Schools aren't allowed to have standards for student achievement levels any more. Thus, everyone passes. This is the nash equilibrium of school funding being dependent on "student outcomes."
At the college level, rankings also rely heavily on 4- and 6-year graduation rates. Administrators notice that and put pressure on processors not to fail students.
You're not allowed to fail students. My 10th grade teacher friend rants constantly about how parents call his boss demanding he pass their kids who haven't handed in a single piece of homework and failed all exams, and he gets forced to pass them.
'The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.' — ̶S̶̶o̶̶c̶̶r̶̶a̶̶t̶̶e̶̶s̶ ̶ (Kenneth John Freeman, 1907 [thanks to morsch])
Apocryphal and also irrelevant. If someone were to have made an unwarranted criticism in 5th century BCE Athens, that would not invalidate that class of criticism forever through the end of time.
Plus, we have hard data about reduced attention spans so this is not even about moral panic.
This is such a boring fallacious argument. Are you seriously suggesting that over the last 2,500 years there have never been any changes to any generation of children/youths due to any circumstances? Of course not; that's a ridiculous preposition.
Maybe there's a bit of complaining from old coots throughout the ages, but that doesn't mean there are never any structural problems ever. Maybe there are real problems today. And maybe there were real problems in Socrates' time too. Merely posting this without any thought is just dismissive nonsense.
Certainly for the situation today, there are huge changes to how kids are raised. Maybe that has zero effect. Or maybe it does. Either way, whatever Socrates did or didn't say has absolutely no bearing on it.
this post is ironic given that we're talking about an article where a professor is complaining about people's poor reading comprehension. the post you're replying to did not explicitly make any argument, they only quoted someone, and no the quoting of someone with no additional commentary is not an argument - lol
Exactly. There are always the people who complain and the people who defend. They are both not indicative of actual social changes. They're just statement factories. Think deeper about what a statement is actually saying instead of dismissing it for falling under some camp. If it is vapid even on its own, then dismiss it.
On this paticular topic, my take is that as technology has advanced, we have gone from the "technology is harmless" side to the "technology is harmful" side sharply. Books and whatnot are great. TV, ehhh. Video games, mobile phones, social media, LLMs: dangerous, or more optimistically, very tricky to get right. I think it's not strange that these three categories I've laid out occupy vastly distinct time spans. It's exactly the power of a technology that ties into both its development and its impact. I certainly don't get similar experiences from reading a book and watching short form video.
For all we know Socrates was correct, and the attitudes did change during his lifetime. History is turbulent, and there is not a straight line from his time to the present. There's plenty of examples of people, children included, behaving differently through a change in time and place. E.g. the difference between a Victorian boarding school and a typical US high school, or the difference before and after the Cultural Revolution in China. Or the difference in behavior between meth addicts and non-addicts.
If meth became widely used, and someone noted the effect this had on how children are behaving, would we also just quote Socrates at them as 'proof' that nothing has changed, because people have been complaining since forever?
Even if we pretend the quote is real (it was invented in the 1900s), then as you suggest, Socrates might have had a point: Athens was pretty much done for as a meaningful political or even cultural entity within a couple generations of Socrates.
Socrates two most prominent students took power with help of the enemy state, dismantled democracy and installed fairly cruel tyrantship. Socrates himself was against democracy, altrought did not participated nor directly supported the tyranny.
For all we know, his quote refers to these political conflicts where he preferred hierarchy and young preferred democracy.
I feel like this quote exists to be used as an excuse for parents to deploy whatever arbitrary discipline is necessary to make their tyrant children get in line and comply.
I mean the way it's worded just makes you want to strike back at contemptuous kids instead of digging down deeper as to why they might behave this way.
I think it won't be far-fetched to say the current generation of children possibly has the lowest impression of their elders as compared to all previous generations in human history.
Not that you can blame them, honestly, looking at the state of the world despite all wisdom and knowledge being more accessible to everyone than it has ever been...
I'm in my thirties. I remember most of these things being true a decade ago. Engineers in training failed the your/you're test. Some people read, but most people did not. We forget that the same ignorance is the norm among people our age because our paths with those people have split years ago. A lot of the behavioural complaints at the end of this post could have been made about me. I didn't have enough time to care about all the things that were forced down my throat. They seemed pointless anyway. I had mandatory French and photography classes to become a software engineer. I'd have enjoyed those if I wasn't working night shifts at a petrol station to pay for them.
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".
> I'm in my thirties. I remember most of these things being true a decade ago.
The author has been a professor and teaching for over 30 years. Presumably he would not be writing this if the type and scale of the problem hadn't changed in that time.
Could it be that the author changed as a person, sees the past with rose-tinted glasses, or fails to recognise that the context changed in the last 30 years?
Yeah, I have an arts degree and twenty years ago I know there was chronic absenteeism in sociology classes because I was chronically absent in sociology. I also couldn't do all the readings each week because I had both homework and other readings and so I had to be strategic, especially when I needed to start my own readings for all the papers I had to write. It's possible this poor professor's readings end up on people's ignore pile.
Matriculating into college with a phone addiction is akin to starting off with executive functioning impairments. I was in college 20 years ago and was probably addicted to the Internet, but I didn't have wifi and a laptop with me at all times, so it wasn't ubiquitous, the way phones are now.
I graduated from an Ivy League college with a 3.5 and did everything he mentioned in this article, minus the cheating. Maybe the problem is him? Just sayin’.
Edit: I should mention I graduated twenty years ago.
It seems some are. My kid is in 4th grade in a city public school (US) and the district just this year banned all phones, tablets, and smart watches during the school day. We’ll see how it goes.
For what goal? Just for them to get instantly addicted once the ban is lifted? For them to lack any communications with their friends and to be excluded from their social circles discussing the newest tiktoks or whatever?
First, lack of a phone won't cause them to be completely excluded from their social circles. If it does, then I'd argue those weren't their friends to begin with. Second, kids need to learn that social acceptance doesn't mean they have to do everything their friends are doing. Third, the long-term benefits of reducing their exposure to social media are outweighed by the short-term benefits of the instant gratification and shared experience of social media.
> completely excluded from their social circles. If it does, then I'd argue those weren't their friends to begin with.
I believe you underestimate the power of being "in". Even if the friends wouldn't be "true", it is still extremely valuable socially. That is, speaking as someone who, due to unrelated reasons, was prevented from fitting in fully. It may not hold much water from a stranger on the internet, but i would've given anything to be able to fit in more at that time. I believe it has set me back socially 3-5 years, with lasting consequences which I may never truly heal.
> Second, kids need to learn that social acceptance doesn't mean they have to do everything their friends are doing
Sure, but they won't learn that when you prevent them from participating activities with their friends. This isn't them deciding that they don't want to participate in something.
> Third, the long-term benefits of reducing their exposure to social media are outweighed by the short-term benefits of the instant gratification and shared experience of social media.
Attention spans can be fixed.
And besides, you shouldn't control any child like that. You might say "they will thank me in the future". But they never will. And the damage done by controlling their life like that is more lasting. Their relationship with authority, with you, with their own autonomy will be forever changed. (Speaking as figurative you, I don't mean to imply you specifically) This teaches them "You don't have a right to own things the authority doesn't want you to own" (Or it teaches them how to lie and hide contraband.)
> And besides, you shouldn't control any child like that.
Every parent exercises some form of control over their child. (Cookie before dinner? No, sorry.) Children need to learn boundaries and it's up to the parents to set those boundaries. It's basic parenting, and isn't as nefarious as you're making it out to be.
> You might say "they will thank me in the future". But they never will.
In my experience this is untrue. I grew up when TV was the primary medium of household entertainment, and yet I was the sole child in my class, and probably my whole school, to not have at TV at home (a deliberate choice on my parents' part). Now that I'm grown up, I'm thankful for it.
Somehow kids were able to make friendships before everyone was online all the time. Perhaps they don't need to be spending time discussing the newest tiktoks. Maybe their friends should be hanging out and doing things.
No. It's not the smartphones that are the problem. Smartphones are a wonderful invention, capable of connecting anyone anywhere.
It's the apps, which overcharge everyone's (not just kids!) brains, by algorithmically "mAxImiZinG eNgaGeMent"
It's time to ban them all. Okay that's a bit much. Ban all algorithmic feeds, all apps must adhere to strictly chronological feed of the strictly subscribed authors.
You sound like one of the author's students. Just restricting juvenile phone use to dumb phones is obviously the more feasible solution than banning or manipulating entire platforms.
I never said ban platforms? TikTok, Facebook could still very well exist and still make more money than any of us ever will. Just without the brain rotting engagement algorithm
If we can all agree that cannabis is bad for the still-developing mind, and can generally get on board with the idea that kids should be kept as far away from it as possible, because it's addicting, because it causes long-term alterations to brain development, because it diminishes motivation and hijacks executive functioning networks, why is it so hard for society to consider treating smartphones, social media, and highly-immersive video games like MMORPG's, with essentially all of the same effects, the same way?
I am part of the generation that grew up with MMORPG's from early childhood (I was about 9 years old when I made my first RuneScape account), but approaching 30, I don't game at all anymore for the exact same reasons I don't touch cannabis anymore. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, it's all the same thing for teenagers. At a neurological level, these platforms are as highly addicting and neural-network-altering as actual psychoactive pharmaceuticals, legal or otherwise.
Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.
Because phone is just a box of wires, without apps it's inert.
It's the apps, which corrode everyone's attention span. And unlike weed, I doubt there will be "algorithmic feed" dealers, because no one actually wants an algorithmic feed.
Sure - to be clear, I am not suggesting banning technology itself. Computers and the internet were also a boon of joy and discovery for me. I self-started programming in TI-basic back in middle school because "computer science" classes that covered anything beyond typing and "here's how to use to a web browser, here's how to use a text editor" skills weren't available until high school for me. I have vivid and fond memories of learning visual basic and making my own GUI apps after this, before eventually starting to learn javascript, python, and "real" programming languages like C.
None of this exploration ever required or involved Facebook or other social media platform or highly immersive video game, save YouTube.
And to be clear, I'm no proponent of the state simply passing universal bans, or infringing upon privacy of adults with facial recognition requirements for using social media, this is a responsibility of parents, many of whom I fear themselves haven't been adequately warned about how addicting these platforms are.
I don't think DARE-style assemblies for both students and parents would be the worst idea to warn both groups about the risks of these platforms, provided they were done honestly, rather than being filled with hyperbole. It doesn't infringe upon anyone's rights, and wouldn't really "cost" anything, but would help educate those who might lack the awareness on the subject.
> I don't think DARE-style assemblies for both students and parents would be the worst idea to warn both groups about the risks of these platforms, provided they were done honestly, rather than being filled with hyperbole.
Yeah that's fair. Probably can't hurt anything with that. But it's hard to get the actual danger across.
> None of this exploration ever required or involved Facebook or other social media platform or highly immersive video game, save YouTube.
That's why I am gunning to limit these kind of platforms, specifically.
> It doesn't infringe upon anyone's rights, and wouldn't really "cost" anything,
Well it depends. If these assemblies worked, they would "cost" the platforms potential engagement and potential revenue. Which is kind of a pointless distinction, I just thought it's interesting
> why is it so hard for society to consider treating smartphones, social media, and highly-immersive video games like MMORPG's, with essentially all of the same effects, the same way?
I agree with you. I would consider social media and games addictive. It's just that the SMS app on my phone isn't addictive. Telegram app, the Photo app also isn't.
> Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.
Agreed. But my paleolithic emotions aren't addicted to the radio waves of my phone, but to the TikTok app specifically.
Sorry if my post was unclear, when I say "platforms", I am talking about Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, open-ended MMORPG's, etc - I agree that the problem is the addiction-optimized psychological experiments, not the operating system or device itself.
I've no clue why people have downvoted this; you're right as rain. A phone is nothing short of a digital slot machine and shouldn't be put in front of adults or children. These algorithms are designed for profit, not humanity. They have far greater control over us than they should.
The funny thing is, they don't even have control. They can't push propaganda. They can just accelerate human desire. Through all the brain rot they have created, they didn't even gain anything significant, just a few % bump in "kEy pErFormAnce iNdiCatoRs".
Capitalism is a system that rewards the selfish and greedy. If you don't pursue every bump in key performance indicators you can, then someone else will and they'll eat your lunch.
Why not educate the users about the dangers misuse and abuse lead to the attention span, instead of banning things?
I vaguely recall too students back in the era where our biggest distraction was MSN messenger and our university forums. They kept both off until late at night.
We're letting people experience the downsides of the attention economy when it's almost (if not entirely) too late to avoid the negatives.
> Why not educate the users about the dangers misuse and abuse lead to the attention span, instead of banning things?
Because social media is precisely in the short term benefit x long term risk that human brains are bad at conceptualizing. Same reasons for why we mandate belts in cars.
Hardly anyone in the "west" gets pulled over by police for seat belt checks (unlike say, India, China), yet nearly everyone still wears them, because they understand if they don't, they'll probably become a stain on the asphalt. I imagine if tomorrow, a law passed that seat belts no longer had to be worn, most people would still use them. Perhaps the regulation and enforcement are only needed initially when not everyone is educated on the long term risks.
To be fair, belts and phones aren’t the same things. Belts are popular now because wearing them is barely an inconvenience compared to the improvement in safety - abstaining from phones is way harder for the average person.
I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV. Cutting back to chronological feeds might improve some things but I don't think that's the root of the issue.
I would suggest the primary difference between then and now is accessibility. As a kid, my screen time was limited not just by my parents indulgence but the social pressure from using a shared device. Smart phones let you carry your personal distraction with you.
I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.
> I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV.
Yeah that's fair.
> I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.
Well to their friends in other classes ("Wanna go out after 3pm lesson").
Additionally, and socially, smart phones, if banned, would be instantly seen as a status symbol. And it would also accelerate strong anti-autority sentimentality. The kids won't understand it, hell adults wouldn't. So it's also the case that you can't really ban them without really adverse social effects.
