Free college and loan forgiveness are major planks of Biden’s New Deal. The problem is far too many people now go to college that have no business attending.
Many survive because, if a professor flunks too many students, he/she will be invited for a chat with the Dean. Survival for a professor often means minimal requirements.
Three exams and a short paper is common. Requiring significantly more work may also merit a visit to the Dean’s office.
Students are paying customers and the college needs to retain as many students as possible to pay for the recent ballooning of administration costs, such as the high-paid diversity and affirmative action deans.
The big question is how much learning goes on in the hallowed halls of academia? Today most young persons’ aspire to go to college, but few ask the fundamental question posed by one study of 2,300 undergraduates by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their book titled, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The question they researched was “how much are undergraduates learning once they get into college?”
For a large proportion of students, the Arum and Roksa research found the answer was a definitive not much.
Their extensive research used the survey responses, transcript data, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester of college, and then retaken at the end of their second year.
Their analysis of a representative sample of 24 colleges, found fully 45 percent of the students surveyed demonstrated no significant improvement in basic skills—critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills—during their first two years of college.
And 36 percent showed very little improvement after four years of college. Significant learning was found only in their major area of study, presumably because their main interest was in that area, as was much of their coursework.
Part of the problem was the lack of rigor required now in college. Even in their major, half of the students did not take a single course requiring a total of over 19 pages of writing, and one-third did not take a single class requiring over 39 pages of reading a week.
Arum and Roksa note that the results were not a surprise for many faculty and administrators—instead, they expected these results from a student body distracted by sports, dating, partying, or working outside jobs, and an institutional culture that puts learning close to the bottom of their priority list.
When I was a professor at Bowling Green State, one of my Black students missed close to half of my classes. When I asked why, he said he had football practice.
When I asked why he didn’t take classes at the time when he did not have practice, he said he was there to play football and that had to be his priority. A few days later, I received a phone call from the coach.
He explained my student was a star player and he added, he needed to maintain a certain honor-point average to stay on the team. Furthermore, I needed to help him achieve that goal.
He was very polite but made it clear it would not help my career at BGSU to give him a poor grade.
I got the point and gave him an undeserved B. To survive as a faculty, a professor has to learn to deal with contingencies such as this.
After all, we all know sports are a critical part of college because they are a major source of income. Sports are also a major means of attracting students.
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries.