At this point, all the problems in Higher Ed-- from rampant cheating and the devaluing of education to the plethora of DEI administrators looking for problems-- have made me seriously consider whether I want my grandchildren to attend college. I hate writing that, but I'd rather they learned an honest trade and worked with their hands than become cheaters and liars.
I will go so far as to say it’s an unnecessary filter for competence in the job market. If companies hired entry-level white-collar candidates with a HS degree, college attendance would dry up.
I would argue that the value of college has always been the contacts you make that help you (and you them) later in life. Everything I learned in college I could have learned on my own from reading books but I wouldn't have made the social connections that have helped my career and personal life.
I learned a lot from my History and China Studies professors. When I was in school (early 80s) the Socratic method still existed at least in some places.
That generation of professors, raised during WW2 and completed their education in the 1940s-50s, are long gone now. That generation of students some of whom actually respected their teachers are also gone.
That's a HUGE change. If I got yelled at by a teacher, I would NEVER tell my parents because then they would discipline me. Nowadays, it seems most parents always take their kids' side and, worse, the kids KNOW it.
Yep this has a lot to do with parenting. I’m a big believer in natural consequences and at the start of every school year I tell my kids’ teachers such and that if one of my kids forget their lunch/homework/coat/permission slip/etc to not call me to save them and that I will support the teachers in whatever their consequence may be, whether that is not being allowed outside at recess to getting a bad grade or whatever. They will not die from missing a meal or a field trip or being cold this one time but they are likely to learn their lesson and not make the same mistake again. Teachers have told me I’m largely alone in this approach and I’ve been called several times over the years requesting I deliver a snack or a jacket or missing homework. I can only imagine the backlash if a teacher actually yelled at a child.
I did too. I had close relationships with several professors and found myself while in college. I understand why some people would come out thinking it was all about the networking, and I think those people missed out. Sadly, I would never send my son to the liberal-arts college I attended now.
That about sums it up. I believe that, gradually over time, university education will diminish in value and prestige to the point where it will almost be an embarrassment to even have it on your résumé.
Yeah but the recent ones have had no contacts because of Covid lockdown and so many colleges isolating them in their dorm rooms even when they were let back onto campus. And even without Covid, how many spend more time online than with people they can hang with IRL?
As with everything you get out of it what you put into it.
I always ask accounting questions when I interview candidates. If they can't answer them then it's a hard pass of course. Then you wasted 4 years and a lot of money for no reason.
I have two daughters in middle school. I also have a family member who is quite wealthy who has helped us put away for the college education and they should both have somewhere between $150k to $200k when they graduate high school for higher education.
The oldest plans on working with my husband in his multi family real estate business. That would require some certifications and marketing. My youngest wants to be a fitness instructor and open her own gym geared towards women. Also requires certifications, marketing and money down on gym space.
Once this is complete, both of them plan on taking the remaining money, which should be fairly substantial, and putting it down on a house. So I figure a couple years after graduation they both should be hopefully gainfully self-employed, starting to earn more money, and be homeowners. If they decide they do want to go into some sort of corporate environment in the future, their real world business experience will probably count for quite a bit. Certainly more than a four year business degree would with no experience.
Compare that with most college graduates, four years out with a useless marketing degree or some thing, who are now broke, and struggling to find basic employment. They also will be able to work for themselves and avoid the corporate hell scape, which I unfortunately have had to be a part of for a good portion of my career.
That said, a lot of our more liberal professional friends are pushing their kids to get into really good schools and get masters degrees and things like history or what not and they think we’re crazy. I’m not sure what the point of it all is. So they can be broke and working at Starbucks? Or maybe they can be well paid living in a corporate job, but honestly the corporate world is getting worse. I know this is hyperbolic but that’s a prison. It used to be that you could work corporate and do some interesting stuff and work with some decent people but that’s getting harder and harder to find. I say this is a professional. Ive been working in corporate for the past 30 years. I’m burnt and I’m getting out and I don’t care if I have to be an Instagram shopper to do it. I can’t see pushing my kids into this anymore.
I loved reading your comment so much! It was not dark but rather REAL. Your daughters are lucky to have a parent that teaches them there is more than one path to success. Also that you are raising them to believe in themselves that they can be entrepreneurs and home owners and that day-to-day happiness and contentment is important. I think YOU are the one who's getting it right. Bravo Mom!
Before my current job, which is challenging and something I *REALLY* enjoy, I was in the corporate "ether"--so many managers had come and gone that nobody really knew what my job was or what I did so I pretty much had next to nothing to do. Sounds ideal, right? Well, not really. Having to sit at a desk for eight hours a day with nothing to do made the days drag on forever--it's not like I could openly read a book or surf the web because the cubicles were all open space so everyone could see what everyone else was doing.
I was in that situation for a couple years. I had an actual office with walls and window behind me, desk facing the door / glass front wall. So, there I was, spending hours a day on discussion forums about various hobbies, reading history, etc. On the plus side, when I did get work emails, I replied REALLY FAST.
Jennifer, your daughters appear to be on a great path. As far as your “professional friends” sometimes it’s best to not follow the heard... especially when it’s headed towards a cliff. One of my favorite and strongest female characters is Dagny Taggert, in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. I remember her using her own rationale, own brain, her own logic to make decisions. While not a huge effect character, she was brave enough to trust her own logic. Your daughters seem to have a great understanding as well.
A good friend of mine who graduated Wharton with 2 boys about to finish high school said the same thing. He doesn't even care if his kids go to college anymore.
It's funny hearing this from a Wharton grad. I went to Penn in the late 2000s. We always joked about how Wharton was the hardest school to get into and the easiest school to get out of because it was all group presentations, bullshit multiple choice exams, and networking. My Wharton friends cared very little about actually learning anything compared to those of us in the other three undergraduate schools and they were extremely open about it. They just wanted the credential that would get them into McKinsey or Goldman or Bain, exactly as the Penn student interviewed in the article describes; nothing has changed on that front. Wharton undergrads went to class as little as possible and constantly found ways to cheat even without the digital tools available to us today. Those of us studying the sciences, humanities or engineering typically cared a lot about actually learning the subject matter of our majors so we spent a lot more time actually working and studying (we all spent a lot of time partying though). It was an open secret that Wharton students were mercenaries, a mindset that no doubt serves grads well in their careers on Wall Street.
All of this to say: Wharton has never been about the education, not for undergrads and certainly not for MBAs.
My kid is applying to colleges right now. The prices are ridiculous, the politics are out of control. I have suggested she go to the local community college for a couple of years, for a fraction of the price. Other family members think she needs a “liberal arts education“ and are pushing her to go to a small (expensive) school. She herself just sees it as a social experience, and wants to attend with friends. The way I see it, as long as she doesn’t borrow money, she’ll probably get something out of it, maybe not a lot of knowledge but at least it’s an experience.
Is that experience worth the price? For the same amount of money, she can travel the world and see what the world is really like.
With the way colleges are, young people are better off if they take some years after high school to learn a trade. Trade is in high demand. Yes even for women too, Save up the money and if the desire to go to college is really there, go when they have some money saved up for tuition. They'll be more mature by then too with some real life experiences and less prone to being indoctrinated.
An experience? Hiking Grand Canyon is an experience. Traveling the country is an experience. Volunteering at a soup kitchen or shelter is an experience. And ANY of these will cost far less and mean far more than any oversold, overpriced, corrupt university indoctrination.
I mean...I can think of many better uses for $250,000 than a four-year summer camp. Does she *really* need to go to college? Maybe a gap year to get herself together?
She has a college fund set up by the grandparents. I've told her she absolutely must not borrow money, and ideally would graduate with lots of funds left over, for graduate school or even just to cash out (at a penalty) for a car or her first downpayment on a property (which I'm encouraging her to purchase as soon as possible).
I feel one of my 2-3 biggest mistakes was not buying property when I was perfectly able to do so earlier in life. Also should have put more into an IRA, and start my own business early on... plenty of mistakes to talk about. But each person has to, and will, make their own mistakes before they learn.
My son picked up German while we were over there, and I am heavily encouraging him to go to University there. A solid engineering education can be had at any of around 20 universities, there's no tuition cost, and the Universities don't have the funding to indulge in took much woke BS. For now.
I get the social experience thing; I too “found myself” in college, but my tribe was very unique; but for most kids in this mindset, where socializing is more valued than learning anything, the people they are socializing with, the social experiences they’ll wind up with —what they remember—-…how do i put this…may not be of the best value for your daughter… What will she get out of it? College has become a very expensive extended adolescence summer camp. And she will be surrounded by extended adolescents. I wish you could steer her towards socializing with a new type of people. These are the people among whom she will likely find a husband and form a new family tree with.
(If this doesn’t apply to your daughter, don’t mind me. I hope people see the point I’m trying to make though.)
Trade school is the way for a lot of people. You'll have a good job, make good money and won't have the debt. College education was never meant for everyone but somehow we've gotten to the point that educated means you've gone to college. Even though most college graduates are dumber than your average plumber.
High school kids are not reading books anymore. I believe neither are college students. Honestly I'm having trouble understanding the point of a college "education" in the current era. You can learn pretty much all of mankind's knowledge at the touch of a button these days. Why pay a small fortune to have it spoonfed to you?
Adrienne - there are, and forgive my term if it offends, white collar trades that are valuable just like the "honest trades" to which I believe you are referring. I believe my engineering degree offers as much of a trade career as a welder or truck driver. What is interesting to me is, welders can't cheat on their tests as their shortcomings will be discovered very quickly!
We are in the same exact boat with our sons. Despite the fact that I am a college professor, we are leaning toward directing them toward trades rather than university. The value and benefit has waned tremendously while the negative implications have increased.
As described to me by my trading floor manager, 'Money is a dirty filthy thing, that tends to attract dirty filthy people'. It looks like the multitrillions of dollars in education has reached this point of attracting the worst behavior.
I'm curious, what would you do to reform your Ivy League school if you had a magic wand? Is the money the problem or a symptom? By money I mean student loans, endowments, cost, the expense of the academic administrative state, and/or the price of the paper (dgree).
The education industry has done an excellent job convincing everyone that having a college degree signifies "intelligence" and "employability" even as colleges and universities have lowered standards significantly. First, we as a society must respect those who work with their hands and/or choose to pursue careers that do not require a college degree (and there should be more of those jobs).
If I had a magic wand, I would hire an ideologically diverse faculty and try to ensure an ideologically diverse student body. I would not tie scholarships to race but to parental income, ensuring a broader swath of people benefit. Finally, I would fire most administrators who do nothing but sit in their cushy offices and get in the way of good teaching.
That's very interesting and thank you for the response. Financial diversity, trades diversity and age diversity are the most important divides that I see in higher ed, and in the US society as a whole. Amen to the administrative purge.
I would suggest in high school to start hiring educators who did not get a college degree or a masters degree in education. This would help diversify thought and move away from the current intellectual incest that is systemically built into the education complex.
I just listened to Chris Rufo on Jordan Peterson's podcast from Feb 27. Chris addresses beautifully the issues of bringing mid- and higher education past the Woke/postmodern state it is currently in. I am so encouraged to hear him! And one of the proposals he mentions involves hiring people to teach who have BAs in REAL subjects - such as math or physics - rather than in "Education".
I'm unsure if the reply was to me or Adrienne, but Rufo's suggestions for a BA or a BS is on the money. The concept should actually be expanded. If you have a successful individual in business, business or cooking, or shop- contracting, who wants to teach- the school or the individual with the desire to teach their craft should not be restrained by a Masters of Ed requirement, or maybe not even with a college degree.
I'm an academic in the UK and we're experiencing similar challenges here. Aside from unfair practice, attendance is another big problem. Across the sector, colleagues report very low levels of attendance, reflecting the recording of lectures and habits formed during the pandemic. Certain administrators don't see this as a problem, but in my opinion, it diminishes the quality of interactions/debates in classrooms and undermines the traditional function of universities.
Increasingly, students are perceiving themselves as consumers. Perhaps we can't blame them - for years, universities have charged exorbitant fees - but this has changed the nature of the traditional university experience. Instead of being places where students come to enrich themselves intellectually, universities are becoming transactional sites. This development is profoundly depressing.
I have tried to take the 50,000-ft view of Western civilization's decline, and to my mind it can all be boiled down to lack of standards. It's a little like watching the Deep State take down America; yes, we have the Constitution that lays out the rules, but the ones that hobble them, they just ignore. Same thing for academia.
You know what needs to be done, and so do your colleagues. So what are you going to do about it?
You make such a good point here - students perceive themselves as consumers and with a bloated administration and most universities, they are right! This is one of the drawbacks to a materialist culture in which everything is on demand and can be delivered to you with the press of a button. Why shouldn't they expect a good grade to be as easy to get as their order on Amazon?
It's a bit chicken and egg. Students view themselves as consumers. They're no longer content with a dorm room and a simple gym. They want an olympic pool, a dining hall with 30 types of ethnic foods and special diets, the latest gym equipment, etc. This all costs money AND requires administration, logistics and maintenance.
For example, at my university we no longer have one person running the dining center (ordering the food, planning menus, etc.) because it's an impossible task for one person since we have a salad bar, a vegetarian / vegan area, various ethnic foods, a keto meal, a smoothie bar, six kinds of milk and milk-like drinks, etc.
It's definitely an improvement from the "mystery meat" I was served in college, but it also requires a lot more work to provide. And this is just one example: this type of wanting lots and the best of everything permeates the entire university. Computer labs can no longer have five year old computers--they need the newest (and more expensive) models. All of this not only costs money, but requires a lot of administrative support.
Honestly, students don't even want most of that crap. When I was in undergrad everybody worked out on the regular old gym machines - nobody used the rock climbing wall or any of the fancy stuff. Hardly anybody ate at the dining hall after freshman year because our school was located in a major city with lots of food options. Nobody ever used the computer labs unless their laptop was broken. Dorm rooms were tiny with shared bathrooms and we still had fun living there - the only major complaint was that one particular freshman dorm had no AC while the rest did, so the first month of school was always miserable for those unlucky students.
I went to an Ivy League school so the kids came from rich backgrounds and had high standards but we could not have cared less about the university providing things like an Olympic size pool and keto meals. I'm not sure why universities feel like those kinds of amenities are so important - maybe it's marketing to impress parents on campus visits? Students at my school did view themselves as consumers, though - it's just that the product was good grades and a degree, not amenities. Arguably that's worse but I think all this talk of amenities is a red herring.
All this is true, but most of the cost increases are the result of the huge decrease in student to administrator ratio which is mentioned in your last sentence.
Well if they were really smart consumers they'd chafe at being charged for not getting a commodity for which they paid. But, if university is free (as in some Euro nations) or paid for my mommy and daddy, that connection is broken, isn't it?
The commodity is not the education, it's the degree. If they can get the degree without wasting time on the education then I suppose it's actually more efficient.
In my late 'forties, bored with sitting in a dark room, looking at black-and-white pictures, and talking to myself, I closed my radiology practice for a while and spent several years at a local university studying undergraduate electrical engineering.
It had always been my first love, and was probably the best time of my life, not least of which were the lasting friendships I made there with men twenty years or more my junior.
One in particular, Chris, became my study partner. The product of a fine hardworking West Virginia family, he struggled with calculus, despite having had near-perfect math scores in a local high school - which, of course, was the problem.
During our DiffEq (differential equations) final exam, the professor left the room, and to my disappointment, Chris and another friend began collaborating and passing answers back and forth using the infrared functions on their calculators. Nobody said much, but after the examination, Talia - a ball-o-fire Russian girl, took the both of them to task - as we say, "ripped them a new a-hole."
Chris and I went to the local Chinese restaurant for lunch, and he began to criticise the woman for giving him and his buddy a hard time. I said nothing. "You're not sayng anything, Jim, and that bothers me."
I hadn't realized, but during the years we studied together, Chris had developed a respect for his older partner, and I saw this as a real teachable moment. "Chris, in the big scheme of things, this doesn't mean a damn thing. But you are going to be a professional engineer, and from time to time you will come under tremendous pressure to sign off on things that are not right, so that contractors can cut corners. The penalty for THAT is real and severe, and I don't mean legal. I mean people may die. Doctors only kill people one at a time; when engineers kill them, they kill them by the dozens. Now is the time to get your head right - when it DOESN'T matter."
"God. I never thought of that."
That was twenty years ago. I hear from Chris at least twice a year. He's married, with two beautiful daughters, and is a successful professional engineer. I hope I helped him a little.
When I first started working, I worked for an independent group of pathologists and one pathologist that I respected a lot gave me a similar ethics 2x4 to the head that to this day I am so thankful for. I was 21 and in sales at the time and we had a dermatologist client that was worth a lot and also very high maintenance. On a random second QA review the pathologist determined the original diagnosis made by one of his partners was incorrect and needed amended. The change in diagnosis would not change the course of treatment and thus patient outcome. I knew the formal amendment would result in loss of the client and suggested that perhaps he didn’t need to amend it after all. In a very serious tone he asked “Are you suggesting that I IGNORE a diagnostic error? That the patient and client don’t deserve to know the true diagnosis?”. It seemed like such a minor thing at the time that I wasn’t viewing it through the lens of right and wrong and how that behavior on a larger scale would be tragic. I think back on that moment often whenever I’m faced with an ethical dilemma and it reminds me how slippery that moral slope can be. The Chris’s of the world are lucky to have mentors willing to speak candidly about what’s truly at stake.
Many of my students are in training to become professionals, who will be called on to make judgments that directly impact the lives and fortunes of others. Reality doesn't grade on a curve, and it doesn't give partial credit.
I continually remind students of this, though opportunities to really bring that message home, as you did with Chris, are few and far between. This was a "teachable moment" well spotted and flawlessly executed.
We ALL should mentor and help others like this. We should view it as an obligation and duty as a good citizen and person. I bet it’s one of you proudest memories.
Engineering courses and exams should be completely re-engineered. Computers can solve complex integrals and differential equations. The challenge is in formulating the correct problem to solve.
A much more complex way to teach, but in the age of Wolfram Alpha and other online tools, it's essential that future engineers learn how to use them for problems that are not pre-digested for them.
Do you even have to cheat to get a degree? I thought as long as you didn't get behind on your payments, and you were really “trying your best”, you were sure to pass.
Granted, I haven't taught in 20 years, but you can believe me when I say that I never once knew or cared whether a student was behind on their payments during my grading. That wasn't my job. And I didn't pass everyone, and I was not unusual in that respect.
Ultimately, competence wins. The problem for the folks who use shortcuts is, they know they used them. Sooner or later (admittedly sometime much later) when called upon to deliver in real time, with no opportunity to use a crutch, those people falter. God help the patient whose doctor cheated his or her way through medical school.
I was thinking the same thing. The much more horrifying phenomenon is when incompetence starts to be protected or excused because of political affiliation or social credit.
Yes, I have a family member who worked for a company that hired a person who checked the requisite boxes, except for competency. My family member ended up having to cover for her. I bet this is happening a lot.
I hope “competence wins”, but as I listen and watch many of our political players, progressive “wokies” and right-wing nuts, I’m thinking competence is in short supply already.
