The rising cost of college is turning students into “customers” who expect to be treated as such, he suggests. Some of it is manifested in amenities like luxurious “leisure pools” for students.
Profs are under pressure to grade more easily (a paying customer shouldn’t get a “C”, right?) and adapt their style to what the students want.
The article quotes Swarthmore psych prof Barry Schwartz: “Costs go up. Parents expect to get value for money. They measure value in a different way. We provide that value, which raises costs, which creates more demand, and the cycle continues.”
Ironically, perhaps, Schwartz is the author of “The Paradox of Choice.”
Oberlin students complained about the ethnic accuracy of sushi served in the cafeteria. They also demanded the school issue no grade lower than a “C” to ensure students had ample time for social activism.
As Bruni puts it, “You are also defining the higher-education experience in a way that has nothing to do with academic rigor, with intensive effort, with the testing of students’ boundaries and the upending of their closely held beliefs.”
This topic isn’t huge news to CC members, but Bruni’s article provides a nice summary.
It’s more of the Special Snowflake culture gone awry. You go to college to get an education, not to have one handed to you on a silver platter. College is hard work for a reason. You are SUPPOSED to be challenged. You are SUPPOSED to be exposed to new ideas that you are unfamiliar with and yes, even ideas that might make you uncomfortable. AND ideas/theories that might even make you think a bit. That is what college is all about.
It is not supposed to be like 4 years at Disneyland. They need to grow up.
To my mind, there are two separate issues here. The first concerns the narrowing of minds and world views on both sides of the political aisle: political correctness gone awry on the one hand (as we see in Oberlin), and intolerance and close-mindedness on the other (e.g., when a devout Christian at Duke refuses to read a book containing references to lesbians and to masturbation).
The second problem is the rising cost of tuition and where that that money goes. The elephant in the room with respect to rising tuition costs is less a matter of building rock climbing walls, and more a matter of funds going to finance bloated salaries of bureaucrats and administrators one the one hand, and maintaining expensive athletics programs on the other, the latter often at the expense of academics as discussed in the report by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. As an example, one estimate I read is that at schools like Duke and Wake Forest, nearly $12K of students’ tuition goes towards funding athletics.
It’s funny. I don’t necessarily agree with the article, because Oberlin is a bit crazy, but at the same time I agree with the overall premise that the student body does need to get in the administration’s face and remind them who they exist to serve. My issue isn’t grading policy or food service, though, it’s that I’m tired of the way the administration does things. I’m pretty angry about university housing move out date being the same day most of us had to take final exams. I’m angry that they gave professors four days to hand in grades, so we didn’t have time to get a fair evaluation. I’m angry about the unnecessarily restrictive policies in place about taking a W in a class if you end up totally overwhelmed. I’m angry that the school tried to dictate to all campus vendors what drink brand they are allowed to sell instead of letting them choose what to stock. I’m angry that they tolerate a lot of work study jobs not being willing to hire Juniors or Seniors. I’m angry that Financial Aid never disburses on time. I’m angry us Summer students don’t get any financial aid at all until one of our classes is basically over. At some point, they do need to be reminded that we are going into debt thousands upon thousands of dollars to go to this place, we are the people they exist to educate, and that we don’t want to deal with an administration that constantly throws a bunch of crap at us.
When I was in undergrad school, I had profs who could barely speak English. Others were simply un-interested in teaching because it got in the way of research. At the same time, many good profs were rigorous and wouldn’t hesitate to hand out a failing grade if that’s what the scores added up to.
In today’s world, the demanding but fair prof may get dinged as much as the one who is simply a bad teacher.
I love how the article focuses on the 1980s. And ignores the 60s when students made many demands similar to what we see now. It might have been more accurate to discuss how many colleges were pressured into pass fail systems during the tumultuous 60s. But of course acknowledging that this is nothing new would have ruined his dopey thesis.
“Yale instituted a policy of “shutting down to open up” as Shapiro recalled. Rather than trying to prevent the protests, the University postponed academic deadlines to maintain order, such as allowing students to take a Pass or Fail grade on several occasions.”
Except this isn’t about spoiled millenials. It’s about the 1960s.
And how about this.
"Activist students on Hofstra’s campus wrote demands for the expansion of student rights, conducted meetings with faculty members and the Administration, held sit-ins, organized protests, coordinated boycotts, and even took over buildings on campus. As Paul Schirrman, a student, wrote in a letter dated May 2, 1969, “Most students, whether they realize it or not, feel oppressed by the system— they are looked down on by the faculty, financially exploited by the administration and forced to take meaningless requirements, as well as compete among themselves for grades.” Schirrman continued by listing a set of demands including the abolishment of requirements outside of one’s major (including compulsory physical education), a student-faculty senate to be comprised of 50 students and 50 faculty members, and the extension of the pass-fail system to any course outside of one’s major. He concluded his letter by writing and underlining the following statement: “As for now, we must unite. All students share a mutual discontent. We must, together, express our desire for something better.”
So how is this some sort of new never before seen shift?
It’s not.
Please @Roger_Dooley. Educate yourself before buying into a poorly thought out thesis.
