8 ms·

Failing Intro Economics

61 points by Bostonian 4y ago

anoonmoose 4y ago
AUTHOR: Socrates (469–399 B.C.) QUOTATION: The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. Person who has been teaching for forty years bemoans the youth these days...more at 11.
- ianbutler 4y ago
  This is a quantified reduction in ability, not a subjective gripe and one that is very commonly observed. A lot of programs are admitting under prepared students.
  - ysavir 4y ago
    > This is a quantified reduction in ability How effectively is it controlling for factors? > A lot of programs are admitting under prepared students. Sure. But there remains the question of _what_ should the students be prepared for, and are educational institutions providing that substance? Meaning, are students under prepared because they don't know how to succeed in a college environment, or are students under prepared because colleges don't know how to teach in a modern environment?
    - teemab 4y ago
      They’re underprepared because they weren’t adequately prepared beforehand.
  - anoonmoose 4y ago
    The only thing I noticed quantified in this paper was the number of students failing. Could just as easily be explained by a decline on the teacher's end.
    - ticviking 4y ago
      Considering that the same system is producing both students and teachers it seems very likely that the quality of both could be declining in a feedback loop. Less prepared instructors produce lower quality students who are themselves poor instructors.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  AUTHOR: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) QUOTATION: 97% of quotes on the Internet are complete fabrications.
  - yeezyseezy 4y ago
    Funny enough, the source[0] that uses this formatting also points out the quote is a fabrication. [0]: https://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html https://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html
- pimbrah 4y ago
  Socrates didn't leave any writings
  - anoonmoose 4y ago
    Yeah, but Plato, who knew him, did I mean this quote isn't in Plato's writings either but still
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  I don't think that's what the professor is doing. From the article: > specifically. Please note, I am not trying to “blame” students for their failing performance; rather, I am trying to understand it. Remedying the situation will require action by both students and faculty.
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    The author then goes on to blame students in 4 out 5 of the following points. To his credit he does suggest several changes he and faculty could make by the end of the article. But I think he's missing the most relevent point: with the vast number of online educational resources on the net, many students have been exposed to what great teaching looks like. Decades ago when this guy started teaching he did not have to survive that competition and comparison. He should stop entirely worrying about what students need to do and up his own game to at least match what anyone can find for free on video streaming platforms and elsewhere. He is the paid professional here. When he has eliminated his own shortcomings then he can perhaps start to correctly identify things that aren't a result of those shortcomings.
    - shafoshaf 4y ago
      They may have been exposed to great teaching, but do they recognize it? Asking people how they feel about the learning without an objective criteria to measure their performance could be a recipe for a local maximum.
      - tchaffee 4y ago
        > but do they recognize it? They don't need to for it to affect attendance. You stick around when you find something captivating and skip that which you find dull. And something that was captivating twenty years ago compared to the other content that was available at that time might be dull compared to today's content. Teachers can't expect styles and material from decades ago to just work like it used to.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    Yet the professor rejects out of hand that any changes need to happen with the course material, instead deciding the he needs to do a better job of "explaining how to succeed in the class" and "somehow making making office hours more welcoming.' Very little to no time is spent looking at ways to do either of those. This the article really is just mostly the professor complaining about his students while doing no introspection on his own possible failures.
- mihaic 4y ago
  I see this quote or mentions along this line popping up every single time someone says there is a regression in a newer generation. But some generations actually are worse than their predecessors (at least in certain aspects). There are universal complaints about teenagers: loud, rude, etc, and there are specifics I see for youth today: they are emotionally more fragile and underdeveloped, are more passive in general, understand complex situations less, and have a harder time in accepting reality. I'm not blaming anyone (if I were it would be the boomers that ruined the youth today), but blanked dismissal of issues because "this is how things have always been" doesn't help. For most of human history we've been at war and at the brink of starvation, and all the while there was a concentrated effort to handle those issues.
  - mstipetic 4y ago
    What is this objective reality people struggle to accept?
    - mellavora 4y ago
      If you don't pay your bills, people come and take your stuff. Then other people come and make you leave your residence. Then you get to live in your car. Unless someone has come and taken that.
      - logicprog 4y ago
        In what way are we "struggling to accept" this reality? If you mean that we want to change this, that's an entirely different discussion and not necessarily an automatic point against us.
      - tchaffee 4y ago
        > If you don't pay your bills, people come and take your stuff. What gave you the idea that younger generations aren't aware of this? About 17 out of 10,000 people in the US are homeless. The vast majority of people in the US are not experiencing what you are describing.
      - 4y ago
- UweSchmidt 4y ago
  I see no reason to outright dismiss Sokrates' analysis, nor the professor's, who is giving quantifyable data (deteriorating grades, grade inflation) and mentioning plausible issues (deteriorationg attention spans). The world is constantly changing and influencing each upcoming generation, for the better or worse, and Sokrates considered this issue important enough to discuss.
- yobbo 4y ago
  To be fair, the ancient Greece did decline and "fall". Probably, this what the Romans said towards the end of their run as well.
- tlear 4y ago