Sure, but the natural consequence is that they will be more inclined to distrust society, authority, and vote for anti-estabishment populist parties.
To quote a great man, we live in society. And it's better to work within a system and get to know it rather than it is to just hate it. And if the first experience of a large portion of youth is system beating them down, you can see how that's gonna grow a strong "tear it all down" mentality.
I don't buy arguments from parents about why they can't just take away their kids' phones, or simply decline to buy them a phone in the first place.
My family didn't have a TV growing up. (This was way before the Internet, when TV was king and HBO and cable were a status symbol.) Me and my siblings tried every argument in the book to get them to buy one, to no avail. Out of the loop on TV pop culture? Boo-hoo. Peers make fun of you for not having a TV? Too bad, so sad. The result was that I participated in more activities that engaged my body and brain. Aside from being bad at TV pop culture trivia from those decades, I turned out just fine.
At the end of they day, parents need to set the standards that they want their children to live by, and stick with them. Even today, a phone is a luxury that a kid doesn't really need, and will likely contribute to low attention span and cause them all manner of anxiety. Don't take my word for it; many studies will back me up.
Reddit and HN can be very addictive, and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok with mere “highest upvote” per topic would still be. I’m doubtful that your strategy would do very much about the problem.
I’d actually prefer HN and Reddit to be just chronological (or “newest comment” on the above-thread level), like traditional forums.
Even on something as anonymous as 4chan where all comments are posted in chrono order I see a difference in behavior after they added direct links to comments so one could easily see how many reactions your comment got as opposed to actually reading every comment.
No, that doesn't address the incentives that cause all those things: maximizing engagement to maximize ad impressions for money. You have to choke the money supply off at the source or the big corporations will just find other engagement mechanisms to hook users to get at more profits.
Instead, tax ad impressions per day per user on a sliding scale that makes it quickly unprofitable to display more than a handful of ads and use the money to fund media literacy classes in schools. Restrict the number and types of advertising that can be shown to children and adolescents, like forbidding animated ads.
Call me old fashioned, but I don't think it'd be that bad for schools to be almost completely analog. Obviously not for classes like CS, but do math class es or English classes really need computers? The whole "digital learning" push feels like it hasn't resulted in significantly better learning than with a book, pen, and paper.
Why is this obvious? Unless you’re talking CS = Programming a specific language, I think it’d be better for the K-12 version of CS to be completely analog save for maybe a “lab” for students in later years of high school.
CS at the lower levels should be programming and playing with computers. What else should it be? Analysis of algorithms? That sounds dreadfully boring for a high schooler
As a senior in high school, I have wanted the latter for most of my time here. I can program and fool around with computers on my own time (and more efficiently than in class). After taking (and being bored in) AP CS A freshman year, I have just dedicated more time to high level math classes instead.
I took AP CS freshman year (30+ years ago), spent the rest of high school learning UNIX, becoming a sysadmin, putzing around with computers. I did spend a summer taking the Berkeley course teaching SICP, but I regret it. I recommend saving that for when you’re a freshman. There will be plenty of time for the theory.
Bulking up on math in HS is smart. I took AP Calculus and then went to community college to take more calculus.
Pretty much. We had one lab period and couple of classroom periods in a week. We even wrote java on notebooks! Can't imagine writing java without IDE autocomplete these days, but "back then"(it was just 7 years ago) I was banging out JOptionPanes and JButton event handlers for a selection sort frontend with pen and paper perfect syntax, all the options memorized. Of course, the salary calculator as well (you enter the different components, it subtracts tax and tells you the answer - obviously a simplistic version)
Totally agree. Unless the use of the computer is integral to the material at hand (learning to program, learning to solve problems numerically, modeling) it is superfluous. Tons of dough spent on making it "modern" just for the sake of it.
As the parent of a young kid: how do you do this? Does this just mean not giving them a smartphone until they’re teenagers? Not letting them take it to school. My oldest kid isn’t even four yet, but I’m already wondering about how to limit his eventual phone usage and also not make him a social pariah.
It should be enforced by the schools: put the phones in a tub in home group and hand them back out at the end of the day. If there’s an emergency call the office or the office calls you. Use exercise books for note taking, etc.
The "social pariah" thing is FUD. It's just people repeating what other people claim to be afraid of, and then becoming afraid of it themselves. Kids can be shitty--if they want to exclude someone or bully them, they're going to do it whether or not the victim has a cell phone. Conversely, if people will only be friends with you if you have a cell phone, then I have some bad news for you: They're probably not genuine friends.
You may consider it FUD, but that was 100% my reality. It's not about people only being friends with you because you have a phone, it's about the shared cultural experience that a group of kids have because of some media they have access to via the phone.
In my case (graduating high school in 2016), I wasn't allowed to watch TV, listen to the radio, play video games, or use the computer at all until I left for college. And especially as an adolescent, those were basically the cornerstone of all conversations between my peers. I never knew what anyone was talking about, and could never really bond with anyone over really anything but sports. And when smart phones became a popular thing in my age group, again I had no access to that or any of the media that it led to.
I will say though, as alienating as it was at the time, I don't particularly regret it because most of what I missed probably wasn't super important, and I think I gained an accurately cynical view on the content media machine as a whole. But I absolute rue the massive difficulties I had building social connections because of it that continue to this day.
We did this with our kids, now college freshman and high school junior, and it was absolutely worth it. In middle school we established "screen break" from Friday night to Saturday afternoon. It was challenging at first but they came to love it. We've had many conversations and read many books on those breaks (and still do). Advice to new parents: keep them off screens as long as possible, and then build in and enforce breaks that become a part of your family routine. Chances are they will end up noticeably different from other kids.
It really feels the same as weed/nicotine/alcohol/sex/other vices. If history has taught us anything, outright banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit. We need to explain (and frequently reinforce) these negative effects of modern phone use so kids can grow up understanding them. Right now, it seems like a lot of people really only start to understand the impacts of this kind of phone use long after they're addicted. Hopefully informing them before that happens would help.
Of course, this kind of thing is easy to do wrong. Programs like D.A.R.E. and THRIVE tried going the way of fear tactics which seems to really not work well. We need to have an open and honest discussion about "yes, this is fun. But it DOES have a bad side" instead.
The last sticking point there is that it assumes people will be rational and come to the conclusion of using with moderation. Hopefully people can be rational... Otherwise I think there's no hope for us in solving the brainrot epidemic.
Oh I just realized I missed the "during the school day" part of the comment I cited. That's totally my mistake. For what it's worth, I agree with banning during the school day but (although no one is making the point here) I would disagree with banning them from children everywhere always.
What is really needed is parents that teach their kids impulse control and how to prioritize, to know what is extracurricular and what is not. You can play video games, smoke weed, do whatever on your phone once your work is done, not before or during.
From my own experience and that of fellow parents that I talked to, explanations will be dismissed outright by the all-knowing teenagers, and any attempt to have a rational conversation on the topic will fail. Just like any addict, kids will deny that they are addicted. I had to act once the smartphone addiction reached a disaster level. What worked the best for me was "no you cannot bring your phone to school or use it before the homework is done, that's my decision and I don't have to provide you with any explanation." Did this generate some resentment and a few tantrums? You bet, but I got the result I wanted, peace of mind and homework done on time.
I disagree with you.
> outright banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit
I think it should be fine to outright ban them in certain contexts, like classroom learning; just as they are outright banned (usually) in theaters or playhouses or places of worship.
And to cite your example, even in the most liberal jurisdictions I think it's not acceptable for students to take drugs in the classroom. Phones are basically the same thing.
Oop, I totally missed the "during the school day" part of the grandparent comment. I totally agree with banning them during the school day. My argument was against the point that the grandparent wasn't making which was banning phones from K-12 students both during and after the school day
There was no mention of an outright ban, merely restrictions on use. Much as we have restrictions on where and when one can indulge in weed, nicotine, alcohol, and so forth.
This is a really good take. My mother did this until high school and some of my favorite classes forced this. Lectures were so much more engaging with no computer distracting me.
Smartphones are easy to blame, but they aren't the core of the problem. They're not just a thing used in the US, but across the world and we don't see the same problems in say, European school systems. The actual issue is multifaceted:
1) Parents in the US are overworked, underpaid and (increasingly) unable to participate in the lives of their children. It should come as zero surprise then that phones are used as a way to get kids out of their hair. If you don't fix this problem then banning phones entirely won't matter, because parents will yell, scream and quite literally assault your schools for taking away phones from their kids.
2) Our K-12 educational system is broken. Kids are graduating with lower literacy rates than ever. College is functioning less as higher education and more like remedial programs, having to teach basic topics that should've been covered as part of the core curriculum.
3) Teachers are also underpaid, overworked and having to deal with the deficiencies in parenting as well as the advent of AI making cheating significantly easier and harder to detect.
These three factors all compound to create a whole generation that we're effectively failing. And given the attacks/teardown of college as an institution, I fear we're going to have our own version of the 'lost generation' until people get angry enough to fix it or our business capabilities collapse.
Parenting and upbringing could be an important and overlooked reason for this lost generation.
I can only speak anecdotally. Way before smartphones were invented, I had enforced limits on computer time to 1-2 hours a day via time tracking software. All this did was breed resentment between me and my parents that led to conflict and punishment. As soon as I got to college I was back to being on my computer all night nearly every day, relieved that I didn't have to put up with them anymore.
The technology restriction wasn't the beginning and end of my mentality all through college. The true cause was how I was raised and my relationship with my parents. They were the only real bullies I've ever had.
People will always attack apps, algorithms and corporations since they're easy to feel powerless about. But if a developing person is given good enough reason to doomscroll so that they able to forget the pain that was imbued in them from an early age, then 1) the outcome in the article results, 2) a major underlying factor in the analysis of why we're failing young people will be missed, and people will assume it's solely the fault of addictive "algorithms" and capitalism, and 3) it's unlikely that people are going to open up about stressors as personal as childhood trauma (a cause) as opposed to behavioral addictions like doomscrolling (a symptom), so the focus will be on attacking and regulating the symptoms, and this cycle of trauma will only exacerbate and repeat itself.
A certain level of trauma can steal decades away from developing persons and set them up for failure, with or without smartphones, and smartphones only make their problems worse. Not to mention, past a certain age people start to blame you for your own failings, even though many of them have roots in actions taken against you that were not your fault, and this only contributes to feelings of misery and hopelessness. Knowing this firsthand, it's no wonder so many people find little else interesting than doomscrolling all day - myself included.
You can regulate apps and restrict smartphones, but I have no idea how to fix bad parenting/emotional trauma at scale. What goes on in families is private by its nature, emotional abuse is legitimized if you never lay a hand on the child and some arbitrary standard of defiance is crossed, and intergenerational trauma can have completely arbitrary causes going back decades, which end up transmitted as meaningless stressors to a victim trapped in an endless search of anything at all to hold close to them...
> It’s also clear that kids whose parents restrict phone use seem to have superpowers compared to those that don’t.
Love this phrase. What might happen is that the next generation, upon seeing this opportunity, will do the opposite of their elders and highly value focus, and more readily dismiss quick gains.
I work with several interns who are exceptionally smart, capable, and well-read.
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.
About the short projects. I am a high school senior, and I sometimes jump around between projects / don't finish them because I sometimes struggle to see the point in finishing them. The only projects I can complete are ones where I can see the point of them and how they will be used.
I'm glad I completed my bachelor's before ChatGPT existed. Now in my master's program, I find myself increasingly dependent on AI. It's gotten to a point where professors grade using AI, so no brain-to-brain exchange is happening — just AI to AI.
For the average student, does it actually matter whether they pass the class or not?
The social contract of "do well in school and you'll get a good job that allows you to afford live a decent life" is on increasingly shaky grounds thanks to things like the property Ponzi scheme reaching even higher levels of pressure, hiring in knowledge work positions being broken, and understandable uncertainty around how AI is going to reshape many positions.
If they're going to be fucked either way, can we blame them for not caring and instead focusing on the very little things that still bring them happiness?
If that’s their attitude why are they paying for college in the first place? I could absolutely understand not thinking college has any benefit for them, I did exactly that, what I don’t understand is deciding to go to college and then not engaging with it.
I'm not American here - because "cushy" jobs require degrees. Any of them, but you need to have them. And because those jobs are often your bland office ones, they don't really require a lot of training/skill, so you're free to do them even if you were an below-average student at a bad major.
All that matters in paper.
(I'm not condoning it, in opposite - but that's a common line of thought)
Maybe they feel it is expected of them and aren’t really interested in the subject matter? I met an engineering student once who told me they hated it but their parents wouldn’t support them for their true passion (the arts). For some I think (given my experience at uni is 2 decades ago) they use it as an excuse to enjoy being young rather than do serious study.
probably because they're bored. Giving a live lecture is the most disdainful form of teaching, using the slowest and most unbalanced way of passing info.
Video your lecture so that the students can watch it at 1.5x speed and do exercises during the class time so that the students are engaged if they decide to show up (which they are more likely to do if they don't have to sit through your live presentation at 1.0x speed).
The students won't watch the recorded videos or do the readings. That's why we have to lecture live.
Then even if we get great students that will do the readings and watch the videos so we can do a flipped classroom; the students will complain that they had to teach themselves and tank the student evaluation scores compared to the lecture version.
Students expect lectures and dislike more active forms of learning even if they learn more. This is not their fault as it's what they've been trained to expect from K-12.
Nah, it's a seriously good book, and even quite gripping towards the end. The problem is that it's rather nihilistic. It's a lot like Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future -- but whereas Ministry had a certain warrior vitality (perhaps too much, too naïve,) I felt like The Overstory made a mockery of human efforts to affect positive change.
Author in the start has said, that around 65% of students have skipped on getting a textbook.
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.
More than a few times i would re-read the textbook end to end in the week leading up to final exam. Particularly for subjects that I knew were foundational for future courses. 20 years later I still find myself breaking out my old textbooks several times a year to refresh a topic.
