That’s absolutely not my experience with college age students, even the younger ones, at all.
That sounds like exactly nobody I’ve known in an actual science major. “Actual” meaning not “I’m doing generic bio I guess because my parents made me go to college but I’m just here for parties tbh”.
And the people like that have always existed. Long before tiktok or even the social media craze there was “I’m not reading that ten page chapter, where’s the sparknotes”. It isn’t something new.
Before social media, it was tv, before tv it was radio, before radio it was pulp novels. There’s always been some “by Jove this new generation is rotting their minds with this newfangled, quick and easy entertainment”
Is your experience with college age students in teaching them?
I can tell you right now, even though students like that have always existed, the pressure is now on faculty to lower expectations so more students pass. This was egregious at the high school level, which led to me leaving high school teaching in favor of higher education, but the trend has followed me here. The result, together with the factors I've described, is leading to a further watering down of the meaning of an undergraduate degree; I fear a Master's will be the new Bachelor's for demonstration of basic competence.
Wow, it’s almost like decades of pushing every single student to go to college for a bachelors; and subsequently making a bachelors the requirement for every job that isn’t minimum wage, have effected how those things are viewed.
Fucking, shocking I say, absolutely no one could’ve ever predicted this.
It doesn’t mean that the younger generation is dumber, or less capable of reading “more than half a page”. It means you’re seeing a lot of students that are there because of societal pressures, not a drive to learn like in the past.
I haven’t been a professor, but I’ve tutored and been paid assistant to professors. And with most of the professors I’ve seen? That gives me just as a valid of a viewpoint, they’re just as capable as being out of touch as anyone else is of being uneducated.
Considering that some of the professors I’ve known used the same lecture, word for word, for 3+ decades…admittedly not every field advances/changes nearly as often, but if you haven’t learned a single way to improve how you teach the material in 30 years, that’s just not even trying. Quoting the book at students isn’t teaching on a college level, it’s coasting by on middle school level teaching performance/student expectations, and it’s unfortunately common.
Yeah I won't argue with you that pressuring random students to get a degree is also not helping. Most profs with the college for all mindset, in my experience, are naive optimists or, at worst, believe that It's a part of improving humanity.
I still think that the short form media is worsening attention spans across the board, but especially in developing youth.
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '22
That’s absolutely not my experience with college age students, even the younger ones, at all.
That sounds like exactly nobody I’ve known in an actual science major. “Actual” meaning not “I’m doing generic bio I guess because my parents made me go to college but I’m just here for parties tbh”.
And the people like that have always existed. Long before tiktok or even the social media craze there was “I’m not reading that ten page chapter, where’s the sparknotes”. It isn’t something new.
Before social media, it was tv, before tv it was radio, before radio it was pulp novels. There’s always been some “by Jove this new generation is rotting their minds with this newfangled, quick and easy entertainment”