Too Easy?

[jsburbidge]

The Atlantic had an article on whether college has become too easy ( https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/07/has-college-gotten-easier/594550/).

It's a bit like asking how big a basket of fruit ought to be: the question "for what purpose?" naturally presents itself.

There's a general level: do we want universities to turn out the brightest possible graduates to foster innovation? To provide critical skills for some majority of the population? To ensure universal literacy and scientific literacy? To provide paper credentials allowing HR departments to do easy first cuts of job applicants? It makes a big difference to how easy you want courses to be.

There's also a specific level. Learning to be an engineer is generally all-or-nothing: you don't want a generally able but not reliable engineer, good at arches but poor at failure analysis. Pieces of an engineering degree, or a chemistry degree, are of little use (unless the aim is purely to match interest, in which case the criteria are unlikely to be hard / easy but interesting / dull). But retaining a reasonable chunk of an English or history course is a benefit to the student in terms of understanding and critical thought without needing a high level of expertise or complete mastery.

Also, there's a difference between "Can exceptional students find challenging courses?" and "Do you need to have a high level of competence to graduate?". This is not quite the same as "is your economic strategy one of innovation or high quality implementation?" but close to it. Not that these questions are well answered in an either/or mode; you probably want both if you want one, and exceptional students will benefit more from courses where they are surrounded by at least very good students. (There's also no evidence that either is really a major goal of society, given the resources allocated. Highly competent people of either sort are not numerous enough to make a significant voting bloc.)

In my personal experience, courses need to be challenging to achieve effective outcomes. I have seen a lot of people in my workplaces over the years who were officially qualified but only "officially" - technical people who couldn't communicate clearly or do effective design or analysis (and whose code left one wincing), history majors with no sense of history, English majors who never read Milton and in any case lacked the skills to do so.

That doesn't mean that courses in software engineering, or core history or English are necessarily "easier" than they used to be; it just means that the graduates are able to avoid the challenging courses. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of students just want their piece of paper with a grade they like, and they'll avoid anything that complicates that.

As a society we could, of course, decide to require that such avoidance is made as difficult as possible, which would mean that a few of them would become accomplished, and the rest drop out. But many of the positions these people are filling are manageable by an intelligent person with no more than a good high school level of learning, so it's not clear what would be the point of doing so. It would also impoverish universities and slightly increase the ranks of the officially unemployed. (One of the aims of extending education to greater ages is to remove the students from bring active members of the workforce). For many purposes, grading at pass/fail is the most that's required to fulfil the later use made by the students of their degrees.

A few decades ago, Ontario tried to address one aspect of this by creating other, more "practical", forms of post-secondary education - multiple community colleges and one polytechnic institute. An interesting thing happened, though: various pressures - internal ones, from teachers; external ones, from competitive and prestige issues - have led to these institutions becoming "universities", if ones which tend to have a decidedly practical tone to them. At the same time, the old universities have started promoting their courses as gateways to employment, with the side effect of generally reducing the strictness of requirements for a major. If the purpose of a major in French is to give you a general mastery of French Language and Literature it's reasonable to require that graduates have had some exposure to Rabelais, Racine, Voltaire, Baudelaire, and Proust, much as French Lycées require. If it is to give you the capacity to function in the Federal Civil Service, deal with French-speaking clients, and generate memos in comprehensible but not artistic French, it matters less what you study as long as it exposes you to the language.

By one judgement, the latter set of standards is "too easy"; by another, it simply follows function.

As an aside, if the difference between "easy" and "hard" is between, for some sizable block of students, getting a 75% average - the lower border of an A when I was in high school - and 66% - the upper border of a C at the same time - the main difference it will make is to the students themselves: except in applying for higher degree programmes, I have always found that nobody is interested in my grades. Employers just want to verify that I have the degrees I claim to have (even when I'm applying over thirty years later and have decades of experience in my current field of work).

My gut reaction is that university has indeed become "too easy", but my considered opinion is that the system itself needs thorough reconsideration in terms of the functions we require. My suspicion is that we are losing a lot of potential talent by failing to challenge those students who are up to it, I equally suspect that there is no good reason to raise the bar for many students for whom the relation between what they study and what they will do for the rest of there lives is one of formal credentialism. There's a broader crisis in terms of the role and structure of post-secondary education playing out, and easy as opposed to hard is not the main question.