A lot of damage can be done before "ultimately" happens. Competence, or the best person for the job used to be the overall goal. Now it's all about checking the right blocks. Does the person have a degree from a highly ranked university, is their GPA above x, does the person have the correct racial background, preferred gender identity, have they completed community service supporting certain green initiatives, having certain disabilities can help. Then once the person is in the job and their lack of competence is displayed it can be very difficult to remove them, especially if the can play a discrimination card for defense.
If you own a local store and you're hiring someone to stock your shelves or run your cash register, you care about that person's competence. But if you work HR in a huge corporation and you are hiring thousands of people you will never meet, why would you care if they are competent? You are making headaches for supervisors throughout the organization, but you never even know it. If your hires are "politically correct" you get lots of praise and awards, even if the business suffers.
So true. Even more so when they really need many workers. I saw that in the military. They lowered the passing score for the Army Physical Fitness Test to get people through basic training. So kids were passing basic training doing x number of push ups or sit ups one day. Then just a few days later the same person goes to their unit and does the same number of push ups and sit ups, but fails the same test. Now that kid is a burden on the unit and they both have to waste time and effort getting the kid in shape instead of focusing on making the kid proficient in his new job. Sometimes the person never gets in shape enough to pass, then effort is made to remove him from the military.
I got into medical school in the 70’s simply because I was good at standardized tests. Which is just a proxy for being able to memorize things. So I graduated with a good fund of knowledge. If people can now cheat their way through medical school by accessing that fund of knowledge on external apps, they will be able to use those same (constantly improving) apps to practice medicine, maybe more effectively than in pre-AI times. Weird times we’re living through.
Yeah, I was sort of kidding. Especially, there are times when the physical exam is crucial. I did urgent care for a few years; treating URI’s all day. But occasionally seeing really subtle, undiagnosed problems--- pronator drift in undiagnosed brain tumor, early epiglottitis in a 4 yo with just a sore throat--- I could go on. It will be interesting how much AI changes non-surgical medical practice.
Exactly. Depending on the diminished quality of the medical community is a bit terrifying. A lawyer friend has been to the hospital twice from a cancer drug that his doc neglected to mention had a 8-13% side effect of a liver reaction which he got. Doctors don’t want to discuss care. They just want to dictate it.
Medical doctors are not trained in pharmacology. That is why that legion of pharmacology sales people is so successful. If you routinely take meds you need a good relationship with an independent (not big box store or chain) pharmacist.
What? You mean you can’t push moral ambiguity, treat young adults as if they are infants, and still expect everyone to work hard and do the right thing? That’s a real shocker right there.
“I didn’t get into academia to be a cop,” says one professor. Yeah, that would involve having expectations. Welcome to the real world. You reap what you sow, and I’ve yet to meet a baby that could change their own diaper.
Here in upside-down world, at what point do employers start ignoring the college students attended and what their GPAs were?
Could we get to a point where a high GPA is a sign of sociopathic, entitled behavior and companies actually prefer to hire the student with the 2.5 GPA as opposed to the 4.0? At least you know (probably) that the 2.5 GPA student earned their B-/C+
Jordon Peterson had a guest who said it best - we may have to give the SAT at the end of college and not the beginning to see if anything was learned. I guess you can cheat your way through that too!!
I thought about giving a test at the beginning of a teaching unit and then giving the same test at the end to evaluate growth and mastery. I abandoned the idea when I realized many students, parents, and admins didn’t actually care whether learning happened. Only that blessed GPA.
My feeling is that blessed GPA will end up having no meaning whatsoever. If “everyone is above average”, then how else can one student/applicant distinguish themselves? Thank you for your viewpoint.
"Stephanie Loomis : ..."I abandoned the idea when I realized many students, parents, and admins didn’t actually care whether learning happened. Only that blessed GPA."
I'd have thought a professor at your level should have reasoned that the value of an exam is in its indication of efficacy in the efforts expended of which the exam is revelatory-- in this case, your efforts. Whatever your students or their parents care or don't care about, wouldn't you like to know how effective your instruction has been?
(..."The EPA is very familiar with dioxins. For more than 25 years, the agency evaluated and assessed the risks posed by exposure to dioxins. ... The agency knows this chemical very well.
"So why is EPA unwilling to test for dioxins in the soil (of East Palestine, OH.)? My guess is because they know they will find it." ... )
Oh, I gave plenty of assessments to verify that the students were doing the work, thinking about it, and applying to their practices. Exams can only do so much. I had required discussions boards with required responses to peers using evidence from the readings. I had projects that required a list of resources wherein class lecture/discussion references were required. For me, the ability to utilized resources was more important than regurgitating information. My subject area, English Language Arts, thrives on free thinking, discourse, rhetoric, and poetics (in the Aristotelian sense.)
Courses where mistakes in processing, measuring, and strictly objective analysis (engineering, math, computer science) are better served by exams than the humanities, at least in most cases.
I'm a business owner and an employer of engineering students. The job description says that I prefer students who have failed a year. Many students ask me why during interviews - I tell them that the experience of failing is humbling, and that it's very important to know how to pick oneself up and try again.
The response I get is that they wish more employers had the same attitude.
Al, I have been in the engineering field for 30 years. I like your approach! I find the school and GPA does not necessarily have a causal effect on your problem solving skills. I hope my term does not offend, but I think all white collar and blue collar trades uncover cheaters very quickly. A welder cannot cheat with welding, a doctor cannot cheat open heart surgery and a civil engineer cannot cheat stressing structural loads. Thank you for your valuable input.
Lazy professors lead to lazy students. The solution -- Blue Books. "Come to class. No tech in the room. Open your Blue Books, please. You will find the test on your desk. It is a new test just for this class. There are five different tests randomly distributed among you. Please show your work. Please begin. You have 90 minutes." Yes, the grading will take longer. Yes, the professor may have less time to do research. However, the core responsibility of the university ... to teach and send responsible young adults into the world ... will more likely be fulfilled.
Of course, now grade 500 of those tests in the next few days......................along with publishing and your committee work. LOL In a bureaucratic system it is bureaucratic values of efficiency that are the order of the day. Our academies were designed in the pre-bureaucratic era...................
Cheating may have less to do with the inherent "morality" of students than with the incentives to which they are subject.
Instructors have some control over the incentives within their courses, including the design of assignments and exams. A recent column on Inside Higher Ed (an online academic news site) opined that, if we teach students to write like robots, they can have a robot do their writing. The careful design of more meaningful projects and products can address that aspect of the problem, but that will take real, sustained effort on the part of instructors, even assuming they have the standing, the latitude, and the incentives to make the effort.
Instructors can also rethink how the overall grading schemes in their classes shape incentives. In his work on moral development, Piaget observed that when students are put in competition with each other for scarce approval or success, they will almost inevitably cheat: either they cheat on their own to get one over on their peers, or they collude in cheating to get one over on their teacher. On those grounds, I have concluded that grading on a curve is quite simply pedagogical malpractice.
There are things beyond instructors' control that shape the incentives, especially the nearly universal obsession with the GPA, which is an increasingly meaningless external indicator of alleged merit. The obsession sets in early, fostered by parents, college admissions processes, financial aid, and peer pressure, then is made much worse by some large employers who will screen applicants first by GPA, only allowing those over a certain threshold even to complete an application.
In my experience, the enforced GPA obsession makes students timid: any slight misstep - a late assignment, a mediocre exam score - feels to them like a career-ending calamity. They are so afraid of failure they have become unable to learn, unwilling to take risks, and much more inclined to find shortcuts around systems that seem to treat them with such contempt.
(For context: I'm an associate professor at a large public university.)
Agree. The most freeing thing ever for me was taking college classes AFTER graduating from college. Once I had the paper in my hand, I was finally free to take a challenging class where I might get a "C" vs. selecting courses where I knew an "A" was guaranteed for showing up and doing the assignments.
I don't really experience it at my current institution, but in past teaching gigs the best students in class were those coming back to take classes just for their own personal interests. I once had a WWII vet enroll in one of my classes. He had been a bombardier in the European theater, and he bowled students over with first-hand accounts of dropping bombs on people . . . while we were discussing the ethics of war!
What Piaget didn’t account for was the expectation that checklists are now more important than growth. There is no such thing as limited approval or success; students demand equity of outcome.
I don't see a lot of that among my students. Given the opportunity, most of them genuinely want to learn, and they are capable of holding themselves to a high standard.
I only see that when I create a kind of artificial bubble within a course which insulates them, a little, from the GPA rat-race into which we are all locked. Within that bubble, they have the opportunity to fail spectacularly, and then recover from failure by trying again . . . and again . . . until they can meet or exceed an unvarying standard of proficiency in a given skill.
I've never seen students so motivated, or so willing to critique their own performance.
Serious question Bob K: how many professors are like you who really care so much about educating that they'll go the length to do what you describe? I think some do. But aren't there also a lot who just teach because they have to, but what they really care about is their own research? And teaching is just a nuisance they put up with to be at the university to do what they want?
Some of this is also a matter of incentives. I'm at a "research university" - part of the system established after the end of WWII. Although faculty performance is assessed on the basis of "research, teaching, and service," with lots of happy talk about how all three are valued equally, it's an open secret that all that really matters is publication and quantitative metrics of the "impact" of publications.
There's a longstanding morbid "joke" that the surest way to destroy your chances of getting tenure as an early-career faculty member is to win a teaching award.
That said, there is at least a sizable minority of faculty who genuinely want to teach well - and who really strive to teach well - and there are lots of resources available on most campuses to support that. Many of them aren't sure what to do, and none of us can do much about the external incentives that bear on students, like the GPA obsession.
This article made me think of the moral corruption of widespread and frequent cheating. What does it do to the moral compass of a brain not yet fully formed? Will this generation go on breaking rules and laws when they are adults? The SEC and the Justice Department may get very busy.