I’m referring to mostly engineering, economics, and finance textbooks. As much as I enjoyed philosophy and ethics, I don’t find myself needing to break those books open.
I still have many of my textbooks from College. They are great reference books, and yes, I read them all.
But that was pre-internet.
I must say, that was a very structured, well laid out way to learn. I mean that as opposed to Googling for each subtopic, reading dozens of webpages on that single subtopic, hoping to find accurate info.
In graduate school, I would spend four to six hours every night hand-copying textbook chapters into a spiral notebook as it was the only way I could slow down my reading sufficiently to actually comprehend the material.
For undergrad, I would always read the 'assigned material' (essays, literature, etc.) but only recall opening one or two textbooks.
The author of the article is a philosophy professor. In the humanities, yes it is common to read books cover-to-cover. They are more often just “books” and less the sort of textbooks you may be thinking of.
Not cover to cover, but yes, we generally did most of the reading most of the time. I don't mean to exaggerate: sometimes you skimmed, and I gave up on Kant, but in a lot of classes you'd be lost and screwed if you didn't make a plausible pass on the reading.
This was 18 years at a massive public university, which by design drew students from all backgrounds.
I'm inherently skeptical of "kids these days" arguments, but it really seems like the smartphones and the way we approached the pandemic was incredibly destructive.
I'm a mathematics graduate student. A good textbook about a topic in math is gold. Sometimes I even prefer reading a book than going to a lecture because I can skip things that I know or take more time on difficult sections. One time, in a theoretical physics course, I just didn't like the lecturer's style. Fortunately, his lectures were based on a very good book (Kuypers, classical mechanics) which I then read. But I don't think that I have ever "finished" a textbook from front to back. There are always things that are more important.
Not CS, but I got a STEM degree from a top university. You read all the books to pass the course, and if you wanted an A, you also read the material on the suggested reading lists.
I have a CS degree. I read all my textbooks. In some math classes I read textbooks I wasn't required to in the library to help me understand things that I didn't understand in the official textbook.
I'm a bit mixed on all these kind of tirades. I imagine a big chunk of most literature undergraduate degrees are people who like the idea of being into literature much more than the kind of work it involves.
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.
As a college student, I think I can respond to this.
> 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
> When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?
If you think of education as trying to lead people into being whole humans, seems like literature and philosophy (properly taught) are some of most critical subjects.
I want this to be true, my arts degree says I even put my money where my mouth is, but university has largely become viewed as vocational training. You do it not to become whole, you do it to become employable.
I'll do that when I can be confident in my ability to afford food. Being a "whole human" just isn't a priority when you might literally become homeless
This feeling will never go away because it’s not caused by circumstances, it’s caused by anxiety.
You’re a student ostensibly studying computer science at University. Taking a few hours a week to stop a smell the roses has zero chance of being the thing that pushes you into homelessness.
When you start working the anxiety won’t go away. You’ll always have the next thing to worry about. What if I lose this job—I only have 6 months of savings. Then you get married and it becomes—if I lose my job my spouse will divorce me. You have a kid and it becomes “Sorry honey I have to work late. Dinner
with the family isn’t a priority when the kids could literally become homeless if I lose my job and we can’t afford good schools.”
You can’t fix the anxiety by accomplishing the next goal. It’s never going to be enough. You have to learn to live with some uncertainty or you’ll end up miserable.
Also from a more practical perspective, there are advantages to being a more well rounded person. The best programmer is rarely the highest paid. Soft skills are at least as important. Being a well rounded human is a big part of those soft skills.
I’m not saying you necessarily need to be well versed in literary fiction. But having a wide breadth of knowledge comes in handy.
>You can’t fix the anxiety by accomplishing the next goal. It’s never going to be enough. You have to learn to live with some uncertainty or you’ll end up miserable.
There is definitely a difference in quality of life due to less worrying once you or your network have sufficient assets and passive income such that short term volatility does not mean you or your kids go hungry/shelter-less.
Sadly this is true. I make about $200k/yr gross, have a working software engineer for a wife, and have enough in retirement that I could “coast” on contributions for the next 30 years and be fine in retirement. I still can’t be rid of the financial anxiety I started with. My childhood involved a homeless shelter, my college years included struggling to make rent and buy food, and those experiences forever colored how I see and treat money.
There's so much to unpack here. I'll start from the bottom.
> better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works
The author gives their background in the second paragraph of the article (did you read it?): "I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name"
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs.
a) It appears that no one is reading the docs, as the author discussed at length (did you read it?)
b) A lecture is always faster than reading. A lecture is cliff notes. A lecture is the person who knows more than you teaching you the most important bits of the docs.
> it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it
You stated that the lecture was too slow so you just read the docs. Here you state that there's not enough time and benefit to reading. Which is it?
> It scares me as well how little interest my peers have in actually learning
Do you see that you're demonstrating that same disinterest? Reading isn't worth your time. Lectures are too slow and the professors are dumb anyway. Etc.
> 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
This implies that there is some educational medium by which you are so deeply focused and involved in, that the author is unaware of, pointed directly at CV building and internship/job getting, that you simply don't have time for the lectures or books that the author's class covers. Is that correct? What is it? How much time are you spending on an average day CV building?
> can I really afford to waste my time like this?
Sweet summer child. You are a college student. You have all the time in the world.
Your post here, if anything, corroborates the author's perspective.
As a college student, feel like I haven’t met any college student with “all the time in the world” as the people say we have lol. Most of my friends who graduated feel like they have more free time after graduating than in college
That’s only because they got better at time management.
The average college student has almost a month off in December, nearly 3 months off in the summer, a week off for thanksgiving, a week off for spring break, and almost nothing to do for the first 2 weeks of each semester.
That’s nearly 6 months of nothing but free time.
People are just remembering how stressful it gets at exam time and near the end of the semester when projects are so and forgetting how much free time they had during the rest of the year.
The Ivy league isn't teaching Dostoevsky any differently than from an 'average' school, and have a significant number of legacy and preferential admissions who wouldn't otherwise pass the academic standards that everybody else had to.
That's not the point at all though. The point is that the author is talking about how college students can't read and comprehend material, and the student refuting clearly didn't read or comprehend the material.
> 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?
This reads as though the goal of reading is to bolster your career opportunities as a developer?
If it's not connected to your career then it shouldn't be viewed that way, it should be viewed as a kind of leisure and the challenges/rewards involved should be compared to the alternatives there (i.e. is the investment in time of being able to understand more complex novels returning a level of personal fulfilment that makes it potentially a more rewarding focus than some more immediately gratifying leisure activity)
It may still be of very low value but viewing the prospect specifically as being damaging to your career opportunities seems like an incorrect perspective to be starting from.
Seeing everything in an utilitarian pov frightens me. I'm a university student, I love reading, I love acting, I love spending my afternoons riding my bike to the seaside or to the tuscanian hills. Nothing of this is going to make me a better developer. But I can't imagine a world in which I don't read, in which I don't get to know people acting or working at the venue meeting other performers, or feeling connected to the Earth with flowers blooming and birds chirping
I think POVs in forums are often much more about framing a thing to justify your beliefs than actually hitting at your own personal implicit values (it's plausible the poster believes leisure is a waste of time and lives by that belief but I doubt it) so I wanted to stick with the original POV approach to highlight the ways it seemed incorrect.
What I wanted to say, it is that it might happen in the future to not have time or will to do those things. Due to stress or long job hours (...) but the guy says that as a uni student he doesn't have the time because he prefers to focus on being a better developer. I read for pleasure especially at evening or at night. in those moments, especially when in the bed, I definitely wouldn't be coding
I would love to do that. In fact my first year was way more relaxed and closer to your experience. I would spend hours wandering the countryside on foot and traveling the country.
Now that graduation is inching closer with no financial backing, it's just not feasible to spend time on anything other than maximizing employability
It makes me so sad how correct this is. I don’t know what the proper term for it is, but it’s the dynamic where everyone works 9 - 5, and then someone wants to get ahead so works an hour later, and then in 2 months everyone is working 9 - 6…until someone else wants to get ahead and starts working until 7. The competition is so stark and the perceived penalties for not meeting a base level of success are so unpleasant, we all need to descend to the most boring and lifeless versions of ourselves to match those who are naturally boring and lifeless.
Sounds like a version of the tragedy of the commons. Or maybe even the prisoner's dilemma, as in every individual chasing their narrow self-interest and making the matter worse for everyone instead of collaborating and making it better for everybody.
Just don’t do that? I’ve never had a problem leaving at 5. Been doing this for 2 decades now.
Live below your means, save enough money so that a year of unemployment won’t kill you, try to work on interesting problems, try to stay in the top quartile for output (You can definitely do this without staying past 5. At most companies you can do this working something closer to 9-1 if you really focus during that time), don’t be a dick, and don’t worry about the rest.
> 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?
The disconnect here is that your professors are assigning you work like this because the purpose of a university education is to broaden your horizons, challenge you, and force you to think about _how to think._
The fact that you're treating it like trade school is your problem, not the university's.
> I distinctly remember being penalized for any insight that didn't fit marking criteria back in high school english lit.
Good for you. High school writing has nothing to do with university-level papers.
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. Some lecturers are also just incompetent with barely any understanding of what they're teaching in the first place...
Your issue, again, is that you're arrogantly assuming you don't have anything to learn from things you personally haven't prioritized. A major role of a university education is to beat that idea out of you by showing you how wrong you are. Pity it isn't sticking.
> ...though this probably wouldn't be as big of a problem in better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works
What the actual fuck, dude? Ivy League? Right in the second paragraph: "I teach at a regional public university in the US."
I went into this article kind of annoyed at the stereotyping of "these kids today," but way to go reinforcing the article's points. Damn.
> The fact that you're treating it like trade school is your problem, not the university's.
When (for many people) going to college almost necessarily means accruing 5-figure to 6-figure debt at the infancy of their careers, they sure as shit better have some sort of marketable skill to justify and remedy that debt coming out of it.
I understand the sentiment of higher education being useful for broadening one's horizons, challenging you, teaching you how to think etc; but you should be arguing in the _positive_ for these things to be available to everyone without a paywall.
Federal loans are enough to pay for a state school (especially if you do your general education at a community college). Income based repayment means you’ll never pay more than 10% of your discretionary income for 20 years (income above 1.5x the poverty level for your family size). If you never make more than 1.5x the poverty level, you’ll never pay back a dime.
College is financially attainable for just about anyone.
> The Trump administration has gotten rid of applications for income-driven repayment plans from the federal aid website.
The change occurs as the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked income-driven repayment plans in its February ruling. That means former President Joe Biden's SAVE plans and PSLF options are no longer available.
The numbers I quoted are still valid. What changed primarily is that it went back to 20 years. Up from 10.
“ Today, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) reopened the online income-driven repayment (IDR) plan and loan consolidation applications for borrowers. The application was temporarily paused to comply with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals injunction issued last month, which directed the Department to cease implementation of the Biden Administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan and parts of other IDR plans. Because the online application incorporated provisions subject to the injunction, it was necessary to revise the form, making it unavailable to borrowers in the interim. Paper loan consolidation applications were available to borrowers during that time.”
> Income based repayment means you’ll never pay more than 10% of your discretionary income for 20 years
So a 10% hit to your income for at least 20 years isn't significant? What percentage of someone's student debt works under income based repayment?
> If you never make more than 1.5x the poverty level, you’ll never pay back a dime.
So... your suggestion is to live just above poverty so you won't have to pay student loans?
> Federal loans are enough to pay for a state school (especially if you do your general education at a community college)
Sure, there exists ways to go about getting a degree which doesn't _have_ to have a massive financial burden for decades, but what percentage of degree holders (Or, those who have student loans) took this path? Is this a pragmatically fair expectation for 17/18 year olds to make?
How do you resolve the "while the total average balance (including private loan debt) may be as high as $41,618"[0]
>So a 10% hit to your income for at least 20 years isn't significant?
It's not a 10% hit to your income. It's 10% of your income over 1.5x the poverty limit. And it's capped at whatever the payments would be under a 10 year repayment plan.
And it's not at least 20 years, it's at most 20 years. If you make more $80k or so you'll pay less under the standard 10 year plan, so you'll pay that. Which for $40k in deb is something like $450 a month (about 6.75% of your income).
>So... your suggestion is to live just above poverty so you won't have to pay student loans?
That's clearly what I said...of course it's not. The point is that worst case scenario you make under 1.5x the poverty limit you make nothing. If you make a little more than that you pay a 10% tax on the money over that (up to about $60k then it goes down).
>Sure, there exists ways to go about getting a degree which doesn't _have_ to have a massive financial burden for decades, but what percentage of degree holders (Or, those who have student loans) took this path? Is this a pragmatically fair expectation for 17/18 year olds to make?
In 2020 around 6% of students took out private student loans. And private student loans represent only around 7% of all student loan debt, so most of them don't have a massive financial burden because they qualify for income based repayment.
>How do you resolve the "while the total average balance (including private loan debt) may be as high as $41,618"[0]
The vast majority of that is federal, which qualifies for IBR, so isn't a massive burden. Don't take out private loans unless you're going to an Ivy League school, or med school.
I simply don't agree that an IBR loan is a good enough deal to not justify one needing useful and employable skills coming out of higher education.
The utility of a degree, from what I've seen, _does_ end up being better than the accrued debt on average, but the distribution of these cases (I simply imagine) leaves enough people on the margin to be harmful.
If you don’t have family money, you probably need to have a plan for what you’re going to do as a career even if college is free.
My point is that whether they need a marketable skill or not has very little to do with student loans. Provided they go to a state school.
If you borrow $40k to go to a state school, the most you’re going to pay is something like $450 a month for 10 years. Any degree no matter how vocationally useless will allow you to make more than $450 a month extra than you otherwise would have.
There are of course cases where this doesn’t hold, but you’d almost have to try for it not to be worth it. The program is good enough that I think we’ve mostly reached the point of diminishing returns, and there are other things we could spend additional money on with higher ROIs.
