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This isn't a very realistic model of academia.
"Back in my day" is one of the easiest and most natural criticisms to make in any field. I think you should take what this guy said with a grain of salt.
Universities were, objectively, massively expanded in that timeframe. "We increased the number of students tenfold, but this did not change quality or composition or culture" is just not a very credible claim. On the other hand, it's just common sense that if you try to take in the top 5% vs the top 50%, the average student will necessary be MUCH worse, even if your measure of competence is unreliable. Likewise, if a professor suddenly has to teach a multiple of the students he used to, the quality of the education almost necessarily suffers (not to mention a similar effect to the students, in which people are given increased responsibilities to handle the load of teaching that in the old regime would never have been given such responsibilities).
Pretty much all older staff reports roughly the same story: In the past, professors had reasonable loads of students, which they could handle on a more individual basis, and which were mostly capable of acting independently. Nowadays, the professors have so many students that they had to transform everything into a standardized, school-like environment. This includes a lot of busywork that can't be too hard since - and here is some divergence - one side says the students are just way worse but we don't want failure rate of >50%, the other side says because it would require more personal interaction for struggling students which the professors simply can't supply anymore. To keep the appearance of excellence, this busywork is also often more time-intensive for the students than the technically harder assignments that students would have gotten in the past. The few professors that don't standardize but keep open-ended problems often don't manage to teach anything and end up having to just pass everyone. The style of political courses functor is describing fits into the same mold imo. It's just really convenient to reduce everything into a one-dimensional political analysis and works very well as a standardized approach.
In fact, I'd argue that most older staff even underestimates the scale of this process, since a large part happens through the generation of new fields that have minimally trained professors and low to no enforced standards. My university for example almost doubled its student body since I started studying here, went away, and came back. All the original courses, however, still have almost the same size. Instead, we have A LOT of new courses that frequently are just thinly-veiled ways of enrolling marginal students that didn't make it in the original courses ("media informatics", for example), and almost universally have very low standards. My wife had to work together on a project with a newly-created "midwife professor", head of the newly created "midwife university course", who is just a practicing midwife that went back to university, did a PhD with a single publication, and instantly got her professorship. She doesn't seem to have any idea how science works whatsoever, and nobody can make her since she has an ultra-safe position as the original arbiter in our university on what "midwife science" even is. And there are multiple new courses like this from which I have not directly heard anything yet, but also no reason to believe it's any different. And both my wife's and others report on existing collaborations that they often try to hide their ignorance behind moralistic grandstanding.
In general, another thing that I have been perceiving myself also is that there is zero pressure to make things harder for students and a lot of pressure to make things easier. If I pass everyone, literally nobody will complain as long as I went through the motions of designing some very easy assignments. On the other hand, if the assignments are too hard and too many fail, firstly it's just extra work for me since I see them again next year, and at some point I have to do an oral exam which is even more work. Then you have the students themselves complain. Then if you fail too many the university admin staff will complain as well. My natural attitude is normally "if they fail, they fail", but even I actively work towards making assignments easier for the students just to spare myself the hassle. It just seems extremely obvious that such a system will only ever get easier over time. And once you have little to no meaningful standards, it's easy to bring in politics, because why not?
What time frame do you have in mind, exactly?
This report suggests doctorates surged in the late 60s as the Space Race and related investments peaked. But that was tracked by similar ramps in number of institutions, amount of funding, etc. so I wouldn’t expect the professor:student ratio to crater.
I was pushing on this because it didn’t match my grad school experience. We still had wide latitude, minimal make-work, very specific classes with low headcount. I’m willing to believe that’s an artifact of engineering and wouldn’t hold for humanities, but my instinct is skepticism.
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I’ve often considered that university should be separated from job training. The university is being tasked with so many things that it cannot do anything to a decent standard. Research suffers because it’s no longer hiring people on just being good researchers. Now they must teach. And they must hand-hold the students who simply want to grade grub. And they must know what industry wants and fear their coursework to train that. It’s an impossible task made even more difficult as more and more students with middling IQs and very poor study skills must be shepherded through university in courses designed for minimum effort and maximum course satisfaction ratings when university level coursework cannot be dumbed down to the level of what would have been a high school sophomore level in 1945. It doesn’t work, and until you have an academy separate from job training midwits there’s not much chance of reintroduced rigor. We’re producing phds who should have flunked out of undergrad.
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