They won't go into public service unless they have idealistic tendencies. Those jobs, mostly requiring law degrees, pay poorly compared to private jobs.
Many of these kids are learning the progressive ideals at colleges. And the kids are ripe for it, too. An 18-year-old no longer has the maturity level of an 18-year-old but a 16-year-old. Kids are mentally growing slower nowadays, likely a product of the indoor bubbles they are raised in.
The professor has a fully formed brain. Yet, there they are not doing a damn thing and allowing this to happen. Because...cushy job. How do people sleep at night?
More rules never works. What we need is for the Ivy's and others to highly incentivize a "Year of Service" similar to Israel. We don't need everyone in the Military, but we do need a re-alignment of values. In hindsight, I wish I had done Jesuit Volunteer Corps back in the day at Boston College.
We have some great interns from Pace University (NY) that come to visit us at our not-for-profit, and they ALWAYS respond when they have real work to do. They want to take care of our Special Needs Hikers on our Friday hikes, and on the ground training works!
I have heard of some folks trying to move forward similar programs. I believe the idea was to put in place a national gap year in which high school graduates would give one year of service either via the military or through a beefed up AmeriCorps program. We have some of what you are talking about in place, and I think it could do a lot of good for rising college students.
I’d like to hear from Academics working in other countries. Is the problem just within US schools, corrupted by their transactional nature? The pressure to succeed in Japan is intense, but is cheating rampant? What about the UK? Europe? India?
It seems that there is a very easy solution to all of this - go back to hand written tests and assignments? Tests are written in halls with invigilators roaming between desks.
It feels a lot like the old anecdote about NASA spending thousands of dollars to get a pen to work in space, while the Russians just took a pencil? The solution doesn't have to be complicated to solve the problem.
My point exactly. A lot of us are wondering why schools don’t just do this.
Schools should return to a more personalized system. After a couple of months, you’ll recognize every face in a 30-person class and you’d instantly notice a total stranger sitting the exam.
The professors are “cheating” as much as the students. They don’t give a damn. All the ones who couldn’t stomach the charade have long since left the building.
I have taught both high school and college, and this has been the story in education for about 20 years now. We have academic environments nobody wants to be in, serviced by teachers that no longer want to be there, students who don’t really want to learn and material that interests no one.
It would be worth our while to approach education in the 21st-century from first principles; WHY are we teaching people? If we clarified the target and freed up teachers and students to find their best way on their own to set a target I think we would get much better results.
Oh for the days when English students thought they could cheat just by watching the movie version of a book. I remember one kid handing in an essay about Heart of Darkness that discussed the colonial exploitation of Viet Nam.
Come on, folks. Quelle surprise. Rampant fraud and cheating???
We ceded control of academia to liberals years ago. There is simply no argument that our universities are almost entirely ridldled with professors and administrators who are left leaning Democrats One study showed Democrat to :Republican ratios among fifty-one of the top sixty-six U.S. News-ranked colleges average 10.4: to 1., Excluding Annapolis and West Point raises the ratio to 12.7 to 1. This compares with a national D:R ratio of 1.6:1 for people who have some graduate school experience. https://www.nas.org/academicquestions/31/2/homogenous_the_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal_arts_college_faculty. Although the numbers are better in certain hard fact STEM departments, the more leftist departments such as sociology et al have zero Republican representatives.
The proof is in the pudding: When you give control of any institution to leftist Democrats it inevitably turns to merde.
The answer to your last sentence, Bruce - is that the only present opposition to Democrats (and yes, I must admit it, they do really need to be held accountable) is the GOP. And what have they done to:
(A) get beyond election denier Trump and have the guts to come forward and challenge him..
(B) articulate a cohesive and coherent platform that would care for not only the top of the economic scale but the bottom as well..from health, to guns, to abortion..The GOP is too scared to go out on a limb anywhere..
(C) propose immigration policies that need to be fair as well as harsh..
(D) try to LEAD instead of being LED by the hard core MAGA right wing (yes, just like Biden is held hostage by his insurgent insufferable progressive wing..)
(E) And for God's sake - put forth electable candidates!!! What the hell is wrong with the RNC??
Or..Or..go to my way of thinking and hope that a third party might somehow in some way spring forth..and challenge the hell out of both of them. The time is nigh..
It's done differently now. Back in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate, there was little opportunity in the small southern town I attended a university in to talk about the de-facto segregation around you, race, social class or even much about feminism. You are right, during the late 1960s and beyond there were a small group of colleges that were on the forefront of pushing barriers/activism. My fellow students were rebelling against the conservative Greek system; we voted for a gay dude as homecoming queen and our student body president was an avowed communist who used student government funds to go to Cuba. But the conversations didn't enter into the classrooms. The state legislature was aghast of course and threatened the President with all sorts of financial penalties...............
After WW2, communist/communist sympathizers and experts in the areas that were under communist rule or threatened to be were drummed out of government and universities by the anti-communist and McCarthy's boys. I think that is pretty effective, just firing them. I remember having to sign a form saying I was not now or ever a member of the Communist Party to work as a beach life guard in Florida in the 1980s. Those were ubiquitous during the 1950s through the 1970s. Same thing to me, different way of accomplishing it..............power corrupts.
Yes, my daughter participated in the strikes too. She learned a lot. I don’t know what the $ raise is, kicks in later in the year. But I know this for sure, when she gets her PhD, I will have funded at least one of those letters 😡. She has the good sense already to know her path forward is not in academia. My hope is the private sector.
Stop unlimited gov't educations loans. Certainly stop talk of "loan forgiveness." Make schools compete for limited students, and make students think hard about where they want to go, or even if they want to go at all.
My idea: defund, dismantle, and reimagine schooling, from top to bottom. The current institutions are so "systemically" corrupt, that they are beyond reform.
All of the conversation here that's not focused solely on the responsibility falling on bad parents is just blah, blah, yada, yada. The fact is, it is our job as parents to raise children with a strong moral compass that can step over all of this hogwash and do what is right, every time, in every situation, period. If you are accepting less from yourself as a parent, then you maybe should have decided against procreating. Until the majority of parents stop trying to be best friends with their kids and suck up the emotional turmoil that comes from sometimes making their children unhappy with them, it's not going to get better. Until the phrase, "I don't care what your friends parents are doing" comes back in to vogue, it's not going to get better.
I remember my dad telling me in no uncertain terms, "My job is not to make you like me, my job is to prepare you to be a productive citizen and a good person, if that pisses you off, so be it. You can get glad in the same panties you got mad in." . And all of the times that I cursed him under my breath amounted to nothing when it finally clicked. I had enlisted in the Marine Corps after I lost a full scholarship to a major school because I wanted to party more than study. Being away from home without the constant reinforcement showed that I didn't have the self discipline that I needed to do what was best for me. I was so afraid to go home and tell my dad what happened that I enlisted as a way to sort of soften the blow when I did tell him. It saved me, but it also completely changed the direction of my life. When I realized how much more capable and prepared I was than the other recruits, it started to become clear. I used to tell them, "If you think this is hard, we're gonna go to my house when we get out of here and my dad will show you what hard is" . I realized that all of the demands that he had put on me growing up had prepared me for what was to come in life. On graduation day, when we were finally released, I made a beeline across that parade deck to shake that mans hand and tell him I understood. After leaving the Marine Corps, I returned to the same school and finished what I had so poorly started. I owe all of the success that I have had in life to my dad's refusal to back down and let me be less than I could be.
Great story. I agree....it all begins with the parents. Sadly, this problem of parents not doing their jobs is currently and will continue to grow exponentially as these students become parents.
Ivy League grad and former professor here.
At this point, all the problems in Higher Ed-- from rampant cheating and the devaluing of education to the plethora of DEI administrators looking for problems-- have made me seriously consider whether I want my grandchildren to attend college. I hate writing that, but I'd rather they learned an honest trade and worked with their hands than become cheaters and liars.
And what’s the actual value of a college education now? I’d argue, if there is one at all, it’s most certainly not worth the sticker price.
The value of a degree has been diluted by the number of people who have them.
I will go so far as to say it’s an unnecessary filter for competence in the job market. If companies hired entry-level white-collar candidates with a HS degree, college attendance would dry up.
I would argue that the value of college has always been the contacts you make that help you (and you them) later in life. Everything I learned in college I could have learned on my own from reading books but I wouldn't have made the social connections that have helped my career and personal life.
I learned a lot from my History and China Studies professors. When I was in school (early 80s) the Socratic method still existed at least in some places.
That generation of professors, raised during WW2 and completed their education in the 1940s-50s, are long gone now. That generation of students some of whom actually respected their teachers are also gone.
That's a HUGE change. If I got yelled at by a teacher, I would NEVER tell my parents because then they would discipline me. Nowadays, it seems most parents always take their kids' side and, worse, the kids KNOW it.
Yep this has a lot to do with parenting. I’m a big believer in natural consequences and at the start of every school year I tell my kids’ teachers such and that if one of my kids forget their lunch/homework/coat/permission slip/etc to not call me to save them and that I will support the teachers in whatever their consequence may be, whether that is not being allowed outside at recess to getting a bad grade or whatever. They will not die from missing a meal or a field trip or being cold this one time but they are likely to learn their lesson and not make the same mistake again. Teachers have told me I’m largely alone in this approach and I’ve been called several times over the years requesting I deliver a snack or a jacket or missing homework. I can only imagine the backlash if a teacher actually yelled at a child.
I did too. I had close relationships with several professors and found myself while in college. I understand why some people would come out thinking it was all about the networking, and I think those people missed out. Sadly, I would never send my son to the liberal-arts college I attended now.
