> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this

It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.

The article mentions that most students are only in it for the diploma anyway, but somehow most people are yet to realize that those diplomas will soon be toilet paper, precisely because they no longer require any actual effort to obtain.

My brother and I graduated from university a little over 4 years ago and we were both top students (he studied music and I studied applied math). There were classes where he and I (without exaggeration) skipped more than 90% of the lectures.

I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.

Having recently finished studies and still being in contact with teaching assistants today, the problem is big. Attendance going down, participation going down, courses and curriculum simplified. I already noticed a big shift after Covid and I'm glad I missed the ChatGPT era.

Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding. In our efforts to standardise everything and come to objective exams, we've rewarded a culture that just intends to pass with the least amount of effort. Next to that are the burdens of being a student; if I didn't have to work most nights of the week, I'm sure I'd have put more effort into studying.

Lectures were often boring and questions would be answered by referring to pages in a textbook. Maybe with recorded media, we should revisit the use of lectures.

All in all, I don't see how academia can keep the standards high in current society. We'll see how it goes.

Two years later, I heard that some students didn't pass the exam and wrote a letter to the faculty director, demanding an easy way. The professor was replaced with another one and they passed the class.

Even in reputable public universities, professors have to adjust their teaching to make sure enough students are satisfied with their facutly choice so they can continue receiving government funding.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/wp-content/uploads...

Certainly there is no time to read widely or sit around thinking or chatting with people who challenge our views .. no time to hang around campus and engage in conversation.

Gary of Garys Economics YT channel makes the point that inequality - in and of itself - robs the middle class of wealth :

Essentially he argues that the fraction of dollars allocated to the middle class is less, and the total amount of dollars is used to apportion 'real' wealth - ie. the total number of atoms, people, energy supply, houses, land, paintings does not go up in proportion, so the same dollar amount will buy less realworld goods.

Science and Technology - universities and startups - require an abundant over-apportionment of capital to make sure that we cast a large net in order to reach those rare talents that make significant advances.

The side effect of wasted funding - students who learn/research stuff they wont use in jobs, and startups that fail to find PMF and scale fast .. is a well educated, better society in which to live.

Relatively low inequality and high progressive tax post-WWII funded the new medicine and tech we now enjoy.

It’s also clear that kids whose parents restrict phone use seem to have superpowers compared to those that don’t.

A good starting point would be fully banning all phones for the entirety of the school day in K-12.

IMO, this is not the problem, but it’s definitely a problem. I think that we should, in fact, fail these kids. And if they repeatedly fail, they should be kicked out. I know that it’s politically untenable, but it also seems right.

It also seems wrong to me that these kids are accepted in to the university to begin with. It seems to me that there is a maturity gap here. Have these people never had the experience of not getting something that they want because they failed to obtain it?

So, IMO, standards should be kept very high. There is no need that all people finish the University. There are plenty of jobs that can be done without attending an University. But the problem is that even for those jobs there's a degree of competence required and some willing to work. And there are people who fail at low qualification jobs. Solution? Bring some competition. Hire only well prepared people.

I don't feel like asking for the slides is unreasonable/unimaginable. Probably varies by university and department, but for my degree (pre-COVID) all lecturers made their slides available on a VLE, generally in advance of the lecture.

It may also explain why so many software developers now are fully incapable of developing software. Everything must start from the world’s largest frameworks and be AI assisted because I guess now even copy/paste is too tiresome. If you need to refactor it’s best to start over from scratch than debug.

The bad news is there are fewer and fewer young candidates available capable of writing original software. It’s the same problem Japan and Korea are having with regard to military enlistment. The population is shrinking, less interested, and less compatible to the minimal requirements.

The good news is that with this growing competence/compatibility gap it gets easier and easier to identify candidates that can perform versus those that absolutely have no current hope.

Looking at the statistics[1], the US went from a 23.2% college completion rate in 1990 to 39.2% completion rate in 2022, or a 67% increase in college degree completions. If you assume that X in the population is constant over time, mechanically you will need to enroll and graduate students from lower percentiles of X in order to increase the overall college completion rate in the whole population.

This process might be particularly acute at "lower tier" institutions that cannot compete with "top tier" institutions for top students.

[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_104.20.a...

I graduated from college in 2001 and the above was true back then too so not sure why the author is making this seem like a new thing.

e.g. for CompSci classes at Rutgers back then:

- First week of class: no open seats in a giant lecture hall

- Halfway through semester: about 50% of people were showing up

- 3/4 of semester: I distinctly remember there being ~10 of us in a lecture hall able to hold 100 people and someone asking "where is everybody??"

- Final exam: lecture hall 90% full with people taking the final

If the purpose is to learn, you can do it better with YouTube and AI. If the purpose is to have fun, socialize and network, that is better done elsewhere, doing sports or other hobbies with other people. If it's babysitting you need, there are cheaper, better and more fun ways for the kids to spend their days. If the purpose is to learn a job, again, education is a terribly wasteful way of achieving that.

Then there's the fact that we'll all soon have to come to terms with, which is that most people are already barely able to contribute value to a white collar job, and in 20 years I'm pretty sure that number will be down 99%.

a) better quality lectures were available online - it's much easier to learn linear algebra from top MIT Professor than a random one at my university

b) the text books were absolutely terrible compared to what was available online

I can understand that 20 years ago people were captivated with the physical lectures because it was the only way. Today however, professors are competing with 3blue1brown, Khan academy, pre recorded lectures from top universities and many more great resources. Standing in front of a blackboard slowly going through an unintuitive math proof is just not going to cut it and people will get bored.

Things I really appreciated: in the U.K. model - the professors job is not to teach; instead they provide reading material/assignments via which the student will learn by themselves. In the French model grades are out of 20. I asked what fraction of their students get a 20/20 in a class every year, and they looked at me confused - “Students never get a 20/20. A good grade is a 16/20!”.

In France, tuition is essentially free. I think expecting every student to finish in 4 years is a huge loss compared to my experience at big state school in the late 90’s where people routinely did 5 or 6 years. I think we can widespread meaningful learning, accurate grades, and fixed duration programs, but not all 3!

When I visit Hacker News I don't click on every link and read it. I read the headlines and click on the interesting ones. But I don't even read the headlines - I skim them. I skip over "Rust Any part 3: we have upcasts" and go straight to the next item: "Everyone knows all the apps on your phone".

My email inbox is the same way. Because I get all this marketing stuff, newsletters, mailing lists, recurring invoices (for a successful payment that's about as important as reading a daily email about a successful cron job).

Why don't I unsubscribe from everything? Because sometimes they're interesting. So I have to skim the headlines and pick them out. I receive everything, then filter it. (I knew about Bitcoin in 2009, Talk to Transformer in early 2020, and CLIP/VQGAN in 2021. If only I had an ounce of business sense, though it's reassuring that nor do most other people)

This is the wrong mode for school, where they're trying to teach you something specific deeply. But someone who's only operated in this mode for their whole life isn't going to be able to turn it off just for school, right?

