AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
From the Post (you've raised this issue before, fiendish):
The demise of university?
By Allison Hanes, National Post
Published: Friday, April 27, 2007
There was a time when James Côté would spend hours marking up the margins of the essays his third-year sociology students at the University of Western Ontario would submit — challenging their arguments, critiquing their prose, making thoughtful suggestions and correcting their grammar.
Now, he does not even return the papers once he tabulates the grades.
Sometime over the past decade, Prof. Côté realized he was ending up with a stack of abandoned essays on his desk at the end of every course, and a sense of futility over the effort he put into providing helpful feedback.
"The students never came to pick them up," he said.
Email to a friendEmail to a friendPrinter friendlyPrinter friendly
This growing sense of disinterest in learning is just one of the demoralizing trends that afflicts the modern Canadian university, and one of many that inspired him to deliver a scathing indictment of the system.
In their forthcoming book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, Prof. Côté and his co-author, Anton Allahar, sound the alarm about the demise of higher education, where many students are more interested in the piece of paper they get at the end of their programs than in the intellectual journey along the way, where professors are cowed into watering down courses and bumping up grades, and where universities are run like corporations hawking mass-produced degrees which are increasingly in demand but increasingly meaningless.
The consequences, the authors argue, are a disengaged student body, disillusioned faculty and a glut of bachelor-degree-holding graduates with unrealistically lofty aspirations in for a shock when they land in a job market fuelled by "credentialism" and plagued by under-employment.
The book chronicles what happens when "fully empowered" students arrive on campus well aware of their rights, but with little sense of their own responsibilities. Accustomed to being coddled in high school and given good grades for minimal effort, they bring a consumer mentality to the classroom which leaves them indignant, combative and ready to complain when they earn anything less than an A – no matter how little they deserve it.
Given the high cost of higher education today — the average tuition for an undergraduate degree in Canada stands at $4,000, never mind ancillary fees, books and living expenses — the professors argue the students are not entirely unjustified in wanting the most bang for their buck.
Prof. Côté recalled an episode three years ago when he experienced this new assertiveness firsthand after informing his students of their grades in a class where the average was 58%.
"One student was just totally irate and very abusive. She got a 60%," he said. "Finally she said 'That does it. I’m dropping this class.' I just said 'Anybody else?' It was good riddance."
Such an attitude leads to what the authors call "degree purchasing" — the placing of value on the framed degree instead of the education.
A full 90% of Grade 9 students now aspire to go on to university today according to recent surveys. But that doesn’t mean all those ambitious high school students are cut out for higher learning, the authors insist in their new book.
They say that under the current system, young people are almost forced to obtain at least an undergraduate degree to have any hope at a decent job – even an unskilled one.
Credentialism is the constant raising of the bar for basic employment, fueled by the belief that a formal education is the best training for the job market.
Ivory Tower Blues describes how credentialism's rampant spread now means that even entry-level paper-pushing jobs like bank teller and office clerk require a university degree, while new diploma programs are sprouting to up the ante in occupations like retail management.
Prof. Côté and Prof. Allahar insist they do not want to be too harsh in their criticism of today's student body. Some students are as thirsty for knowledge and intellectually curious as ever. The best and brightest are still out there, and they thrive despite being dragged down by the mediocrity around them, the authors say in their book.
As for the disengaged undergraduates on whom they focus, the authors lay the blame at the foot of a school system lacking rigour and on a generation of "helicopter parents" who are always hovering, ready to solve the problems of their dependent progeny.
Today's public school students are inculcated with self-esteem at the expense of self-efficacy. Everyone gets a gold star for effort. Every pupil is "special." No child is left behind to repeat a grade no matter how little they grasp, the authors say.
Witness what happened to the C grade. Long used to denote average performance, Cs are no longer an acceptable grade in many households, while As and Bs are assigned with such frequency that all distinctions have been blurred between so-so, good, very good, excellent and outstanding.
The result, said Prof. Côté, is a cohort of semi-literate students arriving on campus quite accustomed to getting As even though they are unable to string a proper sentence together, let alone a paragraph or an entire essay.
Grade inflation begins in high school, the authors say, but has carried over into the university system with students' sense of entitlement, faculty's unwillingness to fight to preserve high standards and administrative policies that reward departments with the most upper-year undergraduates.
The professors readily admit many of their colleagues have been complicit in the decline of academic life, through what they call the "disengagement compact."
Fearing a backlash when it comes time for teaching evaluations or simply intimidated by students willing to whine, cry and yell if they don't get the grade they think they deserve, many faculty have simply succumbed to their new roles as "gatekeepers of the middle class," the authors say.
"This tacit agreement between teachers and students is, 'I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone,' " they said in the book. “ ‘That is, I won’t make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won’t have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well.’ In this compact students get higher grades through pestering, for threat of it, rather than by actually doing the required work or working at a level once required of university students."
