By: Carter Schroppe
If a class ends at 3:15, students will close their laptops at 3:13 to signal to the professor that time is almost up. Online shopping is more prevalent in classrooms than note-taking; The New York Times mini crossword is more likely to be solved than the problem on the board.
Though those of us lucky enough to receive a college education are christened with the label “highly educated,” that term has lost much of its meaning in recent years.
Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen from 57% in 2015 to just 36% in 2023, according to a study from Gallup. A 2021 report from Strada Education Foundation found that just over half of college graduates believe that they earn significantly more than high school graduates, that their degree was worth the cost, and that it helped them achieve their goals.
That was a few years ago, however, and things have only gotten worse since.
The students currently attending colleges and universities were heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The onset of artificial intelligence is working its way into the classroom as we speak (I have ChatGPT loaded up on the tab next to this one), but it remains to be seen how this never-seen-before technology will impact students’ experiences. Though 81% of higher education faculty believe that generative artificial intelligence will noticeably change their institutions in the next five years, only 16% report that their institution is prepared for the change, according to eCampus News.
The pandemic, generative A.I., and Zara’s newest clothing line might be easy culprits, but there are deeply rooted problems in academia that deserve more of the blame.
The relationship between students and educators has eroded to the degree that neither party fully commits itself to the theoretical tenets of higher education that were once held in such high esteem.
The former group prioritizes extracurricular activities and career development more than it does learning. Most students would swap an internship for an A, a few extra connections on LinkedIn for a compliment from a professor. Those who are scrolling on social media or texting their friends during class are simply responding to incentives, however—the ones provided to them by the academic standing in the front of the room.
Grade inflation has dismantled the ethics of perseverance and fortitude. A 2023 study conducted by political scientist Kenneth Kickham and sociologists Mark Horowitz and Anthony L. Haynor Harvard found that 37% of tenured professors at large, public universities admitted to “routinely inflating grades.” The average college GPA rose from 2.81 in 1990 to 3.15 in 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
It used to be that simply passing a class was viewed as a success; now, for many high-achieving students, anything other than a 4.0 is a failure.
This softening of standards manifests itself in objective outcomes but also in the manner through which grades are given— often not earned—in the first place.
It’s commonplace for students to take a final exam and yet not get their test back to see what they got wrong. An essay will be returned with a grade, yet often there won’t be any constructive criticism or comments. Attendance isn’t as relevant as it used to be—some professors have given up to the degree that being present in class is overtly optional. These trends certainly aren’t ubiquitous among all departments, professors, and courses, but they’ve become more prominent in the last few years.
This gradual descent into educational ineptitude also stems from ideological orthodoxies that have captured classrooms around the country.
This manifests itself mostly in the humanities—subjects such as philosophy, media and journalism, and political science are particularly prone to partisanship. The Daily Tar Heel reported in 2022 that 83% of conservative students here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worry about expressing their opinions. Just over half of such students reported that they’ve self-censored more than once in classrooms, while only 9% of liberal students have done so.
Higher education is theoretically a bastion of intellectual freedom and diversity of thought, but that value exists only in theory and rarely in application.
The culture at Carolina—and most other colleges—is such that expressing conservative notions will yield judgment from classmates and educators. To speak out against liberal ideas is to impose a hefty cost upon oneself; there’s almost this unspoken rule that liberalism represents the moral authority and conservatism is a problem to be dealt with. On two separate occasions, I’ve endured lectures that tackled not the topic of the course but rather a conservative politician with whom the professor took issue.
These students and educators who claim so fervently to be “tolerant” rarely if ever apply that ethos to those with whom they disagree. The result is an uncomfortable environment that implicitly belittles students who don’t subscribe to widely-held orthodoxies and popular, ideologically driven political opinions.
Classrooms at Carolina should promote intellectual competition by allowing the marketplace of ideas to decide which opinions are of value and which aren’t. Political discourse is inherent to myriad courses and thus shouldn’t be eliminated but rather appropriately nurtured; the First Amendment was ratified not to protect the speech that makes us comfortable, but that which forces us to question our convictions and engage in valuable debate.
The onus is on the educators to set aside their personal beliefs and establish a culture that accepts every student, regardless of their political affiliation.
A B- every once in a while might not hurt, either.