The Five-Year Party (12 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
George Kuh, the founder and former director of NSSE, found that at college after college around the country, the culture war was only brought under control by an informal détente or peace treaty, engineered by college administrators to restore order. Kuh has dubbed this “the disengagement compact.” Students and professors compromised by adopting an attitude of “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.” The compact wasn’t a formal, written agreement but a kind of cease-fire in the culture war. If professors relax their standards and inflate their grades so that most students can pass, then the students will not complain to administrators or take up valuable office time and will write positive comments on teaching evaluations. In other words, it’s exactly what we saw taking place in Brian Strow’s class at the beginning of this chapter.
“The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades—Bs and sometimes better,” Kuh said. “There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning—on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.”
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NSSE’s surveys found that only 10 percent of American college students were the old-fashioned kind who came to college to learn something. NSSE calls these students “fully engaged.” At the other end of the scale they found that 20 percent of students were “fully disengaged.” An analysis of NSSE data by two sociology professors, however, found that 40 to 45 percent of students were “fully disengaged.” These are the anti-intellectual party school students who chose to spend their time at what
Forbes
magazine dubbed “country club campuses.” The remaining 40 to 50 percent of students were in the middle, sometimes engaged and sometimes disengaged. They didn’t party all the time but maintained only a minimal interest in their educations.
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A study conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found similar results: 40 percent of freshmen are disengaged from academic pursuits or alienated from the educational process.
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Forbes
magazine dubbed “country club campuses.” The remaining 40 to 50 percent of students were in the middle, sometimes engaged and sometimes disengaged. They didn’t party all the time but maintained only a minimal interest in their educations.
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A study conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found similar results: 40 percent of freshmen are disengaged from academic pursuits or alienated from the educational process.
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Other experts on higher education use different terms for the same phenomenon. Author and former Indiana University professor Murray Sperber calls it the “nonaggression pact” between faculty and students, where each side agrees not to impinge on the interests of the other. A faculty member who dares to give a student a C, he said, is breaking the pact and can expect a violent reaction from students and complaints from administrators. The teacher will have “to spend a fair amount of time justifying the grade with detailed written comments on the test or exam and a meeting with the upset student.” Not surprisingly, most faculty choose not to violate the pact and join the ranks of those who grade more generously.
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The resulting decline of academic standards, Sperber said, would be quickly exposed if there were outcome tests for students just before graduation to show how little they have learned in college, but such tests are very rare in academia. “Quality undergraduate education is alive and well in the United States,” he said, “it just does not exist for most students at public universities.”
The disengagement compact is now nearly universal on party school and subprime college campuses where students are allowed to choose whether they want to learn anything or not. Professors have found from experience or from advice from other professors that fighting the system is a time-consuming and losing battle that can lead to poor job evaluations or denial of tenure. Keeping the students happy at any cost, on the other hand, is encouraged by administrators because it reduces the problems they have to deal with from students and keeps the tuition money rolling in.
We’ve seen that students aren’t “engaged,” but we haven’t talked about what this means in terms of actual student work. How much do students really study? The answer: not much.
A number of new reports on successful people have found that the amount of work you do, the amount of time you practice something, the better you become at doing it. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling book
Outliers
, said ten thousand hours of practice separate the mediocre from the world-class and mentions many successful people, including Mozart, golfer Tiger Woods, and the Beatles, who spent years playing music together eight hours a day in Germany. If you work hard at something, you are likely to get better at it and succeed.
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Outliers
, said ten thousand hours of practice separate the mediocre from the world-class and mentions many successful people, including Mozart, golfer Tiger Woods, and the Beatles, who spent years playing music together eight hours a day in Germany. If you work hard at something, you are likely to get better at it and succeed.
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College athletes, musicians, and artists understand this concept and you can see them spending hours in the training room or the studio practicing their skills in order to improve their performances. When it comes to academics, however, college students take a much different attitude. Brought up under the self-esteem movement, they think learning is easy and not worth any effort. It’s something you can learn without any hard work. You can simply sit in class and absorb it without reading, writing, or studying.
Colleges were originally set up under the Horatio Alger idea that hours of hard work set students on the road to success. Take students out of the secular society and create an enclave for them where they can pursue their studies without the distractions of the outside world and you can produce the leaders of tomorrow. A generation ago, students were expected to attend classes for fifteen hours a week and study for another thirty hours a week. If they did this for four years, they would rack up some 4,320 hours of academic study, far less than Gladwell’s ten thousand hours but well placed on the path to success.
But things are different now. National surveys show that half of American college students spend only nine to fifteen hours a week studying, only half of what was common a generation ago. Because of changes in the curriculum, dumbed-down classes, and lowered expectations, students find they can get by doing very little work and still be rewarded with a grade of B or even A. And instead of being ascetic refuges from the world, today’s college campuses are full of distractions like climbing walls, parties, rock concerts, hot tubs, student centers, and high-definition cable television sets that compete with academics for the students’ time and attention.
“This is a learned set of behaviors,” said Richard Hersh, a former college president, of the few hours students spend studying. “Students are being rewarded for it. They don’t do a lot of work but they still get a B. They can buy a paper on the internet and not get caught. No big deal. They can join a fraternity and party five nights a week and then brag about being smashed and still making it through their classes. This is being learned and they get victimized by it.”
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Instead of teaching them to swim, he said, colleges teach students how to tread water. Students who make a minimal effort manage to stay afloat and not drown but essentially they stay in the same place. “That’s a crime,” Hersh said.
