Comment by FilosofumRex

The "average" college student description fits Harvard students quite well.

Harvard used to offer a "shopping week" at the beginning of each semester, so the students could attend classes and then decide to enroll or not. Needless to say, it devolved into a prof arbitrage, where no student would take a class if prof required attendance, frequent homework, or strict no make-up policy. It was abandoned last year.

Anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard revealed that admins and profs had known that most of AA and DEI types would fail and never graduate, or would have to change to non-stem fields. So, they offered layers, upon layers of extra-classrooms (dorm based) help - recitations by grad students, group P-setting, free tutoring, emergency tutoring on exam nights, etc - just to keep the graduation rates up. So students stop going to classes, never bothered to take notes or even open a textbook, just attend the help session on the eve of quizzes/exams!

MIT isn't far behind, it offers 6 different version of physics 1 (8.01, 8.011, 8.012, 8.01L, ES.801, ES.8012). So most students just need to pick the right class and they're guaranteed to pass, why bother with the details.

Cell phones are just an obvious symptom, they're not the cause. The more expensive & elitist the college education gets, the more transactional the students will regard it.