  This is why going back to Math is always the way. Out of 100 students in Econ 101. How many can read a problem and setup then solve a simple linear system? Forget it how many can solve a linear system Old professor I had in university would do a Math quiz in the first class, with disclaimer on the paper: If you find this hard save your money and drop out. Just some basic Algebra. Tenure and teaching for 30 years, he genuinely did not give a fuck. Of course lots of people would skip first class due to their O week.. Same epic prof would give exactly same tests year to year with 2-3 number changed around.. then fail everyone who provided answers from a wrong year. You would think people would learn or word would get passed down.. nope.
wildrhythms 4y ago
I genuinely believe a lot of professors are out of touch, especially around this point: >Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help. [...] I suspect there is an increased factor of intimidation associated with being lost in the material and asking a much older male professor for help. Let's ignore the weird second half assumption about 'older males' for now... Young people do not have a concept of 'come to the office seeking help'. In my years of professional experience I have not once gone to someone's office to seek help. Instead, people email each other, text, chat, video call... help can be synchronous or asynchronous. I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-down busy grading papers, or just about to leave? Young people can be extremely sensitive to how they impose themselves on other people. Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with, and I think this should include allowing students to get help with the material anonymously. (I don't intend to direct this at this specific professor, but the bemoaning of students not seeking help I find is often linked to professors thinking it's still 1972)
- stdbrouw 4y ago
  It does seem to be One Weird Trick that nobody knows about: bother the professor and the TAs whenever you need help – whether that's over email or during office hours – and most of them, most of the time, will help. Never had the courage to make use of office hours when I was still in college, and now as a TA I realize how much of a fool I was not to.
  - zhdc1 4y ago
    Courses in almost all universities are evaluated. Those evaluations actually do matter.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I mean, every professor sets aside time for office hours, but ignoring them while you are getting in bad shape in a class is a time-honored tradition.
- 4y ago
apwheele 4y ago
Utility(Sleeping In) > Utility(A in MacroEconomics)
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Also, smarter or more disciplined kids might have realized utility of small less selective private college is not commensurate with costs, so they are opting to go with lower cost government supported schools or focus on getting into more selective schools.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Seems very unlikely to have a significant effect size
  - apwheele 4y ago
    I think this is plausible on the margins, although it could be true that Davidson relative to peers are lower but still overall take the same test they are higher compared to 20 years ago as well (is there some term for people somewhat smarter over time?). Or more specifically `Smart(Davidson Now) < Smart(Peers Now)` could be true, but this doesn't 100% imply `Smart(Davidson Now) < Smart(Davidson 20 years ago)`. That said, as a professor you take kids as they are, not as you wish them to be. I have only taught at state schools, but if I had to teach the same course at a community college (or an advanced high school) I would likely alter my course/lectures at least some to accomodate the different pupils. I remember Macro econ was a tough slog when I was an undergrad (it was at 8am). IMO they should do micro as the intro course and leave macro for the majors.
    - treis 4y ago
      It's not impossible. College admissions 20 years ago was more or less GPA + ACT/SAT. These days it's far more holistic to the point of ACT/SAT not being required at Davidson. Found one article that says only 60% of admitted students submitted an ACT/SAT score. Can easily see a not so smart kid that checks boxes and had a good high school GPA due to parental supervision totally bombing out in college.
JWLong 4y ago
> Our study at Davidson College showed that in-class transmission of Covid, for instance, was very low. Despite that, attendance was very poor in my introductory economics course. COVID transmission over video conferencing is typically zero. Still blames students for not showing up to class during a pandemic.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
This guy has another article where he discusses AP economics (college level econ taken in high school with a test at the end that can be applied for college credit) as being superior to undergrad econ 101. I think that's an interesting position to write about. I tend to agree. My decade past high school experience found the AP courses were excellent. I did almost a dozen of them. https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/ap-economics-is-a-model-of-academic-rigor/ https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/ap-economics-is-a-mo... I think most of his points in the featured article are missing the point even if his thesis is generally correct. In my memory, most students were pretty poor. Lots of them did not understand how to learn. They tried to get through class and make up for it later, and then found that hard, and so they gave up, then scraped by because the classes themselves weren't really all that hard and you could do fine without understanding it. I can't imagine this guy's econ 101 is very different. Now imagine that cohort after a couple years of being half tuned into remote learning classes? Yeah they probably suck at school. I only learned how to be a student in the last couple years of high school. If I was instead just playing video games while half listening to a zoom for those two years I'd probably be a lot worse off too.
- Telemakhos 4y ago
  AP classes are excellent, and excellent students take them. The 101 courses in college are basically remedial courses for the students who are not excellent. I think this points to problems earlier in education: excellent students are always going to excel, but the rest of the students now accepted into college (and student debt) are not well prepared by the education they received in high school. This started before the pandemic. The twentieth century began with children learning Latin and Greek in high school and ended with adults learning remedial English in college.
  - eltondegeneres 4y ago
    The twentieth century began with children making up ~20% of the workforce, which wasn't outlawed until 1938. I assume they weren't being taught Latin down in the coal mines.
fny 4y ago
This point is really bizarre: > The expectations at the college or university level seem to be falling. In other words, the AP course has actually adapted more to changing and challenging economic conditions, particularly macroeconomic ones, than has the more stagnant college-level course. How is it that a college has more stagnant material than a curriculum designed by a bureaucracy? This sounds like a Davidson problem.