Completely false. I went to one of the cheapest accredited colleges around, I received the maximum pell grant, and my federal loans covered about 65% of the tuition. I worked full time through college to cover the remaining tuition and books.
If we're using today’s numbers, max Pell Grant is $7,400 per year. You can borrow $5,500 in federal loans as a freshman, $6,500 as a junior, and $7,500 as junior/senior. So the average is $6,750 (independent students and student's whose parent can't qualify for a plus loan can take out more).
That's $14,150 per year. Let's take one of the highest cost of living states--california. Cal state LA: tuition and mandatory fees: $7,160, books: $1,054.
That's about $6k a year more than you need for tuition and books. Obviously this isn't going to cover all of your living expenses, so you're going to need to work or live with family.
But if you're an independent student, with the larger loan limits, you could get close if you live really cheap.
The disconnect here is that your professors are assigning you work like this because the purpose of a university education is to broaden your horizons, challenge you, and force you to think about _how to think._
this would be fine if it didn't cost as much as a new car and my career did not depend on it. I can broaden my horizons for free at library
It's hilarious to explain you can't be assed to read a novel for a class that is about literary analysis and then also say It scares me as well how little interest my peers have in actually learning.
Part of the idea of courses that aren't direct job skills is that you will have done it and learned from it.
This is nice when you have the time to sit down and enjoy literature at a leasurly pace. It's not nice when it's one of many obligations that comes with its own deadlines and tests.
In fairness, this is the standard university experience and has been for many decades. You either figure out how to balance your time and make the grades or you don’t.
Sure, and making the grade often has nothing to do with getting the job (e.g. just because you have a CS degree doesn't mean you're a shoe-in for that dev job you applied to). But since tests and degrees are simply indicators, not absolute proof, that you're qualified, people fudge tend to things every step of the way; it's turtles all the way down.
> The ratio of internships to qualified students is far better than 1:1200.
To be fair, for a person with several years of industry experience it feels like the ratio of applicants to openings for tech jobs really is some absurdly high number - high enough to where you can be out of experience-appropriate work for years, plural.
I don't know if the overall market can generalize to university internships however, which may be the disconnect.
However, I remember one time in the recent past where I was offered to interview for a position that was designed for recent graduates with no industry experience. They offered this to me knowing I had graduated long ago and already had industry work for a while. My conclusion was that after a whole two months of interviewing candidates, they simply could not find any recent graduates qualified enough for their own recent graduates opening.
I did feel some guilt being offered that position knowing it was supposed to have gone towards someone with far fewer opportunities to get hired than me. I don't know if this is an indication of the state of universities, recent graduates, hiring managers who write up the postings and don't know what they actually want, the job market in general, or some other factor I haven't considered...
Oh there really are thousands of people that apply to each job. But that’s because people who have a hard time finding a job stay in the market longer. Think of it as if there are 1000 permanently unemployed people who will apply for any job opening.
But if you look at unemployment and underemployment rates, it’s clear that the ratio is nowhere near as what it feels like just from looking at the number of people who apply to a job.
We’re in a job market downturn. It is definitely possible to be out of work for years.
But unless you’re in the bottom say 20% of developers that’s not likely to happen.
Even after the dotcom boom tech unemployment only got to 6.5% or so.
> 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.
I Can't Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems
> Oh, goody. I’m a benchmark. Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication. Problem one solved. But guess what else? I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. Some lecturers are also just incompetent with barely any understanding of what they're teaching in the first place - though this probably wouldn't be as big of a problem in better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works
Memories of my degree 20 years ago. We didn't have (many) pre-recorded videos of lectures available to watch whenever we wanted at whatever speed we wanted, the way we do now.
Now there's a good range of lectures given away for free, I'm not sure even the top 10% of lecturers (beyond the best individuals in the world on whichever topic) are adding much value — In theory one could interrupt the lecture to clarify a point, but that's also a thing one can often do alone with the internet.
And that's for the best lecturers. We had some good teachers, but also some bad ones.
The C lectures were fantastic, the practical security sessions were fun (started with ~ "if you've already hacked this WiFi box, please log out so I can show everyone else how to break into it"), etc.
For the bad ones… there was one in my final year where I was using my laptop to record the whole session at 44 kHz (audio only), and the lecturer claimed that motion capture recordings couldn't go for more than a few minutes because that would be "several megabytes" of data. There was another who was giving us an example of formal methods, but they got the proof wrong and didn't notice (and had a voice that meant nobody cared). Another had an impenetrable accent, I might have understood a total of two words in the entire lecture, though I could at least follow the written material projected on the screen.
Same kids as always but so many are displaced today. Most of them shouldn’t be in a university as they aren’t particularly smart, curious, or interested in becoming a serious person at that moment.
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.
> 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.
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's also much easier to pay attention if you don't have to frantically take notes. To focus on what an equation means, instead of focusing on transcribing it correctly, and then maybe trying to understand it later, if there's any time left, before the lecture moves on.
Absolutely true, and writing down 'cheat sheets' of such summaries was one of the most effective ways to learn. But I simply did not have the understanding yet, within 60 seconds of being presented new material, to be able to write a good summary of it. And at the same time also write a non-summary, in the likely case that things would not be clear from the summary alone when reviewing. And do all of this before the lecture moves on to the next thing that needs first understanding, then transcribing, then summarizing.
For some lectures I follow the course in class. For some other lectures I just read the slides on which the lectures are based and go in depth on my own. Some other friends follow all the lectures. Some others just don't follow that much.
I don't know why you provide a one method that should fit everyone, while everyone has a preferred way of studying that isn't necessarily the best approach for other people
Because the lecturing professor assigned a textbook, making both lectures and the textbook relevant to the course.
Also, it's at least three distinct methods! Read before lectures, read after lectures, read on both sides. Dealer's choice. Neglects recorded lectures and the possibilities they open up.
Talking about people's preferences and studying is funny. Most people prefer not to study. Preferences have little to do with good study habits. The above approaches have worked for hundreds of years just fine.
Well, of course if a textbook is required to be read, you read it period. I was talking about different study methods in the bounds of what is allowed to do
Typically, the issue is slides allows the speaker to present stuff much faster than a person can realistically write (unlike writing on a board), so you end up with lossy notes. The coping mechanism for students is therefore by writing notes on the slides. Slides also help you preview the lecture, though few people probably actually do this.
My psych professor twenty years ago gave out the slides with strategic blanks in them, that way you didn't have to write the whole thing down, but you did need to listen at least to the point where you could fill in the missing bits.
It's not me who doesn't give the slides. Some people are just precious about their work. I personally don't think this type of attitude is great for a teaching professional.
What I find though when taking notes from a non-academic conference presentation is that I often don’t know what the most salient points or compressed takeaways are in real-time. I don’t end up with a transcript but I do end up with a lot of discard and I’ll take pics of some slides.
If you understand it that well already, why are you attending a lecture that covers it?
Truly excellent lecturers can often guide some people to that understanding in a note-friendly amount of time, but oh god, most people are not excellent lecturers. The vast majority that I attended were almost literally just reading from the book in class. Book-structured information isn't at all the same as lecture-structured.
Here in italy, in stem university (especially computer science) being given slides is a given.
Some teachers record their lectures as well, although it's not mandatory. For some subjects I prefer following in the class, and for some others imho having the slides and doing on your own is much better than having to follow lectures. It depends. But at least, you have a choice
Edit now that I think about it, everyone's mileage may vary wildly. I think I haven't been studying by taking notes in a lot of time. I'd rather just read the slides and try to understand the whys and whats behind what was explained. Some colleagues of mine would rather take notes or write a condensed version of the course material to better remember it. I guess ymmv a lot
From my experience, if a lecturer doesn't give slides, there are two possible reasons:
1) They are not theirs and want to avoid being caught;
2) They believe they are the only source of truth and need to show the insects, I mean students, their place.
Saw both of them.
And if there are no lecture notes, I am not going to be more engaged with it. Au contrare, I will be franaticaly copying everything from them to my notebook and not listening to the lecture itself.
Yea this was the one part that puzzled me. Why would a professor be protective of their lecture slides? I seem to remember most of my professors being fine with distributing these. Or at least it was never a point of contention.
Yea, this one was weird to me. Most of my professors would automatically send out their slides after class. After all you just… showed them to the whole class. What’s the point of keeping them a secret afterwards?
Same. My professors did this because they wanted you to not be spending your time and energy writing notes during class but instead following the lesson and asking questions.
When I was an undergrad (2008-2012) I don't think I even had any classes that were given as PowerPoint slides. If they had been though, I don't think I would have felt bad asking for them - they definitely could have helped jog my memory! Notes aren't always perfect...
I was in school (2011-2016) and almost all professors had a wiki or moodle where we could find all their slides and documents.
I noticed that the rare few professors who didn't upload their powerpoints, were mostly the ones who would just recite the content of their slides in class (almost) word-for-word.
I don't think I ever took any lecture notes at all in the entirety of my CS education at Carnegie Mellon, long before COVID. Everything the professors taught was in slides that were published online, or in the best cases, full fledged PDF lecture notes that explained everything in detail and were published online.
This makes it significantly easier to pay attention during lectures. Denying your students work that you have already done is ridiculous. Whether or not a student wants your lecture notes is orthogonal to whether they come to lecture.
I’m terrible at learning from powerpoints just by watching/listening so I would write down ppt slides word for word in lectures. I absolutely could never keep up with the lecture pace, the instructors would move on to the next slide too quickly. They were usually great lecturers, it’s just inefficient to spend the extremely precious lecture time waiting for students to copy things down.
I did finally settle on a better solution, because my professors all shared the ppt slides at least day-of for every lecture. So I downloaded the ppt onto my tablet and used a stylus to write my notes to each slide. It worked well for me
Being given slides online and in paper form was a given when I went to university two decades ago, which puts the OP's "kids these days" rant into context[1]. You soon learned which lecturers added value with insights or exposition that went beyond the bullet points...
[1]with one exception, who used an overhead projector, except for the time it failed when she cancelled the lecture because she refused to use the blackboard on the grounds of aversion to chalk dust. A good lecturer tbf, and I think even she supplied us with blank subtitled lecture notes to copy her graphs onto
Some of these observations aren't particularly surprising, but this line really took me out of it:
> 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.
She is teaching courses that involve reading books. In her words: “I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre”. Five or more books plus a textbook might cost $100. (And yes of course all of these are on Gutenberg and Libgen, but the point is that the kids don’t read them either way.)
Setting aside Libgen (never used it, don’t know anything about it), it’s unlikely that any of those authors is available on Gutenberg in a modern, critical translation. Reading primary texts in their publication language was dead or dying even when I was a philosophy major, but still it’s impossible to do close textual analysis without a scholarly translation.
I know some of the early translations of e.g. Nietzche sometimes end up saying the opposite of what might have been intended, which is a downer.
I guess that anyone which, on top of being an English native, can read both French and German, and are confident that they can grasp anything from some of their most sybilin hermeneuticians, is really far from the average student, whatever their nationality.
The linked text is clearly announcing it's focused on the average student, not the top of bottom tiers.
I'm not sure about the opinion that the author implies about Harry Potter, but I'm confident the series is an easier read and still give you plenty of opportunity to discuss about philosophical and literacy topics.
Anyway, that's definitely an interesting reading, I forwarded it to my wife who teach as a physician, something I rarely feel like relevant to do with HN posts.
A considerate professor would allow using an older or multiple editions of the books, and assign appropriate readings or problems for multiple editions. Libgen e-books are a strictly better product anyways: you don't have to carry it around and you can annotate them without the notes being inside the book.
Tuition at similar (second tier state) schools is going to be ~$6000 per semester! It goes up from there.
What's going on that the students have the resources for the tuition but not books at 5-10% of that cost (that's a 4 course load with books costing $100-150 per course)?
Don't know how school funding operates in the US so this is a guess:
Parents cover the fees and give the kids an allowance for the rest; either the kids budget poorly or the allowance fails to really account for just how expensive the first few weeks are with all the books you're expected to buy?
The average parent in the US can't afford an extra $12000 per year in expenses. College students take out loans to pay for their education. I'm not sure what the average debt load is currently, but people I personally know who got away with a "small" student loan debt owed around $30000, and I've known people with >$100k student loan debt just from an undergraduate education.
Parents covering school mostly went away in the 90's outside of the particularly wealthy segments of society. Mostly student loans since then, which people hope to have paid off by the time they retire to avoid having their social security payments garnished. Joking of course; nobody assumes social security will still be there.
Ha I would spend a couple hours in front of the library copy machine at the start of the semester, and then take my stack to the store and get it bound myself.
I considered this for one particularly hard to find book and it turned out it would have not cost much more to just buy the textbook compared to printing it lol
In fairness, as a philosophy major, I realized fairly early on that most of what we read was out of copyright. I suppose if he's assigning stuff that is ABOUT what some philosophers wrote, it makes sense, but forgive me if I prefer just saving money to read Aristotle from Project Gutenberg.
And sure, there is more contemporary philosophy, and it's great he's keeping the books affordable. But if it's anything early 20th century or prior, don't be so surprised people are going to read what's in the public domain instead.
Haha what I remember in those cases was that the main value in having the assigned book was being able to same page during class discussions.
I mean, literally the same page — so if someone says “what did ya’ll think about this quote on p.156” I could actually get to it in time instead of scrambling to find the passage in whatever I printed out from Project Guttenberg.
For this reason my strategy to save book money was usually to get the assigned books from the library and camp out in front of the copy machine for an afternoon.
20 years ago, I would get the book list from the professor and purchase the identical "international editions" of the same books on Ebay, shipped out from Macmillan India or a foreign imprint publisher. They were probably 1/3rd of the US price, but the content was identical.
Often times, professors would allow us to purchase earlier editions of the book for our coursework, which were a fraction of the cost of the most recent edition.
Worst case scenario, I could reserve the book at the school library, but I'd have to move fast as there'd only be a handful of copies available.
