From The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/07/has-college-gotten-easier/594550/
I read the article. The title is a bit misleading and click-baity (which seems to be par for the course for the Atlantic lately). The main focus of the article is on graduation rates and the difficulty of figuring out why many schools continue to have poor graduation rates especially when GPA’s are going up. The upshot of the article is that there’s no one single explanation (and no single fix) for poor graduation rates.
College almost certainly has gotten easier, or at least less work, over the recent decades, due to technological advances.
Need to find references for your term paper on a relatively obscure topic? No problem, go to the web site of the university library to see what books on the topic are there. Search the broader web to find what else may exist. And if something of interest is not in the university library or on the web, it can probably be ordered for delivery in a few days. Not like the old days when your parents had to go to the library (uphill both ways in the snow) and spend a lot of time going between the card catalog and the stacks of books to find the ones that have the needed information (and hope they were not checked out). And mail-ordering something was more time consuming back then, if one even knew what to look for.
Of course, when writing the finished paper, word processing and desktop publishing software makes it a lot faster, easier, and less error-prone than typing it on a typewriter and using correction fluid to fix errors like when your parents went to college.
Need to write a computer program for an assignment in a computer science course? Your desktop/laptop computer in your dorm room probably has orders of magnitude more processor speed, memory, and storage than the shared computers that your parents had to use to write their computer programs in computer science courses.
I don’t know. My D is working her tail off. One course alone met 9 hours/week and her project team met additionally at least 20 hrs/week. Again, for one class. She had 4 others.
My H who also was an engineering major, back in the stone ages, said she’s working more than he did.
@ucbalumnus – your post sure brings back memories! I took an intro to computer science class in ~1973 (???). Very basic stuff – but the programs we wrote involved punch card. After figuring out the program and punching the card, then I’d go to the computer room and stick the card(s) in a slot in this huge machine on one side of the room, and wait. The machine would click and whirr for a few minutes, and then clatter, clatter, clatter - my results would come out on a huge sheet of green & white striped paper from a printer on the other side of the room.
^ we didn’t have the punch cards in 82 / 83 but we had very limited computer lab availability. You were actually assigned a time where you could use the computers in the library. Mine was Thursday night from 10 pm to 1am. That was it. If you couldn’t get the project done, too bad, so sad! Really got in the way of happy hour (actually not!) Glad i took that class pass / fail.
So the hardest parts of college are getting in AND getting out. SMH and LOL.
Grade inflation is the answer here.
Going back to the Atlantic article – it looks like the people quoted in the article have ignored the elephant in the room:
THEY WROTE:
[QUOTE=""]
students appeared to be studying less and spending more time working outside of school
students were, on average, earning higher grades in their first year of college
[/QUOTE]
then speculate, speculate, speculate.
Here’s the part that they forgot to think about:
$$$$
Students are working more, studying less because that is the only way that most of them can AFFORD college.
Their grades are better because (a) college is so damn expensive they can’t afford to diddle around; (b) they probably are arriving better prepared for college because of all of the pressure to take AP’s in high school,-- and given costs, the less-prepared students are more likely to start at community college; © students who have jobs while at school tend to be more efficient and disciplined in the use of their time; and (d) they are racking up so much debt just to attend school that they are keenly aware of the need to graduate, preferably on time .
I can’t believe that someone wrote an entire article about trends in college GPA, graduation rates and study patterns without the word “debt” appearing a single time in the article.
And back in the old days we walked to class in waist deep snow uphill - both ways.
I disagree that it’s easier. But it’s impossible to know without a time machine.
Employers seem to have much less confidence in the college degrees awarded now. Most of my young friends have been asked to take some type of test (writing, or math skills) or to provide standardized test scores in connection with their employment applications.
^Yes, while colleges have been de-emphasizing test scores and testing in general, top employers, especially those in certain areas of high tech and financial services, have increasingly been using their own proprietary tests, and/or asking applicants for their standardized test scores, for both internships and regular jobs.
I don’t know about other schools, but my kid is studying and pursuing his ECs very diligently at Stanford. I don’t know about grade inflation, but this does not mean they don’t study hard. According to my kid, most students there study very hard and are challenged. They talk about “duck syndrome”, which is looking calm and in control while underneath, they are furiously pedaling to stay afloat. Our kid went to a competitive high school and didn’t study as hard as he is doing at Stanford. As an example, he rarely stayed up past 11:30 PM to study during high school, but he often stays past 2 or even 3 AM to study at Stanford especially during certain periods.
Now, when I went to a top 15 college, I rarely studied more than 1 hour per day, and as a result, I was content to graduate with 2.9 GPA after having changed my major 5 times. And I studied even less during high school. Therefore, based on my own experience, I have to disagree with OP.
From what I have seen, computer companies are not interested in scores from standardized tests like SAT, ACT, etc… But interviewers may give computing related questions to check applicants’ claimed skilled.
But is Wall Street more likely to want to see SAT scores (implicitly suggesting that what one did while in high school is still important even if you are a college graduate)?
Easier? More efficient. Back in the day I remember all the time I spent in the library looking up books, trying to track down ones that had been lent out, going to different campus libraries, requesting and waiting for inter-library loans, photocopying pages from books and journal articles, etc. Then there was all the time spent doing things like referencing and bibliographies. I did a second masters a few years back. The ease of finding and saving articles and books on the college library website, jstor etc, and the time Mendeley saved me with referencing were an eye opener… and I’m sure younger students would be way more savvy with those than I was. So can you spend less time and do the same quality work? Or spend the same amount of time but do better work because you’re doing more actual studying and less peripheral stuff? Absolutely.
Let me clarify a bit. For internships, application to every one of the top-tier companies seems to ask for standardized test scores, but for regular jobs, only some do. Not sure why they think the test scores are still important. Perhaps as a proxy for IQ, even though the correlation isn’t as strong as it used to be?
They ask for standardized test scores (or their own 6 hour coding test, for tech firms) because they are indicia of relevant skills for the job. If you have more recent scores than SATs, such as GMATS or GREs, those are often accepted as well. Many finance jobs require solid and rapid quantitative ability and mental math skills, as evidenced by high scores. Similarly, many corporations have implemented writing tests for applicants, particularly for communications type jobs. A college degree, even from a top college, is not indicative of sufficient math or verbal ability for some types of entry level jobs, employers believe. Several top firms require all scores within the last 10 years, and I’ve seen it asked of those in their thirties.
I’m in my 50s and was asked to take a coding test as part of an interview process. I don’t think it has much to do with “kids today”.
One thing no one has mentioned is the ready availability of answers to homework problems on the internet. For many of my students, doing their physics homework consists in typing in the question and writing down the answer (or cutting and pasting it if they go that route). Of course, this does not lead to better grades, since they don’t learn from these exercises, but it sure makes things easier than they were for us back in the day. It’s a demoralizing problem for the faculty to have to deal with.
I think you need to take major into account. Don’t think my son or his friend’s would say his engineering is easy. As stated, it’s easier to get things done like research, paper writing etc due to technology and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. By the time I had to get dressed, get my things together, walk about a mile to the library, look up what I needed and actually found the book, if it was actually there… Today the paper could of been written… Lol… ??.