At some schools, football and men’s basketball are profit generators. However, in most such schools, such profit is consumed by the costs of all of the other sports, so that intercollegiate athletics overall costs money at all but about 20 schools. NCAA D1 schools must field 7 sports for each of men and women, or 6 for men and 8 for women, with at least 2 team sports for each gender, so it is not like a school can have only the profit generating sports without the loss making sports.
I was on campus in 1969, @maya54, and there were definitely some activist pressures. But, my tuition was less than $3000, dorms were spartan, gym facilities were ancient, and comfort expectations were low. In those days, schools were less worried about retention metrics than weeding out weaker students. Quite a different balance.
@Spaceship : Post #4 : absolutely legit - I never understood why housing could not look at the academic calendar before scheduling the move out date- How hard can that be? In these days of Internet posting of grades, I do not understand the short turnaround times for grade submission (back in the olden days, we had to hand in paper forms on staggered dates - but that’s no longer the case). Faculty are just as frustrated by these issues. And many academic administrators have never taught and continue to be clueless.
Re: financial aid etc.- please write to your congressman/senator. Those rules are made by the US Government’s Dept. of Education, which is apparently tone deaf to the fact that many students need financial aid in the summer, need work study etc… , need to work during the semester and so may not be able to handle 12 credits minimum to maintain full time status. If students want to stage a meaningful protest - this is where they should start. The students at the elite institutions protesting about sushi and Woodrow Wilson do not speak for the vast number of students struggling to make it all happen.
@Roger_Dooley That’s because a lot of colleges now fo the weeding out in the admission process. But my point is that the idea that the push from overlies students is absolutely nothing new and the failure of the article you cited to give historical reference marked its thesis weak.
So his personal anecdote is the basis of his thesis? Nice piece of critical thinking skills. (Perhaps a call to UNC-CH to ask them when they started encouraging evals might have helped his case, or more likely, not.)
fwiw: we were strongly encouraged to complete course/faculty evaluations at the large public that I attended back in the dark ages. Not a new phenomena.
A lot of schools had professor evaluation forms in the 80s. At many schools, they were not official though. Students organized them and rated the professors and then shared them with the underclassmen. Those evaluations were taken more seriously than they should have been maybe, but they got he faculty’s attention quickly.
Social activism? Students with parents who can afford private college had NO perspective and LITTLE experience that would cause their opinions to matter. The Snowflakes represent the latent guilt of their rich liberal parents for the world that THEY created.
The fact that anyone gave more that 5 seconds of thought to the proper Sushi is proof these students are worthless. If you want ‘activism’, go to a place where you actions can actually DO something to change the world. Dig toilets in Somalia, build homes in Bangladesh. Something.
And, at either of those locations, the proper ethnic content of Sushi will be the LAST thing you will worry about.
Something to keep in mind which the article and OP forgot/didn’t bother to mention, the part about Oberlin issuing grades no lower than a C(really a C-) is not a demand completely out of the blue.
A large part of it is a demand by some Oberlin students to bring back a grading policy which existed from sometime in the late '60s up until 2004 in which any grade lower than a C- was counted as a No Entry(NE) and not shown on the external transcript. Am speaking as an Oberlin alum who attended when the NE grading policy for grades lower than a C- was still in effect. With the exception of the additional use of plus/minus grades, our grading policies back then weren’t very different from Brown*.
Another thing to keep in mind is that while this may sound great, failing too many classes will leave substantial transcript holes the student will need to explain to grad admissions and employers along with putting one’s Federal FA at risk if one dropped below full-time(12 credit hours) and thus, not considered to be making sufficient academic progress.
[quote]
With the inception of its open curriculum in 1969, Brown University eliminated breadth requirements and implemented grading policies that encourage students to explore the curriculum widely. Students may choose to take most courses for a letter grade or on an S/NC basis—Satisfactory/No Credit. The Brown transcript records only full-letter grades of A, B or C (without plusses and minuses) or S (for Satisfactory). **There is no grade of D, and failing grades are not recorded.**
I was on a near-full-ride FA/scholarship package at the time I attended because my immediate family had no money to pay for any college related expenses. What wasn’t covered by that package was made up with summer/part-time earnings as a private academic tutor/computer tech.
Also, complaints about school food isn’t limited to the upper/upper-middle class American undergrads. For instance, one of the minor factors sparking the Tiennamen protests among college students was complaints about the poor quality of cafeteria food and from my father and some older relatives’ accounts…poor quality of school food* in some schools/colleges in Mainland China/Taiwan during the 20’s till the late '50s factored into many student protests and even a few riots.
Granted, the issues in the accounts from the '20s till the '50s were much more similar to the situation which started the sailor riots on the Imperial Russian Navy ship the Potemkin.....the serving of rotten meat and the insistence by the Captain and his Naval officers that the sailors eat it.
While my father’s own college dorm food situation wasn’t as dire…his experience with college dorm food in The ROC(Taiwan) in the '50s was such he felt the army food he had while serving his 2 years of mandated military service after graduation as a conscripted junior officer…including US issued C-Rations were a marked improvement.