For those who want to do that today there is no need to bother with eBay or shipping from abroad. The publishers tried to stop them claiming copyright violation but the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the first sale doctrine applies [1].
Since that ruling many independent booksellers in the US started importing those foreign editions and selling them through online marketplaces such as Abe Books and Biblio.
Here are some examples of the savings. Lets say you are a math student, and your introductory calculus is taught from the first volume of Apostol's Calculus, your multivariable calculus taught from the second volume, and you real and complex analysis class uses Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis.
The US editions of those will set you back around $220 for the first volume of Apostol, around $140 for the second volume, and around $240 for Rudin.
On Abe Books you can get the international editions of the Apostol books from a US seller for $24.39 for volume 1 and $23.40 for volume 2 with free shipping. There are several more US sellers with then in the $30-40 range.
For the Rudin book $22.06 will get it from a US seller on Abe Books with free shipping. There are few more US sellers in the $35-50 range.
Biblio isn't as good on these particular books. They are available at comparable price but only from Indian sellers with shipping from India.
I haven't seen the international edition of Rudin but I have both the US and international editions of both volumes of Apostol and the text is the same. It is the physical form that differs. The US edition is hardback printed on finer paper. The international edition is a paperback printed on rougher paper and the pages are smaller.
[1] Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013)
I did take class out of Tommy I and II and used the international editions. Having taught linear algebra myself since I wouldn’t use it for linear algebra because some of the stuff in there for numerics is outdated.
Yes, this is it. You can usually find some discounted or free way to get most books, but I had classes where you literally submitted homework through the same system you accessed the book through, and it was like $150.
I guess I'm on the other side of this. $30-100 is a reasonable price for books for a college-level course in the United States.
Assuming this https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college is accurate, tuition at the mid-level state university in the article is probably around $10k/year. That's more than it should be, but why would you play $10k/year for classes then not buy the books?
For the overwhelming majority of students, tuition is not paid out of pocket. It's paid with loans. They see it as an investment towards a career which will allow them to pay back those loans. For many, the weight of their debt does not sink in until well after college. Meanwhile, textbooks are an immediate cost with an immediate impact on a student's financial situation.
I attended university in the early 2010s. After my freshman year I stopped buying textbooks for most classes. More than just their cost, I found that most textbooks really were optional. Most professors never even referenced them throughout the course. I figured I could always buy a book later if I found out I needed it, but that never happened. The few books I actually did buy after my freshman year were all mistakes. I have not read any of them and I had no trouble with their associated classes.
It sounds like the professor who wrote this article actually incorporates the course material he assigns. Good for him. But in my experience that is quite rare.
The best was when you could download the book and share a PDF with the class. Fuck the textbook industry, it's extortionate.
I would, however, be thrilled to find a $35 text. The average cost of my upper division textbooks was closer to $200 each. Some courses would assign multiple books.
> More than just their cost, I found that most textbooks really were optional. Most professors never even referenced them throughout the course.
Imho that’s what makes the textbook overpriced: the usefulness in the course. In my academic years i’ve seen some textbook that are actually pleasant to read and that you could actually rely on, alone, to pass the course… and then so many books that where completely useless: either more of a reference than anything else or some poorly written text by the same professor holding the course.
At some point I resorted to ligben first, and then bookstore later and only if the book did deliver some actual value.
> For the overwhelming majority of students, tuition is not paid out of pocket. It's paid with loans. They see it as an investment towards a career which will allow them to pay back those loans. For many, the weight of their debt does not sink in until well after college. Meanwhile, textbooks are an immediate cost with an immediate impact on a student's financial situation.
Textbooks can equally well be paid for with college loans, they aren't restricted to tuition-only.
> Textbooks can equally well be paid for with college loans, they aren't restricted to tuition-only.
Making the financial problem with study costs in the USA even worse, more cash to buy textbooks from credit means higher prices that can be extracted for the books, just like any other good which is mostly paid through easily achievable loans.
Because it is an additional expense and fairly often you don't actually need it. You are paying a lot of money for that one chapter you will maybe have to read and whose content you can likely find elsewhere.
Plus, the idea that everyone should buy it is bonkers. There are or should be libraries in school that costs $10k a year. Or at least, there should be used book from last year or rhat one book 5 friends bought together. All these would be financially reasonable decisions.
Yes, I had the exact same thought. $35 is a lot of money to people who aren't tenured professors or fully employed developers like myself now.
The lack of understanding of economic realities just kinda stinks.
It was a long time ago now, but the biggest reason I ended in a local two-year college instead of a four-year university was I simply couldn't afford the $20 application fees. I only applied to two schools because it was all I could afford.
I live near Big State U. The median student drops that much money on booze over two weeks (or one week if it’s an important holiday like Halloween or Saint Patrick’s day).
What I see is that the declining interest in the life of the mind that was already evident a generation earlier has accelerated, particularly during the COVID years. I see this as the reversion of a historical anomaly. In the postwar era, a number of things converged: the GI Bill allowed a lot of ambitious new blood to enter the university system, competition with the Soviets ensured generous funding, and many the finest brains of a generation of Europeans relocated to the US. This all started to come undone in the late 1960s, when the counterculture made the establishment start to question the value of the academy, the world war 2 GIs finished their educations, and the cream of 1930s Europe died off. Really, it’s surprising how long we’ve been able to sustain a decline since then.
They’ve been sucking up international students from Asia mostly to fill in the gap just like everything else. Let superior countries raise them then bring them over with the lure of big money. It’s all the US has to offer anymore is a chance for the select few to become part of the 1%, oligarchy. 300 million normal people may as well not exist here.
From what I can tell, children of foreign elites are about as serious about education as students born in the US, but they drive luxury cars, live in fancy off campus housing, and find different things to do that aren’t the assigned reading. The number of Lamborghinis in town is all out of proportion to the area’s income.
I believe the prior post is referring to first generation students that receive their primary education in foreign countries.
Like I said in another post, the environment in these primary schools in the United States is just not set up for success. Their standards are low and they allow smart phones and distracting device devices in schools. Not to mention the overt focus on athletics over academics. However, the last point is not the biggest issue as that’s been a part of primary education in high school in the US for a century at least.
Meh. Lazy stereotypes. Imported students can be just as dumb as home grown, US-educated students can be just as smart as foreign, and I think the distribution is about the same everywhere. I think other countries have their own malaise, I’m just not in a good a position to understand the causes.
At least they have physical textbooks. Many classes now only provide links to a PDF document and the students still pay $100-$200 for the privilege. Plus, you can’t recover a portion of the cost of the book by reselling it nor can students save money by buying used books.
I disagree that K through 12 is not part of the problem though. The presence of phones in schools, especially smart phones, has definitely had an impact on the learning skills of students. In the old days, if you will, people had to pass physical pieces of paper around in class secretly to communicate, which was riskier and usually a one or two time event. Smart phones are a Pandora’s box of distractions. I also blame schools for lowering their standards to accommodate the lower standards of the students entering their schools. The schools are simply passing these students down the down the river of eventual disappointment. There should be remedial courses and schools should dismiss students that are not willing or able to pass these courses in order to have the ability to perform at an acceptable level.
Taking their money and providing a degree when they haven’t actually learned the material is borderline fraud.
Pfft one of my text books isn’t even a PDF— it’s a proprietary app that requires internet access and is 350mb. Doesn’t allow copy and paste either of course. And I’m sure I’ll have to pay another $60 for the license again next semester for the second part of the class.
THAT is gross. At least when books were expensive, you knew you could recoup some of that cost the following year selling them back. It also meant you could buy them cheaper used. Assuming you didn't have a professor assigning their own texts and insisting you got the latest edition...
At my university, every teacher published a PDF with the material on their website. In other to pass the exam, I was expected to familiarize myself with the PDF. Obviously, the PDF could be very long and complicated, but that's beside the point. I don't understand why this system is so controversial.
> 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.
Yeah well, 40 years ago that is what my textbooks cost. I was surprised by that quote that they were so inexpensive.
It's interesting, in my country if a classmate bought a textbook I would assume they bought the one because they love the subject and are going to keep using it after college. I don't think I ever actually saw someone buy a textbook.
Pearson make great money charging obscene amounts for books. In many subjects they'll have some online component so if you thought you could get away with using a second hand copy of last year's edition they'll make you have to pay for the online access section separately regardless.
Yes. Most textbooks retail in the ~$200 range. I remember that I had one class in college that had such a long list of recommended textbooks (on top of two required texts) that buying all the course materials would cost $3000 retail, and this was 10 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.
It's a Western problem. In China students work very hard because they had to beat a tough competion to even be able to attend the University. And they know that finishing the University with good grades will mean a difference between a good life and a hard one. In South Korea it's the same.
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'm going to say something really out of pocket about the average American student, so forgive me.
Americans aren't used to having to compete. When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.
I think a large part of it is an entitlement issue that's pretty common in our culture. But there are also cultural undercurrents from resentful Americans who failed to get ahead in life that actively denigrate the concept of education and the educated.
Maybe I’m biased because I grew up in a family where my dad at one point was a musician and my siblings and I all pursued competitive careers at one point in our lives (academia, acting, business, music, sports), but I don’t know if Americans in general are averse to competition. In fact, I’d say Americans love competition. Americans generally love sports, for example.
I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”
That’s funny, since I think your sports leagues are the best example of fake competitiveness. Every major sports operates a closed league.
The greatest basketball talent ever from my country is playing for a team that’s tanking (see? it even has a word), which for those who don’t know is the act of purposefully losing games to be able to get better draft picks. Because of a closed league, the players and staff are not really punished for bad performance.
The reason for this (besides the obvious financial reasons) is the idea of losing completely. In football leagues around thw world, historical giants have faded away to irrelevancy due to bad performances year after year or mismanagement (for which there are rules for to have fewer incidents).
Fundamentally though the sports system is more enertainment than pure competition.
>When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.
I you even know how often I've heard students complain about "having my A taken away from me". It's insane, but it's also what to expect from a society just like you described who has been told that the point of school is to get good grades.
Now, a lot of students here are discovering that minmaxing to get a high GPA in a degree like compsci lands them firmly in jobless land if they failed to use those 4 years in an environment of learning to actually learn things. Doesn't even have to be from courses, things like student groups and competitions, research opportunities, etc.
Employers don't really want people whose sole interest is to do nothing and be rewarded for it.
That difference in Asian societies as against Western ones doesn't come from "higher standards" or whatever; it comes from a much more mundane reason: not doing good in school here literally has immediate far-reaching consequences because everything is scarce and up for brutal competition.
In the West kids can randomly decide to drop entire years after high school, or even skip college altogether - because it's (apparently) easy to not be immediately destitute without a good job. In India and China children grow up witnessing how much of a divide that makes, and how thin the line seperating their fates from "respectable" to brutal poverty is. No kid growing in such an environment will take school lightly.
I wonder if, as inequality increases and the social safety net disappears in the USA, this will change. My parents told me “do what you love, as long as you work hard you’ll succeed and be fine.” I did what I loved (the arts), worked my ass off and succeeded, and wasn’t fine. Thank god I learned to code in the 20-teens, when competition was lower.
I most certainly will transmitting a different set of values to my kids. Not going to go full straight A’s psychopath because I’ve seen what that’s done to some peers, but unless I win the lottery my kids will not be being told to just “do what they love” (unless they happen to love applied math lol)
The only way to keep standards high is to cease using degrees solely as class indicators and stop requiring a bachelor's degree for the overwhelming majority of white collar jobs (that we all know don't need the specific knowledge from the degree or else the required degree would be more specific, and that we also know the degree doesn't indicate work ethic necessarily, go look at the people working much harder precisely because they don't have a degree, if anything the degree serves as a license to slack off like the upper class so).
Otherwise the potential downside of not graduating with at least a bachelor's degree is so devastating that the population (who don't want to be perpetually responsible for their adult children that have been made unemployable in any decent capacity for no reason other than to make certain email job people feel important) will accept nothing less than a pass rate approaching ever closer to 100%.
If you want to make education rigorous, you have to address that problem and then also try to address the K-12 education system that faces a similar but more extreme version of the same issue (because not being able to properly read and write are genuinely bad indicators for the majority of white collar jobs, and failing to graduate high school tends to indicate fundamental issues in that respect moreso than failing to graduate with a bachelor's, which usually just indicates immaturity / lack of money / boredom / a million other things that don't imply missing fundamental skills).
>In China students work very hard because they had to beat a tough competion to even be able to attend the University
This is an unfair comparison. The equivalent of those chinese students do work as hard in America - they just wouldn't be found at OP's school, there would be in a Tier 1 school.
Hint: in China, university admissions is based in large part on students's performance on the 高考, a national entrance exam, taken at the end of high school.
My experience with Chinese universities is they work so hard to pass the gaokao to get in then relax through university. This is common throughout all of east Asia. Maybe at top universities it’s different.
Perhaps $100 per course per semester is better spent elsewhere, and maybe walking out of a lecture on Dostoevsky is the correct thing for a human to do.
Are students walking out of brain surgery classes because of phones?
I am definitely interested in how things look for STEM majors on average, and whether they've seen a similar decline. Although the article has a quote from a math professor, and that's certainly not a degree you get into without some level of dedication.
"This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? 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."
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.
I speculate that not a few of them are paying some attention to what brings power and influence in the world, and see that the most powerful man in the world is the opposite of what college would form them into if given the chance.
It’s hard to believe in the system we’ve got going.
As with so many modern debates, it feels like people quickly choose a side and then work backward—rationalizing every argument from that perspective without much critical thought beyond maybe acknowledging some surface-level issues (yes, phones exist and people are probably addicted to them). The author falls into this trap too!
Spending $100 on a single course material can be a real burden for college students taking multiple classes per term. Sharing lecture slides was a basic expectation decades ago. Students were cheating long before ChatGPT: The response like the one about the UGM could’ve just as easily been lifted from SparkNotes.