I think in the past we received information through a lot less channels - an unusually large amount would be two or three newspapers on your doorstep every day and five to ten monthly magazine subscriptions. And many of them had relatively limited scope - like magazines about gardening or weightlifting - so you could unsubscribe if you didn't like that topic. Reddit and Twitter and Instagram try to be sources of everything.

College students in today's declining Japan are working harder than ever before, and they're complaining about their parents' (now grandparents?) generation's broken understanding of the reality of college life.

Could it be that people of today that have grown up reading prose that is mostly to get to the point, and convey what is needed now do not have the ability to meander like that? If so, does this make them "illiterate"?

College kids are arriving with a transactional mindset because more and more that's what schooling has drilled into them for their entire student experience since grade school.

College used to be a thing people did to "round out" their education. You gain some life experience, read some great literature, debate lofty ideas, and meet friends who will go out into the world with you.

Now — especially when you factor the cost and the loans — people look at it as a checkbox and the evaluation is "what job will this get me."

Most kids can’t read serious fiction or ruminate about classical philosophy because they just don’t have the tools to get there. They’re disengaged because they don’t want to be there but the alternatives are worse, or appear to be. They’re escaping reality because they’re constantly being humiliated.

I don’t have a solution in today’s knowledge economy where being smart, which most people aren’t, is a prerequisite to “success”. I can criticize though as that’s easy. The university system is not for most people. The idea that we should ensure that those that belong should get pathways in and not overlooked means we try to send everyone. And it feels like social death to many if you don’t go.

Maybe the kids are smart enough to realize college is mainly a bullshit hurdle to get over so they can get a bullshit job and that little of what they learn matters in that bullshit job. That a diploma is a checkbox and not an affirmation of intellectuality in most cases.

> Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done.

At least for me, it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it, especially for novels and literature. Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?

Edit: note - we don't have any literary modules in my course - any reading would be voluntary.

> What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

I distinctly remember being penalized for any insight that didn't fit marking criteria back in high school english lit. If ChatGPT-like writing is what'll get me to pass, so be it.

> Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.

Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. This is very uni/course specific though

- Credentialism isn’t a secret. Students attend university not to learn, but to get a credential. The only way to get said credential is to get good grades, and there are lots of ways to get good grades. When I studied chemical engineering, it was an open secret that everyone was cheating. The professors didn’t care so long as it appeared that you weren’t. People readily took easy classes or sought easy professors. Many people looked to get accommodations that they didn’t need so that tests would be easier. I don’t hate accommodations, I had a few.

- This professor that authored this post is complaining that students don’t have original thoughts. For undergraduates, classes are primarily about competency. Having an original thought is really hard work. You have to have a breadth of knowledge in a field that can’t be attained in an undergraduate course.

- I hate to blame technology. Our phones and computers are some of the most valuable tools that we have. I love to read. My parents went out of their way to make sure that my siblings and I could all read well, and we weren’t allowed to watch television. TikTok is more fun than reading. Phones are more fun than reading. I don’t blame people for using them over reading.

The state of education and reading in America is a travesty. I don’t have any solutions.

American students are mostly rich by any global standard and very, very lazy. Doesn’t matter a huge amount as they don’t matter — they will amount to nothing anyway. The States imports enough talent to make up for the lacuna. In the meantime, their parents pump cash into what will become their Alma Maters.

When I went to an Ivy League US university as a grad student I was astonished at the remedial nature of undergraduate courses. Content that students in my country mastered at 13 needed to be spoon-fed to US students that were 5-6 years older.

Even back then almost nobody failed a course in the US. It was a major deal to fail someone. I came from a culture where the standard was absolute. No curve. Get below z% and you spent the Summer getting ready for a retake. Fail that, and you were out.

Education was paid by the State so it wasn’t a business. Profs could fail 20 - 40% of a class and often did.

It is astonishing that a Philosophy prof is seeing this. Who the fuck does philosophy at Uni and can’t be arsed to read the recommended texts?

He/she is a full Prof. Almost impossible to fire. So fail the lot of those entitled, lazy, bums I say. Enjoy that tenure!

Now I devote my life to work and my 3yo daughter and when I have ~1h for myself on a working day (after she’s gone to bed) I just mindlessly scroll on my phone, and when I’ve tried to read a book I just lost any kind of attention span I had and I realised that I’ve “read” a couple of pages but I wouldn’t be able to say what they were about because my mind was elsewhere. So I end up reading a lot of text on any given day but never literature, it’s either code, emails, Slack messages, technical docs or websites…

I’ve seen some students toss in 5+ files of code into GPT just to prompt it over and over again, hoping it produces a desirable output. When it fails too many times they open a new chat and try again. I’ve heard conversations about the best way to prompt the AI to do our assignments for us.

I get that there’s been shifts in student attitudes - there’s lots of other people in similar positions saying it.

But, I think this quote of all of the text shows how the author has a distain for their students not simply because of any perceived lack of effort. My best professors would send these to the class without prompting.

But, the author clearly buys into the mystique of the professor like their lecture notes are some secret formula.

Meanwhile, they quote:

>Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.”

If I had a teammate in a shared intellectual pursuit who didn’t share their notes…

First, the (widely known) problem that I thought about which inspired the idea: basically, how can you maintain academic standards for the class you are teaching, when so few of the students are really prepared to be successful.

Sure, you can just keep the standards high/static, fight cheating the best you can, and fail most of the students until you get fired. You could try to teach all the preliminary material yourself, trying to make up for years of poor education, but that's probably too much for the time you have and wastes the time of students already prepared.

But how about, instead, having a placement exam on Day 1? A qualifier, if you will. It would test a representative set of knowledge you should already have in order to be successful. The students who don't pass are dropped without judgement, and that's it. Nobody's time is wasted. You can move quickly through a wait-list if there is one, and few students will find themselves with a failing grade halfway through the course.

Thoughts?

If I'm being honest, a lot of my professors (perhaps a big majority even) were just bad teachers and I got much more value out of the textbook, looking up stuff on the internet, or just tinkering with the at home assignments. I can say with 100% certainty that ChatGPT would have been infinitely more helpful in me learning calculus compared to the professor who taught my class in university.

I also don't really align with the issues he has with students asking for the slide decks used in class. If it can help your students learn the material, the whole purpose of the class, then what's the big deal? This point in particular almost made it seem like he's a bit salty over his students not being deferential enough to him.

All in all, despite doing many of the things that this writer takes issue with when I was in college myself years ago, I have a great career and I'm good at my work. So I think the kids are going to be just fine.

To me this indicates that, all else aside and even granting for the sake of argument they’re correct in all other aspects, they simply aren’t a good teacher, not providing a basic and easy to share resource. Even during my time in University a couple decades ago I never encountered a professor who had slide available in an easily shareable format yet would refuse to make them available. They’re your own notes on digesting, synthesizing, and analyzing the material? Well that’s exactly the sort of thing that is both useful and essentially your job to impart in a fashion that allows students to learn. Whatever the deficiencies of students today, you’re not doing your job if you decide to stand on principle for your own conception of how a student should learn instead of figuring out what will be effective.