- scruple 4y ago
  Because the students taking an AP course are motivated to move beyond the 101 level before they even have the opportunity to take the 101 level course. 101 level courses are for people who can't otherwise move passed it through other means.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Imo biggest issue is that professors are incentivized to research, not teach. 101 classes have a high percentage of non-major, disinterested students, so the good teachers don't want to teach them. So the combination of undergrads being an annoyance that must be dealt with in order to do the real job of research, and the teachers who actually take that annoyance seriously not teaching this class means 101 classes are commonly not updated and little work is put into them by the teachers. AP courses are designed by people whose job is designing courses, not people whose job is research and "oh yea teach these undergrads too."
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students. They have been told not to attend class “if they are not feeling well,” and many take that warning quite literally. Did the author forget about Covid. These students has their last two years of high school completely overturned by Covid and broad shutdowns. Of course, they are going to take the warning literally for school. I think the Covid shutdowns really hurt young people’s education, and we are only just seeing the evidence for how much.
hikingsimulator 4y ago
Having had economics classes in the past, I echo the teacher's feeling that economics is a somewhat stagnant or entrenched field. I would further say that it is fairly ideological and terse up to being cryptic at times to some extent. Econometrics and how it's taught come to mind. If you grant this assumption, I wonder how much students' lack of interest may come from the field's teachings clashing with a person's everyday life and experiences.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  Might also be that outsiders perception of the usefulness and validity of standard economics has taken a big hit. Result is students unwilling to put in very much effort.
smallerfish 4y ago
> First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students... Unlike in other courses, these students then had a permanent deficiency in that important topic. Well that's easily fixable with low effort - at minimum make a web conference for each of the lectures, but better yet save the recordings onto a platform that students can refer back to later.
- recyclelater 4y ago
  Why? Not every job is remote friendly, why set up that expectation? I get that there’s some give and take from both sides here (teacher, being paid by students, and students, meeting the expectations of the teachers tasked with both educating as well as filtering), but I don’t think making everything remote will get people who already skip class watching videos of class. Edited to clarify filtering comment: if teachers don’t filter out low performing students who don’t make any effort to work within their environment, then the trust in a college degree as a signaling mechanism to potential employers goes away. It’s already started to go away for a variety of reasons, but graduating students who can’t do basic math and can’t regularly even attend lectures will destroy it completely within the next ten years. I say this as an employer who already has a shaky trust in a degree based off real world experience hiring CS graduates.
mdorazio 4y ago
I think there are multiple things going on here that the professor doesn’t seem to grasp: 1) The pandemic response of schools completely disrupted the learning level and style of an entire generation of kids for two years, and we’re now seeing the downstream impact of that. 2) I’m pretty sure that compared to 20 years ago, the more capable students are using AP Econ to test out of the college intro course, so you would expect the average interest and effort level of the remaining students to naturally decline. 3) I’m having trouble parsing this statement: “As a result, the student experience increasingly diverges from that of other courses, in which students feel a higher level of comfort, receive greater affirmation of their opinions, and earn higher grades.” But on the surface it seems to match a trend I noticed in college where students are optimizing for easy grades instead of for actual learning. 4) It really seems like the academic field of macroeconomics stopped matching reality in 2008 and now an entire generation of kids have grown up mistrusting economists and policy makers for good reasons.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >I’m having trouble parsing this statement: “As a result, the student experience increasingly diverges from that of other courses, in which students feel a higher level of comfort, receive greater affirmation of their opinions, and earn higher grades.” But on the surface it seems to match a trend I noticed in college where students are optimizing for easy grades instead of for actual learning. It's probably because the market in most jos, including corporate jobs, doesn't need or optimize for actual learners. Which wouldn't be a problem if there was internal motivation, but the whole culture doesn't respect or optimize for inspiring that either... >It really seems like the academic field of macroeconomics stopped matching reality in 2008 and now an entire generation of kids have grown up mistrusting economists and policy makers for good reasons. I think it never matched reality: it's just that things were cushier before 2008 (all the way to the previous serious bubble and accompanying economists spin).
- amcoastal 4y ago
- moviewatcher333 4y ago
HEmanZ 4y ago
My response to everyone saying this must be the professor’s fault: I graduated right before the pandemic, so I don’t know how things changed during the last two years, but I do know that US college students at mid-tier universities are very bad at learning. If I saw a professor at my university take the time to think this hard about why students are failing so badly, then I would trust his performance over the students. I would say about 85% of the classmates I had (again, right before the pandemic) were completely unwilling to put in any effort to learn whatsoever. It still makes me mad thinking how many students expected grades to be given for nothing. Most wouldn’t study more than 30 minutes for a test and expect to be given a B for “good job you took it” and then go complain in office hours when they failed. Davidson looks to be about the same quality as my university, so i expect their students are similar. What happens to these 85% students after the pandemic? I suspect they got even more used to doing nothing and expecting a pass. Please note, just like the professor points out, there are always a minority of students who are very good at learning, who are motivated to learn, and who excel in classes where 80% fail. If a class had 100% failure problem then I’d blame the professor.
