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jsburbidge) wrote2019-12-30 06:56 pm
Too Easy?
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.
no subject
(Interestingly, there are some trades -- for example, that of electrical lineman where there's a specific employment distinction between third and fourth year apprentices! -- that have got much, much tougher than they were.)
The fix isn't the university standards in isolation; the fix is making most jobs unavailable to degree credentials. (Which actually means, given all the stuff on walls, creating a new set of academic credentials.) That lets you have academic universities, chiefly concerned with unscrewing the inscrutable, and the job credentials most people want. (It would help to create a lot more academic-adjacent jobs in a broad range of research topics.)
no subject
Entirely agreed.
The irony is that all one time the government sort of tried to do that, though at the time the universities required less of a reset. The Robarts/Davis changes in the 60s were an attempt to provide paths which were not "academic" in nature.
I have a long-time friend/acquaintance who was a senior administrator at Seneca College in the 1970s and 80s. He groused for years, fighting a rearguard battle, about the way in which the staff (who were mainly M.A.s with the exception of the minority of "practitioner-taught" courses) kept pushing for the colleges to become more academic (because they were largely frustrated academics). And they won; Ryerson is no longer a polytechnic and Seneca is no longer a "community college".
And tool-and-die makers have a shortage of new blood... (I had a great-uncle who was a tool-and-die makers, who kept being offered more work every time he started to retire.)
There is a good argument that in general practical credentials and more abstract ones should be treated as oil and water; and that apprenticeship is frequently better than coursework. (Occasionally there are people who are good at both. My father in retirement has developed a second career as a bookbinder while retaining his first career as an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. But it's probably not the way to bet; I'll never be as good with my hands as he is.)
I'm not sure what would be required for a reset, though; changing the credentials model would upset a lot of apple-carts and (even though it would be good for universities in the long run) would be hard on them in the short run.
no subject
What you can do is three things.
Research Track. There are no grants or scholarships or ANYTHING available for Research Track; if any of your ancestors have ever donated anything to any university you can't get in, and your parents can't give you anything while you're on it. If your marks stay high enough, you stay in on a full-ride system. If you graduate, you graduate with an Academic Degree.
There are explicit quotas for Research Track; it is specifically biased to limit white male involvement to about a quarter. (Which is plenty for the actual aptitudes and low enough to break the existing closed-guild culture in most academic fields.) It is NOT STEM-only. As a government, you provide really vicious feedback mechanisms for differential graduation rates. (You decrease the permissible percentage of administrative budget, some of which manifests as across-the-board salary reductions in progressive-taxation ways (the higher your salary the more you lose), and it lasts and lasts; you need a perfect record for ten years to start seeing increases in the admin budget. You include things like "administrative staff cannot park on campus" alongside the percentage reductions.)
As of $DATE, you can't go to grad school without an Academic undergrad degree OR ten+ years experience and passing an exam. You can't get in from Degree Track anymore.
Degree Track. This is a what we have now. You don't change it much. You're going to work in an office; you have a stamp on your forehead that says "Middle Class". This is what most people sending their kids to university care about.
Skills Track. A long -- ten year or more -- apprenticeship at some material trade. This includes a shedload of field biology and most engineering as well as the kind of toolmaking and millwright work and so on things that come immediately to mind. Also most medical things; emphatically, doctors. There is no reason for MD to be an academic degree and the necessary massive cultural change (so there's none of this "of course you make good decisions after being awake for 24 hours" nonsense) is overdue. You try to chunk this up so that you can do it in pieces; the first three years are EMT things, next three years are nurse things, etc. Or the current technician-to-engineer gradation.
One advantage is that you have to have people skills, too; you're going to be forced to have them because you are going to start off in a group where you have no status. (Unlike the implicit status of med students...) Another is that you put more structure and less opportunity to mess up into the system this way. There are cutouts to go be a tech or an EMT or whatever without having to finish the whole thing. People who get twitchy about "being an engineer" can be focused on the P. Eng. part.
no subject
Regarding "Research Track": you say both: "There are no grants or scholarships or ANYTHING available for Research Track" and "If your marks stay high enough, you stay in on a full-ride system."
Do you mean by "full-ride system" that fees, room, and board are covered? Because in that case scholarships seem to be entirely unnecessary. I did something close to that - got at least tuition every year as an undergraduate and actually ended off better-off than when I started as a graduate student; but it was all scholarships and fellowships.
The structural problem at the university level at present is that their staffing has been pulled way out of shape by the current market demands. Revamping to a different model might be stressful, though I suspect that any faculty who could get to teach Research stream would jump at the opportunity.
STEM might be where this is least needed. My overall sense is that the math and physics courses with serious cred (at University level) haven't changed much; the standards you'd be abandoning would be too obvious just by looking at the textbooks. It's the other disciplines which have tended to slide.
no subject
STEM hasn't corroded much, but STEM was also where the "if you're not a man, you're going to leave" is worst. I remember 80s compsci classes as being a third women, and rising; I can't remember the last time we got a female applicant for a developer position. The informal collective decision that this was not a girl thing needs correcting. (Which is easier as the relative salaries drop.)