Kuh said NSSE statistics show that about 20 percent of students are simply drifting through college, yet they don’t flunk out and are awarded diplomas. These students have figured out how to game the system to get what they want with the least possible effort. They keep their heads down and avoid attracting attention. They pick large classes and tend to hang together as a group sleepwalking through college.
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“If this is not higher education’s dirty little secret, then it ought to be,” said Kuh.
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“If this is not higher education’s dirty little secret, then it ought to be,” said Kuh.
Many of my students in New Hampshire admitted to me that they did no reading or work at all outside of class. They wanted me to set aside time at the end of each class so they could complete their homework assignments. That left them free for the other 95 percent of their time to enjoy the many distractions colleges have to offer. Class time was learning time, but once they left the class, all interest in learning anything was simply turned off.
The University of Maryland, which has been surveying students’ study habits for a decade, found that the average amount of time a student spends studying is 14.8 hours per week rather than the 25 hours professors recommend. “It’s something that we still preach, but have I ever met a student who does it? Probably not,” said Marcy Fallon, director of the University of Maryland’s Learning Assistance Service. “As much as we preach it, they’re not doing it.” She is most concerned about students who take four or five courses a semester but study only six to ten hours a week. “That’s a problem,” she said.
The college environment rewards minimal studying, but it’s not where this sense of entitlement and disinterest in learning comes from. For that, we have to look to our culture.
In 1994, when the members of the college class of 2010 were entering the first grade, a very popular movie was released that won six Oscars, including best picture and best actor. The main character was a lovable idiot who defied all the odds by participating in every major event of his lifetime. His philosophy was that life was just a box of chocolates and you could try out a new self-indulgent treat each day.
A decade and a half later, it seems that Forrest Gump unwittingly spawned an entire generation for whom learning and knowledge are superfluous and who sincerely believe that life will simply hand them their own box of chocolates without any of the hard work that previous generations thought was part of the road to success.
In a 1999 public opinion survey, 55 percent of Americans under the age of thirty said they expected to become rich during their lifetimes. But when interviewers asked a follow-up question about how they expected to acquire that wealth, the answers were vague. Just over 70 percent admitted there was no way they would get rich through their current careers and 76 percent said Americans were not “as willing to work hard at their jobs to get ahead as they were in the past.” They also rejected the idea that inheritance or investments would set them on the road to riches.
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So how were all of these young Americans going to land on Easy Street? Simple, they said, all it took was a little luck. Good fortune, they said, would inevitably catch up with them and bestow upon them their righteous benefits. Economist Jeremy Rifkin, commenting on the results of this survey, said an entire generation had bought into the mindset that there was no connection between work and success. Younger Americans were “increasingly caught up in the media culture that sold the idea of instant gratification of one’s desires” and that “each successive generation of Americans was less willing or even less able to work hard and postpone gratification for future rewards.” In fact, he said, today’s young narcissists seem to have replaced the classic “American dream” with an “American daydream.”
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What we are seeing among young people today is the very opposite of the Horatio Alger myth. It’s not hard work and climbing up the ladder that leads to success, they say, but becoming a cockeyed optimist and having blind faith that it’s just a matter of time before a sudden bolt from the blue will bestow upon them the riches that they rightly deserve. It’s the attitude that they might as well have a good time and avoid hard work while killing time waiting until the wheel of fortune smiles upon them. I was baffled by this attitude until I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
, in which she describes how millions of Americans have bought into the idea that by simply visualizing what you want—high salaries, yachts, and expensive cars—they will be drawn to you by the near-magical “law of attraction.”
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Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
, in which she describes how millions of Americans have bought into the idea that by simply visualizing what you want—high salaries, yachts, and expensive cars—they will be drawn to you by the near-magical “law of attraction.”
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So where does education fit into this success-without-work attitude? The old-fashioned mission of education was that it prepared young people with the wisdom, knowledge, and skills they would need to take advantage of opportunities to climb up the ladder to success and to enable them to better understand the world around them. But if today’s young people have bought into the belief that they are simply marking time until fortune strikes them, traditional education begins to look like a very boring and very long waste of time. It matches perfectly the attitude that many of today’s party school students express. Partying is what you do while waiting for the lightning bolt of success to strike you, and any efforts you make to better yourself are a waste of time and effort. Party school administrators are merely matching their pitch to their customers’ needs:
This is the best place to have a good time until the golden arrow of good fortune strikes you.
This is the best place to have a good time until the golden arrow of good fortune strikes you.
None of this is any news to Bart Simpson, the very popular wisecracking cartoon character on
The Simpsons
television program. During the years when today’s college students were growing up, Bart was often shown wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan, “Underachiever and Proud of It!” Bart’s slogan has now become the credo of a generation. Learning is for losers, they say. The goal of life is to have a good time and avoid anything that looks like work. Showing interest in a topic in class, asking a question, or even reading the textbook and completing assignments can be social suicide. Students who attempt to follow the “smart track” through school risk being branded forever as nerds who will never be invited to parties or asked out on dates. Some of my smartest students showed me Facebook pages where they were trashed by other students for asking questions in class and reading the textbook.
The Simpsons
television program. During the years when today’s college students were growing up, Bart was often shown wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan, “Underachiever and Proud of It!” Bart’s slogan has now become the credo of a generation. Learning is for losers, they say. The goal of life is to have a good time and avoid anything that looks like work. Showing interest in a topic in class, asking a question, or even reading the textbook and completing assignments can be social suicide. Students who attempt to follow the “smart track” through school risk being branded forever as nerds who will never be invited to parties or asked out on dates. Some of my smartest students showed me Facebook pages where they were trashed by other students for asking questions in class and reading the textbook.
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