On the other hand: Maybe educational outcomes really are declining, but no one wants to pump the brakes because failing students might mean less funding. Maybe Socrates actually was noticing something real about generational decline—attitudes and norms do shift between generations; they’re not locked on some linear path. Maybe we need to just revisit the concept of university as vocational school in general.
We’re so preoccupied with proving we’re right that we lose the ability to honestly evaluate which changes deserve serious scrutiny and which ones are just part of the usual generational churn aside from the obviously massive ones (like phones). One side is wrong and stupid about all facets, my side is correct.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadAt the college level, rankings also rely heavily on 4- and 6-year graduation rates. Administrators notice that and put pressure on processors not to fail students.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1jmsp7n/my_6th_gr...
Careful about bogus “ancient” quotations on this topic, though., the article warns.
Plus, we have hard data about reduced attention spans so this is not even about moral panic.
Maybe there's a bit of complaining from old coots throughout the ages, but that doesn't mean there are never any structural problems ever. Maybe there are real problems today. And maybe there were real problems in Socrates' time too. Merely posting this without any thought is just dismissive nonsense.
Certainly for the situation today, there are huge changes to how kids are raised. Maybe that has zero effect. Or maybe it does. Either way, whatever Socrates did or didn't say has absolutely no bearing on it.
On this paticular topic, my take is that as technology has advanced, we have gone from the "technology is harmless" side to the "technology is harmful" side sharply. Books and whatnot are great. TV, ehhh. Video games, mobile phones, social media, LLMs: dangerous, or more optimistically, very tricky to get right. I think it's not strange that these three categories I've laid out occupy vastly distinct time spans. It's exactly the power of a technology that ties into both its development and its impact. I certainly don't get similar experiences from reading a book and watching short form video.
If meth became widely used, and someone noted the effect this had on how children are behaving, would we also just quote Socrates at them as 'proof' that nothing has changed, because people have been complaining since forever?
For all we know, his quote refers to these political conflicts where he preferred hierarchy and young preferred democracy.
I mean the way it's worded just makes you want to strike back at contemptuous kids instead of digging down deeper as to why they might behave this way.
Not that you can blame them, honestly, looking at the state of the world despite all wisdom and knowledge being more accessible to everyone than it has ever been...
> Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
what a world we live in...
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".
The author has been a professor and teaching for over 30 years. Presumably he would not be writing this if the type and scale of the problem hadn't changed in that time.
Edit: I should mention I graduated twenty years ago.
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.
I think you chose well
I still don't believe that it's worth it, with the exclusion from their social circle causing a bigger health issue than social media, but I get it.
I believe you underestimate the power of being "in". Even if the friends wouldn't be "true", it is still extremely valuable socially. That is, speaking as someone who, due to unrelated reasons, was prevented from fitting in fully. It may not hold much water from a stranger on the internet, but i would've given anything to be able to fit in more at that time. I believe it has set me back socially 3-5 years, with lasting consequences which I may never truly heal.
> Second, kids need to learn that social acceptance doesn't mean they have to do everything their friends are doing
Sure, but they won't learn that when you prevent them from participating activities with their friends. This isn't them deciding that they don't want to participate in something.
> Third, the long-term benefits of reducing their exposure to social media are outweighed by the short-term benefits of the instant gratification and shared experience of social media.
Attention spans can be fixed.
And besides, you shouldn't control any child like that. You might say "they will thank me in the future". But they never will. And the damage done by controlling their life like that is more lasting. Their relationship with authority, with you, with their own autonomy will be forever changed. (Speaking as figurative you, I don't mean to imply you specifically) This teaches them "You don't have a right to own things the authority doesn't want you to own" (Or it teaches them how to lie and hide contraband.)
Every parent exercises some form of control over their child. (Cookie before dinner? No, sorry.) Children need to learn boundaries and it's up to the parents to set those boundaries. It's basic parenting, and isn't as nefarious as you're making it out to be.
> You might say "they will thank me in the future". But they never will.
In my experience this is untrue. I grew up when TV was the primary medium of household entertainment, and yet I was the sole child in my class, and probably my whole school, to not have at TV at home (a deliberate choice on my parents' part). Now that I'm grown up, I'm thankful for it.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-06/mobile-phone-ban-canb...
It's surprising that this isn't done everywhere.
Note, kids from year 4 (9 years old) in many parts of Australia do have a Chromebook.
It's the apps, which overcharge everyone's (not just kids!) brains, by algorithmically "mAxImiZinG eNgaGeMent"
It's time to ban them all. Okay that's a bit much. Ban all algorithmic feeds, all apps must adhere to strictly chronological feed of the strictly subscribed authors.
There, the phone addiction crisis solved.
I am part of the generation that grew up with MMORPG's from early childhood (I was about 9 years old when I made my first RuneScape account), but approaching 30, I don't game at all anymore for the exact same reasons I don't touch cannabis anymore. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, it's all the same thing for teenagers. At a neurological level, these platforms are as highly addicting and neural-network-altering as actual psychoactive pharmaceuticals, legal or otherwise.
Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.
It's the apps, which corrode everyone's attention span. And unlike weed, I doubt there will be "algorithmic feed" dealers, because no one actually wants an algorithmic feed.
None of this exploration ever required or involved Facebook or other social media platform or highly immersive video game, save YouTube.
And to be clear, I'm no proponent of the state simply passing universal bans, or infringing upon privacy of adults with facial recognition requirements for using social media, this is a responsibility of parents, many of whom I fear themselves haven't been adequately warned about how addicting these platforms are.
I don't think DARE-style assemblies for both students and parents would be the worst idea to warn both groups about the risks of these platforms, provided they were done honestly, rather than being filled with hyperbole. It doesn't infringe upon anyone's rights, and wouldn't really "cost" anything, but would help educate those who might lack the awareness on the subject.
Yeah that's fair. Probably can't hurt anything with that. But it's hard to get the actual danger across.
> None of this exploration ever required or involved Facebook or other social media platform or highly immersive video game, save YouTube.
That's why I am gunning to limit these kind of platforms, specifically.
> It doesn't infringe upon anyone's rights, and wouldn't really "cost" anything,
Well it depends. If these assemblies worked, they would "cost" the platforms potential engagement and potential revenue. Which is kind of a pointless distinction, I just thought it's interesting
I agree with you. I would consider social media and games addictive. It's just that the SMS app on my phone isn't addictive. Telegram app, the Photo app also isn't.
> Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.
Agreed. But my paleolithic emotions aren't addicted to the radio waves of my phone, but to the TikTok app specifically.
I would also ban them globally, not just for kids but like I'm sure that would be a whole 'nother discussion.
And they doomed a generation in the process
But seriously agreed, that's why I propose what I propose - when it's banned no-one can do it and no one can eat your lunch (*)
(*) Subject to exceptions, as the War on Drugs can attest, but I think it would work in this instance
I vaguely recall too students back in the era where our biggest distraction was MSN messenger and our university forums. They kept both off until late at night.
We're letting people experience the downsides of the attention economy when it's almost (if not entirely) too late to avoid the negatives.
Because social media is precisely in the short term benefit x long term risk that human brains are bad at conceptualizing. Same reasons for why we mandate belts in cars.
Hardly anyone in the "west" gets pulled over by police for seat belt checks (unlike say, India, China), yet nearly everyone still wears them, because they understand if they don't, they'll probably become a stain on the asphalt. I imagine if tomorrow, a law passed that seat belts no longer had to be worn, most people would still use them. Perhaps the regulation and enforcement are only needed initially when not everyone is educated on the long term risks.
I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV. Cutting back to chronological feeds might improve some things but I don't think that's the root of the issue.
I would suggest the primary difference between then and now is accessibility. As a kid, my screen time was limited not just by my parents indulgence but the social pressure from using a shared device. Smart phones let you carry your personal distraction with you.
I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.
Yeah that's fair.
> I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.
Well to their friends in other classes ("Wanna go out after 3pm lesson").
Additionally, and socially, smart phones, if banned, would be instantly seen as a status symbol. And it would also accelerate strong anti-autority sentimentality. The kids won't understand it, hell adults wouldn't. So it's also the case that you can't really ban them without really adverse social effects.
Probably something we should be encouraging in our youth.
To quote a great man, we live in society. And it's better to work within a system and get to know it rather than it is to just hate it. And if the first experience of a large portion of youth is system beating them down, you can see how that's gonna grow a strong "tear it all down" mentality.
My family didn't have a TV growing up. (This was way before the Internet, when TV was king and HBO and cable were a status symbol.) Me and my siblings tried every argument in the book to get them to buy one, to no avail. Out of the loop on TV pop culture? Boo-hoo. Peers make fun of you for not having a TV? Too bad, so sad. The result was that I participated in more activities that engaged my body and brain. Aside from being bad at TV pop culture trivia from those decades, I turned out just fine.
At the end of they day, parents need to set the standards that they want their children to live by, and stick with them. Even today, a phone is a luxury that a kid doesn't really need, and will likely contribute to low attention span and cause them all manner of anxiety. Don't take my word for it; many studies will back me up.
I’d actually prefer HN and Reddit to be just chronological (or “newest comment” on the above-thread level), like traditional forums.
Instead, tax ad impressions per day per user on a sliding scale that makes it quickly unprofitable to display more than a handful of ads and use the money to fund media literacy classes in schools. Restrict the number and types of advertising that can be shown to children and adolescents, like forbidding animated ads.
Why is this obvious? Unless you’re talking CS = Programming a specific language, I think it’d be better for the K-12 version of CS to be completely analog save for maybe a “lab” for students in later years of high school.
Bulking up on math in HS is smart. I took AP Calculus and then went to community college to take more calculus.
Yeah, I do think that kids would get a ton out of hands-on analog classes where they learn logic, problem solving, etc.
Exams we would have to write code, or predict the results of code or spot bugs
My teacher was a bit of a dick and would sometimes intentionally leave out a brace. Therefore “does not compile” was sometimes a valid answer :-)
In my case (graduating high school in 2016), I wasn't allowed to watch TV, listen to the radio, play video games, or use the computer at all until I left for college. And especially as an adolescent, those were basically the cornerstone of all conversations between my peers. I never knew what anyone was talking about, and could never really bond with anyone over really anything but sports. And when smart phones became a popular thing in my age group, again I had no access to that or any of the media that it led to.
I will say though, as alienating as it was at the time, I don't particularly regret it because most of what I missed probably wasn't super important, and I think I gained an accurately cynical view on the content media machine as a whole. But I absolute rue the massive difficulties I had building social connections because of it that continue to this day.
I make sure that my daughter (6) sees me writing in my notebook, reading, making things etc. More often than not, she then wants to join in.
I will hold out giving her a smartphone as long as possible, and up until she has one, I will try and show her all the other fun things.
Of course, this kind of thing is easy to do wrong. Programs like D.A.R.E. and THRIVE tried going the way of fear tactics which seems to really not work well. We need to have an open and honest discussion about "yes, this is fun. But it DOES have a bad side" instead.
The last sticking point there is that it assumes people will be rational and come to the conclusion of using with moderation. Hopefully people can be rational... Otherwise I think there's no hope for us in solving the brainrot epidemic.
Is what I was responding to in the grandparent of your comment
From my own experience and that of fellow parents that I talked to, explanations will be dismissed outright by the all-knowing teenagers, and any attempt to have a rational conversation on the topic will fail. Just like any addict, kids will deny that they are addicted. I had to act once the smartphone addiction reached a disaster level. What worked the best for me was "no you cannot bring your phone to school or use it before the homework is done, that's my decision and I don't have to provide you with any explanation." Did this generate some resentment and a few tantrums? You bet, but I got the result I wanted, peace of mind and homework done on time. I disagree with you.
They may be 'forbidden fruit', but does that means that it would lead to more use of them?
Do you think people drank more in 2020 or 1920 during prohibition?
Do you think people smoked more weed in 2025 or, say, 1985 when it was less legal?
Do you think there is more gambling in 2025, or in 1925 when the laws banning it were still fresh?
I think you'll reach the conclusion that outright banning does in fact reduce the usage of the vice.
I think it should be fine to outright ban them in certain contexts, like classroom learning; just as they are outright banned (usually) in theaters or playhouses or places of worship.
And to cite your example, even in the most liberal jurisdictions I think it's not acceptable for students to take drugs in the classroom. Phones are basically the same thing.
How many 10 years old smoke weed, have sex, and drink alcohol ?
10 years old spending hours per days on their phone on the other hand...
1) Parents in the US are overworked, underpaid and (increasingly) unable to participate in the lives of their children. It should come as zero surprise then that phones are used as a way to get kids out of their hair. If you don't fix this problem then banning phones entirely won't matter, because parents will yell, scream and quite literally assault your schools for taking away phones from their kids.
2) Our K-12 educational system is broken. Kids are graduating with lower literacy rates than ever. College is functioning less as higher education and more like remedial programs, having to teach basic topics that should've been covered as part of the core curriculum.
3) Teachers are also underpaid, overworked and having to deal with the deficiencies in parenting as well as the advent of AI making cheating significantly easier and harder to detect.
These three factors all compound to create a whole generation that we're effectively failing. And given the attacks/teardown of college as an institution, I fear we're going to have our own version of the 'lost generation' until people get angry enough to fix it or our business capabilities collapse.
I can only speak anecdotally. Way before smartphones were invented, I had enforced limits on computer time to 1-2 hours a day via time tracking software. All this did was breed resentment between me and my parents that led to conflict and punishment. As soon as I got to college I was back to being on my computer all night nearly every day, relieved that I didn't have to put up with them anymore.
The technology restriction wasn't the beginning and end of my mentality all through college. The true cause was how I was raised and my relationship with my parents. They were the only real bullies I've ever had.
People will always attack apps, algorithms and corporations since they're easy to feel powerless about. But if a developing person is given good enough reason to doomscroll so that they able to forget the pain that was imbued in them from an early age, then 1) the outcome in the article results, 2) a major underlying factor in the analysis of why we're failing young people will be missed, and people will assume it's solely the fault of addictive "algorithms" and capitalism, and 3) it's unlikely that people are going to open up about stressors as personal as childhood trauma (a cause) as opposed to behavioral addictions like doomscrolling (a symptom), so the focus will be on attacking and regulating the symptoms, and this cycle of trauma will only exacerbate and repeat itself.
