college?
So colleges have to balance the needs of their stakeholders - employers/ graduates want the credential to be a sign of education; and current students who want good grades and less work.
The "implied terms of the transaction" have always been that current students have to learn enough that they're not devaluing the credential.
I have interviewed prospective employees who come in with no academic credentials all the way through to those who have completed degree programs at one of the top 50 universities. Regardless of university, students are individuals and shouldn’t be given more or less credit because of the name of the school they attended.
Full. Stop.
That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one.
As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it.
Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.
While I agree with you in practice, institution name (of their school, prior employer, ...) is, overall, a hard to escape filter when you're staring down the barrel of thousands of applications per open role.
There are other early-out filters you can use, but none of them are perfect in quickly reducing the application count to a tractable number for your HR/hiring managers/engineers to tackle.
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I agree that the trend is not sustainable, but that's not the students' responsibility — they're just responding to incentives.
Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.
> or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential
Employers haven't recognized such signalling in my lifetime, if ever.
However, there are a sufficient number of professions (e.g. medicine) where it is legally required to attain accreditation through the college system to keep the aura of being job creators. The average teenager, with no life experience other than sitting in the classroom for the past 12 years of their life and playing soccer on the weekend, deciding what to do after high school doesn't know the difference.
To make matters more complex, said teenagers don't recognize that not all people are equal. They hear things like "high school dropouts make x% less than college graduates" and think that means they must go to college to not suffer the same fate, not realizing that the high school dropout cohort is dominated by those with disabilities and other life challenges that prevents them from earning more in industry. Surprising to many, handing a Harvard degree over on a silver platter to someone with severe autism will not cure what ails them.
So there is really no risk to the system. The incentives are by and large already based on misunderstandings with so much religion in place now to keep those misunderstanding alive and are otherwise driven by legal requirements that aren't apt to go away.
Besides, even if all that is destroyed, the primary reason one goes to college is still for the dating pool. Academic rigour remains necessary to keep the quality of potential partners up. Tinder and the like may have tried to encroach on that, but I suspect it has only made it more desirable to be on/near campus to increase the likelihood of a match. Users of those services aren't searching the world over to find "the one".
Yeah, and the nature of the transaction evolves over time in a way that makes aging professors uncomfortable.
I get the sense the author just doesn’t have the same rapport with students they likely once did. Students stop coming to class and don’t go to office hours and they don’t know why.
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.
I went to college 20 years ago and lots of professors distributed slides and lecture notes to students. I assume it’s even more common now. Yes, I wouldn’t ask a speaker to let me read their private notes, but that’s not how PowerPoint slides shown in class are generally perceived.
Agreed. A course that did not distribute slides / lecture notes 35 years ago when I studied (well known engineering school in Canada) was considered annoying / the prof trying to force students to attend.
> It is a transaction.
That is a purely rational take, but people are seldom rational. My pet theory is that inertia is a huge reason why people choose college. Majority of people who go to college do it as a continuation of 10-12 years of continuous schooling (or partying). As they climb educational or social hierarchies they are constantly reminded that college is a next step. Thus going to college feels far more familiar and less scary than joining the workforce. Thus, going to college is a default choice for many.
After the gut decision is made it can be wrapped into whatever rational argument.
The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.
That's part of it, but the author acknowledges that college has been transactional for quite a while. What has exacerbated the issue was COVID and the rise of extremely potent, addictive social media. I wouldn't be surprised if we look back on social media as the digital equivalent of children drinking and smoking weed, i.e. something that causes permanent damage to one's brain.
The technology may be amplifying the effects because that's what technology does but it is not a change to the underlying dynamics.
"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. They just have better tools to respond to the same incentives.
I'm not saying it's good - it's clearly an unsustainable trend, but the students are not the ones driving it, so they're not equipped to stop it.
>"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character.
