To me the authors critiques break down into three categories:
- Impacts of Covid: in academia we are still very much seeing some impacts from covid. Students are behind in a lot of ways and that gap is never going to be made back up in a single class.
- “Old man yelling at clouds”: he mentions his text books range from $40-100 for a class, but for all classes that can get up over $500. Additionally, many students know some books will be used once (I had classes that never used some of the “Required” texts.
- College as a employment pipeline: given they’re Gen they are prime for the group of students where college was sold as a pipeline to good jobs. This has pumped up enrollment numbers (meaning it drags down the average). Lower-mid schools will be most impacted by lowering standards driven by increased demand.
He’s not wrong that it feels like students are less engaged, but I’m not sure if not as convinced it is a shift in the populace as much as a shift in the average college student (both due to covid and increased enrollment).
If that is what you took from the article, your reading comprehension is lacking, ironically.
Covid is only mentioned tangentially, not as a main cause. Telephones are mentioned as more of a cause for student behavior than Covid is.
‘old man telling at clouds’ instead of breaking down the argument of the writer, as you stated you were going to do, you pick out a single subject that is written about and choose to defeat that argument with a personal observation. Which is basically a straw man argument because: In the article the price of textbooks is a very small argument that students use to hide behind. The main argument is that they’re not reading it paying attention at all…
The transactional nature is talked about, as it’s the lowering of standards.
The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this.
Yet the main problem is not that, it’s the general attitude of the students that have changed. A chronic disconnection between the student and the subject of study. Aan absence that is mental and sometimes even physical. The level of disinterest is new and the professor is frustrated because he doesn’t know how to combat that.
I understand what you see wrong with my comment and hopefully can explain a bit better.
Basically the entire article is based on anecdotal evidence. I found that the root of each of their arguments really fell into a couple different areas. One being a misunderstanding on the long term impacts of Covid, the second being that the author is a bit behind the times (cost/use of textbooks was an easy example as it has been a major critique in college for over a decade), and the last calling out that the “average” student he interacts with may be getting pulled down by higher enrollment numbers.
For the most part my hope was to introduce some potential alternative interpretations to the things the author is seeing, that have some backing in statistics and research (although I know I did not provide them in my comment).
same as it ever was