A certain level of trauma can steal decades away from developing persons and set them up for failure, with or without smartphones, and smartphones only make their problems worse. Not to mention, past a certain age people start to blame you for your own failings, even though many of them have roots in actions taken against you that were not your fault, and this only contributes to feelings of misery and hopelessness. Knowing this firsthand, it's no wonder so many people find little else interesting than doomscrolling all day - myself included.
You can regulate apps and restrict smartphones, but I have no idea how to fix bad parenting/emotional trauma at scale. What goes on in families is private by its nature, emotional abuse is legitimized if you never lay a hand on the child and some arbitrary standard of defiance is crossed, and intergenerational trauma can have completely arbitrary causes going back decades, which end up transmitted as meaningless stressors to a victim trapped in an endless search of anything at all to hold close to them...
Love this phrase. What might happen is that the next generation, upon seeing this opportunity, will do the opposite of their elders and highly value focus, and more readily dismiss quick gains.
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.
Rubbish in, rubbish out. Just increasing entropy, a day at a time..
The social contract of "do well in school and you'll get a good job that allows you to afford live a decent life" is on increasingly shaky grounds thanks to things like the property Ponzi scheme reaching even higher levels of pressure, hiring in knowledge work positions being broken, and understandable uncertainty around how AI is going to reshape many positions.
If they're going to be fucked either way, can we blame them for not caring and instead focusing on the very little things that still bring them happiness?
All that matters in paper.
(I'm not condoning it, in opposite - but that's a common line of thought)
probably because they're bored. Giving a live lecture is the most disdainful form of teaching, using the slowest and most unbalanced way of passing info.
Video your lecture so that the students can watch it at 1.5x speed and do exercises during the class time so that the students are engaged if they decide to show up (which they are more likely to do if they don't have to sit through your live presentation at 1.0x speed).
They'll adjust.
He was surprised nobody wanted to attend his lectures.
EDIT: fixed a lot of typos...
The students won't watch the recorded videos or do the readings. That's why we have to lecture live.
Then even if we get great students that will do the readings and watch the videos so we can do a flipped classroom; the students will complain that they had to teach themselves and tank the student evaluation scores compared to the lecture version.
Students expect lectures and dislike more active forms of learning even if they learn more. This is not their fault as it's what they've been trained to expect from K-12.
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.
Definitely not important, it mainly reflects on how are teachers choosing to disseminate their knowledge.
But that was pre-internet.
I must say, that was a very structured, well laid out way to learn. I mean that as opposed to Googling for each subtopic, reading dozens of webpages on that single subtopic, hoping to find accurate info.
For undergrad, I would always read the 'assigned material' (essays, literature, etc.) but only recall opening one or two textbooks.
This was 18 years at a massive public university, which by design drew students from all backgrounds.
I'm inherently skeptical of "kids these days" arguments, but it really seems like the smartphones and the way we approached the pandemic was incredibly destructive.
More reason why college degrees are worthless signals.
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.
> 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
If you think of education as trying to lead people into being whole humans, seems like literature and philosophy (properly taught) are some of most critical subjects.
You’re a student ostensibly studying computer science at University. Taking a few hours a week to stop a smell the roses has zero chance of being the thing that pushes you into homelessness.
When you start working the anxiety won’t go away. You’ll always have the next thing to worry about. What if I lose this job—I only have 6 months of savings. Then you get married and it becomes—if I lose my job my spouse will divorce me. You have a kid and it becomes “Sorry honey I have to work late. Dinner with the family isn’t a priority when the kids could literally become homeless if I lose my job and we can’t afford good schools.”
You can’t fix the anxiety by accomplishing the next goal. It’s never going to be enough. You have to learn to live with some uncertainty or you’ll end up miserable.
Also from a more practical perspective, there are advantages to being a more well rounded person. The best programmer is rarely the highest paid. Soft skills are at least as important. Being a well rounded human is a big part of those soft skills.
I’m not saying you necessarily need to be well versed in literary fiction. But having a wide breadth of knowledge comes in handy.
There is definitely a difference in quality of life due to less worrying once you or your network have sufficient assets and passive income such that short term volatility does not mean you or your kids go hungry/shelter-less.
> better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works
The author gives their background in the second paragraph of the article (did you read it?): "I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name"
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs.
a) It appears that no one is reading the docs, as the author discussed at length (did you read it?)
b) A lecture is always faster than reading. A lecture is cliff notes. A lecture is the person who knows more than you teaching you the most important bits of the docs.
> it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it
You stated that the lecture was too slow so you just read the docs. Here you state that there's not enough time and benefit to reading. Which is it?
> It scares me as well how little interest my peers have in actually learning
Do you see that you're demonstrating that same disinterest? Reading isn't worth your time. Lectures are too slow and the professors are dumb anyway. Etc.
> 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
This implies that there is some educational medium by which you are so deeply focused and involved in, that the author is unaware of, pointed directly at CV building and internship/job getting, that you simply don't have time for the lectures or books that the author's class covers. Is that correct? What is it? How much time are you spending on an average day CV building?
> can I really afford to waste my time like this?
Sweet summer child. You are a college student. You have all the time in the world.
Your post here, if anything, corroborates the author's perspective.
The average college student has almost a month off in December, nearly 3 months off in the summer, a week off for thanksgiving, a week off for spring break, and almost nothing to do for the first 2 weeks of each semester.
That’s nearly 6 months of nothing but free time.
People are just remembering how stressful it gets at exam time and near the end of the semester when projects are so and forgetting how much free time they had during the rest of the year.
> I'm a tenured philosophy professor with an Ivy League PhD.
This reads as though the goal of reading is to bolster your career opportunities as a developer? If it's not connected to your career then it shouldn't be viewed that way, it should be viewed as a kind of leisure and the challenges/rewards involved should be compared to the alternatives there (i.e. is the investment in time of being able to understand more complex novels returning a level of personal fulfilment that makes it potentially a more rewarding focus than some more immediately gratifying leisure activity)
It may still be of very low value but viewing the prospect specifically as being damaging to your career opportunities seems like an incorrect perspective to be starting from.
I think POVs in forums are often much more about framing a thing to justify your beliefs than actually hitting at your own personal implicit values (it's plausible the poster believes leisure is a waste of time and lives by that belief but I doubt it) so I wanted to stick with the original POV approach to highlight the ways it seemed incorrect.
Now that graduation is inching closer with no financial backing, it's just not feasible to spend time on anything other than maximizing employability
Live below your means, save enough money so that a year of unemployment won’t kill you, try to work on interesting problems, try to stay in the top quartile for output (You can definitely do this without staying past 5. At most companies you can do this working something closer to 9-1 if you really focus during that time), don’t be a dick, and don’t worry about the rest.
The disconnect here is that your professors are assigning you work like this because the purpose of a university education is to broaden your horizons, challenge you, and force you to think about _how to think._
The fact that you're treating it like trade school is your problem, not the university's.
> I distinctly remember being penalized for any insight that didn't fit marking criteria back in high school english lit.
Good for you. High school writing has nothing to do with university-level papers.
> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. Some lecturers are also just incompetent with barely any understanding of what they're teaching in the first place...
Your issue, again, is that you're arrogantly assuming you don't have anything to learn from things you personally haven't prioritized. A major role of a university education is to beat that idea out of you by showing you how wrong you are. Pity it isn't sticking.
> ...though this probably wouldn't be as big of a problem in better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works
What the actual fuck, dude? Ivy League? Right in the second paragraph: "I teach at a regional public university in the US."
I went into this article kind of annoyed at the stereotyping of "these kids today," but way to go reinforcing the article's points. Damn.
When (for many people) going to college almost necessarily means accruing 5-figure to 6-figure debt at the infancy of their careers, they sure as shit better have some sort of marketable skill to justify and remedy that debt coming out of it.
I understand the sentiment of higher education being useful for broadening one's horizons, challenging you, teaching you how to think etc; but you should be arguing in the _positive_ for these things to be available to everyone without a paywall.
College is financially attainable for just about anyone.
> The Trump administration has gotten rid of applications for income-driven repayment plans from the federal aid website.
The change occurs as the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked income-driven repayment plans in its February ruling. That means former President Joe Biden's SAVE plans and PSLF options are no longer available.
“ Today, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) reopened the online income-driven repayment (IDR) plan and loan consolidation applications for borrowers. The application was temporarily paused to comply with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals injunction issued last month, which directed the Department to cease implementation of the Biden Administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan and parts of other IDR plans. Because the online application incorporated provisions subject to the injunction, it was necessary to revise the form, making it unavailable to borrowers in the interim. Paper loan consolidation applications were available to borrowers during that time.”
http://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-...
So a 10% hit to your income for at least 20 years isn't significant? What percentage of someone's student debt works under income based repayment?
> If you never make more than 1.5x the poverty level, you’ll never pay back a dime.
So... your suggestion is to live just above poverty so you won't have to pay student loans?
> Federal loans are enough to pay for a state school (especially if you do your general education at a community college)
Sure, there exists ways to go about getting a degree which doesn't _have_ to have a massive financial burden for decades, but what percentage of degree holders (Or, those who have student loans) took this path? Is this a pragmatically fair expectation for 17/18 year olds to make?
How do you resolve the "while the total average balance (including private loan debt) may be as high as $41,618"[0]
[0]: https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics#:~:te...
It's not a 10% hit to your income. It's 10% of your income over 1.5x the poverty limit. And it's capped at whatever the payments would be under a 10 year repayment plan.
And it's not at least 20 years, it's at most 20 years. If you make more $80k or so you'll pay less under the standard 10 year plan, so you'll pay that. Which for $40k in deb is something like $450 a month (about 6.75% of your income).
>So... your suggestion is to live just above poverty so you won't have to pay student loans?
That's clearly what I said...of course it's not. The point is that worst case scenario you make under 1.5x the poverty limit you make nothing. If you make a little more than that you pay a 10% tax on the money over that (up to about $60k then it goes down).
>Sure, there exists ways to go about getting a degree which doesn't _have_ to have a massive financial burden for decades, but what percentage of degree holders (Or, those who have student loans) took this path? Is this a pragmatically fair expectation for 17/18 year olds to make?
In 2020 around 6% of students took out private student loans. And private student loans represent only around 7% of all student loan debt, so most of them don't have a massive financial burden because they qualify for income based repayment.
>How do you resolve the "while the total average balance (including private loan debt) may be as high as $41,618"[0]
The vast majority of that is federal, which qualifies for IBR, so isn't a massive burden. Don't take out private loans unless you're going to an Ivy League school, or med school.
The utility of a degree, from what I've seen, _does_ end up being better than the accrued debt on average, but the distribution of these cases (I simply imagine) leaves enough people on the margin to be harmful.
My point is that whether they need a marketable skill or not has very little to do with student loans. Provided they go to a state school.
If you borrow $40k to go to a state school, the most you’re going to pay is something like $450 a month for 10 years. Any degree no matter how vocationally useless will allow you to make more than $450 a month extra than you otherwise would have.
There are of course cases where this doesn’t hold, but you’d almost have to try for it not to be worth it. The program is good enough that I think we’ve mostly reached the point of diminishing returns, and there are other things we could spend additional money on with higher ROIs.
That's $14,150 per year. Let's take one of the highest cost of living states--california. Cal state LA: tuition and mandatory fees: $7,160, books: $1,054.
That's about $6k a year more than you need for tuition and books. Obviously this isn't going to cover all of your living expenses, so you're going to need to work or live with family.
But if you're an independent student, with the larger loan limits, you could get close if you live really cheap.
this would be fine if it didn't cost as much as a new car and my career did not depend on it. I can broaden my horizons for free at library
Part of the idea of courses that aren't direct job skills is that you will have done it and learned from it.
The ratio of internships to qualified students is far better than 1:1200. You don’t need to be in the top tenth of a percent to get an internship.
Worst case scenario you don’t get the internship you want and it takes you an extra year or 2 to get the job you wanted.
Take some time to enjoy your youth without worrying about min maxing everything. You’re never going to have fewer responsibilities than you do now.
>slower than if we just read the docs
Don’t take classes where the content of lectures can be replaced by reading the docs. Take theoretical classes. Learn the practical stuff on your own.
Also seek out the experts. Ask questions. Spend time with them. Unless you do to grad school, you’ll never have this kind of access to experts again.
To be fair, for a person with several years of industry experience it feels like the ratio of applicants to openings for tech jobs really is some absurdly high number - high enough to where you can be out of experience-appropriate work for years, plural.
I don't know if the overall market can generalize to university internships however, which may be the disconnect.
However, I remember one time in the recent past where I was offered to interview for a position that was designed for recent graduates with no industry experience. They offered this to me knowing I had graduated long ago and already had industry work for a while. My conclusion was that after a whole two months of interviewing candidates, they simply could not find any recent graduates qualified enough for their own recent graduates opening.
I did feel some guilt being offered that position knowing it was supposed to have gone towards someone with far fewer opportunities to get hired than me. I don't know if this is an indication of the state of universities, recent graduates, hiring managers who write up the postings and don't know what they actually want, the job market in general, or some other factor I haven't considered...
But if you look at unemployment and underemployment rates, it’s clear that the ratio is nowhere near as what it feels like just from looking at the number of people who apply to a job.
We’re in a job market downturn. It is definitely possible to be out of work for years.
But unless you’re in the bottom say 20% of developers that’s not likely to happen.
Even after the dotcom boom tech unemployment only got to 6.5% or so.
I Can't Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems
> Oh, goody. I’m a benchmark. Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication. Problem one solved. But guess what else? I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19783650
Memories of my degree 20 years ago. We didn't have (many) pre-recorded videos of lectures available to watch whenever we wanted at whatever speed we wanted, the way we do now.