Idk, it's totally possible that as COVID happened and they watched the government lock them in their homes away from each other and forced them to miss important moments in their lives (remote graduations for example), then they watched the rise of EZ-Cheat systems (ChatGPT) which made their creators extremely wealthy, combined with crypto frauds (that our own President does in his free time), they started to think that the way to get ahead in life was to lack character and be lazy...
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The transaction has changed a great deal though. GPA used to be more heavily weighted and professors used to be more essential for references. You might bring your transcript to an interview. Now, it seems to be all about projects. Coursework has dwindled in relevance.
Goodhart's Law in action
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit.
It’s worth pointing out that this is a perception that has been cultivated. Position the degree as first and foremost a job credential, cut state support, and force students and their parents to directly bear the cost for this supposedly individualized benefit through higher tuition. “The customer is always right” and no learning need occur.
“Starving the Beast” is a documentary on this topic: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5444928/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_p...
I can't respond to any specifics of the documentary, but it looks to me like the universities themselves are the biggest cultivators of this perception, with the goal of increased enrollment.
If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.
I see state funded education as making the problem worse. The market just reacts to what is available, and funding everyone to go to college, whether or not its useful or resourceful to do so means companies have a large enough pool of applicants to make it a requirement.
I could see even, that employers themselves would take up the cost to train if they lacked qualified applicants. Imagine for example there wasn't a billion CS students. All the company still need programmers, so what are they going to do?
IMO, instead of funding universities, simply give people a stipend to be used for some sort of educational purpose.
Not only that but he is shooting the messenger
> My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.
They (the prof class) created this situation. They could have upheld their standards and seen the number of students go down but they preferred to fill their classrooms at the expense of quality.
This is like a manager who is complaining that no one can code while offering McDonalds hourly rates.
Professor here. We did not create it, we responded to administration prioritizing profit over performance and prestige. They passed the decision down to us instructors by threatening our employment if we failed too many students. Since tenure is heavily dependent on student outcomes, giving a student a lower grade than what they think they deserved will almost certainly result in negative feedback, which threatens your tenure. For non-tenured faculty it could result in a contract non-renewal.
I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role."
In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome?
At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts.
As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.
You are just going in circles to justify that you are the victim of all of this "non sense". That's like a guy saying "I didn't want to break the law but my employer forced me to it and he would have fired me, etc. etc. I am not saying you broke any laws but drawing a parallel here.
Professors are not (at least not supposed) to be a decoration in a University. They are what makes a University; or break it. You have all the leverage. You accepted the situation, went along with it and now it's backfiring.
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Did you finish reading? The author said later on that holding the bar high wasn't an option since it would risk his job. The blame should be on the universities, not on the professors who don't have much power to fix the problem.
But how far do you go with the blame?
If the universities hold the bar high, they'll risk their funding from parents not wanting to enroll their child and the government not funding a failing school. The blame should be on society?
I think professors are in a good place to actually step up and say no. They're all highly educated individuals who can likely leave academia and get jobs in the private sector. They're best set up to break the cycle.
I don’t agree personally. I went to school about 10 ago to a private University (nearly full ride because universities used to care about PSAT performance for no clear reason). My school was heavy on co-ops meaning it was more job outcome focused than most.
In my opinion it was mostly a rite of passage thing. It was the first time I was granted independence including personal responsibility, a brand new social network, sex, etc.
It was just adulthood with training wheels. I’m not going to argue that sounds like an ideal social structure but it was very useful to me. The raw alternative of jumping into the workforce probably would have led to bad outcomes even if it all worked out economically.
The stepping stone to employment felt like it was just sort of assumed like finishing high school. I felt nothing getting either diploma.
I might feel some serious existential dread if the market I was entering resembled the one now though.
>The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero.
I was one of those 'rounds to zero' students, in the physical sciences, long ago. I wanted to learn how to verify a hypothesis by looking at the evidence. And after 4 years, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of significant lab exposure. What we did get was cookbook labs, mostly on the very basic stuff. What we also got after that was theory, theory and more theory. Usually from unenthused teachers, going through the motions. From my perspective, it was mostly a waste of time.
