Category Archives: Academics

A loyal reader sent me a link to this Washington Post article, “Is college too easy? As study time falls, debate rises.”   Here’s a very long quote:

Some critics say colleges and their students have grown lazy. Today’s collegiate culture, they say, rewards students with high grades for minimal effort and distracts them with athletics, clubs and climbing walls on campuses that increasingly resemble resorts.

Academic leaders counter that students are as busy as ever but that their attention is consumed in part by jobs they take to help make ends meet.

Consider George Mason, Virginia’s largest public university and a microcosm of modern academia. Some students care for dependents. Many commute to class. Seventy percent of seniors hold off-campus jobs. George Mason students spend 14 hours, on average, in weekly study, close to the national average.

“It’s not enough,” said Peter Stearns, the George Mason provost. “And it’s a figure that troubles us, not only at Mason but in higher education generally.”

The university has responded by launching an honors college and an undergraduate research initiative in recent years — driven, Stearns said, by “the need to create a more challenging undergraduate environment.”

Tradition suggests that college students should invest two hours in study for every hour of classes. The reality — that students miss that goal by half — emerged from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a research tool for colleges that examines the modern student in unprecedented detail.

I guess I have two thoughts for now.  First, I don’t know if college has gotten easier or not, but the attitude about keeping students in college has changed dramatically in the last 25 or so years.  When I was in college back in the 1980s, the way college success was presented to students was not everyone will be able to succeed.  In fact, at many universities, it was a badge of pride that a lot of students failed out.  But nowadays, one of the marks of success of a university is its retention/graduation rates:  that is, one of the problems that EMU has it’s retention/graduation rates aren’t as high as they should be.

Second, I’m not sure these guidelines of studying two hours for every hour of class-time have ever been completely true, and I think that at least some of this concern about students not studying enough is just classic “the kids today just aren’t as good as we were when we were kids” thinking.

None of this to say that maybe it is true that college is “too easy” in an effort to appeal to more students, to retain more students, etc.

eReserves is an electronic “reserve desk” that lots of university libraries (including EMU) use to make readings available for all kinds of things, though mostly for courses.  Instead of putting together a course pack, I tend to put everything up on eReserves, free for students and easier for me.  But for a long time now, there has been one potential problem:  is this legal?

Well, a long story short, as the CHE reports in “Long-Awaited Ruling in Copyright Case Mostly Favors Georgia State U.,” the answer is yes.  Here are the opening paragraphs:

A federal judge in Atlanta has handed down a long-awaited ruling in a lawsuit brought by three scholarly publishers against Georgia State University over its use of copyrighted material in electronic reserves. The ruling, delivered on Friday, looks mostly like a victory for the university, finding that only five of 99 alleged copyright infringements did in fact violate the plaintiffs’ copyrights.

“My initial reaction is, honestly, what a crushing defeat for the publishers,” said Brandon C. Butler, the director of public-policy initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries. Given how few claims the publishers won, “there’s a 95 percent success rate for the GSU fair-use policy.” The ruling suggests that Georgia State is “getting it almost entirely right” with its current copyright policy, he said.

I guess it’s the season– graduation and all, and the slightly quieter “between terms” times for me– but it sure seems like I’ve been seeing a lot of interesting articles and commentary pieces on higher ed lately.  A few I thought I’d share here:

“Tempering the Rise of the Machines” in Inside Higher Ed is one of those piece that will scare the bejeezus out of those of us who make a living actually teaching, until you realize it is mostly science fiction.  The article summarizes a report:

The report, called “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education,” was co-written by Lawrence S. Bacow and William G. Bowen, the former presidents of Tufts and Princeton Universities, respectively, along with several Ithaka analysts. It was bankrolled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The report contained little advocacy one way or another; rather, the authors appeared to strive for a dispassionate analysis driven by a general sense that the rise of machine learning is inevitable and universities should be prepared. Their findings were based on interviews with senior administrators at 25 public and private, four-year and two-year colleges, including “deep dive” analyses at five of them.

Their objective was to assess the potential roadblocks that might prevent these traditional institutions from adopting sophisticated, “machine guided” learning tools into their curriculums. Technology designed to usher students through new material is thought likely to play a significant role in the future of higher education, although critics have worried that relying too heavily on such technology could harm learning.

Sure, a report written by a bunch of administrators based on interviews with administrators (and not faculty nor students) and financed by a group that has been tone-deaf to teaching in the past and which has obvious interest in the use of computer technology in all spheres of our lives; what could be biased about that?  The “good news” here is it turns out that the magic of software that could eliminate professors entirely is at best decades away.

Then there’s “Did Anyone Ask the Students?, Part I” on the CHE web site and by Jeff Selingo.  Selingo is the editorial director of The Chronicle and in the course of thinking about new technologies and such being introduced by “educational entrepreneurs” and traveling around the country to different campuses, he decided to actually ask students about these things.   The short list of what he found so far (Part 2 is tomorrow, I guess):

• Face to face still matters and students still want it.
• Students need to do “more career exploration” before college than they do now.
• Majors don’t matter.

As I commented on the site,  this does square with my experiences in interacting with students– well, at least mostly.  I teach about as much online as I do in person, and I think for the most part, my online students would rather be taking classes f2f, but life/practicality gets in the way.  And since I’m teaching at a large public regional university (and not a place that is mostly online), almost all of my online students are taking f2f classes at the same time.  I do think majors matter to students perhaps more than Selingo is implying– it seems like what they really value is flexibility and choice, which isn’t quite the same thing as not valuing a major– but I also think majors probably matter more to faculty who put a lot of investment into the discipline/turf.  Anyway, I’m looking forward to part 2.

Last (for now), there’s Frank Bruni’s New York Times column (which I found via the Selingo piece), “The Imperiled Promise of College.”  It’s a bit all over the place, raising questions about the value of a college degree in the first place especially relative to the current economy.  The opening paragraphs seem true to my experience (and Bruni and I are roughly the same age, I should point out):

For a long time and for a lot of us, “college” was more or less a synonym for success. We had only to go. We had only to graduate. And if we did, according to parents and high-school guidance counselors and everything we heard and everything we read, we could pretty much count on a career, just about depend on a decent income and more or less expect security. A diploma wasn’t a piece of paper. It was an amulet.

And it was broadly accessible, or at least it was spoken of that way. With the right mix of intelligence, moxie and various kinds of aid, a motivated person could supposedly get there. College was seen as a glittering centerpiece of the American dream, a reliable engine of social mobility.

I think there are two ways to look at the way things have changed.  One is where Bruni goes, questioning the value of higher ed– or at least of some majors– for folks entering the job market today.  (Though see above regarding the argument that majors don’t matter).

The other way to look at it is the undergrad BA/BS is no longer an “amulet” so much as it is the entry point to a graduate degree that is now the ticket that gets you to a decent income and job security.  I don’t know to what extent actual statistics support this, but I hear from a lot of my MA students nowadays that the masters degree is what the bachelors degree was for me almost 25 years ago: the entry point into the professional job.  As one former student said to me, “everyone’s got a BA; you’ve got to do something to distinguish yourself if you’re going to get something.”