THE INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCES OF ACCESS-ASSESSMENT-REMEDIATION-RETENTION.

For the two decades of Cold Spring Shops posts, one message that I have stayed on almost obsessively is higher education going wrong by offering a sub-prime product.  I've come to the conclusion that the U.S. News problem exists in part because parents and students recognize much of higher education is a sham.  Now if higher education types would see it.  "Recognizing the problem is the first step toward fixing it."

Perhaps, reality is dawning.  A recent Higher Education Politics & Economics article is encouraging, from my perspective, although it suggests morale in the classroom is shot.  "To account for their participation in eroding standards, faculty refer to trends in the wider economy and culture that we dub the 'broke-woke-stroke' convergence."  Their inferences of declining morale do draw on a small sample.

As we were interested as much as possible in the “typical” university experience, we surveyed faculty at large, public universities of average selectivity. We chose the departments of English, math and sociology to represent the humanities and hard and soft sciences and received 223 responses from tenured professors.

The discussion does not give me reason to rethink my hypothesis that there is excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention.

Our takeaway from such responses, supplemented with more than 1,300 voluntary comments, is that professors today face a host of pressures to reduce standards. Foremost among them is corporatization (“broke”), which faculty overwhelmingly identify as a serious problem. Here we see cash-strapped colleges and universities scramble to attract and retain students, whatever their intellectual readiness. The consequences are troubling. Universities eliminate tenure-track positions and engage in an amenities arms race to appeal to students, while faculty face intensified pressure to maintain their program enrollments. Rigorously grading or (worse) failing students only exacerbates their already unsustainable debt, a natural concern of compassionate faculty, while program cuts loom should student “consumers” opt for a less daunting major. This is perhaps the most perverse metric in higher education today—evaluating programs’ health and survival based on the number of graduates rather than rigor and hard-earned excellence.

The sample of universities and departments might be one in which the grant-getting imperatives aren't as much of a factor as simple retention is.  That two of the three surveyed disciplines are notorious for showing their liberalitas by deconstructing standards, and yet, lowered standards are hurting morale, is at once troubling and encouraging.

“Woke” sensibilities also play a role in eroding standards by politicizing student performance disparities, especially by race. While wokeness emerged as heightened advocacy around racial and gender injustices, today the word is used as a pejorative by mostly conservative critics who denounce what they see as a campus climate hostile to the values of meritocracy, free speech and colorblindness. We cite in our article a 2020 statement by the president of Brooklyn College on the “structural obstacles” faced by students of color; the statement references a drive to raise funds for “professional development” for faculty with the “highest racial disparities in outcomes and the highest D/F/W rates.” We cite as well a Boston University teaching guide on the “hidden curriculum,” where the authors suggest it “may not be fair or even valid” to hold marginalized students to such expectations as doing the readings, arriving to class on time, participating in class discussions or using “standard English.” It is not difficult to see how these sensibilities undermine standards. And note the irony: woke faculty members who condemn corporate-minded administrators are their unwitting bedfellows in student social promotion.

It's better than that, dear reader.  The easiest way to retain students and make the disparate outcomes go away is to pass everybody, no matter how poorly they perform.

Our reference to “stroke” is looser—referring to widely observed generational changes associated with increased student entitlement and fragility. Here faculty members may feel compelled to stroke the egos, as it were, of students viewed as increasingly likely to push back for higher grades or others perceived as too vulnerable to receive stringent appraisals of their work. Widely cited cultural underpinnings include helicopter and overindulgent parenting (“everyone’s a winner”), an accompanying victimization culture (including safe spaces and trigger warnings) and a spirit of “educational romanticism” where all students, whatever their ability, are deemed capable of academic success with enough student support. Faculty’s perception of playing a more therapeutic role with students, whom they often perceive as demanding higher grades for less work, can be understood in this context. Indeed, it is not surprising that student pushback is the main reason faculty in our survey cited for inflating grades.

Lest we forget, the responsibilities of the professor include saying no and upholding standards.  Institutions that respect that sort of discipline are more likely to survive the shakeout of excess capacity that is under way.