This alone makes the author’s other observations suspect, perhaps not it kind but at least degree, since it’s clear that one of their core gripes is that students simply don’t learn the way they want students to learn, and they aren’t willing to meet students where they’re at to do the job they’re paid for. This isn’t “get off my lawn,” this is a landscaper saying “I’m gonna cut your lawn the way i want to cut it.”

What is this guy's problem. I frequently present to my companies C suite and I've never considered not sending them my unredacted presenters notes...If there's value in them for me why wouldn't their be value in them for others trying to learn about my topic.

> Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.”

Class is optional. Students are paying for a service, they are not required to come to class nor do the work. If a student chooses to do the abovementioned and fails, it is their choice and their problem. Let people make their own decisions.

>They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. … I’ve even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect.

I wonder why people don’t want to come to your class.

> Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.”

The good student should get a life or join some Stasi-inspired organization. This is scary, why can't we just leave people alone?

But, don't blame the 18-19 yr olds for being astute enough to recognize the true signal from noise. For example, Every major university library renovation I've seen, has resulted in far fewer books on shelves but more audio/visuals, group study rooms, and coffee bars. What signal does that send about intrinsic value of books.

> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.

The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.

I think this is the main explanation. The median college student has a lower IQ now compared to 10 years ago because more people are going to college, and the marginal new student is below the college educated median.

That's it, everything else is downstream. The top 100k university students are as studious and capable as ever before.

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LPyqPrgtyWwizJxKP/how-do-we-...

In the future we'll feed Underground Man through an AI, have it change all the proper nouns to some other set of names, defined per student and thereby watermarking the text to that specific student. Can only read it on a school issued e-paper device so the user can't easily extract the text without a camera and OCR. Then each exam question is rendered per student based on their versions, so an AI model won't know which text this pertains to.

The problem is not the phones, k-12, etc. The problem is something like 38% of the workforce has a bachelor's degree and it probably should be more like max 25%. This guy's very average college is likely majority people who should not be in a college degree program and his college is graduating them regardless of failure to attain an actual education.

And thus I have a genuine question to other people here. How common it was for students to actually read a textbook, cover to cover? I did my CS undergrad in Poland - and talking to my peers, I don't think a single of us ever did that. We used lecture slides at best and online resources for code.

I've always been quick on the weights, if you give me a workout plan I'll say something like "that's a great workout plan but it needs supersets" [1] It's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time that some people sit in the machines forever but it's steadily gotten worse. I complained to the head of the fitness center at my Uni two years ago about students sitting in the machines and scrolling on their phones.

Lately I've been going to Crunch and over there it seems 90% of the young people are wearing Airpods; lately I've been getting more assertive about asking "can I cut in?" when somebody has been sitting in the leg curl machine for 25 minutes but today it involves gesturing wildly like Brain from Inspector Gadget and having them take the pods out before I can make the ask, at least they are always polite about it.

It's bad enough that I picked up a copy of Enter the Kettlebell and a 35 pound kettlebell (an intimidating object right now) and will probably set up some TRX straps in my AV/VR/rec room. My fox wants me to do functional training anyway.

Re: grad students

I'm a non-academic with an academic background who works at a research university. My unit shares a kitchen with a bullpen of about 40 grad students so I wind up talking to them all the time. Pre-pandemic it seemed I could always get them to talk about what they were working on but this year many of them seem terribly inarticulate. The CSGU union saturates the area with posters that explain what they are doing for grad students that should be easy to read but I get the impression that some struggle.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness/what-is-a-superset

Before I started, a teacher was fired for failing too many students, so there is definitely a trend toward reducing the quality. But I got through my master of science just as the AI chatbots rose to the mainstream, already frustrated that the courses could have easily included 30% more material.

I don't even want to imagine how bad things get when people currently in middle school or high school reach university after having had access to "word salad machines" their whole schooling.

Harvard used to offer a "shopping week" at the beginning of each semester, so the students could attend classes and then decide to enroll or not. Needless to say, it devolved into a prof arbitrage, where no student would take a class if prof required attendance, frequent homework, or strict no make-up policy. It was abandoned last year.

Anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard revealed that admins and profs had known that most of AA and DEI types would fail and never graduate, or would have to change to non-stem fields. So, they offered layers, upon layers of extra-classrooms (dorm based) help - recitations by grad students, group P-setting, free tutoring, emergency tutoring on exam nights, etc - just to keep the graduation rates up. So students stop going to classes, never bothered to take notes or even open a textbook, just attend the help session on the eve of quizzes/exams!

MIT isn't far behind, it offers 6 different version of physics 1 (8.01, 8.011, 8.012, 8.01L, ES.801, ES.8012). So most students just need to pick the right class and they're guaranteed to pass, why bother with the details.

Cell phones are just an obvious symptom, they're not the cause. The more expensive & elitist the college education gets, the more transactional the students will regard it.

They just take money without teaching the students anything.

In some countries the universities have to be accredited by some body. And they will lose their accreditation if their output is just people who are functionally illiterate, know nothing about a subject and have no qualifications.

But yeah, of course it's absurd to expect one professor to run this on their own when it's really a school-level issue.

For me as the student, it has always been frustrating to see a professor start the class material WAY back from what they stated as the prerequisites. (When it was too late for me to switch to another class - as least at conferences I can walk out and do something else.)

For me as the professor, it was frustrating that there was no framework at the school to address the problem. The problem was harder than "do I flunk them?", it was "who do I teach for?" It would be part of my job to change this - if things were structured for this to be part of my job. At some schools it is, at others not.

Now with LLM, I think everyone at work uses it to generate documents. And then, we all just use LLM to summarize the documents for us in a few paragraphs. The whole exercise is now a waste of time.

Document writing culture is great but I'm starting to wonder the real benefits in the erabof LLM. To demonstrate this point, I asked my team to just create slides for the next sync up, something that is frowned upon in my culture. To my surprise, the meeting seems to be very productive with everyone engages in the discussion and not bogged down too much in reading for 30 minutes then discuss. It was just: 1) agenda for today 2) slides 3) q&a

I think we cut about 50% of everyone time for that monthly meeting.

I can only imagine that the intellectual malaise has become more widespread. So long as we reward that form of incuriosity and treat education as solely a transactional economic exercise, the lack of preparedness for post-secondary levels should surprise no one.

The chief problem seems to be language complexity and especially holding on to a thought for more than a few words. Even something like The Outsiders will sometimes expect you to keep a few plates spinning in your head until the author takes them back from you a couple sentences or maybe a whole paragraph later. This is a skill especially exercised by reading poetry, as it tends to feature a lot of that holding-onto-context through multiple clauses thing, waiting for the meaning to be resolved.

They can't do that.

They also increasingly find perspectives other than the first person, in fiction, uncomfortable to read.

> All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

That said this is a slight romanticization of the position you are in, because in my experience a minority of teachers are usually invested in making sure their subject is appreciated and understood.

