Standards on College Campuses

as bad as you think

In my last post, I provided “what some may think is a ‘hot take’ about why trust in higher education has decreased: perceived grade inflation and reductions in standards may be having an impact.”  Unfortunately, I tend to think that perception is accurate.  That is, I tend to think many of us in academia have lowered our standards a great deal.  I worry about this.  I worry that we are graduating students who are not as prepared to think independently and analytically as those who came out 15 or 20 years ago.

I’d suggest that many of us have made it easier for students by:

-requiring less work.

-making assignments that are easier.

-grading more leniently.

-capitulating and raising grades when someone complains (and to avoid that).

My worry, though, is not merely about the way things are in college now; it is a practical worry about the future.  I want there to be great doctors, for example, who are not only well-trained in the mechanics of their specific roles (doing laparoscopic surgery, perhaps), but who are able and willing to make well-reasoned, spur of the moment decisions if something goes sideways in the process.  I want a surgeon who ‘has the credentials’ and has memorized the standard process involved in an operation, but I want more from a surgeon; I want one who was and is willing to work hard and take responsibility for their actions, including those that are required when the unexpected occurs.  The same is true for other fields: should I need their expertise, I want to be able to hire accountants, lawyers, etc., who not only know the process they must use, but who are able to think about it independently, who are willing to do the necessary work to see what others might miss, and who take responsibility for what they do. (I want the same of car mechanics and others, whether or not they have a college education—college is not the only way to gain the traits and skills I discuss. Certainly, though, I don’t want college to be where these traits and skills are destroyed.)

Good professionals need to face challenges, anticipate the unexpected, find the best path through unexpected terrain, adapt to changing circumstances as they arise.  Perhaps some do all of this naturally.  Many learn to do it while being trained.  For many professions—accounting, medicine, and law, seem clear examples—that training starts in college and continues in profession schools.  I believe my college professors challenged me—challenged me to think through problems and come up with solutions on my own (which is not to say they were in any way original).

It seems, though, that we don’t challenge our students as much professors did in the past.  And our students don’t seem to expect us to.  They expect, in fact, to be told precisely what to do.  For one sort of example, they often expect grading rubrics that lay out exactly what they have to do on any given assignment to receive the sort of grade they want.  (Asking students to come up with an entire project on their own is usually met with confusion.)

Not only do we not seem to challenge students the way professors did in the past, but (as many have noted), we give them higher grades than they would have received a decade ago for the same level of work.

One of the reasons some of us may lower our standards—reducing the difficulty of work assigned and giving higher grades for a level of work—is a fear of retaliation of all sorts from students who get lower grades.  Some may rightly  think their administrators will not be supportive if a student challenges their grades—or if they engage in other retaliatory measures.  Even if not worried about retaliation, many simply realize it’s a hassle to deal with complaining students and far easier to prevent the complaints by giving higher-than-deserved grades. (Consider also that grad students and adjuncts do a tremendous amount of the teaching on college campuses; neither has job security and both have other goals that leave them rationally eager to reduce difficulties with students.)

The fact that many faculty give less work, less difficult work, and higher than deserved grades may suggest to some that faculty have also gotten worse.  Perhaps, they will think, the lowered standards in college follow from lower standards for faculty.  That is, they may think colleges have lower standards for hiring faculty than were prevalent in the past.  In fact, standards for faculty seem to have increased—when we have a new hire in my department, for example, we regularly expect our applicants to have multiple publications right out of grad school.  And they do; often quite a few.  New faculty regularly seem to out-publish established faculty.

I would suggest that there is (at the least) a correlation between the increased standards for faculty and reduced standards for students.  Given the increased requirements with regard to publications, faculty are clearly incentivized to pay more attention to publishing than teaching.  They are incentivized to pay less attention to students—and that is easier to do when the students get what they want.

Though there may be more than mere correlation involved, I should note the reduced standards for students seems to be prevalent also at colleges that do not expect faculty to publish very much. Higher standards for faculty publishing isn’t likely to be the main causal factor.

If there is causation, it’s likely the incentives that exist at all colleges and universities. Indeed, much of what I said above do exist all over: its simply easier to prevent complaints from students then to deal with complaints; hence, there is incentive to give better-than-deserved grades. Moreover, faculty might rightly believe that they need to keep students happy so that they get good evaluations from those students—because salary raises might be largely based on those evaluations. Add in the existence of “RateYourProfessor.Com” and other such websites and the incentives get even clearer. Administrators want to attract students (some seem to think of them as “customers”) and so want the faculty to appear to be fun rather than difficult.

I should make clear that some of us do maintain the standards we had in previous years.  Indeed, some of us likely work very hard to do so.  Some may even have increased their standards.   The problem is that if an entire department does this, it risks losing students to other departments that do not.  Some departments—whole fields of academia—are known to give higher grades than others.  Students that go to school primarily to get a degree so they can get a certain type of job rationally prefer to take classes in departments that give higher grades; they can then graduate more easily and with higher GPAs.  The result is that administrators are likely to divert resources to those departments—after all, they have more students! Departments that have reputations for giving harsher (more honest) grades lose funding, find themselves unable to make hires, and may even be closed. Clearly, the incentives are not aligned for maintaining high standards!