- jterrys 4y ago
  College is a few years behind me, but not too far that I've forgotten my general experience. As a graduate from a mid-tier university in the US: -Nobody has ever given a shit about Intro to Econ. Practically every single Freshman is forced to take it so everyone bemoans the experience. -Most schools allow you to take a Community College version of the course and transfer over credits saving you time and money (and effort depending on the school). -In the "Hierarchy of Course Priorities", Intro to Econ is barely above Anthropology and soft sciences. I.e nobody gives a shit. Nobody has ever given a shit. And nobody wants to read through 20 pages of supply and demand and hear about a dude named Keynes because nobody thinks they're going to be an Economist or care or think its important. (Of course they're detrimentally wrong, but we're not here to criticize them, just see things from their perspective) -Mid tier universities can have a mix of really good and really bad professors. So while he's pouring out his heart and soul, his faculty colleagues might be giving even less of a shit than his students. Degrading overall morale and willingness to learn. Especially when its entirely possible now to coast through a class online, do a few multiple choice exams, and move on with your life. -Finally, Freshman classes as a whole filter out students who have poor studying discipline, so the likelihood of encountering failing students will be higher than average.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fuball63 4y ago
I'm a new professor that was a devops engineer in the field until a year and a half ago. I understand that out in the field, we think professors are all just lazy out of touch academics, publishing papers to meet a quota; I used to think this myself. Some definitely are, but I think its important for the audience to understand that I am new to this, working very hard at being good at this, and primarily a teaching professor (I do not do research and teach a full load, no research or administrative duties). I teach computer science. These are my observations to the five points the author raises: 1. "First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students." I think this is true and always has been true for entry level college classes. You usually have a set of students who will never come, a set of students who will always come, and the middle is what you need to worry about. My solution to this is require attendance, which I first started this year. I've noticed remarkable differences in class; I'm more involved in learning, can fix problems earlier with less feedback time, and students are more engaged with the materials outside of class. 2. "Second, work outside of class was not done with consistency." This is a tough one. I was shocked to find how many students don't read anything. Not just the textbook; they don't read documentation or even the lab assignments. I'm sure this has been a thing since I was in school in the 2000's. I think this is a case of "students just don't know how to". I try to teach them how to read documentation, as it is a skill, not something natural to common life. I also think requiring short essays on reading material is superior over multiple choice because it makes "brute forcing" through the assignment less easy. You can just copy snippets from a web search, and that happens, but again, I'm just trying to move the "middle" here. 3. "Third, basic mathematics proficiency, whatever the claims of our admissions office, is greatly lacking." This is an interesting one too, especially in computer science. Most of my students in my entry level classes do not understand the concept of a filesystem. Using phones and chromebooks their entire life, they've never had to find files outside of a search field. Some know even less about how to use the computers we bring to class. I blame this on big tech making crappy products and driving people to appliance computers, but that's a rant for another day. This is surprising but not difficult to overcome; you just have to teach it in the first week. You lose valuable time you should be teaching the material to teaching "how to find your file to submit", but good pre-made materials can alleviate this somewhat. 4. "Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help." This is definitely true, but also, they don't seek out reading the text/assignments for help or on campus tutoring. I also think this is something you have to teach; how to formulate a question based on something you don't know. I also want to mention here that cheating is rampant in computer science, so this is a more tempting approach for many students. Again, another issue for another discussion. 5. "Fifth, and finally, the introductory economics course, as stated in my 2014 Inside Higher Ed article, has remained somewhat constant." Other than the student learning outcomes (SLO's), courses in college are surprisingly flexible. I'm free to do pretty much what I want in the bounds of the SLO's. But: prepping a course is very work intensive, and it takes away from the student-centric work referenced in the other 4 points. Anyway, in closing, just want to say that there are a lot of good hardworking, non-tenured, full time professors out there. Its the hardest I've ever worked in my entire career and the most challenging work I've ever done. A lot of the points raised in the article are true, and its not just "kids these days" but systemic problems ranging from early education, tech literacy, and motivations for even attending college.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> Others appeared baffled by the theory, in both microeconomics and macroeconomics; nine students received a grade of “D” or “F.” This performance was perhaps the worst by a group that I have had in 50 years of teaching introductory economics, going back to my first such offering in 1972. 1) Perhaps the univ has dropped its standards? And doesn't make an effort to prep those on the lower end? 2) 50 years? I can't help but wonder how exciting and engaging this course isn't. Perhaps student performance is a reflection of prof performance?
vondur 4y ago
Regarding students attending classes. I went to a state university and on a typical lecture day, around 25->30 percent of students didn't show up. I was a Chem major and it blew my mind. This was especially crazy in O-Chem and P-Chem, bot of which have high failure rates. I will admit this is probably more prevalent in a state university compared to a more prestigious school.
- rustybelt 4y ago
  This one blows my mind. I wasn't the brightest student in college but knew enough to show up everyday. I still remember walking into Calc II on 9/11/2001. The professor (a Jesuit priest) was leading the class in prayer. At least 80% of the kids in that class showed up.