Many professors are first and foremost researchers that do teaching as a part time job, I've had teachers that clearly didn't even bother to make sure that students could clearly read what's on the blackboard, i had to skip some classes solely for that reason, i often felt guilt for it. I've had a teacher that explicitly said that we should read a book covering the lesson before going to the class at all, in my eyes this was all a lazy excuse for a course that was rushed because the time didn't allow for a proper presentation of the subject, all the while there were almost useless classes to fill the gaps, i think my university has serious time allocation problems, i struggled a lot with those kind of subjects because i had the expectation of at least have a somewhat rough idea of the topics when going back home from class, those classes didn't satisfy this and this left me quite anxious(i was, and still am also coping with loneliness), because i had to do more work on-top of household chores and keeping myself fed, i think most professors don't realize this and I think it's because most of them didn't have to move across different cities for hundreds of kilometers to attend university, and they also had less financial pressure (we have very few state-owned campuses in my European country).

Did i mention that many of them also refuse to record/stream the classes even though all the cameras and software are already set up?

One idea is to not ask for the papers back. When I was in University it was very much impressed upon me that writing papers was for my own benefit. All our marks came from end of year exams where we were essentially writing a paper in three hours under exam conditions.

Accordingly — and this obviously only works in a syllabus where grades are awarded only on exam results — nothing says “this is for you not for me” more than not even asking for the papers to be submitted.

(Our papers were marked but only with hints. The marks didn’t count and we went through each paper as a class, together, so could essentially mark them ourselves based on the points we did and did not raise.)

Intellectualism is at all-time lows. Weep!

> It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones...They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones.

> Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop out or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming.

The problems of society obviously bleed into college life.

Is that considered cheap in the US? Do people not do like 5 courses per semester?

Sounds like an educational system problem.

I find it very odd the need to blame phones for everything. POTUS probably can't read a serious novel cover to cover, few of the senior managers at my work can, these kids are all going to pass college despite not being able to do it, it's a basic question of incentives.

The average college student must also juggle 4 to 5 rigorous classes that each demand 3 to 4 hours of homework in a 24 hour day. It makes it very difficult to spend more than the bare minimum on any particular concept if you want to stay a float.

I do agree that the lack of attention span the writer points out is a real problem. I have seen few people even have the ability to read a textbook cover to cover.

I had a great college education. The professors were good, and we were all piss-poor and wanted to move up in life. Our college was (still is) in a corner of the world you never think anything good about, not in general, less so academically. So we knew that our college title was essentially worthless, at least the part of it made of paper. But some of it we could wear, in the way we spoke and treated others, and in the way we faced professional settings, and in how we faced life in general. Two decades down the road, I think it turned out great. Mine it's not a unique story; later in life I've met people with similar backgrounds, from completely different parts of the world.

Looking at it now, I realize I had the immense privilege of externalities to keep me laser-focused, and none of the shortcuts, the-quick-money-ways-out that tempt so many.

Its like gym - everyone should exercise but only a few love it and the rest would rather get the muscles without putting in the effort. The gym rats and the purists are still enjoying real gains. However, now the reluctant majority has access to steroids called LLMs that are providing hollow gains in form of useless degrees and certifications while no one seems to care about the long term damage.

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

The author is careful to point out he is describing "average" students. This implies there are still good students. That has not changed.

The author mentions one:

"Last semester I had a good student tell me, "hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.""

My first semester of business school, I realized I opened only half of the books/packets I was told to buy.

I made a decision to see if I could do the next 3 semesters without buying any books or packets.

I think I needed a book once or twice for some specific homework assignments. For the packets, I even took an Ethics in Business class where every week you were supposed to read a case to prepare for class discussion. I would just listen to folks make points for the first 15 minutes, figure out what the case was about and then make a new point based on that. Professor even wrote in my class feedback "you always have a good insight to bring to class discussions."

I mention this to point out that a lot of emphasis is put on textbooks that either:

- the professor doesn't even use but is required to select (one professor stated this explicitly)

- are considered "great!" by the professor but awful at teaching the material

- are pretty good but duplicate what is in the lectures.

Perhaps a critical qualification of this is that the author is a philosophy professor. Humanities departments are losing students and faculty at a great pace.

Would professors in other departments on average have the same experience?

If directionally similar, are STEM professors having the same magnitude of experience?

It's important to remember that those are very young people, right out of high school. We expect then to have skills they're likely not honing in a no-child-left-behind environment. Above all we expect them to understand the importance of all this, even though they have little to no experience as adults.

Perhaps we're just slowly turning into boomers, shaking our fist at "kids these days".

Is this because they know you are going to grade on a curve? So it's a sort of cooperative race to the bottom?

Otherwise you would think that the extreme expense of university would make people work harder, and care more.

Sidenote: I graduated university in 2005. Facebook came out for the general public in 2006. It's weird to think I was the last graduate class without generalised social media and smartphones.

personally, i think this is long overdue and overall good. colleges shouldnt be so sports-centric and i think sports would benefit overall if there more more popular local teams in sports beside baseball and hockey.

the doom and gloom on the state of college sports is loudly lamented on ESPN and the like. learning academics are circling the drain makes me expect to see many colleges shut down.

then i start to think about the midrange medical professionals because my spouse is a nurse. nurses cant LLM their way through college because they have to pass the NCLEX. will colleges only exist for scientists and nurses who need lab access and need to pass a monitored exam to complete their training?

Now while I was a teacher I didn't see a single student with parents like this. It was always teachers' fault if a kid didn't learn, got a bad grade, just didn't listen or behaved like an asshole.

But I recently gave a talk in a colleague's class who allows laptops. Even before I began I had lost 3/4 of the room. The truly interested students closed their laptops and asked questions.

At the same time, as someone who was very addicted to the internet but only got a smartphone/broadband (previously having a 40 hour monthly limit) in my late teens I do look back at just how much I read then compared to ever since mournfully. I didn't grow up in a house that valued reading much so it was a lot of work to even get started regularly reading stuff with no knowledge base of what I might even like to start from. I'm still able to read a few semi-challenging novels a year but it's an insane amount of work to get into the zone now and I can't picture teenage me with a smartphone and constant internet access ever managing to build up any kind of habit at all.

As far as writing is concerned, I think how aggressively LLMs want to rephrase everything is a big issue and I'm not sure how it can be resolved. As autoprompts get more and more florid it's probably unsurprising people are going to get lazier and lazier at precisely phrasing anything. I tried using them building out my CV earlier this year and it was a great sounding board but the actual text it was giving me was atrocious.

I don't think I understand. Are students expected to pay north of $100 per course for textbooks?

If this is the cheap one, how much are the expensive ones? Why is this not bundled up with the tuition fees or why are the textbooks not borrowed from a common library that all students can use?

Those students he's describing are exactly like a lot of his high school peers from 35 years ago who didn't go to university.

Even attending college fifteen years ago, I didn't attend class. What was the point when it was clear the average undergrad class was just a group reading of a textbook? I am paying for the degree. The education became a distraction before I was born.

At least this bodes well for my grad school life.

Students ask for lecture slides and that bothers you? Pare down your slides so the content is rendered useless unless they come to class.

