Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel challenge the recent spate of books and articles complaining about college students.
They write:
For broader participation to lead to positive outcomes — for example, the completion of degrees without huge debt burdens — students must have good experiences in the classroom. This is especially important yet incredibly difficult as the new economics of college are compromising the time, energy, and money that students and many of their professors have to spend on quality learning.
These are the core challenges of college today — and yet they are too often ignored. Instead, symptoms of those problems dominate air time, as the stereotype persists of “academically adrift” “snowflakes” “coddled” by their universities. Consider the recent essay by Nancy Bunge, “Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers. It Hurts Students,” which takes on student evaluations. Bunge contends the “unearned arrogance encouraged by the heavy reliance on student evaluations helps produce passive, even contemptuous students who undermine the spirit of the class and lower its quality for everyone.”
Her enemy appears to be sites like the often-lamented Rate My Professors, but her piece also attacks the students themselves, and reinforces a set of assertions largely drawn from one influential yet extremely narrow study, Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Jospia Roksa. The limited learning lamented by the authors is said to be linked to insufficiently challenging instructors, and according to Bunge those instructors are not demanding more of their students because they want to get good grades. She cites a Chronicle survey in which faculty members claim that students are “harder to teach” these days. The overall narrative suggests we should feel sorry for the faculty. If only they could have more-engaged students to teach.
There is an alternative explanation. Today’s college students are the most overburdened and undersupported in American history. More than one in four have a child, almost three in four are employed, and more than half receive Pell Grants but are left far short of the funds required to pay for college. Rather than receiving help from their parents to pay for college, even the youngest college students often have to use their loans to pay their parents’ bills.
Whereas previous generations could turn to food stamps for help, today’s students have to first work long hours to qualify for the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Similarly, students years ago could quickly talk to an adviser for help, but now they may be sharing that adviser with more than 500 other students. “Kids these days” aren’t kids at all. But this fact is neglected by many researchers and by too many faculty members who think of their own experiences in college rather than their students’ when crafting teaching plans…
In other words, the work of higher education — as with all of education — has to begin with a deep respect for students. They are not mere data points, not just rows in an online grade book. Students are human first. And so are their teachers. The exploitation of adjuncts, erosions to tenure, and the overall dismal working conditions throughout much of higher education contributes to faculty frustration and anger — which is now spilling over to affect students.
College has become the place America loves to hate, and college professors and students are the unwitting victims. It doesn’t require much cynicism to recognize this as part of a political plan to destabilize or even reverse the democratization of higher education.
But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.
Diane Ravitch's blog 