61 points by Bostonian 4y ago

AUTHOR: Socrates (469–399 B.C.) QUOTATION: The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. Person who has been teaching for forty years bemoans the youth these days...more at 11.

ianbutler 4y ago
This is a quantified reduction in ability, not a subjective gripe and one that is very commonly observed. A lot of programs are admitting under prepared students.
- ysavir 4y ago
  > This is a quantified reduction in ability How effectively is it controlling for factors? > A lot of programs are admitting under prepared students. Sure. But there remains the question of _what_ should the students be prepared for, and are educational institutions providing that substance? Meaning, are students under prepared because they don't know how to succeed in a college environment, or are students under prepared because colleges don't know how to teach in a modern environment?
  - teemab 4y ago
    They’re underprepared because they weren’t adequately prepared beforehand.
- anoonmoose 4y ago
  The only thing I noticed quantified in this paper was the number of students failing. Could just as easily be explained by a decline on the teacher's end.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    Considering that the same system is producing both students and teachers it seems very likely that the quality of both could be declining in a feedback loop. Less prepared instructors produce lower quality students who are themselves poor instructors.
pfdietz 4y ago
AUTHOR: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) QUOTATION: 97% of quotes on the Internet are complete fabrications.
- yeezyseezy 4y ago
  Funny enough, the source[0] that uses this formatting also points out the quote is a fabrication. [0]: https://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html https://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html
pimbrah 4y ago
Socrates didn't leave any writings
- anoonmoose 4y ago
  Yeah, but Plato, who knew him, did I mean this quote isn't in Plato's writings either but still
mwcampbell 4y ago
I don't think that's what the professor is doing. From the article: > specifically. Please note, I am not trying to “blame” students for their failing performance; rather, I am trying to understand it. Remedying the situation will require action by both students and faculty.
- tchaffee 4y ago
  The author then goes on to blame students in 4 out 5 of the following points. To his credit he does suggest several changes he and faculty could make by the end of the article. But I think he's missing the most relevent point: with the vast number of online educational resources on the net, many students have been exposed to what great teaching looks like. Decades ago when this guy started teaching he did not have to survive that competition and comparison. He should stop entirely worrying about what students need to do and up his own game to at least match what anyone can find for free on video streaming platforms and elsewhere. He is the paid professional here. When he has eliminated his own shortcomings then he can perhaps start to correctly identify things that aren't a result of those shortcomings.
  - shafoshaf 4y ago
    They may have been exposed to great teaching, but do they recognize it? Asking people how they feel about the learning without an objective criteria to measure their performance could be a recipe for a local maximum.
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      > but do they recognize it? They don't need to for it to affect attendance. You stick around when you find something captivating and skip that which you find dull. And something that was captivating twenty years ago compared to the other content that was available at that time might be dull compared to today's content. Teachers can't expect styles and material from decades ago to just work like it used to.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  Yet the professor rejects out of hand that any changes need to happen with the course material, instead deciding the he needs to do a better job of "explaining how to succeed in the class" and "somehow making making office hours more welcoming.' Very little to no time is spent looking at ways to do either of those. This the article really is just mostly the professor complaining about his students while doing no introspection on his own possible failures.
mihaic 4y ago
I see this quote or mentions along this line popping up every single time someone says there is a regression in a newer generation. But some generations actually are worse than their predecessors (at least in certain aspects). There are universal complaints about teenagers: loud, rude, etc, and there are specifics I see for youth today: they are emotionally more fragile and underdeveloped, are more passive in general, understand complex situations less, and have a harder time in accepting reality. I'm not blaming anyone (if I were it would be the boomers that ruined the youth today), but blanked dismissal of issues because "this is how things have always been" doesn't help. For most of human history we've been at war and at the brink of starvation, and all the while there was a concentrated effort to handle those issues.
- mstipetic 4y ago
  What is this objective reality people struggle to accept?
  - mellavora 4y ago
    If you don't pay your bills, people come and take your stuff. Then other people come and make you leave your residence. Then you get to live in your car. Unless someone has come and taken that.
    - logicprog 4y ago
      In what way are we "struggling to accept" this reality? If you mean that we want to change this, that's an entirely different discussion and not necessarily an automatic point against us.
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      > If you don't pay your bills, people come and take your stuff. What gave you the idea that younger generations aren't aware of this? About 17 out of 10,000 people in the US are homeless. The vast majority of people in the US are not experiencing what you are describing.
    - 4y ago
UweSchmidt 4y ago
I see no reason to outright dismiss Sokrates' analysis, nor the professor's, who is giving quantifyable data (deteriorating grades, grade inflation) and mentioning plausible issues (deteriorationg attention spans). The world is constantly changing and influencing each upcoming generation, for the better or worse, and Sokrates considered this issue important enough to discuss.
yobbo 4y ago
To be fair, the ancient Greece did decline and "fall". Probably, this what the Romans said towards the end of their run as well.
tlear 4y ago
This is why going back to Math is always the way. Out of 100 students in Econ 101. How many can read a problem and setup then solve a simple linear system? Forget it how many can solve a linear system Old professor I had in university would do a Math quiz in the first class, with disclaimer on the paper: If you find this hard save your money and drop out. Just some basic Algebra. Tenure and teaching for 30 years, he genuinely did not give a fuck. Of course lots of people would skip first class due to their O week.. Same epic prof would give exactly same tests year to year with 2-3 number changed around.. then fail everyone who provided answers from a wrong year. You would think people would learn or word would get passed down.. nope.