1. Standardized tests no longer required with lower admission requirements to ensure diversity.
2. Once admitted, cheating on tests permitted.
3. No more advanced classes that make those who don’t qualify feel excluded.
4. Equality of outcome the objective rather than equality of opportunity.
Do I have that right?
That about sums it up. I believe that, gradually over time, university education will diminish in value and prestige to the point where it will almost be an embarrassment to even have it on your résumé.
Yeah but the recent ones have had no contacts because of Covid lockdown and so many colleges isolating them in their dorm rooms even when they were let back onto campus. And even without Covid, how many spend more time online than with people they can hang with IRL?
As with everything you get out of it what you put into it.
I always ask accounting questions when I interview candidates. If they can't answer them then it's a hard pass of course. Then you wasted 4 years and a lot of money for no reason.
I have two daughters in middle school. I also have a family member who is quite wealthy who has helped us put away for the college education and they should both have somewhere between $150k to $200k when they graduate high school for higher education.
The oldest plans on working with my husband in his multi family real estate business. That would require some certifications and marketing. My youngest wants to be a fitness instructor and open her own gym geared towards women. Also requires certifications, marketing and money down on gym space.
Once this is complete, both of them plan on taking the remaining money, which should be fairly substantial, and putting it down on a house. So I figure a couple years after graduation they both should be hopefully gainfully self-employed, starting to earn more money, and be homeowners. If they decide they do want to go into some sort of corporate environment in the future, their real world business experience will probably count for quite a bit. Certainly more than a four year business degree would with no experience.
Compare that with most college graduates, four years out with a useless marketing degree or some thing, who are now broke, and struggling to find basic employment. They also will be able to work for themselves and avoid the corporate hell scape, which I unfortunately have had to be a part of for a good portion of my career.
That said, a lot of our more liberal professional friends are pushing their kids to get into really good schools and get masters degrees and things like history or what not and they think we’re crazy. I’m not sure what the point of it all is. So they can be broke and working at Starbucks? Or maybe they can be well paid living in a corporate job, but honestly the corporate world is getting worse. I know this is hyperbolic but that’s a prison. It used to be that you could work corporate and do some interesting stuff and work with some decent people but that’s getting harder and harder to find. I say this is a professional. Ive been working in corporate for the past 30 years. I’m burnt and I’m getting out and I don’t care if I have to be an Instagram shopper to do it. I can’t see pushing my kids into this anymore.
Well, that took a dark turn. Ha ha.
I loved reading your comment so much! It was not dark but rather REAL. Your daughters are lucky to have a parent that teaches them there is more than one path to success. Also that you are raising them to believe in themselves that they can be entrepreneurs and home owners and that day-to-day happiness and contentment is important. I think YOU are the one who's getting it right. Bravo Mom!
Thank you.
Before my current job, which is challenging and something I *REALLY* enjoy, I was in the corporate "ether"--so many managers had come and gone that nobody really knew what my job was or what I did so I pretty much had next to nothing to do. Sounds ideal, right? Well, not really. Having to sit at a desk for eight hours a day with nothing to do made the days drag on forever--it's not like I could openly read a book or surf the web because the cubicles were all open space so everyone could see what everyone else was doing.
I was in that situation for a couple years. I had an actual office with walls and window behind me, desk facing the door / glass front wall. So, there I was, spending hours a day on discussion forums about various hobbies, reading history, etc. On the plus side, when I did get work emails, I replied REALLY FAST.
Jennifer, your daughters appear to be on a great path. As far as your “professional friends” sometimes it’s best to not follow the heard... especially when it’s headed towards a cliff. One of my favorite and strongest female characters is Dagny Taggert, in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. I remember her using her own rationale, own brain, her own logic to make decisions. While not a huge effect character, she was brave enough to trust her own logic. Your daughters seem to have a great understanding as well.
A good friend of mine who graduated Wharton with 2 boys about to finish high school said the same thing. He doesn't even care if his kids go to college anymore.
It's funny hearing this from a Wharton grad. I went to Penn in the late 2000s. We always joked about how Wharton was the hardest school to get into and the easiest school to get out of because it was all group presentations, bullshit multiple choice exams, and networking. My Wharton friends cared very little about actually learning anything compared to those of us in the other three undergraduate schools and they were extremely open about it. They just wanted the credential that would get them into McKinsey or Goldman or Bain, exactly as the Penn student interviewed in the article describes; nothing has changed on that front. Wharton undergrads went to class as little as possible and constantly found ways to cheat even without the digital tools available to us today. Those of us studying the sciences, humanities or engineering typically cared a lot about actually learning the subject matter of our majors so we spent a lot more time actually working and studying (we all spent a lot of time partying though). It was an open secret that Wharton students were mercenaries, a mindset that no doubt serves grads well in their careers on Wall Street.
All of this to say: Wharton has never been about the education, not for undergrads and certainly not for MBAs.
My kid is applying to colleges right now. The prices are ridiculous, the politics are out of control. I have suggested she go to the local community college for a couple of years, for a fraction of the price. Other family members think she needs a “liberal arts education“ and are pushing her to go to a small (expensive) school. She herself just sees it as a social experience, and wants to attend with friends. The way I see it, as long as she doesn’t borrow money, she’ll probably get something out of it, maybe not a lot of knowledge but at least it’s an experience.
Is that experience worth the price? For the same amount of money, she can travel the world and see what the world is really like.
With the way colleges are, young people are better off if they take some years after high school to learn a trade. Trade is in high demand. Yes even for women too, Save up the money and if the desire to go to college is really there, go when they have some money saved up for tuition. They'll be more mature by then too with some real life experiences and less prone to being indoctrinated.
An experience? Hiking Grand Canyon is an experience. Traveling the country is an experience. Volunteering at a soup kitchen or shelter is an experience. And ANY of these will cost far less and mean far more than any oversold, overpriced, corrupt university indoctrination.
Agreed. There used to be some value in associating with lots of smart, highly educated people in a concentrated cauldron of learning.
I don't think there's much learning going on these days, certainly not much book learning.
I mean...I can think of many better uses for $250,000 than a four-year summer camp. Does she *really* need to go to college? Maybe a gap year to get herself together?
She has a college fund set up by the grandparents. I've told her she absolutely must not borrow money, and ideally would graduate with lots of funds left over, for graduate school or even just to cash out (at a penalty) for a car or her first downpayment on a property (which I'm encouraging her to purchase as soon as possible).
I feel one of my 2-3 biggest mistakes was not buying property when I was perfectly able to do so earlier in life. Also should have put more into an IRA, and start my own business early on... plenty of mistakes to talk about. But each person has to, and will, make their own mistakes before they learn.
My son picked up German while we were over there, and I am heavily encouraging him to go to University there. A solid engineering education can be had at any of around 20 universities, there's no tuition cost, and the Universities don't have the funding to indulge in took much woke BS. For now.
I get the social experience thing; I too “found myself” in college, but my tribe was very unique; but for most kids in this mindset, where socializing is more valued than learning anything, the people they are socializing with, the social experiences they’ll wind up with —what they remember—-…how do i put this…may not be of the best value for your daughter… What will she get out of it? College has become a very expensive extended adolescence summer camp. And she will be surrounded by extended adolescents. I wish you could steer her towards socializing with a new type of people. These are the people among whom she will likely find a husband and form a new family tree with.
(If this doesn’t apply to your daughter, don’t mind me. I hope people see the point I’m trying to make though.)
Don’t discount the downsides to the “experience.” There are MANY.
Yes, she’ll get something out of it. However, the chances are she’ll come out a worst person, morally, and socially.
I tell my friends and their kids that a trade is more honorable and probably more lucrative than an undergrad degree.
Trade school is the way for a lot of people. You'll have a good job, make good money and won't have the debt. College education was never meant for everyone but somehow we've gotten to the point that educated means you've gone to college. Even though most college graduates are dumber than your average plumber.
High school kids are not reading books anymore. I believe neither are college students. Honestly I'm having trouble understanding the point of a college "education" in the current era. You can learn pretty much all of mankind's knowledge at the touch of a button these days. Why pay a small fortune to have it spoonfed to you?
At this point, it's just a social delineator. You followed through and checked the box.
lol That last comment, though! HAHAHAHAHA
Adrienne - there are, and forgive my term if it offends, white collar trades that are valuable just like the "honest trades" to which I believe you are referring. I believe my engineering degree offers as much of a trade career as a welder or truck driver. What is interesting to me is, welders can't cheat on their tests as their shortcomings will be discovered very quickly!
Well, at least properly learning to lie and cheat opens up a career in politics. There is that.
We are in the same exact boat with our sons. Despite the fact that I am a college professor, we are leaning toward directing them toward trades rather than university. The value and benefit has waned tremendously while the negative implications have increased.
It's heartbreaking, isn't it?
Thank you Adrienne, & my sentiments exactly.
As described to me by my trading floor manager, 'Money is a dirty filthy thing, that tends to attract dirty filthy people'. It looks like the multitrillions of dollars in education has reached this point of attracting the worst behavior.
I'm curious, what would you do to reform your Ivy League school if you had a magic wand? Is the money the problem or a symptom? By money I mean student loans, endowments, cost, the expense of the academic administrative state, and/or the price of the paper (dgree).
Thanks for the thoughtful question!
The education industry has done an excellent job convincing everyone that having a college degree signifies "intelligence" and "employability" even as colleges and universities have lowered standards significantly. First, we as a society must respect those who work with their hands and/or choose to pursue careers that do not require a college degree (and there should be more of those jobs).
If I had a magic wand, I would hire an ideologically diverse faculty and try to ensure an ideologically diverse student body. I would not tie scholarships to race but to parental income, ensuring a broader swath of people benefit. Finally, I would fire most administrators who do nothing but sit in their cushy offices and get in the way of good teaching.