Few professors have been willing to take a stand and those who do risk censure or unpopularity.
Just over a year ago, a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island made his overcrowded History of Christianity class a stunning offer: He would give a grade of 70% to anyone who stopped showing up for the rest of the semester and didn’t bother to complete any of the course work. About 20 students took him up on the offer and the veteran academic was ultimately forced into premature retirement by an embarrassed administration.
David Weale made national headlines and garnered notoriety for his seemingly cynical act, but he was also lauded by many who shared his frustrations for daring to expose some unpalatable truths about Canada’s post-secondary education system.
Prof. Côté has since employed the UPEI test on his own classes – as a hypothetical exercise. When he offers 68% to anyone who quits, the only takers are those who failed the mid-term. As he edges the freebie higher, more students are willing to take the bargain.
"At 80%, virtually the whole class would walk out," he said. "A lot of students react to it like, 'I got an 80 — that's mine.' They're very egocentric about it. It's almost like a possession to them."
The authors trace the roots of this malaise to the myth that successive decades of government policy created to sell the public on the merits of education: the longer young people stay in school the better.
Designed to boost high school graduation rates and delay the entry of workers into a labour market with few opportunities, the dream has been so eagerly adopted by recent generations and their doting parents that a university degree is now perceived as a birth rite that guarantees a well-paying white collar job and automatic membership in the ranks of the middle class, the authors say.
In the process, blue collar work has been stigmatized, despite the fact that some trades and
professions may actually offer the same or better financial advantages and more satisfaction than often times bleak office work.
Many European countries, like Germany, stream young people early on into occupations that match their interests through apprenticeship programs and practical training.
Prof. Côté said Canadian youth could benefit from more structured options, instead of the "soft sorting" that pushes many of them aimlessly into the university system without clear goals. Even volunteer work, travel or the "gap year" that many British students take before commencing their academic studies, he said, might offer Canadian students the direction and motivation they lack.
Otherwise, the generation that has never been told 'No' and has never been taught to deal with disappointment, is in for a fall when they finally are handed those devalued undergraduate degrees. And many of them, Prof. Côté says, face a spiral of underemployment when they hit the wall of their own compounded incompetence – condemned to a career of white collar drudgery, not unlike the absurdity and disillusionment captured in the popular television series The Office.
"Most are going to learn at a very late age what most people learned at an early age: How to fail," he said.
ahanes@nationalpost.com
AoD
The demise of university?
By Allison Hanes, National Post
Published: Friday, April 27, 2007
There was a time when James Côté would spend hours marking up the margins of the essays his third-year sociology students at the University of Western Ontario would submit — challenging their arguments, critiquing their prose, making thoughtful suggestions and correcting their grammar.
Now, he does not even return the papers once he tabulates the grades.
Sometime over the past decade, Prof. Côté realized he was ending up with a stack of abandoned essays on his desk at the end of every course, and a sense of futility over the effort he put into providing helpful feedback.
"The students never came to pick them up," he said.
Email to a friendEmail to a friendPrinter friendlyPrinter friendly
This growing sense of disinterest in learning is just one of the demoralizing trends that afflicts the modern Canadian university, and one of many that inspired him to deliver a scathing indictment of the system.
In their forthcoming book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, Prof. Côté and his co-author, Anton Allahar, sound the alarm about the demise of higher education, where many students are more interested in the piece of paper they get at the end of their programs than in the intellectual journey along the way, where professors are cowed into watering down courses and bumping up grades, and where universities are run like corporations hawking mass-produced degrees which are increasingly in demand but increasingly meaningless.
The consequences, the authors argue, are a disengaged student body, disillusioned faculty and a glut of bachelor-degree-holding graduates with unrealistically lofty aspirations in for a shock when they land in a job market fuelled by "credentialism" and plagued by under-employment.
The book chronicles what happens when "fully empowered" students arrive on campus well aware of their rights, but with little sense of their own responsibilities. Accustomed to being coddled in high school and given good grades for minimal effort, they bring a consumer mentality to the classroom which leaves them indignant, combative and ready to complain when they earn anything less than an A – no matter how little they deserve it.
Given the high cost of higher education today — the average tuition for an undergraduate degree in Canada stands at $4,000, never mind ancillary fees, books and living expenses — the professors argue the students are not entirely unjustified in wanting the most bang for their buck.
Prof. Côté recalled an episode three years ago when he experienced this new assertiveness firsthand after informing his students of their grades in a class where the average was 58%.
"One student was just totally irate and very abusive. She got a 60%," he said. "Finally she said 'That does it. I’m dropping this class.' I just said 'Anybody else?' It was good riddance."
Such an attitude leads to what the authors call "degree purchasing" — the placing of value on the framed degree instead of the education.
