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Should the college become more difficult? | New Yorker


About twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in the English language, I taught a chapter in a special observation room at the teaching center at my university. My students and I sat around a long oval table while the cameras recorded us. I cannot remember the novel we discussed, but I know what I learned when I saw the tape after that, with my educational coach. She noted that when I was inviting the students, I often looked at my right, and I lost the high hands to my left. I did not let the silence continued for a long time, instead, I only spoke when the student had worked courageously to speak. On the positive side, I noticed that I was using a technique that I loved, which I borrowed from my teacher: it was like calling the cold, except that after I surprised the student with a difficult question, I told them that you would defend in a few minutes, to give them time to think about what they say. She told me that this was “warm”.

Teaching was my favorite part of the Graduate School, and I participated in training as much as possible. While I was studying, or focused in another way on students, my role in the higher education project was logical to me: I was spending years to learn about literature so that I could explain this to students who want to improve themselves. Outside the chapter, the Foundation was more blurry. I knew that what was really important in my professional progress was academic research. My educational skills were mainly relevant. In fact, it was warned that teaching was a distraction from the “real work” to write articles for my peers.

Sometimes it looked as if the courses were a distraction for my students as well. Although she was mysterious and diligently, she was often immersed in extracurricular activities – the efforts made by skills, musical groups, sports, and startups – to the point that they are struggling to find time to study. I was myself part of a young company as a university student, and I was aware of the basic logic that leads to excessive curriculum: grade inflation, which allowed intermediate students to do less, and made it more difficult to distinguish between themselves academic. All incentives, both teachers and students, encouraged a lower act in the semester and more.

These contradictions were not surprising. They reflected the complex nature of the modern university, in which university teaching origins are one of the many competing priorities. The implicit theory was, mainly, that students learned their first -class researchers at the university, some of them were great teachers and some of them were not. Some chapters will be difficult, while others are easy to laugh; The grades will be highly high. In any case, there will be a lot to do it outside the classroom. It will be possible about many great minds. When learning does not occur through education, this will happen through osmosis.

Was this theory convincing? Twenty years ago, it seemed so – but today the gears may not be burning. Students’ debts became a burden on generations, as tens of millions of people got federal loans to obtain degrees. At the same time, the college appears to have become very easier, in ways indicating the contraction of its basic functions. in “Amateur watch: The date of teaching college in AmericaEducation researcher Jonathan Zimmerman notes that in 2011, he was about forty -three percent of the degrees of university theses; In 1988, he was thirty, and in 1960 he was fifteen years old (at the Atlantic OceanRose Horwich a reportIn 2024, the average cumulative rate in the graduation category at Harvard University was 3.8). During almost the same period, “the average study amount by people in the college decreased by approximately 50 percent, from 25 to 13 hours a week.” Zimmerman cited a poll that he finds that in one semester, half of the respondents did not take a wide range of institutions one course that requires writing more than twenty pages.

It is still the case that university graduates tend to be higher companions. However, the latest data shows that people with four -year scientific degrees are struggling now to finding jobs. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence may soon restore work in a variety of fields; Many famous university majors, such as marketing, may be proven less valuable than they were. When artificial intelligence is used by students, it also threatens to convert the class into a theater, where the learning act is simulated instead of adopting it. Students can get a chat that do their work for them, and teachers can give enlarged grades, and everyone can feel satisfied during very little learning. Popular singer Jesse Wales explains, in his song “there”, which is mutually agreed between students, teachers and administrative faculty members.college“You are pretending to try, they will pretend that you won the class.” If you want to be a doctor or engineer, you may be worthy of it;

Since the middle of the last century, the number of Americans in the college has increased significantly – in preliminary numbers, by about five workers. This development was unavoidable, driven by the rise of knowledge work and the opening of higher education for groups that were once excluded. However, in the past decade, the registration began to contract, and this contraction is expected to continue. Demography is a potential factor: It is expected that the decrease in the birth rate, which began around 2007, is expected to lead to less than the elderly at high school. But it seems that more people can also conclude that the college has changed, and does not deserve the cost. Universities start on their way to look eternal, but higher education is an industry like anything else, with its share of ascension and landing. If the college is a bubble, can you prepare for an explosion?

Zimmerman told me, when I recently spoke to him: “Academics used to be the main event in the college, surrounded by many side offers.” “Now, side offers may be the main event.” Even universities with good faith faced the universities enjoyed by good resources to stop this transformation, and Zimmerman finds the roots of the problem in the history of teaching at the American College. He starts with Mark Hopkins, a professor of philosophy who was the head of Williams College from 1836 to 1872. If Socrates invented the symposium, Hopkins was an American envoy: at a time when education was often through great lectures and photographic recitation, he led students in talks about the meaning of life. James A. Garfield, who was one of his students, “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins at one end of the record and a student on the other hand.” This idea has become a bliss for teachers, as Zimmerman, who understood the teaching of the college as a “attractive” activity, writes mainly on the vitality of personal professors.

There are good reasons for holding this opinion. A talented teacher can change your life; The curriculum is unlikely to be pre -written by the bureaucracy. As kindergarten teachers know until the twelfth grade, the administrative supervision of the curricula is fraught with procedural and political risks. The colleges, which Zimmerman, have moved to this area by staying loyal to Garfield’s vision. After a decade, greater and more complicated in the institutional point of view, with the flowing plans filled with the parity – but, because “more and more American higher education exposed to the bureaucratic umbrella, mostly outside it.” Today, officials manage each aspect of university life, but designing and implementing the courses is often a special issue for individual professors to report themselves.

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