Comment by intended

I disagree that's the central issue, that's why I didn't engage with it.

The belief that students are somehow now mentally broken in a way unique and never-before-seen is an enormous claim. These articles never manage to support this claim. Instead they just assert it as if it's so obvious it doesn't require any actual work to show.

Where you see some problem that starts pre-university, what I see is students acting rationally given the system they find themselves in. My own university experience was decades ago but no different except for the absence of smartphones and laptops in the lecture theatres. Bad lecturers, bad material, rampant cheating and fake marking schemes in which there was no connection between work and final grades: all the problems have been there for a very long time. Phones didn't create this problem, educators did. It's just easier for faculty to play pretend when students appear to be staring at the front of the auditorium because they have nothing else to stare at.

> 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.

Unsurprisingly. In the past:

1. Those with lower attention spans generally didn't try to go to college in the first place. They often didn't even graduate from high school[1].

2. If they did try, colleges rejected their application long before they ever arrived on campus. Now colleges seek to accommodate them.

College used to be just for elites. At some point we decided it should be for everyone. When you try to shove more and more people into college, you're going to find out that most people don't have what it takes. It is like us deciding everyone should get to play in the NFL and then wonder why the talent is so poor...

We can't have it both ways.

[1] When I was in high school the graduation rate was only around 60%. Nowadays it is around 90%. That is a substantial shift in relatively few years. Did the students suddenly become better students out of the blue? Of course not.