wildrhythms 4y ago

I genuinely believe a lot of professors are out of touch, especially around this point: >Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help. [...] I suspect there is an increased factor of intimidation associated with being lost in the material and asking a much older male professor for help. Let's ignore the weird second half assumption about 'older males' for now... Young people do not have a concept of 'come to the office seeking help'. In my years of professional experience I have not once gone to someone's office to seek help. Instead, people email each other, text, chat, video call... help can be synchronous or asynchronous. I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-down busy grading papers, or just about to leave? Young people can be extremely sensitive to how they impose themselves on other people. Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with, and I think this should include allowing students to get help with the material anonymously. (I don't intend to direct this at this specific professor, but the bemoaning of students not seeking help I find is often linked to professors thinking it's still 1972)

stdbrouw 4y ago
It does seem to be One Weird Trick that nobody knows about: bother the professor and the TAs whenever you need help – whether that's over email or during office hours – and most of them, most of the time, will help. Never had the courage to make use of office hours when I was still in college, and now as a TA I realize how much of a fool I was not to.
- zhdc1 4y ago
  Courses in almost all universities are evaluated. Those evaluations actually do matter.
bee_rider 4y ago
I mean, every professor sets aside time for office hours, but ignoring them while you are getting in bad shape in a class is a time-honored tradition.
4y ago

apwheele 4y ago

Utility(Sleeping In) > Utility(A in MacroEconomics)

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Also, smarter or more disciplined kids might have realized utility of small less selective private college is not commensurate with costs, so they are opting to go with lower cost government supported schools or focus on getting into more selective schools.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Seems very unlikely to have a significant effect size
- apwheele 4y ago
  I think this is plausible on the margins, although it could be true that Davidson relative to peers are lower but still overall take the same test they are higher compared to 20 years ago as well (is there some term for people somewhat smarter over time?). Or more specifically `Smart(Davidson Now) < Smart(Peers Now)` could be true, but this doesn't 100% imply `Smart(Davidson Now) < Smart(Davidson 20 years ago)`. That said, as a professor you take kids as they are, not as you wish them to be. I have only taught at state schools, but if I had to teach the same course at a community college (or an advanced high school) I would likely alter my course/lectures at least some to accomodate the different pupils. I remember Macro econ was a tough slog when I was an undergrad (it was at 8am). IMO they should do micro as the intro course and leave macro for the majors.
  - treis 4y ago
    It's not impossible. College admissions 20 years ago was more or less GPA + ACT/SAT. These days it's far more holistic to the point of ACT/SAT not being required at Davidson. Found one article that says only 60% of admitted students submitted an ACT/SAT score. Can easily see a not so smart kid that checks boxes and had a good high school GPA due to parental supervision totally bombing out in college.

JWLong 4y ago

> Our study at Davidson College showed that in-class transmission of Covid, for instance, was very low. Despite that, attendance was very poor in my introductory economics course. COVID transmission over video conferencing is typically zero. Still blames students for not showing up to class during a pandemic.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

This guy has another article where he discusses AP economics (college level econ taken in high school with a test at the end that can be applied for college credit) as being superior to undergrad econ 101. I think that's an interesting position to write about. I tend to agree. My decade past high school experience found the AP courses were excellent. I did almost a dozen of them. https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/ap-economics-is-a-model-of-academic-rigor/ https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/ap-economics-is-a-mo... I think most of his points in the featured article are missing the point even if his thesis is generally correct. In my memory, most students were pretty poor. Lots of them did not understand how to learn. They tried to get through class and make up for it later, and then found that hard, and so they gave up, then scraped by because the classes themselves weren't really all that hard and you could do fine without understanding it. I can't imagine this guy's econ 101 is very different. Now imagine that cohort after a couple years of being half tuned into remote learning classes? Yeah they probably suck at school. I only learned how to be a student in the last couple years of high school. If I was instead just playing video games while half listening to a zoom for those two years I'd probably be a lot worse off too.