Now there's a good range of lectures given away for free, I'm not sure even the top 10% of lecturers (beyond the best individuals in the world on whichever topic) are adding much value — In theory one could interrupt the lecture to clarify a point, but that's also a thing one can often do alone with the internet.
And that's for the best lecturers. We had some good teachers, but also some bad ones.
The C lectures were fantastic, the practical security sessions were fun (started with ~ "if you've already hacked this WiFi box, please log out so I can show everyone else how to break into it"), etc.
For the bad ones… there was one in my final year where I was using my laptop to record the whole session at 44 kHz (audio only), and the lecturer claimed that motion capture recordings couldn't go for more than a few minutes because that would be "several megabytes" of data. There was another who was giving us an example of formal methods, but they got the proof wrong and didn't notice (and had a voice that meant nobody cared). Another had an impenetrable accent, I might have understood a total of two words in the entire lecture, though I could at least follow the written material projected on the screen.
You must be going to the easiest school ever.
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/excuse-me-but-why-are...
It isn't a waste of time, I promise.
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.
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's called studying.
I don't know why you provide a one method that should fit everyone, while everyone has a preferred way of studying that isn't necessarily the best approach for other people
Also, it's at least three distinct methods! Read before lectures, read after lectures, read on both sides. Dealer's choice. Neglects recorded lectures and the possibilities they open up.
Talking about people's preferences and studying is funny. Most people prefer not to study. Preferences have little to do with good study habits. The above approaches have worked for hundreds of years just fine.
Notes are definitionally lossy. If they weren't lossy, they'd be a transcript.
The act of compressing a lecture into notes helps students learn. Merely transcribing does not imply understanding.
If you understand it that well already, why are you attending a lecture that covers it?
Truly excellent lecturers can often guide some people to that understanding in a note-friendly amount of time, but oh god, most people are not excellent lecturers. The vast majority that I attended were almost literally just reading from the book in class. Book-structured information isn't at all the same as lecture-structured.
Some teachers record their lectures as well, although it's not mandatory. For some subjects I prefer following in the class, and for some others imho having the slides and doing on your own is much better than having to follow lectures. It depends. But at least, you have a choice
Edit now that I think about it, everyone's mileage may vary wildly. I think I haven't been studying by taking notes in a lot of time. I'd rather just read the slides and try to understand the whys and whats behind what was explained. Some colleagues of mine would rather take notes or write a condensed version of the course material to better remember it. I guess ymmv a lot
1) They are not theirs and want to avoid being caught; 2) They believe they are the only source of truth and need to show the insects, I mean students, their place.
Saw both of them.
And if there are no lecture notes, I am not going to be more engaged with it. Au contrare, I will be franaticaly copying everything from them to my notebook and not listening to the lecture itself.
I noticed that the rare few professors who didn't upload their powerpoints, were mostly the ones who would just recite the content of their slides in class (almost) word-for-word.
This makes it significantly easier to pay attention during lectures. Denying your students work that you have already done is ridiculous. Whether or not a student wants your lecture notes is orthogonal to whether they come to lecture.
I did finally settle on a better solution, because my professors all shared the ppt slides at least day-of for every lecture. So I downloaded the ppt onto my tablet and used a stylus to write my notes to each slide. It worked well for me
[1]with one exception, who used an overhead projector, except for the time it failed when she cancelled the lecture because she refused to use the blackboard on the grounds of aversion to chalk dust. A good lecturer tbf, and I think even she supplied us with blank subtitled lecture notes to copy her graphs onto
> 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 know some of the early translations of e.g. Nietzche sometimes end up saying the opposite of what might have been intended, which is a downer.
The linked text is clearly announcing it's focused on the average student, not the top of bottom tiers.
I'm not sure about the opinion that the author implies about Harry Potter, but I'm confident the series is an easier read and still give you plenty of opportunity to discuss about philosophical and literacy topics.
Anyway, that's definitely an interesting reading, I forwarded it to my wife who teach as a physician, something I rarely feel like relevant to do with HN posts.
A single book in a non-literature class could easily go for more than that. CS was especially bad in this regard, for some reason.
What's going on that the students have the resources for the tuition but not books at 5-10% of that cost (that's a 4 course load with books costing $100-150 per course)?
Parents cover the fees and give the kids an allowance for the rest; either the kids budget poorly or the allowance fails to really account for just how expensive the first few weeks are with all the books you're expected to buy?
This guy is a philosophy professor, so if he is assigning a book every 1-2 weeks, in a 14-week semester, let’s say that’s like 8 books.
Buying 8 books for under $100 is cheap. It does sound like he takes care to craft an affordable syllabus.
Of course, if you are taking 5 classes a semester it’s gonna add up, but this is really not on the egregious end of things.
And sure, there is more contemporary philosophy, and it's great he's keeping the books affordable. But if it's anything early 20th century or prior, don't be so surprised people are going to read what's in the public domain instead.
I mean, literally the same page — so if someone says “what did ya’ll think about this quote on p.156” I could actually get to it in time instead of scrambling to find the passage in whatever I printed out from Project Guttenberg.
For this reason my strategy to save book money was usually to get the assigned books from the library and camp out in front of the copy machine for an afternoon.
Often times, professors would allow us to purchase earlier editions of the book for our coursework, which were a fraction of the cost of the most recent edition.
Worst case scenario, I could reserve the book at the school library, but I'd have to move fast as there'd only be a handful of copies available.
Since that ruling many independent booksellers in the US started importing those foreign editions and selling them through online marketplaces such as Abe Books and Biblio.
Here are some examples of the savings. Lets say you are a math student, and your introductory calculus is taught from the first volume of Apostol's Calculus, your multivariable calculus taught from the second volume, and you real and complex analysis class uses Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis.
The US editions of those will set you back around $220 for the first volume of Apostol, around $140 for the second volume, and around $240 for Rudin.
On Abe Books you can get the international editions of the Apostol books from a US seller for $24.39 for volume 1 and $23.40 for volume 2 with free shipping. There are several more US sellers with then in the $30-40 range.
For the Rudin book $22.06 will get it from a US seller on Abe Books with free shipping. There are few more US sellers in the $35-50 range.
Biblio isn't as good on these particular books. They are available at comparable price but only from Indian sellers with shipping from India.
I haven't seen the international edition of Rudin but I have both the US and international editions of both volumes of Apostol and the text is the same. It is the physical form that differs. The US edition is hardback printed on finer paper. The international edition is a paperback printed on rougher paper and the pages are smaller.
[1] Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013)
Assuming this https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college is accurate, tuition at the mid-level state university in the article is probably around $10k/year. That's more than it should be, but why would you play $10k/year for classes then not buy the books?
I attended university in the early 2010s. After my freshman year I stopped buying textbooks for most classes. More than just their cost, I found that most textbooks really were optional. Most professors never even referenced them throughout the course. I figured I could always buy a book later if I found out I needed it, but that never happened. The few books I actually did buy after my freshman year were all mistakes. I have not read any of them and I had no trouble with their associated classes.
It sounds like the professor who wrote this article actually incorporates the course material he assigns. Good for him. But in my experience that is quite rare.
I would, however, be thrilled to find a $35 text. The average cost of my upper division textbooks was closer to $200 each. Some courses would assign multiple books.
Imho that’s what makes the textbook overpriced: the usefulness in the course. In my academic years i’ve seen some textbook that are actually pleasant to read and that you could actually rely on, alone, to pass the course… and then so many books that where completely useless: either more of a reference than anything else or some poorly written text by the same professor holding the course.
At some point I resorted to ligben first, and then bookstore later and only if the book did deliver some actual value.
Textbooks can equally well be paid for with college loans, they aren't restricted to tuition-only.
Making the financial problem with study costs in the USA even worse, more cash to buy textbooks from credit means higher prices that can be extracted for the books, just like any other good which is mostly paid through easily achievable loans.
Plus, the idea that everyone should buy it is bonkers. There are or should be libraries in school that costs $10k a year. Or at least, there should be used book from last year or rhat one book 5 friends bought together. All these would be financially reasonable decisions.
The lack of understanding of economic realities just kinda stinks.
It was a long time ago now, but the biggest reason I ended in a local two-year college instead of a four-year university was I simply couldn't afford the $20 application fees. I only applied to two schools because it was all I could afford.
What I see is that the declining interest in the life of the mind that was already evident a generation earlier has accelerated, particularly during the COVID years. I see this as the reversion of a historical anomaly. In the postwar era, a number of things converged: the GI Bill allowed a lot of ambitious new blood to enter the university system, competition with the Soviets ensured generous funding, and many the finest brains of a generation of Europeans relocated to the US. This all started to come undone in the late 1960s, when the counterculture made the establishment start to question the value of the academy, the world war 2 GIs finished their educations, and the cream of 1930s Europe died off. Really, it’s surprising how long we’ve been able to sustain a decline since then.
Like I said in another post, the environment in these primary schools in the United States is just not set up for success. Their standards are low and they allow smart phones and distracting device devices in schools. Not to mention the overt focus on athletics over academics. However, the last point is not the biggest issue as that’s been a part of primary education in high school in the US for a century at least.
I disagree that K through 12 is not part of the problem though. The presence of phones in schools, especially smart phones, has definitely had an impact on the learning skills of students. In the old days, if you will, people had to pass physical pieces of paper around in class secretly to communicate, which was riskier and usually a one or two time event. Smart phones are a Pandora’s box of distractions. I also blame schools for lowering their standards to accommodate the lower standards of the students entering their schools. The schools are simply passing these students down the down the river of eventual disappointment. There should be remedial courses and schools should dismiss students that are not willing or able to pass these courses in order to have the ability to perform at an acceptable level.
Taking their money and providing a degree when they haven’t actually learned the material is borderline fraud.
I know I’ll be flagged and downvoted for this but I don’t care.
Yeah well, 40 years ago that is what my textbooks cost. I was surprised by that quote that they were so inexpensive.
Is that considered cheap in the US? Do people not do like 5 courses per semester?
> > 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.
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.
Americans aren't used to having to compete. When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.
I think a large part of it is an entitlement issue that's pretty common in our culture. But there are also cultural undercurrents from resentful Americans who failed to get ahead in life that actively denigrate the concept of education and the educated.
I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”
That’s funny, since I think your sports leagues are the best example of fake competitiveness. Every major sports operates a closed league.
The greatest basketball talent ever from my country is playing for a team that’s tanking (see? it even has a word), which for those who don’t know is the act of purposefully losing games to be able to get better draft picks. Because of a closed league, the players and staff are not really punished for bad performance.
The reason for this (besides the obvious financial reasons) is the idea of losing completely. In football leagues around thw world, historical giants have faded away to irrelevancy due to bad performances year after year or mismanagement (for which there are rules for to have fewer incidents).
Fundamentally though the sports system is more enertainment than pure competition.
Americans spend more time watching sports more than exercising themselves:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-leisur...
https://time2play.com/blog/americas-sports-watching-habits/
https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/study-1-in-4-americans-watc...
I you even know how often I've heard students complain about "having my A taken away from me". It's insane, but it's also what to expect from a society just like you described who has been told that the point of school is to get good grades.
Now, a lot of students here are discovering that minmaxing to get a high GPA in a degree like compsci lands them firmly in jobless land if they failed to use those 4 years in an environment of learning to actually learn things. Doesn't even have to be from courses, things like student groups and competitions, research opportunities, etc.
Employers don't really want people whose sole interest is to do nothing and be rewarded for it.
In the West kids can randomly decide to drop entire years after high school, or even skip college altogether - because it's (apparently) easy to not be immediately destitute without a good job. In India and China children grow up witnessing how much of a divide that makes, and how thin the line seperating their fates from "respectable" to brutal poverty is. No kid growing in such an environment will take school lightly.
I most certainly will transmitting a different set of values to my kids. Not going to go full straight A’s psychopath because I’ve seen what that’s done to some peers, but unless I win the lottery my kids will not be being told to just “do what they love” (unless they happen to love applied math lol)
Otherwise the potential downside of not graduating with at least a bachelor's degree is so devastating that the population (who don't want to be perpetually responsible for their adult children that have been made unemployable in any decent capacity for no reason other than to make certain email job people feel important) will accept nothing less than a pass rate approaching ever closer to 100%.
If you want to make education rigorous, you have to address that problem and then also try to address the K-12 education system that faces a similar but more extreme version of the same issue (because not being able to properly read and write are genuinely bad indicators for the majority of white collar jobs, and failing to graduate high school tends to indicate fundamental issues in that respect moreso than failing to graduate with a bachelor's, which usually just indicates immaturity / lack of money / boredom / a million other things that don't imply missing fundamental skills).
This is an unfair comparison. The equivalent of those chinese students do work as hard in America - they just wouldn't be found at OP's school, there would be in a Tier 1 school.
A) the median university student in the USA?
B) the median university student in China?
Hint: in China, university admissions is based in large part on students's performance on the 高考, a national entrance exam, taken at the end of high school.
Or brain surgery, or lawyering, or designing roads and buildings.
And what if they work at a nuclear power plant?
Perhaps $100 per course per semester is better spent elsewhere, and maybe walking out of a lecture on Dostoevsky is the correct thing for a human to do.
Are students walking out of brain surgery classes because of phones?
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.
It’s hard to believe in the system we’ve got going.
Spending $100 on a single course material can be a real burden for college students taking multiple classes per term. Sharing lecture slides was a basic expectation decades ago. Students were cheating long before ChatGPT: The response like the one about the UGM could’ve just as easily been lifted from SparkNotes.
On the other hand: Maybe educational outcomes really are declining, but no one wants to pump the brakes because failing students might mean less funding. Maybe Socrates actually was noticing something real about generational decline—attitudes and norms do shift between generations; they’re not locked on some linear path. Maybe we need to just revisit the concept of university as vocational school in general.
We’re so preoccupied with proving we’re right that we lose the ability to honestly evaluate which changes deserve serious scrutiny and which ones are just part of the usual generational churn aside from the obviously massive ones (like phones). One side is wrong and stupid about all facets, my side is correct.