How the economic crisis is screwing over my students

[I wrote this six months ago and forgot about it, as is my wont... everything is still applicable, as far as I can make out. With the current hole in the California budget, and my ongoing skepticism about the likelihood of Californians voting to raise taxes on themselves to make up the shortfall, the current situation is worse, if anything.]

It is grading time again - time to see just how ineffective I have been in instilling the fundamentals of geophysics into the minds of my students. As I once again find that even the simplest variations on the well-hackneyed themes that we have covered time and again in class and in homework assignments are apt to completely flummox them, I am left wondering how it came to be this way. Have the current crop of students somehow lost the ability to solve problems that need even a minuscule amount of lateral thinking? Or did they ever have it to start with?

While I am unlikely to resolve this fundamental problem in a single, barely-considered blog post, my suspicion is that much of the blame for my current class's problems lies with the dire funding situation in public universities. And though there should be a certain amount of individual responsibility attached to their performance, as well as mine, I do think that many of today's students don't know or expect any better, based on the sub-par experience they've had already. Specifically, I think that three aspects of the current cash-strapped university experience are particularly damaging:

1. Class sizes and multiple-choice testing

In order to teach more students for less cash, loading up classes with as many people as possible has become commonplace. This model has resulted in an estrangement of faculty from students, with most instructor-student contact hours coming from graduate teaching assistants. Moreover, it is logistically impossible to assess performance in such classes in any way other than through multiple-choice tests.

The end result is that the average class experience does not demand deep engagement with the material, or require much in the way of critical thinking. Indeed, even if a student does manage to pursue such higher learning tasks, there are few avenues for discussing and/or validating their ideas.

2. Tuition costs and out-of-class work

The Regents of the University of California, following two decades of underfunding from the state (and the California taxpayer), have in recent years decided to pass on all the unfunded costs of a college education on to their students. The consequence of this dramatic realignment in funding is tuition costs that have risen almost exponentially in the past five years.

I feel very sorry for the students who have been subjected to this while at college. They are now forced to pay out thousands of dollars each successive year on top of the already pricy costs they agreed to when they started. Many of the students in my classes, most of whom are first generation college students and are not from wealthy backgrounds, work in jobs outside of class time in order to make ends meet.

And because they are working in their jobs, they don't have time to do their assignments, let alone go over their notes and consolidate their knowledge. Forget reading around the subject — nobody in my recent class had read the textbook until prompted to in class. You can't devote the proper amount of time to study when you are treading water to survive. Given the effect this has on student performance, I am left wondering whether it is worth the hassle for these students — if they continually get poor grades and are working all hours to do so, and all with no guarantee of a better job at the end of it all, at what point will they call it quits?

I fear that the de facto removal of the redistribution of wealth with respect to higher education is going to render a traditional college experience for many low to middle income students impossible, and put the brakes on upward mobility for my students.

3. Pester power and grade inflation

Perverse incentives abound for faculty members to devalue the academic enterprise from within. This is true at the best of times, and of course we are currently experiencing the worst of times. The fear of losing one's job has not been greater in my lifetime than it is today. Academics rarely consider themselves employable outside the ivory towers they inhabit. And so many will appease irate students upon whose positive evaluations they rely for their continuing employment or advancement.

Academic appeasement can take many forms, but the most pernicious is the lowering of grading standards such that more students get top grades. This can lead to a sense of entitlement in some students ("I'm an 'A' student"), and also the idea that they can wrangle for better grades by nagging and complaining. In my large lecture class I get several students each year who have evidently had some success with this method upstream. It's annoying to deal with, and I don't think it does the students involved any favors. (Is it a skillset or a mindset that stands one in good stead for later life? For a career?) One of my colleagues has made the point to me that if those students put the same amount of effort into studying the material as they did into grade-grubbing, they would have no problems at all with their grades. And they would have learned something along the way, too!

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I don't have any quick or easy solutions to the problems facing higher education in the current climate. I have been disappointed that politicians at the state level have not made the case for public higher education as a public good, and a better investment of state general funds than (say) incarcerating petty criminals. Improvements to the methods used to assess faculty members' teaching effectiveness may be a possible way of addressing the grade inflation problem, but will probably involve a modest investment of resources at a time when they are scarce. Reducing class sizes and tuition costs can only be addressed with a much larger addition of funds. Unless the will (and the money) can be found from somewhere, all I can forsee is continuing devaluation of the public education experience.