Telemakhos 4y ago
AP classes are excellent, and excellent students take them. The 101 courses in college are basically remedial courses for the students who are not excellent. I think this points to problems earlier in education: excellent students are always going to excel, but the rest of the students now accepted into college (and student debt) are not well prepared by the education they received in high school. This started before the pandemic. The twentieth century began with children learning Latin and Greek in high school and ended with adults learning remedial English in college.
- eltondegeneres 4y ago
  The twentieth century began with children making up ~20% of the workforce, which wasn't outlawed until 1938. I assume they weren't being taught Latin down in the coal mines.

fny 4y ago

This point is really bizarre: > The expectations at the college or university level seem to be falling. In other words, the AP course has actually adapted more to changing and challenging economic conditions, particularly macroeconomic ones, than has the more stagnant college-level course. How is it that a college has more stagnant material than a curriculum designed by a bureaucracy? This sounds like a Davidson problem.

scruple 4y ago
Because the students taking an AP course are motivated to move beyond the 101 level before they even have the opportunity to take the 101 level course. 101 level courses are for people who can't otherwise move passed it through other means.
colinmhayes 4y ago
Imo biggest issue is that professors are incentivized to research, not teach. 101 classes have a high percentage of non-major, disinterested students, so the good teachers don't want to teach them. So the combination of undergrads being an annoyance that must be dealt with in order to do the real job of research, and the teachers who actually take that annoyance seriously not teaching this class means 101 classes are commonly not updated and little work is put into them by the teachers. AP courses are designed by people whose job is designing courses, not people whose job is research and "oh yea teach these undergrads too."

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students. They have been told not to attend class “if they are not feeling well,” and many take that warning quite literally. Did the author forget about Covid. These students has their last two years of high school completely overturned by Covid and broad shutdowns. Of course, they are going to take the warning literally for school. I think the Covid shutdowns really hurt young people’s education, and we are only just seeing the evidence for how much.

hikingsimulator 4y ago

Having had economics classes in the past, I echo the teacher's feeling that economics is a somewhat stagnant or entrenched field. I would further say that it is fairly ideological and terse up to being cryptic at times to some extent. Econometrics and how it's taught come to mind. If you grant this assumption, I wonder how much students' lack of interest may come from the field's teachings clashing with a person's everyday life and experiences.

Gibbon1 4y ago
Might also be that outsiders perception of the usefulness and validity of standard economics has taken a big hit. Result is students unwilling to put in very much effort.

smallerfish 4y ago

> First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students... Unlike in other courses, these students then had a permanent deficiency in that important topic. Well that's easily fixable with low effort - at minimum make a web conference for each of the lectures, but better yet save the recordings onto a platform that students can refer back to later.

recyclelater 4y ago
Why? Not every job is remote friendly, why set up that expectation? I get that there’s some give and take from both sides here (teacher, being paid by students, and students, meeting the expectations of the teachers tasked with both educating as well as filtering), but I don’t think making everything remote will get people who already skip class watching videos of class. Edited to clarify filtering comment: if teachers don’t filter out low performing students who don’t make any effort to work within their environment, then the trust in a college degree as a signaling mechanism to potential employers goes away. It’s already started to go away for a variety of reasons, but graduating students who can’t do basic math and can’t regularly even attend lectures will destroy it completely within the next ten years. I say this as an employer who already has a shaky trust in a degree based off real world experience hiring CS graduates.

mdorazio 4y ago

I think there are multiple things going on here that the professor doesn’t seem to grasp: 1) The pandemic response of schools completely disrupted the learning level and style of an entire generation of kids for two years, and we’re now seeing the downstream impact of that. 2) I’m pretty sure that compared to 20 years ago, the more capable students are using AP Econ to test out of the college intro course, so you would expect the average interest and effort level of the remaining students to naturally decline. 3) I’m having trouble parsing this statement: “As a result, the student experience increasingly diverges from that of other courses, in which students feel a higher level of comfort, receive greater affirmation of their opinions, and earn higher grades.” But on the surface it seems to match a trend I noticed in college where students are optimizing for easy grades instead of for actual learning. 4) It really seems like the academic field of macroeconomics stopped matching reality in 2008 and now an entire generation of kids have grown up mistrusting economists and policy makers for good reasons.

coldtea 4y ago
>I’m having trouble parsing this statement: “As a result, the student experience increasingly diverges from that of other courses, in which students feel a higher level of comfort, receive greater affirmation of their opinions, and earn higher grades.” But on the surface it seems to match a trend I noticed in college where students are optimizing for easy grades instead of for actual learning. It's probably because the market in most jos, including corporate jobs, doesn't need or optimize for actual learners. Which wouldn't be a problem if there was internal motivation, but the whole culture doesn't respect or optimize for inspiring that either... >It really seems like the academic field of macroeconomics stopped matching reality in 2008 and now an entire generation of kids have grown up mistrusting economists and policy makers for good reasons. I think it never matched reality: it's just that things were cushier before 2008 (all the way to the previous serious bubble and accompanying economists spin).
amcoastal 4y ago
moviewatcher333 4y ago