That's very interesting and thank you for the response. Financial diversity, trades diversity and age diversity are the most important divides that I see in higher ed, and in the US society as a whole. Amen to the administrative purge.
I would suggest in high school to start hiring educators who did not get a college degree or a masters degree in education. This would help diversify thought and move away from the current intellectual incest that is systemically built into the education complex.
I completely agree.
Thanks for the civil, interesting discussion!
I just listened to Chris Rufo on Jordan Peterson's podcast from Feb 27. Chris addresses beautifully the issues of bringing mid- and higher education past the Woke/postmodern state it is currently in. I am so encouraged to hear him! And one of the proposals he mentions involves hiring people to teach who have BAs in REAL subjects - such as math or physics - rather than in "Education".
Hi Kate,
I'm unsure if the reply was to me or Adrienne, but Rufo's suggestions for a BA or a BS is on the money. The concept should actually be expanded. If you have a successful individual in business, business or cooking, or shop- contracting, who wants to teach- the school or the individual with the desire to teach their craft should not be restrained by a Masters of Ed requirement, or maybe not even with a college degree.
I'm an academic in the UK and we're experiencing similar challenges here. Aside from unfair practice, attendance is another big problem. Across the sector, colleagues report very low levels of attendance, reflecting the recording of lectures and habits formed during the pandemic. Certain administrators don't see this as a problem, but in my opinion, it diminishes the quality of interactions/debates in classrooms and undermines the traditional function of universities.
Increasingly, students are perceiving themselves as consumers. Perhaps we can't blame them - for years, universities have charged exorbitant fees - but this has changed the nature of the traditional university experience. Instead of being places where students come to enrich themselves intellectually, universities are becoming transactional sites. This development is profoundly depressing.
"Transactional site" is a perfect description of what is happening.
Thanks!
I have tried to take the 50,000-ft view of Western civilization's decline, and to my mind it can all be boiled down to lack of standards. It's a little like watching the Deep State take down America; yes, we have the Constitution that lays out the rules, but the ones that hobble them, they just ignore. Same thing for academia.
You know what needs to be done, and so do your colleagues. So what are you going to do about it?
You make such a good point here - students perceive themselves as consumers and with a bloated administration and most universities, they are right! This is one of the drawbacks to a materialist culture in which everything is on demand and can be delivered to you with the press of a button. Why shouldn't they expect a good grade to be as easy to get as their order on Amazon?
It's a bit chicken and egg. Students view themselves as consumers. They're no longer content with a dorm room and a simple gym. They want an olympic pool, a dining hall with 30 types of ethnic foods and special diets, the latest gym equipment, etc. This all costs money AND requires administration, logistics and maintenance.
For example, at my university we no longer have one person running the dining center (ordering the food, planning menus, etc.) because it's an impossible task for one person since we have a salad bar, a vegetarian / vegan area, various ethnic foods, a keto meal, a smoothie bar, six kinds of milk and milk-like drinks, etc.
It's definitely an improvement from the "mystery meat" I was served in college, but it also requires a lot more work to provide. And this is just one example: this type of wanting lots and the best of everything permeates the entire university. Computer labs can no longer have five year old computers--they need the newest (and more expensive) models. All of this not only costs money, but requires a lot of administrative support.
Honestly, students don't even want most of that crap. When I was in undergrad everybody worked out on the regular old gym machines - nobody used the rock climbing wall or any of the fancy stuff. Hardly anybody ate at the dining hall after freshman year because our school was located in a major city with lots of food options. Nobody ever used the computer labs unless their laptop was broken. Dorm rooms were tiny with shared bathrooms and we still had fun living there - the only major complaint was that one particular freshman dorm had no AC while the rest did, so the first month of school was always miserable for those unlucky students.
I went to an Ivy League school so the kids came from rich backgrounds and had high standards but we could not have cared less about the university providing things like an Olympic size pool and keto meals. I'm not sure why universities feel like those kinds of amenities are so important - maybe it's marketing to impress parents on campus visits? Students at my school did view themselves as consumers, though - it's just that the product was good grades and a degree, not amenities. Arguably that's worse but I think all this talk of amenities is a red herring.
All this is true, but most of the cost increases are the result of the huge decrease in student to administrator ratio which is mentioned in your last sentence.
Hmmmm....."attendance is another big problem."
Well if they were really smart consumers they'd chafe at being charged for not getting a commodity for which they paid. But, if university is free (as in some Euro nations) or paid for my mommy and daddy, that connection is broken, isn't it?
The commodity is not the education, it's the degree. If they can get the degree without wasting time on the education then I suppose it's actually more efficient.
In my late 'forties, bored with sitting in a dark room, looking at black-and-white pictures, and talking to myself, I closed my radiology practice for a while and spent several years at a local university studying undergraduate electrical engineering.
It had always been my first love, and was probably the best time of my life, not least of which were the lasting friendships I made there with men twenty years or more my junior.
One in particular, Chris, became my study partner. The product of a fine hardworking West Virginia family, he struggled with calculus, despite having had near-perfect math scores in a local high school - which, of course, was the problem.
During our DiffEq (differential equations) final exam, the professor left the room, and to my disappointment, Chris and another friend began collaborating and passing answers back and forth using the infrared functions on their calculators. Nobody said much, but after the examination, Talia - a ball-o-fire Russian girl, took the both of them to task - as we say, "ripped them a new a-hole."
Chris and I went to the local Chinese restaurant for lunch, and he began to criticise the woman for giving him and his buddy a hard time. I said nothing. "You're not sayng anything, Jim, and that bothers me."
I hadn't realized, but during the years we studied together, Chris had developed a respect for his older partner, and I saw this as a real teachable moment. "Chris, in the big scheme of things, this doesn't mean a damn thing. But you are going to be a professional engineer, and from time to time you will come under tremendous pressure to sign off on things that are not right, so that contractors can cut corners. The penalty for THAT is real and severe, and I don't mean legal. I mean people may die. Doctors only kill people one at a time; when engineers kill them, they kill them by the dozens. Now is the time to get your head right - when it DOESN'T matter."
"God. I never thought of that."
That was twenty years ago. I hear from Chris at least twice a year. He's married, with two beautiful daughters, and is a successful professional engineer. I hope I helped him a little.
When I first started working, I worked for an independent group of pathologists and one pathologist that I respected a lot gave me a similar ethics 2x4 to the head that to this day I am so thankful for. I was 21 and in sales at the time and we had a dermatologist client that was worth a lot and also very high maintenance. On a random second QA review the pathologist determined the original diagnosis made by one of his partners was incorrect and needed amended. The change in diagnosis would not change the course of treatment and thus patient outcome. I knew the formal amendment would result in loss of the client and suggested that perhaps he didn’t need to amend it after all. In a very serious tone he asked “Are you suggesting that I IGNORE a diagnostic error? That the patient and client don’t deserve to know the true diagnosis?”. It seemed like such a minor thing at the time that I wasn’t viewing it through the lens of right and wrong and how that behavior on a larger scale would be tragic. I think back on that moment often whenever I’m faced with an ethical dilemma and it reminds me how slippery that moral slope can be. The Chris’s of the world are lucky to have mentors willing to speak candidly about what’s truly at stake.
Many of my students are in training to become professionals, who will be called on to make judgments that directly impact the lives and fortunes of others. Reality doesn't grade on a curve, and it doesn't give partial credit.
I continually remind students of this, though opportunities to really bring that message home, as you did with Chris, are few and far between. This was a "teachable moment" well spotted and flawlessly executed.
We ALL should mentor and help others like this. We should view it as an obligation and duty as a good citizen and person. I bet it’s one of you proudest memories.
Great job. I mean it. It’s good to know there are people out there like you, and that younger people are listening to them.
Engineering courses and exams should be completely re-engineered. Computers can solve complex integrals and differential equations. The challenge is in formulating the correct problem to solve.
A much more complex way to teach, but in the age of Wolfram Alpha and other online tools, it's essential that future engineers learn how to use them for problems that are not pre-digested for them.
Cheat all you want. Education is a process, not an event. It's about learning how much you are capable of.
Someday there will be something you want very badly - you'll be up against someone who did the work, learned the skills - and they will run over you.
Unless, of course, the job after which you seek is dependent upon some "affirmative action" quotas.......
Do you even have to cheat to get a degree? I thought as long as you didn't get behind on your payments, and you were really “trying your best”, you were sure to pass.
Granted, I haven't taught in 20 years, but you can believe me when I say that I never once knew or cared whether a student was behind on their payments during my grading. That wasn't my job. And I didn't pass everyone, and I was not unusual in that respect.
That sure wasn't what it was like when I was at UCSB 20 years ago. Pretty easy to fail
Well....lots of people who are not in academia think that.
Was that supposed to be an insult?
Just an observation. Take however you wish.
Besides the experience, what did you get from college that cannot be learned outside of college for free?
I'm tired of unqualified white women getting jobs, too.
How about unqualified black women?
Sure. But the issue is that white women benefit more than anyone else from "affirmative action."
Just like other people are tired of white men getting jobs?
But....they still are, all over the place, so there's that.
Or the legacy admission, which is affirmative action for white people.
Shhhhh!!
One can only hope. The “community pool” is polluted.
Ultimately, competence wins. The problem for the folks who use shortcuts is, they know they used them. Sooner or later (admittedly sometime much later) when called upon to deliver in real time, with no opportunity to use a crutch, those people falter. God help the patient whose doctor cheated his or her way through medical school.
I was thinking the same thing. The much more horrifying phenomenon is when incompetence starts to be protected or excused because of political affiliation or social credit.
Yes, I have a family member who worked for a company that hired a person who checked the requisite boxes, except for competency. My family member ended up having to cover for her. I bet this is happening a lot.