Attendance is down? Mark attendance with a simple, 1-question quiz every lecture that students need to be in class to access (QR code, iClicker, etc.). Make it count towards a whole grade-letter percentage of your grade.

Students leaving to "use phones" during class? Students can take classes back to back. Sometimes with almost no break in between (unless you consider racing across campus from one class to the next a break). It's not easy to switch subjects like that and meaningfully contribute to both spaces.

I dunno man. Not writing a 3000 word email is one thing, but if you make a power point an then don't share it electronically, it smells like you are cajoling students to attend your lectures in order to stroke your ego. These people are paying a lot of money to attend your course; if they feel that they would get more value out of looking at your power point without attending your lectures that is not something that should be sneered away. Both as an undergraduate student and a graduate TA I was always very put off by this kind of high-handed bullying instructors would engage in to juice attendance of their courses. Just teach well and evaluate accurately. That's what they're paying you for. They're not paying for you to harass them into being at some inconvenient place at a particular time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

> Students are less respectful of the university experience ---attendance, lateness, e-mails to me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility

The most noticeable dimension for me is this one:

> During the Covid lockdown, faculty bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that as a matter of routine.

In my experience, no matter what flexibility is given up front (e.g., drop lowest quiz score), there will always be some students who ask for additional accommodations. In particular there seems to be a common belief among students that all deadlines are "soft", and they should be able to turn in any missed work any time before the end of the term. Sometimes they'll expect a late penalty, but it seems like a real shock to many students to be told, "No, if you don't submit the assignment by the deadline, your score is zero."

I taught a little bit online during the pandemic and initially I thought there were some benefits to keeping some things online, but now I'm not so sure. For instance, doing tests online means they don't take up in-class time. But the extent to which people seem willing to cheat or otherwise cut corners has me seriously considering whether I should revert to in-person paper tests.

The article does veer a bit into stuff that seems a bit more questionable to me. Like, I can see not wanting to pay $100 for a textbook --- and this is especially true because students are often jaded by having many classes where they buy a $100 textbook and only need to read a few chapters, so it doesn't seem worth it. Likewise, it seems reasonable to me to provide the lecture slides, although I agree that it's annoying when students pester and pester to get them.

My impression of students' reading and writing abilities is also a more positive than the article author's, although that may be because the school I teach at is more competitive. But it's in the low-level logistics (like attendance) where I see the biggest decline in student behavior.

I should also say that in pretty much every class I teach, there are still a substantial number of engaged and motivated students. It's just that the lower bound for the standard students have for themselves has been lowered even more, and the average has dropped a bit towards that lower bound.

As for "the kids don't read", I doubt it. This was perhaps only true when the movies got sound.

nowadays, being a student is an obligation: without those diplomas, you dont get anything. but with those diplomas, you can not get anything.

so you have to split your attention between different sources to split the risk.

I'm not a lecturer but I have spent too much time on Threads recently, which is almost as bad. And two things are obvious about posters who are student age or thereabouts.

One is that they have a timid and uncurious view of the world which is bizarrely ahistorical. They know about Miyazaki, because Ghibli and anime are nice, but they know virtually nothing about the history of cinema, literature, art, or music.

Nothing made before around 2000 exists for them. Worse, many are actively hostile to it, because it's "problematic" for various reasons, all taken from a standard list of words like "colonial" and "elitist" which - having no functional knowledge of anything before 2000 - they don't entirely understand, but are sure they do.

The other is that many of them are completely colonised by corporate ideology, and completely unaware of it. Success, hustle, grift, attention-farming, social media strategising, personal branding, and the rest - it's their core morality. Even if they're nominally progressive.

So you get a weird kind of pseudo-morality which appears to be socially oriented, but is often just libertarian under a thin veneer.

Everyone was surprised by how Gen Z voted, but when you put these together it's not so surprising at all.

What's happening is that traditional written literacy has been replaced by a new kind of electronic literacy - moving images over text, shallow quick-hit emotional manipulation over deep insights, transience over permanence, and a kind of entitled transactional narcissism driving it all.

I do see an issue with some where they hop around and don't finish long form projects. But I think thats a function of college where racking up resume filler seems more important these days.

^I really like living like this. I couldn't imagine being the "good student" ratting out the guy in front of me for gambling! We have to make our own way, school is like this bubble - even if you excel within it, you're just excelling WITHIN it. It's meaningless to me.

These are adults. It sounds like you know they're not going to the bathroom, so reminding them of this (and treating them like children) is infantilizing and damages the relationship.

I would also mention, I also have a hard time sitting still for 50 minutes. One of my professors used the Pomodoro method in class -- after 25 minutes of lecture, he would stop, tell people to get up, stretch, walk around, chat, whatever, before starting up again in 5 minutes. It was awesome and showed huge respect for the students. I never missed a class of his.

Chronic absenteeism was normal. Disappearing students was normal. Pretending to take notes was normal. Indifference was normal. I'm sure all of the above has __always__ been happening.

> I believe they didn’t buy the books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the excuse they offer.

> All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.

How about don't charge for the material you present in your course? That is scumbag behavior to teach a course and require your students to buy books you stand to profit from.

Why not?

Despite the disclaimer, this part made me think it actually might be an old man shaking a fist at clouds...

> Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

Yes, it's a difficult job. TikTok is captivating. Good luck.

I can’t imagine why one would take a philosophy course if one does not like reading.

More reason why college degrees are worthless signals.

Or have cell jammers in schools.

I don't think the professor meant that entirely literally, but I'm sure they had considerable visibility into students' thinking and personality, through the students' writing.

(This was shortly before the "cheat-GPT" plague; maybe now a professor's only insight from a given student's writing assignments is that their student is a cheater.)

> All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

This is a brilliant, beautiful last paragraph. This writer cares and is crying out for help, but sadly none will probably come.

> Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

I don't know nothing about Dostoevsky. Never read any of his books. I don't even know when he was born or dies. I only know the word Dostoevsky. It can be any author or book, not specific to Dostoevsky. Now, coming to my hatred for the exam question: What the fuck am I? A telepath? How am I supposed to know what was happening in Dostoevsky mind when he wrote that paragraph in the book? Whatever is the answer the professor think is right, is that answer approved by Dostoevsky himself? If not, who the fuck the professor think he is to tell me my answer is wrong (yeah I know he can do whatever he wants with his exams - but you get the point) and not in accordance with Dostoevsky intentions? If Dostoevsky didn't write anything about his intentions of that book, what is the point of writing a book? Aren't words, sentences and paragraphs meant to transmit knowledge without so much delusional interpretations? This is all just mental gymnastic spouting one non sense after other without any way to confirm the real intention behind the author mental model.

I really don't understand this type of questions. Is there a book explaining the mental model of the author while he wrote the book under study? If not, any interpretable opinion is valid as any other.

> We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints.

I didn't spend 60K out of intellectual curiosity. I was interested in a ladder to multi six figure tech jobs. The actual classes did nothing to get me into those. Only algorithms was related to that goal. Physics and chemistry certainly didn't do anything for me.

All the things he complains about students not doing? None of them go on a resume. None come up in an interview and it is a rational response to changing incentives.

