I graduated from a reasonably prestigious Eastern Public University in 1981 after working my proverbial tush off… I was ill prepared by High School, and completely flabbergasted by the “inside” and rather difficult nature of collegiate life and education.
I struggled, shifted gears, and kicked my way through school, changing majors because I lacked the base skills to perform my first choice (Engineering). I was then treated to a blow my Junior year when my second choice (Communications – Television and Film) evaporated as the school was torn apart from its performing arts companion. This little move came with a session with my “very sorry” course adviser explaining that maybe I could transfer for a few semesters/quarters to another university where the courses that were no longer available might be made available to me. Though, it would be two or three additional years before I could graduate. So I switched to my minor (History) and took no less than 15 hours of advanced history course work for my Senior year, and one Summer session… I managed to claw my way out of school one quarter late, and with an average grade.
1. We lacked the tools the kids of today have. A 1977 500 word term paper was an exercise in sheer grinding work. If you typed, you were lucky; but there were no word processors. Typing meant perfection or erasures, with erasable bond paper a forbidden item in presentation so money for copies was involved. Grading was vicious. Ten points were taken off for a missed period, misspelled word or typo. The “passive voice” of today’s writing was forbidden. Comma splices were abjectly sinful. “D” grades were plentiful, and complaining about them was met by the usual statement that this is college and you still write like you are in high school.
Of course that essay was easy, compared to the deluge of research papers that required thousands of words, footnotes, bibliographies, and recorded note cards.
Microsoft Word or Open Office for the money challenged makes all of that work a tragic joke.
2. Grading methods are completely off the scale. My son, now a sophomore at the very same and now more Prestigious Eastern Public Institution from which I graduated, presented me with his second Dean’s List Letter for his Freshman Year. I don’t think that there were more than several handfuls of kids who came close to their respective Dean’s lists in my Freshman year. He reported that there was nothing special about it. He slept through his Geology class, stating that he learned it all in high school Earth Science. He was already an academic sophomore at the end of his first Freshman semester because he had more than a semester’s worth of credit from various AP tests, including full credit for a full year of 5 hour Calculus… a talent for which he has no intellectual use. He hates math with 20 passions.
The truth is that most kids who show up in college and who have been “prepped” for college by Cambridge, AP, and IB programs in high school, are bored and unchallenged by their first two years in a university.
Add to that, the proliferation of computers, word processors, spread sheets, the internet, and various free information services, and the traditional university system becomes more of a monetary turnstile and initiation rite than it does a method of education.
What I do know is that my barely average QCA (every course that I took and passed or failed – yes we actually failed things back then) counted for exactly the same part of my grade as every other course) was worth infinitely more than the current B that every kid seems to get for doing nothing more than showing up.
The upshot is, I suppose, that college has become a “required” punch on a “life ticket”, instead of a privilege and a challenging educational experience. Ticket punching will destroy us faster than having no colleges students at all.
Just to report to the good professor… The local Community College is overflowing. It’s several campuses in the area are brimming with students, and schools are actually announcing that their graduates are proudly going to Community College.
Economics are dictating the change. Eventually the market rules.
r/John – TMF