It’s no longer a case of when. It’s already at the highest levels of government.
I hope “competence wins”, but as I listen and watch many of our political players, progressive “wokies” and right-wing nuts, I’m thinking competence is in short supply already.
A lot of damage can be done before "ultimately" happens. Competence, or the best person for the job used to be the overall goal. Now it's all about checking the right blocks. Does the person have a degree from a highly ranked university, is their GPA above x, does the person have the correct racial background, preferred gender identity, have they completed community service supporting certain green initiatives, having certain disabilities can help. Then once the person is in the job and their lack of competence is displayed it can be very difficult to remove them, especially if the can play a discrimination card for defense.
If you own a local store and you're hiring someone to stock your shelves or run your cash register, you care about that person's competence. But if you work HR in a huge corporation and you are hiring thousands of people you will never meet, why would you care if they are competent? You are making headaches for supervisors throughout the organization, but you never even know it. If your hires are "politically correct" you get lots of praise and awards, even if the business suffers.
So true. Even more so when they really need many workers. I saw that in the military. They lowered the passing score for the Army Physical Fitness Test to get people through basic training. So kids were passing basic training doing x number of push ups or sit ups one day. Then just a few days later the same person goes to their unit and does the same number of push ups and sit ups, but fails the same test. Now that kid is a burden on the unit and they both have to waste time and effort getting the kid in shape instead of focusing on making the kid proficient in his new job. Sometimes the person never gets in shape enough to pass, then effort is made to remove him from the military.
Or the union card.
Nailed it. Especially the last sentence.
Medical School students don't need to cheat. Instead Medical Schools are eliminating their 1st year test because too many were failing it.
I got into medical school in the 70’s simply because I was good at standardized tests. Which is just a proxy for being able to memorize things. So I graduated with a good fund of knowledge. If people can now cheat their way through medical school by accessing that fund of knowledge on external apps, they will be able to use those same (constantly improving) apps to practice medicine, maybe more effectively than in pre-AI times. Weird times we’re living through.
But the problem remains - what question to ask the AI or Google?
You still have to take a good history and do an examination - before you can order any tests.
Yeah, I was sort of kidding. Especially, there are times when the physical exam is crucial. I did urgent care for a few years; treating URI’s all day. But occasionally seeing really subtle, undiagnosed problems--- pronator drift in undiagnosed brain tumor, early epiglottitis in a 4 yo with just a sore throat--- I could go on. It will be interesting how much AI changes non-surgical medical practice.
Exactly. Depending on the diminished quality of the medical community is a bit terrifying. A lawyer friend has been to the hospital twice from a cancer drug that his doc neglected to mention had a 8-13% side effect of a liver reaction which he got. Doctors don’t want to discuss care. They just want to dictate it.
Medical doctors are not trained in pharmacology. That is why that legion of pharmacology sales people is so successful. If you routinely take meds you need a good relationship with an independent (not big box store or chain) pharmacist.
That’s good information
What? You mean you can’t push moral ambiguity, treat young adults as if they are infants, and still expect everyone to work hard and do the right thing? That’s a real shocker right there.
“I didn’t get into academia to be a cop,” says one professor. Yeah, that would involve having expectations. Welcome to the real world. You reap what you sow, and I’ve yet to meet a baby that could change their own diaper.
Here in upside-down world, at what point do employers start ignoring the college students attended and what their GPAs were?
Could we get to a point where a high GPA is a sign of sociopathic, entitled behavior and companies actually prefer to hire the student with the 2.5 GPA as opposed to the 4.0? At least you know (probably) that the 2.5 GPA student earned their B-/C+
Jordon Peterson had a guest who said it best - we may have to give the SAT at the end of college and not the beginning to see if anything was learned. I guess you can cheat your way through that too!!
I thought about giving a test at the beginning of a teaching unit and then giving the same test at the end to evaluate growth and mastery. I abandoned the idea when I realized many students, parents, and admins didn’t actually care whether learning happened. Only that blessed GPA.
My feeling is that blessed GPA will end up having no meaning whatsoever. If “everyone is above average”, then how else can one student/applicant distinguish themselves? Thank you for your viewpoint.
"Stephanie Loomis : ..."I abandoned the idea when I realized many students, parents, and admins didn’t actually care whether learning happened. Only that blessed GPA."
I'd have thought a professor at your level should have reasoned that the value of an exam is in its indication of efficacy in the efforts expended of which the exam is revelatory-- in this case, your efforts. Whatever your students or their parents care or don't care about, wouldn't you like to know how effective your instruction has been?
(..."The EPA is very familiar with dioxins. For more than 25 years, the agency evaluated and assessed the risks posed by exposure to dioxins. ... The agency knows this chemical very well.
"So why is EPA unwilling to test for dioxins in the soil (of East Palestine, OH.)? My guess is because they know they will find it." ... )
Oh, I gave plenty of assessments to verify that the students were doing the work, thinking about it, and applying to their practices. Exams can only do so much. I had required discussions boards with required responses to peers using evidence from the readings. I had projects that required a list of resources wherein class lecture/discussion references were required. For me, the ability to utilized resources was more important than regurgitating information. My subject area, English Language Arts, thrives on free thinking, discourse, rhetoric, and poetics (in the Aristotelian sense.)
Courses where mistakes in processing, measuring, and strictly objective analysis (engineering, math, computer science) are better served by exams than the humanities, at least in most cases.
Trust me it’s a bit of waste because you can’t count the first test and kids know it.
Love this!
GRE is the test you speak of, but to get into grad school.
My beloved alma mater did away with GRE requirements while I was in grad school.
I'm a business owner and an employer of engineering students. The job description says that I prefer students who have failed a year. Many students ask me why during interviews - I tell them that the experience of failing is humbling, and that it's very important to know how to pick oneself up and try again.
The response I get is that they wish more employers had the same attitude.
Al, I have been in the engineering field for 30 years. I like your approach! I find the school and GPA does not necessarily have a causal effect on your problem solving skills. I hope my term does not offend, but I think all white collar and blue collar trades uncover cheaters very quickly. A welder cannot cheat with welding, a doctor cannot cheat open heart surgery and a civil engineer cannot cheat stressing structural loads. Thank you for your valuable input.
Lazy professors lead to lazy students. The solution -- Blue Books. "Come to class. No tech in the room. Open your Blue Books, please. You will find the test on your desk. It is a new test just for this class. There are five different tests randomly distributed among you. Please show your work. Please begin. You have 90 minutes." Yes, the grading will take longer. Yes, the professor may have less time to do research. However, the core responsibility of the university ... to teach and send responsible young adults into the world ... will more likely be fulfilled.
Of course, now grade 500 of those tests in the next few days......................along with publishing and your committee work. LOL In a bureaucratic system it is bureaucratic values of efficiency that are the order of the day. Our academies were designed in the pre-bureaucratic era...................
And the truth.....you shouldn't really have 500 students.
Agreed..................and you don't need as many administrators as students either!!!
Cheating may have less to do with the inherent "morality" of students than with the incentives to which they are subject.
Instructors have some control over the incentives within their courses, including the design of assignments and exams. A recent column on Inside Higher Ed (an online academic news site) opined that, if we teach students to write like robots, they can have a robot do their writing. The careful design of more meaningful projects and products can address that aspect of the problem, but that will take real, sustained effort on the part of instructors, even assuming they have the standing, the latitude, and the incentives to make the effort.
Instructors can also rethink how the overall grading schemes in their classes shape incentives. In his work on moral development, Piaget observed that when students are put in competition with each other for scarce approval or success, they will almost inevitably cheat: either they cheat on their own to get one over on their peers, or they collude in cheating to get one over on their teacher. On those grounds, I have concluded that grading on a curve is quite simply pedagogical malpractice.
There are things beyond instructors' control that shape the incentives, especially the nearly universal obsession with the GPA, which is an increasingly meaningless external indicator of alleged merit. The obsession sets in early, fostered by parents, college admissions processes, financial aid, and peer pressure, then is made much worse by some large employers who will screen applicants first by GPA, only allowing those over a certain threshold even to complete an application.
In my experience, the enforced GPA obsession makes students timid: any slight misstep - a late assignment, a mediocre exam score - feels to them like a career-ending calamity. They are so afraid of failure they have become unable to learn, unwilling to take risks, and much more inclined to find shortcuts around systems that seem to treat them with such contempt.
(For context: I'm an associate professor at a large public university.)
Agree. The most freeing thing ever for me was taking college classes AFTER graduating from college. Once I had the paper in my hand, I was finally free to take a challenging class where I might get a "C" vs. selecting courses where I knew an "A" was guaranteed for showing up and doing the assignments.
I don't really experience it at my current institution, but in past teaching gigs the best students in class were those coming back to take classes just for their own personal interests. I once had a WWII vet enroll in one of my classes. He had been a bombardier in the European theater, and he bowled students over with first-hand accounts of dropping bombs on people . . . while we were discussing the ethics of war!
What Piaget didn’t account for was the expectation that checklists are now more important than growth. There is no such thing as limited approval or success; students demand equity of outcome.
I don't see a lot of that among my students. Given the opportunity, most of them genuinely want to learn, and they are capable of holding themselves to a high standard.
I only see that when I create a kind of artificial bubble within a course which insulates them, a little, from the GPA rat-race into which we are all locked. Within that bubble, they have the opportunity to fail spectacularly, and then recover from failure by trying again . . . and again . . . until they can meet or exceed an unvarying standard of proficiency in a given skill.
I've never seen students so motivated, or so willing to critique their own performance.
Maybe there is hope.
Serious question Bob K: how many professors are like you who really care so much about educating that they'll go the length to do what you describe? I think some do. But aren't there also a lot who just teach because they have to, but what they really care about is their own research? And teaching is just a nuisance they put up with to be at the university to do what they want?
