ALL THE STUDENTS ARE BELOW AVERAGE.

Hilarius "Scriptum Philosophia" Bookbinder takes stock of his students.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

What follows is not for the faint of heart.

Reading?

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it.

That backfires.

Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

Writing?

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

I lost track of how many red pens I wore out noting the mechanical errors on the exams, that in addition to offering suggestions how to complete an answer.

Mathematics?  It's not even algebra readiness.

I’m less informed to speak out on this one, but my math prof friends tell me that their students are increasingly less capable and less willing to put in the effort. As a result they have had to make their tests easier with fewer hard problems. When I was a first semester freshman (at a private SLAC, yes, but it wasn’t CalTech) I took Calculus 1. Second semester I took Calculus 2. I don’t think pre-calculus was even a thing back then. Now apparently pre-calc counts as an advanced content course. My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.

Symbolic Logic was a requirement when I was a grad student. The course was a cross-listed upper-division undergrad/grad class. Jaegwon Kim taught the course, and our sole textbook was W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic, which we worked through in its entirety. I think we spent two weeks on propositional logic before moving on to the predicate calculus. We proved compactness, soundness, and completeness, and probably some other theorems I forget. There is no possible way our students, unless they were math or computer science majors, would survive that class.

There's a lot more at the link, none of it encouraging.  The professor's job, though, is to say No and uphold standards, and let the chips fall where they may.

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

Well, no, the real market test is in how many of those "transactional" or "disconnected" students land those middle-class office jobs they're after.

All is proceeding as I had foreseen, to borrow a phrase. "Sooner or later, reality will dawn.  There is excess capacity to shake out, consolidation will mean liquidation, and the terminally stupid people in charge will be brought to book for their failures."

Unfortunately, the way the academic pecking order works, if Scriptum's institution folds, his academic career folds with it.

Joanne Jacobs reads the essay and asks two or three questions.  "Why take philosophy if you don't care about thinking and learning, and you're not willing to do the work? Take a business class. (Too much math?) Why spend the time and money and energy to go to college?"

Northern Star columnist Habiba Kamel answers those questions, and again, it's not for the faint of heart.

At NIU, classes run Monday through Friday. Many students believe that classes should only be held Monday through Thursday, as many social gatherings occur on Thursday nights. In addition to this, students have expressed that class attendance is minimal on Fridays, leading to fewer students learning in their classes. This leads to the question: Should NIU host classes on Friday?

The argument for the negative is predictably depressing: sleeping off the Thirstday activities, or getting an early start back to the home town honeys, Northern Illinois still being overwhelmingly a suitcase school.