College, Entitlement, and Careers

I read a piece on NPR this morning that reminded me of a blog article that I read a while back. The NPR article, titled "A Lack of Rigor Leaves Students 'Adrift' in College," discusses how students coming out of college today have not developed their critical thinking skills or writing skills beyond what they had in high school.

We could play all sorts of blame games. In the end, I think that we run into a chicken-egg dilemma. Have we created a system in colleges where faculty/adjunct positions depend on student evals, thereby forcing teachers to be soft on the students? Or is it something else?

I think it is a combo of things. One thing they mentioned in the article was that 90% of high school students expected to go to college. Expected. Really? College is no longer a privilege to most people. They see it as a right. But is it?

When students get to college, they are paying money to be there. Based on my experience, some students (and their parents, for that matter) tend to see themselves as customers. As customers, it does not matter how little or how much they put into something, they expect to get what they want, which in academia, is an "A."

I'm sorry if I am callus or whatever, but in my mind, you are PAYING for a PRIVILEGE. You are paying to sit and learn from people who have proven themselves to be experts in their field. You should work your BUTT off to do well.

I hate to sound old, but "when I was in college," I had a professor once ask us, "Since when is a B bad? B is 'above average!' A is 'exceptional!'"

AMEN to that.

Now. All of this smacks of entitlement. One article that I read (that I cannot remember right nowl... uuugh) wrote that some students coming out of college feel that since they paid for an education, "did their time," and graduated, that they deserve a job. Not true of most students and certainly not true of the students I have worked with. However, I think that it speaks towards an undercurrent of the current culture.

I don't want to overgeneralize. I was an odd undergraduate student and just didn't mingle well with the other students.

In the end, I wonder. What, if anything, can we do to stop or reverse what is going on? CAN we stop it? Do we want to? And finally, do we NEED the rigor?

I think we do need rigor. Now more than ever, with so much information at our fingertips, we need to teach our students how to think critically, write, and properly ask questions.