How can someone utter and in the same breath accuse his students of writing in cliches?

Anyways halfway through the course the professor gave us a survey on "how the course was going" (bless him) and he got absolutely reamed. One person complained that they had to learn OCaml, that OCaml was too hard, that the professor didn't do enough to teach them OCaml, and that he would rather the course be taught in Java. The professor, legitimate confusion on his face, said that he had published the course syllabus with multiple resources for learning OCaml and that he had held office hours specifically for people to ask him questions or bring up problems, why hadn't the student come then? Response: "I am too busy, I don't have time to go to office hours." Another girl piped in saying it was "difficult to remember to check the course syllabus every week" and therefore she had "forgotten" to do the reading and therefore she didn't know any OCaml.

I was actually furious. I emailed him after the class and said that all these people were fucking dribbling morons and that he was doing fine and I liked the course and learned a lot. Looking back I'm sure the strong language probably made him feel more awkward than vindicated, but eh.

When I was in high school, the kids graduating with 4.0's were much smarter than me, and frankly probably smarter than I am now twenty years later. I just don't think that is the case anymore.

People from roughly my age, early thirties and younger, are just chronically heedless. It's not about specific academic tasks it's a general lack of mental and physical acuity. You go in a coffeeshop or a library, you ask for something, if there's a young person behind the counter chances are you get a blank stare or you have to repeat yourself while they have a phone in one hand. Young people in my experience can't focus on long conversations, literally just looking at your face and pay attention.

Ted Gioia is quoted in the piece describing it as "checked out zombies" and that's exactly right. There's so many conversations these days where you basically have to snap your fingers in front of someone's face because they're like a distracted cat or something. I taught a soldering class at a makerspace a few years ago and every young person was physically clumsy, as if they had two left hands. Seniors participating did better than 20 year olds. The author is not just a grumpy old teacher, if you pay attention this is everywhere, and all the reading and spelling problems are downstream from it.

Now along with some people skipping college altogether and other students maybe not wanting to speak up in class for whatever reason professors may feel totally alone.

I have to say this does go both ways, of course as student I am inherently biased but there are professors that are not totally present in their lessons, don’t know their material, etc. Now I haven’t been a student for decades do this may not have changed at all or is just a tangential part of my comment.

Also if I had to ‘guess’ the reason students are going backwards, it’s phones, it’s social media, it’s a lack of third places, it’s the quick and fast content on social media. That’s also the reason reading has been on a rather downwards trend.

And all our ‘creature comforts’ / being lazy also ‘rots’ your brain. As in IF you start using AI tools for coding it starts being so integral you can barely do without, same for AI for reading and even like how using a calculator makes you worse at quick head math.

For context, I want to reveal a little bit of private information. I grew up in a family that was somewhere between lower class and middle class. My parents found out (or perhaps decided?) that I was quite intelligent as a child. And so they really wanted me to go to university, become part of the "educated elite", and make them proud. Whenever I would do anything that was "smart", I could feel their love and appreciation. I internalized this as "smart = loved". So when I started to struggle in school, because it turned out that you need more than just intelligence but also effort, I stopped trying. In hindsight, I realized that I would rather be seen as a lazy genius than as hardworking average student. Could I have been a hardworking genius? No, I'm pretty intelligent compared to most people, but I'm not a Mensa member or anything (despite the lack of trying -- how does geography knowledge end up on an intelligence test, anyway?). I did end up finishing high school at the highest level, and then got a university bachelors, but the whole process took about 1.5x as many years as it's supposed to, because I treated actual exams as practice exams, and I'd sometimes pass them on the "retry" (usually I did not, but I'd pass them the next year). Suffice to say, I am filled with self-shame and anguish whenever anyone even brings up the topic of education.

so, with that out of the way so you can better choose how much to value my opinions, I want to discuss a few points:

> Attendance is a HUGE problem

Is it really a problem, though? God I wish that my classes were recorded, like so many other studies' classes were. I had a pretty bad sleeping disorder, and having to go to class each day at 9 am, expected to be at peak intellectual level, was really hard for me. It's much better now that I'm working, but still I'm at my best around 11 AM. How I envied students who could watch classes at 6 pm, or whenever they felt like it, and even having the option to re-watch classes!

> I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out.

Just let them watch their phones in class, then. If you really want them to act as adults, let them choose their own priorities.

> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate.

Why the hell not? What is the point of this? Is this a hierarchy/power thing? Why would notes from a classmate be better than, you know, teachings from their teacher?

> I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces.

Okay so two things: making notes on a laptop is fine, it's no worse than writing on a notebook. Yes, I know that there are some supposed benefits to the hand-eye coordination from writing, but I can't imagine that that's what you care about. No you're probably annoyed by the fact that they are choosing to do different things on their laptop while in your class. But as I said above, just let them. It's their own responsibility to pay attention, and it's neither your obligation nor your right to treat them as children. Instead, consider why these students might be "checking out". Why are they in this class if they just want to gamble and watch memes? Could it be that they are being pressured into being here and that they are desperately trying to "cheat" the system into expressing themselves? Could it be that this hierarchical system where they are supposedly "adults" they still find themselves being stuck in this boring structure where education staff have become their new parents is not the best way for them to find out what they want to do with their lives? I was a bored, distracted student like this. If I could go to university again (I could, but it's exprensive -- not just because costs are high, but much more so because it means missing years of income) I would probably be an excellent student now -- but it would be because I choose to be a student. I never chose to be a student, except that I "chose" to go along with expectactions, and I know that many fellow students felt the same. These people are adults, yes, but they're also still on the same "school child" mindset that they have been on since they were 4 years old. They can't wait to finally be done and actually, you know, live. Okay that was a long rant.

> No, you can’t make up the midterm because you were hungover and slept through your alarm, but you can if you had Covid. Then they just don’t show up. A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.

Okay this opinion is probably way out there, but: why not? If a test is supposed to just be a measure to determine if a student has absorbed the provided information, then why not allow them to take the test because they missed the first one from being hungover? Why have them wait a FULL YEAR to take the class again, if it's entirely possible that they have already absorbed all the information? The article complains about bored students who have "checked out". Gee, with this kind of mindset, I wonder why?

> One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us.

BUT THEY ARE, though! Just younger versions. From their perspective, they are told pretty much "yeah you're adults now, but before you can begin your life, you have to finish this 3-5 year degree, which will be pretty much exactly as the last 15 years of your life have been but now classes are optional and you'll rake up huge debts in the process that you might be able to pay back over the next 15 years". These are not 40 year olds who had a succesful degree and are now, of their own volition, deciding to study something that truely interests them. These are young adults who are not just studying something that they pray will be interesting to them (because how will they know before starting?) and in the meantime are also dealing with finally having some private freedom -- like renting their own apartment, having relationships, finally being able to drink all night and not have to worry about waking up mom, and whatever else comes with that. I know several people like that who ended up becoming professors at a university, so yes they are very much like you. Trying to make them "the others" doesn't do either of you any good.

> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.

why isn't the teacher just providing these books for free in PDF form? Teachers who require students to read the books that they are selling has always felt very bad to me: the teachers have this weird conflict of interest because they can set any price for their books and the students will have to buy it because otherwise they can't complete their degree. I mean, depending on the country (I'm not american), I know some students are already paying over 60k per year - why does that not include the teacher's required textbook? why is it that someone who has no money, who is given a scholarship to attend university, might still fail due to having no money?

Alright, that concludes my rant. Clearly I've been very triggered by this post. As a final note: I want to say that I wish that I had had competent LLMs when I was studying. Textbooks are often written by extremely verbose and long-winded people, which perhaps is not true for the author, but I too really struggled with reading those. And not just because they were long and boring, but also because simple explanations are just much more effective ways to explain complex themes. LLMs are AMAZING at breaking down complicated topics into smaller ones that you can understand, and more importantly, it can tell you in a way that you understand, it "speaks your language" if you will. It's like having a private tutor. Students should be thriving right now because they all got private tutors! Amazing! But instead, the field of education is failing to capitalize on this and is only capable to seeing how it's a problem for the way things have been done in the past. Adapt! Learn! Improve! Don't be complacent, consider that AI might be a tool that can help you teach: encourage students to use it! Find a new way to teach that capitalizes on this amazing new tool in humanity's collective toolbelt.

Alright now my rant really is concluded, haha.

Unimaginable to not have the lecture slides ahead of time so that I don't have to spend the whole time copying.

> Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.”

So what? Are you paying them or the other way around? Maybe your lectures aren't that interesting.

> The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

> One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us

You sound condescending and not very interesting. How much original thinking do you bring?

Taking a look at your blog, the vibes are off and I find most of the writing uninspired, borderline cringey. Also, is it important that you're a "tenured philosophy professor with an Ivy League PhD" or should your ideas stand on their own?

https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-old-m...

"While I am a lesser son of great sires, I am descended from kings." meh..

Do you think that Roderick Chisholm would have the same issues with student engagement, and would he react in the same way you are?

It takes a special type of person to bring the ideas to life and not everyone is meant to be a lecturer/teacher. I would love to watch a few of your lectures so I can put myself in your students' shoes.

I spent a huge amount of college "in my goon cave" and absent from lectures. There are many reasons why students do this, and it's not your job to judge them. I didn't figure out what I was really interested in for basically the entirety of college. Once I figured it out, graduate school was the complete opposite experience.

imho the point of college is not to take in information, but to i) figure out what you're interested in and ii) make life-long friendship and connections. Information is widely available online for once you know what you're interested in.

Your attitude is like you're the keeper of secret knowledge and the kids need to attend your lectures and read your book in order to access it. Maybe the kids already figured out that you're not providing any more knowledge than they have access to outside of class, and if class is not engaging then bother attending?

A major problem in college is that you can't know ahead of time if the class/professor is going to be interesting, and the engaging advanced classes are locked behind required intro classes. Kind of like a RPG game where you can't know what the advanced skills are without tech-ing into the basic skills, except in real life you can't re-spec and make a new character as easily.

While you're probably right about the overall trend of intellectual curiosity, you might be part of the problem. We're not getting rid of phones and laptops.

Instead of trying to fight tech, one solution would be to allow any student to drop-in on any class in progress (in real-time and or accessing past class recordings) which would let them decide if they want to invest in the taking the boring beginner required classes.

We act like there is a one size fits all solution to education, but there really isn't. Some of us had it very easy. When I was growing up, I liked science, so I read every kids science book I could get out of the library. That's how I learned reading comprehension; by reading things that would be interesting to comprehend. And having an interest lets it cascade; people pick up on your interest and customize the rest of your academic career for that specific interest. I went to a special math and science high school. We did research. We built things and learned the math behind engineering. I then went to college for engineering. Pretty easy to figure out "what actually matters" in that context. The question is... what do we do for everyone else? Sometimes people don't show a clear interest in something that early, and it's pretty important to be interested.

Also gotta say, if I was in the professor's class, I probably wouldn't have done the reading and would have turned in similarly shitty papers. (OK, OK, not as bad as the example provided, but probably just as careless and ... wrong.) I'm not illiterate, but sometimes a subject simply doesn't interest me, and I'm not going to spend times on things that aren't interesting or valuable. I wouldn't expect this professor to be particularly interested in reading or comprehending anything I wrote, for example. Write me a 500 word essay on why Nix is just a Jsonnet file with extra steps. He'd probably get an F and would tell me it doesn't matter, because you know what, it doesn't really! Different people like different things, and you can still be a valuable member of society while having near-zero interest in somebody else's field. (Having said that, I do read fiction occasionally. But ya know, if the book is boring, I just stop reading it and nobody gets in trouble.)

I do think that phones and short videos and all that is probably not great for society, but people are looking at something to keep their mind occupied, and that's the easiest thing. What are we doing to give people better things to be occupied by? Nothing? A 12 week course on existentialism? Hmm, maybe that's the problem.

As in

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_show

     "Medicine shows were touring acts
     (traveling by truck, horse, or wagon
     teams) that peddled "miracle cure"
     patent medicines and other products
     between various entertainments."
     

Currently with some of the media and more, it's the same for the audiences -- fooled.

Well, then: Have a college education with some math, physical science, biology, psychology, literature, fine arts, meet some people and improve understanding of people see some all time great examples of good thinking, and then will have some good defenses against being fooled.

E.g., there is from page 76 of

     Susan Milbrath, 'Star Gods of the
     Maya:  Astronomy in Art, Folklore,
     and Calendars (The Linda Schele
     Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian
     Studies)', ISBN-13 978-0292752269,
     University of Texas Press, 2000.

     "Indeed, blood sacrifice is required
     for the sun to move, according to
     Aztec cosmology (Durian 1971:179;
     Sahaguin 1950 - 1982, 7:8)."

Today with some good education, we can look at this claim and right away conclude: Absurd, nonsense, wasting human life.

So, the Mayan audiences didn't have a good, current US college education and were vulnerable to being seriously fooled.

For some of the college courses,

     "Once you have been in a 
     course like that about 
     all you can say is that 
     you have seen it."  

Absolutely, the lack of engagement by my peers I see is insane. We have a Discord group for our cohort and the lack of basic problem-solving ability and engagement is disheartening. I especially remember during my Software Engineering class (in year 2, so they have had three programming classes in year one + the whole summer to explore), only three of my group out of eight actally engaged to a serious extent.

I had to write a parser for a game file format in said class - just ASCII text. Some of the non-engaging group members couldn't be bothered, or maybe they were scared, to read the nice error message I gave for my parser. I designed it to be nice and readable, tells you what the issue is (e.g., "extraneous comma" or "unknown tile type {}") and the line and column, but I effectively had to be support for these people, who just could not read the error message.

There's also a massive fear of even basic mathematical analysis (e.g., in an algorithms class we were analysing traditional graph search algorithms, not that we were asked to prove anything ourselves, but were shown lemmas and relations and I recall my cohort reeling at it).

Part of this is definitely AI, most people cannot program without GPT, even to a basic extent.