Years later I learned what Feynman meant when he said "Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." Maybe if I'd heard that, I've have dropped out after two years instead of hoping I'd get to the part where someone cared.
I think most teachers are not naive wrt the transactional perception of education in their students. However, what keeps a passionate teacher going is the belief that, if they do their job well, at least some significant subset of students will take genuine interest in the material. I don't think it's naive to hope for that, I've seen this happen a lot when I was a student.
What OOP is lamenting is that that's no longer possible.
I think plenty of students are there because they want to learn a subject, singular. Everything else is just the unrelated overhead they're stuck with for their white collar job permit.
Does that mean it would be better if the majority of people went to trade schools and left the universities for the minority who want an education for it's own sake?
The reason why I wanted to study CS in university was because I was curious, not because of possible job offers you get if you have a degree. When I applied I thought that this was the primary motivator for others as well. Turns out I was very wrong, although I did meet a few students who were studying mainly for their curiosity.
They have a university for this now, its called Western Governors University.
They did the steps, got all the regional accreditations etc. but its all self driven and structured to cater to speed running a college degree.
You can learn alot at WGU, don't get me wrong, but they are clearly just fine if you are there simply to speed run getting that diploma.
Sure, but not all degrees are equal. Institutions have reputations based on how smart / effective their graduates tend to be. So by making it harder for the careless ones to graduate, a university can enhance the value of the degree for those that do. Even with the transactional attitude, it would behoove students to want to be pushed.
Yet institutions don't do this so your reasoning is faulty. Particularly at the "value of the degree" line. There are few, if any, degrees that provide value and even fewer that provide employable skills.
Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465278
This may be fake, but as somebody who went to a school that took academic rigor very seriously, I'm confident that my degree is the most valuable thing I own. Recruiters from both startups and entrenched companies are constantly reinforcing that belief.
The market for degrees may be pretty skewed, but that doesn't mean it's not a real market with supply/demand dynamics
That is true, but I don't think the students are the ones responsible for the second and third order effects of maintaining academic rigor. They're just playing the game they're given.
Ya, the current students do not, but future students do. They're the ones who will take their business elsewhere.
Schools with slipping standards may not see negative effects in the short term, but people are waking up to the fact that a lot of degrees are nowhere near worth the tuition, and the first schools to go bust will tend to be the ones with the worst cost/benefit ratio.
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Then what a tragic misuse of societal resources. A simple IQ test would be a better signal to employers than a massively overpriced four year charade.
If that were actually the case, companies would be using simple IQ tests.
That’s why most students will never truly find a job – they’re all too busy looking.
What do you mean by that? That doesn’t really make sense
Makes perfect sense. The things you do to look for a job don’t help you do the job.
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It's telling this sentence has the student as one to blame, when it's a structural issue and the weight of the blame rests more heavily on the shoulders of the universities.
> The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero.
Further - even if someone wants to learn these subjects, most don't see the value in paying for a college course to learn them. Close to no one, after receiving a college degree in a subject, says "I want to learn more about X, I'm going to go ahead and pay $4,000 to take a class in it at the nearby college."
Plenty of people learn things after they graduate. Just about everyone does so in a better manner than a college course. Colleges are only viable because they dangle degrees over students' heads, and then they complain that students are only coming for the degrees.
The problem is that the value the students get out of the transaction is being lowered by their own actions in the class
Well said, believe this is it
I can’t find the exact citation at the moment, but I believe that American students were described as viewing the education process as transactional in a wider sense by Max Weber in 1905 (Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism I think?)
I can say at least that it was a major point in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).
And now the white-collar jobs are being replaced by vibe AI app-making. It seems most of college now isn't for most people. Maybe the kids can save their money and just make vibe apps.