Some of this is also a matter of incentives. I'm at a "research university" - part of the system established after the end of WWII. Although faculty performance is assessed on the basis of "research, teaching, and service," with lots of happy talk about how all three are valued equally, it's an open secret that all that really matters is publication and quantitative metrics of the "impact" of publications.
There's a longstanding morbid "joke" that the surest way to destroy your chances of getting tenure as an early-career faculty member is to win a teaching award.
That said, there is at least a sizable minority of faculty who genuinely want to teach well - and who really strive to teach well - and there are lots of resources available on most campuses to support that. Many of them aren't sure what to do, and none of us can do much about the external incentives that bear on students, like the GPA obsession.
This article made me think of the moral corruption of widespread and frequent cheating. What does it do to the moral compass of a brain not yet fully formed? Will this generation go on breaking rules and laws when they are adults? The SEC and the Justice Department may get very busy.
The people cheating to get their diploma will probably be working at the SEC and the Justice Department. Some of them are probably already there.
They won't go into public service unless they have idealistic tendencies. Those jobs, mostly requiring law degrees, pay poorly compared to private jobs.
Many of these kids are learning the progressive ideals at colleges. And the kids are ripe for it, too. An 18-year-old no longer has the maturity level of an 18-year-old but a 16-year-old. Kids are mentally growing slower nowadays, likely a product of the indoor bubbles they are raised in.
But they provide connections , a steady check and prestige to their fellows.
I admire those who go into public service a great deal. I hope idealism drives as many of them to that route for at least part of their career.
there is nothing wrong with service, its an honorable job. But there are people who join for more than idealism.
The professor has a fully formed brain. Yet, there they are not doing a damn thing and allowing this to happen. Because...cushy job. How do people sleep at night?
There are already plenty of adults doing as you say.
It’s everywhere.
Really? I think this is where the cheaters will end up.
More rules never works. What we need is for the Ivy's and others to highly incentivize a "Year of Service" similar to Israel. We don't need everyone in the Military, but we do need a re-alignment of values. In hindsight, I wish I had done Jesuit Volunteer Corps back in the day at Boston College.
We have some great interns from Pace University (NY) that come to visit us at our not-for-profit, and they ALWAYS respond when they have real work to do. They want to take care of our Special Needs Hikers on our Friday hikes, and on the ground training works!
I have heard of some folks trying to move forward similar programs. I believe the idea was to put in place a national gap year in which high school graduates would give one year of service either via the military or through a beefed up AmeriCorps program. We have some of what you are talking about in place, and I think it could do a lot of good for rising college students.
I’d like to hear from Academics working in other countries. Is the problem just within US schools, corrupted by their transactional nature? The pressure to succeed in Japan is intense, but is cheating rampant? What about the UK? Europe? India?
It seems that there is a very easy solution to all of this - go back to hand written tests and assignments? Tests are written in halls with invigilators roaming between desks.
It feels a lot like the old anecdote about NASA spending thousands of dollars to get a pen to work in space, while the Russians just took a pencil? The solution doesn't have to be complicated to solve the problem.
My point exactly. A lot of us are wondering why schools don’t just do this.
Schools should return to a more personalized system. After a couple of months, you’ll recognize every face in a 30-person class and you’d instantly notice a total stranger sitting the exam.
The professors are “cheating” as much as the students. They don’t give a damn. All the ones who couldn’t stomach the charade have long since left the building.
But then again, everything written with a pencil could easily be erased. The Russians are good at that..
I have taught both high school and college, and this has been the story in education for about 20 years now. We have academic environments nobody wants to be in, serviced by teachers that no longer want to be there, students who don’t really want to learn and material that interests no one.
It would be worth our while to approach education in the 21st-century from first principles; WHY are we teaching people? If we clarified the target and freed up teachers and students to find their best way on their own to set a target I think we would get much better results.
Oh for the days when English students thought they could cheat just by watching the movie version of a book. I remember one kid handing in an essay about Heart of Darkness that discussed the colonial exploitation of Viet Nam.
Come on, folks. Quelle surprise. Rampant fraud and cheating???
We ceded control of academia to liberals years ago. There is simply no argument that our universities are almost entirely ridldled with professors and administrators who are left leaning Democrats One study showed Democrat to :Republican ratios among fifty-one of the top sixty-six U.S. News-ranked colleges average 10.4: to 1., Excluding Annapolis and West Point raises the ratio to 12.7 to 1. This compares with a national D:R ratio of 1.6:1 for people who have some graduate school experience. https://www.nas.org/academicquestions/31/2/homogenous_the_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal_arts_college_faculty. Although the numbers are better in certain hard fact STEM departments, the more leftist departments such as sociology et al have zero Republican representatives.
The proof is in the pudding: When you give control of any institution to leftist Democrats it inevitably turns to merde.
So why do we put our nation in their hands?
The answer to your last sentence, Bruce - is that the only present opposition to Democrats (and yes, I must admit it, they do really need to be held accountable) is the GOP. And what have they done to:
(A) get beyond election denier Trump and have the guts to come forward and challenge him..
(B) articulate a cohesive and coherent platform that would care for not only the top of the economic scale but the bottom as well..from health, to guns, to abortion..The GOP is too scared to go out on a limb anywhere..
(C) propose immigration policies that need to be fair as well as harsh..
(D) try to LEAD instead of being LED by the hard core MAGA right wing (yes, just like Biden is held hostage by his insurgent insufferable progressive wing..)
(E) And for God's sake - put forth electable candidates!!! What the hell is wrong with the RNC??
Or..Or..go to my way of thinking and hope that a third party might somehow in some way spring forth..and challenge the hell out of both of them. The time is nigh..
But I'm getting my hopes up..
I feel your pain.
So the academies were so much better pre-1970s when the conservatives ran them?
Eugenics anyone????
Power corrupts.................
It's done differently now. Back in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate, there was little opportunity in the small southern town I attended a university in to talk about the de-facto segregation around you, race, social class or even much about feminism. You are right, during the late 1960s and beyond there were a small group of colleges that were on the forefront of pushing barriers/activism. My fellow students were rebelling against the conservative Greek system; we voted for a gay dude as homecoming queen and our student body president was an avowed communist who used student government funds to go to Cuba. But the conversations didn't enter into the classrooms. The state legislature was aghast of course and threatened the President with all sorts of financial penalties...............
After WW2, communist/communist sympathizers and experts in the areas that were under communist rule or threatened to be were drummed out of government and universities by the anti-communist and McCarthy's boys. I think that is pretty effective, just firing them. I remember having to sign a form saying I was not now or ever a member of the Communist Party to work as a beach life guard in Florida in the 1980s. Those were ubiquitous during the 1950s through the 1970s. Same thing to me, different way of accomplishing it..............power corrupts.
Either we create new institutions or purge the loons rotting inside our current institutions.
I vote we create new institutions.
Berkeley grad students just got a small raise.
Yes, my daughter participated in the strikes too. She learned a lot. I don’t know what the $ raise is, kicks in later in the year. But I know this for sure, when she gets her PhD, I will have funded at least one of those letters 😡. She has the good sense already to know her path forward is not in academia. My hope is the private sector.
And yes, the system is broken.
Abandoned or been excluded from?
If you're excluded and ostracized the choice is taken away from you.
Looked what happened to U of Penn Law prof Amy Wax when she dared to break from progressive orthodoxy.
Stop unlimited gov't educations loans. Certainly stop talk of "loan forgiveness." Make schools compete for limited students, and make students think hard about where they want to go, or even if they want to go at all.
The solution: Burn it down, RT, burn it down!
No wait, that's what a Leftist would do.
My idea: defund, dismantle, and reimagine schooling, from top to bottom. The current institutions are so "systemically" corrupt, that they are beyond reform.
All of the conversation here that's not focused solely on the responsibility falling on bad parents is just blah, blah, yada, yada. The fact is, it is our job as parents to raise children with a strong moral compass that can step over all of this hogwash and do what is right, every time, in every situation, period. If you are accepting less from yourself as a parent, then you maybe should have decided against procreating. Until the majority of parents stop trying to be best friends with their kids and suck up the emotional turmoil that comes from sometimes making their children unhappy with them, it's not going to get better. Until the phrase, "I don't care what your friends parents are doing" comes back in to vogue, it's not going to get better.
I remember my dad telling me in no uncertain terms, "My job is not to make you like me, my job is to prepare you to be a productive citizen and a good person, if that pisses you off, so be it. You can get glad in the same panties you got mad in." . And all of the times that I cursed him under my breath amounted to nothing when it finally clicked. I had enlisted in the Marine Corps after I lost a full scholarship to a major school because I wanted to party more than study. Being away from home without the constant reinforcement showed that I didn't have the self discipline that I needed to do what was best for me. I was so afraid to go home and tell my dad what happened that I enlisted as a way to sort of soften the blow when I did tell him. It saved me, but it also completely changed the direction of my life. When I realized how much more capable and prepared I was than the other recruits, it started to become clear. I used to tell them, "If you think this is hard, we're gonna go to my house when we get out of here and my dad will show you what hard is" . I realized that all of the demands that he had put on me growing up had prepared me for what was to come in life. On graduation day, when we were finally released, I made a beeline across that parade deck to shake that mans hand and tell him I understood. After leaving the Marine Corps, I returned to the same school and finished what I had so poorly started. I owe all of the success that I have had in life to my dad's refusal to back down and let me be less than I could be.
Great story. I agree....it all begins with the parents. Sadly, this problem of parents not doing their jobs is currently and will continue to grow exponentially as these students become parents.
Good for you.
Yes, parents are doing a poss poor job.