I'm not particularly intelligent, I just work and engage with my studies. I can't imagine just going to university and coasting (though the UK loan system incentivises that, but that's another story) I think we have too many people going to university (I blame Blair) because it's the societal expectation, and a loan is given instantaneously to anyone who applies.

This may be part of just going to a mediocre university though. I plan to do a postgraduate, ideally at a much better university, hopefully my peers there will be significantly more engaged.

Attendance is a big thing, and I fall into this myself. My university has a policy of recording all lectures, so why go? I know it's 'wrong', but I feel I learn more efficiently with a recording, and due to the lack of engagement I mentioned earlier, it's not like there's a seminar style where we all come having read a research paper or something and discuss it, or go through exam questions (honestly, I would love that and actually attend - but I doubt that many students would do the reading). It is just a lecture which I can just watch at home. This does hurt the community spirit of the university, but honestly I'm not that bothered.

However, I completely disagree with the textbooks (though let's be real, if students wanted to read them - many could just pirate them, but they don't) section, as well as the slides. I also agree that note-taking is important, but to completely lose the original content seems unnecessary (I appreciate the argument that in the workplace meetings are only taken down as minutes vs a recording though).

> They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training

- I mean, this whole essay then gets reflected the exact same upon the JDs the school has hired, right? They're thinking the exact same thing about you, from the legal perspective

> Why buy what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it.

-Is this person telling the students to pirate? I mean, good!, but you should come out and just say that, I think.

> Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level

-This is the average for a US adult (same with grade reading level). All you're saying here is that the university is selecting for average people.

> I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop

- ... then stop assigning papers? What am I missing here? Look, Plato bemoans that people use writing to not memorize everything anymore. I'm sorry that the essay that you loved as a tool for the mind is essentially dead (and I am too), but we must be brave enough to face that fact and move on.

> W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic ... There is no possible way our students, unless they were math or computer science majors, would survive that class.

-Funny! I took this exact same book for a class ~20 years ago (...oh god...). I was a STEM major then and the book is essentially just boolean algebra. I whizzed through it, mostly hungover, and all the Philosophy majors barely scraped by. Nothing's changed!

>Chronic absenteeism.

-Okay, yeah, this is a new thing to me, possibly. I skipped out on an entire GE class once and managed to get a high grade all the same. It was a frosh level class I was just taking for the GE credits though and I was in upperdivision so I never went as I already knew the material. Maybe this is something that is happening with them? That's the most caritable I can get though. I think the author has a real point here.

> look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you

-I had the exact same speech given to me ~20 years ago, and it was true. Granted this was a physics class, no philosophy. But yeah, especially at the freshman level, the kids fail out of school or change majors a lot. That's the beans.

> I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out.

-Sounds reasonable to me? Also it sounds like this professor likes being the professor more than they like teaching people. At that age, I'd walk out all the time too. Like, these people are adults, yeah, respects must go both ways. But calling people out on it is, to me, kinda a jerk move.

> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides

-What the everliving shit?! This person is an asshole? Right? What the fuck was the point of doing this digitally if you can't just endlessly copy and things for free? My company thrives on .ppts and those get sent around like so much spam email. Is this professor living in the stone age? what the hell am I missing here?

> Last week I had an email from a student who essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material for him prior to yesterday’s midterm

-Ok yeah, no, that's totally fair. Fuck that student, they're an asshat.

> Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.

-Okay, yeah, this is really why I wanted to 'react' at this. The gambling thing, the addictions. Michael Lewis (Moneyball), has a recent set of articles out on the sports gambling in the US. TLDR: This is as bad as the opioid epidemic. If Mike Lewis is saying that it's as bad as pill popping, look, you should sit up and take action fast. It's almost entirely young men, it's nearly all of them, and about half of them will develop to 'problematic gambling' and ~1/5th to full blown 'gambling addiction'.

What that means for our dear Professor here is that almost all your 'male students' (because of that metric alone) should be seen as you would look at medium-heavy opioid users, that are popping pills in your class right now in front of you. How would you treat someone that is doing drugs in your class as you teach? Are you going to treat them a little differently, yeah? Like, nearly wanting to throw them out of the classroom right there? Because that is more akin to what is happening than a simple Tiktok addiction.

Look, this country has all of a sudden dug a lot of potholes in the road of life for it's youth. Legal weed, gambling, vapes, porn, AI, tinder, etc. It all adds up to a young person trying to navigate it all. Unfortunately, yeah, that's going to affect the classroom too and the person teaching it.

> A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.

-Yeah, that's nothing new I'd think. I imagine this professor is mostly bemoaning that they love their subject and school and many students just, well, don't. Oh, and they're addicted to their phones.

> It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones.

-Yes. Yes! YES! You're not going to be competing with all the PhDs out of your psych department that are getting paid 10-50x your salary now to make sure the undergrads are gambling away the student loan chacks and are endlessly looking at makeup ads and porn and the hell that is tinder. Yes! They are addicted. Treat them as addicts.

> What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all?

-YES! They must learn the lesson now, or they will never get a job, right? This is the kind thing to do to them, not the nice thing, but the kind thing.

> That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

-Okay, yeah, university education has become captured by the very same forces that have addicted your students. No, you're not going to deprive them of anything, it seems, they are already there per this essay. Yes, you're all out of a job, and so now it affects you and now you care? I'm not seeing why I should have a lot of sympathy here. You're not doing the job, the department isn't caring about it's non-TT personnel, let alone adjuncts, let alone student. It seems to me that ya'll need to give a shit about something other than yourself and your interests? I know this is a rant, so logical consistency isn't supposed to really be a part of this. But I'd love a follow up essay that goes into what they think could feasably happen to fix all this.

> It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.

-Well, I'm sorry to say (as a random internet commentor with no skin in the game), bu it sounds like you all need to get together and demand to be given more or just quit.

> All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad.

-Yeah man, I think that's all of us. Regroup after this semester and try to get the department together over dinners this summer and think up a better way forward. Do not do this alone, get allies together and make it better. The kids are worth it.

> Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

-Yeah. Pause then. It sounds like this professor is burnt out and needs a break. The ax needs a sharpening.

Can you blame them? Looked them up and it's the sootiest coal, unimaginable slop. Who would want to read that?

>recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.”

You might want to rethink your concept of objectivity bud.

>As a result they have had to make their tests easier with fewer hard problems.

Well there's your problem. If it's impossible to fail it's irrational to try.

I love teachers melting down over reaping what they've sown.

Edit: I should mention I graduated twenty years ago.

> > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides.

uhm, why not? smh. even if they contained answers - redact them and share. there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone would like them.

anyway, more relevant to the article: get rid of guaranteed student loans and all of these problems will solve themselves imo. it's no shock people treat college like a joke when there's little at stake for them personally. add insult to injury with people trying to absolve them of bad decisions in the form of getting rid of the little accountability - loans - that they had.

two steps to success: 1. stop forcing college on everyone. 2. make colleges guarantee the loans. the quality of the students will change, resolving the issue the article author has.