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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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The quality of graduates from the top schools has fallen precipitously over the last 30 years. This shows in two ways. Firstly, while in college, students are less interested in the material, ask less questions, interact with their TAs and professors less, and generally are more like consumers than people engaged in discovery. The quality of exam answers increased up until about 2010, but the quality of in-person engagement decreased notably. Students who are selected for doing well on exams do well on exams, but somehow, they are less interested, and significantly less interesting. Cheating has gone from being almost unheard of, save for very marginal students who were desperate to pass, to commonplace, and now to almost universal. I have seen students speak at graduation who did not do a single problem set of their own.

I think this coincides with the neoliberal push in education, but the cracks in the foundation were already there much earlier. I think captivating a child's attention in grade school was always going to be an issue. They're much more interested in exploring and imagining than being forced into a chair ala the Prussia model of education. As a person who paid his way through college, cheating looks like an attractive option if you're falling behind; considering the financial investment you put into your classes. Someone's 'always' had to pay for it at the end of the day, but I think the financialization of the university system continues to contribute a crucial piece of the problem.

Once these kids hit the workplace, they are strikingly lost.

This was me, also. Maybe I took for granted so much the fact that I could coherently speak English, that I could turn around after graduation and say it felt like I didn't learn anything. But I didn't feel like I was prepared for life in any way. When I asked myself "what next?," I had no idea how to answer it or where to go. I think a 'practical' education solves this problem where an 'academic' education barely makes any attempt to address it. Maybe that's part of the reason for higher education's insistence on extracurriculars and their interest in your time spent outside of the classroom. I did do pretty well (though not exceptional) in the former but not the latter. It's still difficult for me to tell if I'm a successful product of the contemporary American educational system or not. I'm not exactly where I would like to be in life, but I'm not really complaining either. I think the lack of social and economic mobility in the job market and other socioeconomic ladders are to blame, from a policy standpoint more than my education was.

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