A full 90% of Grade 9 students now aspire to go on to university today according to recent surveys. But that doesn’t mean all those ambitious high school students are cut out for higher learning, the authors insist in their new book.
They say that under the current system, young people are almost forced to obtain at least an undergraduate degree to have any hope at a decent job – even an unskilled one.
Credentialism is the constant raising of the bar for basic employment, fueled by the belief that a formal education is the best training for the job market.
Ivory Tower Blues describes how credentialism's rampant spread now means that even entry-level paper-pushing jobs like bank teller and office clerk require a university degree, while new diploma programs are sprouting to up the ante in occupations like retail management.
Prof. Côté and Prof. Allahar insist they do not want to be too harsh in their criticism of today's student body. Some students are as thirsty for knowledge and intellectually curious as ever. The best and brightest are still out there, and they thrive despite being dragged down by the mediocrity around them, the authors say in their book.
As for the disengaged undergraduates on whom they focus, the authors lay the blame at the foot of a school system lacking rigour and on a generation of "helicopter parents" who are always hovering, ready to solve the problems of their dependent progeny.
Today's public school students are inculcated with self-esteem at the expense of self-efficacy. Everyone gets a gold star for effort. Every pupil is "special." No child is left behind to repeat a grade no matter how little they grasp, the authors say.
Witness what happened to the C grade. Long used to denote average performance, Cs are no longer an acceptable grade in many households, while As and Bs are assigned with such frequency that all distinctions have been blurred between so-so, good, very good, excellent and outstanding.
The result, said Prof. Côté, is a cohort of semi-literate students arriving on campus quite accustomed to getting As even though they are unable to string a proper sentence together, let alone a paragraph or an entire essay.
Grade inflation begins in high school, the authors say, but has carried over into the university system with students' sense of entitlement, faculty's unwillingness to fight to preserve high standards and administrative policies that reward departments with the most upper-year undergraduates.
The professors readily admit many of their colleagues have been complicit in the decline of academic life, through what they call the "disengagement compact."
Fearing a backlash when it comes time for teaching evaluations or simply intimidated by students willing to whine, cry and yell if they don't get the grade they think they deserve, many faculty have simply succumbed to their new roles as "gatekeepers of the middle class," the authors say.
"This tacit agreement between teachers and students is, 'I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone,' " they said in the book. “ ‘That is, I won’t make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won’t have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well.’ In this compact students get higher grades through pestering, for threat of it, rather than by actually doing the required work or working at a level once required of university students."
Few professors have been willing to take a stand and those who do risk censure or unpopularity.
Just over a year ago, a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island made his overcrowded History of Christianity class a stunning offer: He would give a grade of 70% to anyone who stopped showing up for the rest of the semester and didn’t bother to complete any of the course work. About 20 students took him up on the offer and the veteran academic was ultimately forced into premature retirement by an embarrassed administration.
David Weale made national headlines and garnered notoriety for his seemingly cynical act, but he was also lauded by many who shared his frustrations for daring to expose some unpalatable truths about Canada’s post-secondary education system.
Prof. Côté has since employed the UPEI test on his own classes – as a hypothetical exercise. When he offers 68% to anyone who quits, the only takers are those who failed the mid-term. As he edges the freebie higher, more students are willing to take the bargain.
"At 80%, virtually the whole class would walk out," he said. "A lot of students react to it like, 'I got an 80 — that's mine.' They're very egocentric about it. It's almost like a possession to them."
The authors trace the roots of this malaise to the myth that successive decades of government policy created to sell the public on the merits of education: the longer young people stay in school the better.
Designed to boost high school graduation rates and delay the entry of workers into a labour market with few opportunities, the dream has been so eagerly adopted by recent generations and their doting parents that a university degree is now perceived as a birth rite that guarantees a well-paying white collar job and automatic membership in the ranks of the middle class, the authors say.
In the process, blue collar work has been stigmatized, despite the fact that some trades and
professions may actually offer the same or better financial advantages and more satisfaction than often times bleak office work.
Many European countries, like Germany, stream young people early on into occupations that match their interests through apprenticeship programs and practical training.
Prof. Côté said Canadian youth could benefit from more structured options, instead of the "soft sorting" that pushes many of them aimlessly into the university system without clear goals. Even volunteer work, travel or the "gap year" that many British students take before commencing their academic studies, he said, might offer Canadian students the direction and motivation they lack.
Otherwise, the generation that has never been told 'No' and has never been taught to deal with disappointment, is in for a fall when they finally are handed those devalued undergraduate degrees. And many of them, Prof. Côté says, face a spiral of underemployment when they hit the wall of their own compounded incompetence – condemned to a career of white collar drudgery, not unlike the absurdity and disillusionment captured in the popular television series The Office.
"Most are going to learn at a very late age what most people learned at an early age: How to fail," he said.
ahanes@nationalpost.com
AoD
