Are College Students Getting Worse?

Experienced faculty members often grimly answer this question in the affirmative, judging by the chat around the campfire at professional gatherings such as the recent TCCTA Fall Conference for Faculty Leaders. It seems to many teachers that standards were once higher, students were more deferential, and young people had a more modest sense of entitlement "back in the day." 

Not so fast, say a couple of commentators in Inside Higher Ed. Here's the link to the entire article. 

Gary W. Lewandowski Jr.and David B. Strohmetz are educators at Monmouth University. They point to plenty of evidence (albeit anecdotal) that professors were worried over the quality of their students a long time ago, pointing out, for instance, that "a faculty report once concluded that 25 percent of students admitted to Harvard in 1897 did not have the writing skills necessary to succeed in college." 

Historians might add that, during colonial days, drunkenness, laziness, and slovenly behavior were deemed by college administrators to be approaching epidemic proportions—at highly selective schools no less. Going even further back (to put it mildly), some scholars have argued that Plato's Republic was written out of deep concern over the dismal academic preparation and character of Athenian youth. The book presents some rather drastic views on education, after all, so there must have been a problem to begin with.

Has there ever been a generation of "seasoned" teachers who heartily approved of their contemporary cohort of young students? It's an interesting question, though any putative answer won't solve the problem of today's high attrition or low scores in algebra. 

The authors of the Inside Higher Ed. piece also point out that most college professors were probably good students when they went to school, so perhaps they tend to judge today's students by an unfair yardstick. And wouldn't we have checked our cell phones for messages constantly—and irritatingly—if we possessed them back then? But technology is a whole other conversation.  

Here's a passage:

"If students are not ideal scholars, there must be a good reason for how this came to be. A common explanation for students’ shortcomings involves generational differences. But it seems too easy to merely conclude that the students of today, "generation me," are qualitatively different than students of the past. We must remember that when we compare students past and present, we may be using an unfair comparison group. We run the risk of using our own past experience as the default comparison group. This presents two problems. First, our recollection of our own college experience may suffer from retrospective biases where we recall things more favorably than they were. Did we really do all of our reading? Did we really avoid procrastinating? Did we truly devote ourselves to our coursework? Were we really attentive in class 100 percent of the time? Certainly, we are prone to some degree of rosy retrospection."

Comments

[Ken Luke]

My comment is with reference to institutions protecting personal information residing on college owned computers. At Tyler Jr. College we use Active Directory. This security software has been set to "time out" the computer being used in 15mins, if no activity is present (turns the computer off and the user must sign back in). This is a good program but creates some problem if the faculty member is visiting with a student or perhaps a colleague.
My question is, are there other community colleges using Active Directory or some other program. If so, what is your "time out" set at and what is your protocol?