HEmanZ 4y ago

My response to everyone saying this must be the professor’s fault: I graduated right before the pandemic, so I don’t know how things changed during the last two years, but I do know that US college students at mid-tier universities are very bad at learning. If I saw a professor at my university take the time to think this hard about why students are failing so badly, then I would trust his performance over the students. I would say about 85% of the classmates I had (again, right before the pandemic) were completely unwilling to put in any effort to learn whatsoever. It still makes me mad thinking how many students expected grades to be given for nothing. Most wouldn’t study more than 30 minutes for a test and expect to be given a B for “good job you took it” and then go complain in office hours when they failed. Davidson looks to be about the same quality as my university, so i expect their students are similar. What happens to these 85% students after the pandemic? I suspect they got even more used to doing nothing and expecting a pass. Please note, just like the professor points out, there are always a minority of students who are very good at learning, who are motivated to learn, and who excel in classes where 80% fail. If a class had 100% failure problem then I’d blame the professor.

jterrys 4y ago
College is a few years behind me, but not too far that I've forgotten my general experience. As a graduate from a mid-tier university in the US: -Nobody has ever given a shit about Intro to Econ. Practically every single Freshman is forced to take it so everyone bemoans the experience. -Most schools allow you to take a Community College version of the course and transfer over credits saving you time and money (and effort depending on the school). -In the "Hierarchy of Course Priorities", Intro to Econ is barely above Anthropology and soft sciences. I.e nobody gives a shit. Nobody has ever given a shit. And nobody wants to read through 20 pages of supply and demand and hear about a dude named Keynes because nobody thinks they're going to be an Economist or care or think its important. (Of course they're detrimentally wrong, but we're not here to criticize them, just see things from their perspective) -Mid tier universities can have a mix of really good and really bad professors. So while he's pouring out his heart and soul, his faculty colleagues might be giving even less of a shit than his students. Degrading overall morale and willingness to learn. Especially when its entirely possible now to coast through a class online, do a few multiple choice exams, and move on with your life. -Finally, Freshman classes as a whole filter out students who have poor studying discipline, so the likelihood of encountering failing students will be higher than average.

deleted 4y ago

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fuball63 4y ago

I'm a new professor that was a devops engineer in the field until a year and a half ago. I understand that out in the field, we think professors are all just lazy out of touch academics, publishing papers to meet a quota; I used to think this myself. Some definitely are, but I think its important for the audience to understand that I am new to this, working very hard at being good at this, and primarily a teaching professor (I do not do research and teach a full load, no research or administrative duties). I teach computer science. These are my observations to the five points the author raises: 1. "First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students." I think this is true and always has been true for entry level college classes. You usually have a set of students who will never come, a set of students who will always come, and the middle is what you need to worry about. My solution to this is require attendance, which I first started this year. I've noticed remarkable differences in class; I'm more involved in learning, can fix problems earlier with less feedback time, and students are more engaged with the materials outside of class. 2. "Second, work outside of class was not done with consistency." This is a tough one. I was shocked to find how many students don't read anything. Not just the textbook; they don't read documentation or even the lab assignments. I'm sure this has been a thing since I was in school in the 2000's. I think this is a case of "students just don't know how to". I try to teach them how to read documentation, as it is a skill, not something natural to common life. I also think requiring short essays on reading material is superior over multiple choice because it makes "brute forcing" through the assignment less easy. You can just copy snippets from a web search, and that happens, but again, I'm just trying to move the "middle" here. 3. "Third, basic mathematics proficiency, whatever the claims of our admissions office, is greatly lacking." This is an interesting one too, especially in computer science. Most of my students in my entry level classes do not understand the concept of a filesystem. Using phones and chromebooks their entire life, they've never had to find files outside of a search field. Some know even less about how to use the computers we bring to class. I blame this on big tech making crappy products and driving people to appliance computers, but that's a rant for another day. This is surprising but not difficult to overcome; you just have to teach it in the first week. You lose valuable time you should be teaching the material to teaching "how to find your file to submit", but good pre-made materials can alleviate this somewhat. 4. "Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help." This is definitely true, but also, they don't seek out reading the text/assignments for help or on campus tutoring. I also think this is something you have to teach; how to formulate a question based on something you don't know. I also want to mention here that cheating is rampant in computer science, so this is a more tempting approach for many students. Again, another issue for another discussion. 5. "Fifth, and finally, the introductory economics course, as stated in my 2014 Inside Higher Ed article, has remained somewhat constant." Other than the student learning outcomes (SLO's), courses in college are surprisingly flexible. I'm free to do pretty much what I want in the bounds of the SLO's. But: prepping a course is very work intensive, and it takes away from the student-centric work referenced in the other 4 points. Anyway, in closing, just want to say that there are a lot of good hardworking, non-tenured, full time professors out there. Its the hardest I've ever worked in my entire career and the most challenging work I've ever done. A lot of the points raised in the article are true, and its not just "kids these days" but systemic problems ranging from early education, tech literacy, and motivations for even attending college.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> Others appeared baffled by the theory, in both microeconomics and macroeconomics; nine students received a grade of “D” or “F.” This performance was perhaps the worst by a group that I have had in 50 years of teaching introductory economics, going back to my first such offering in 1972. 1) Perhaps the univ has dropped its standards? And doesn't make an effort to prep those on the lower end? 2) 50 years? I can't help but wonder how exciting and engaging this course isn't. Perhaps student performance is a reflection of prof performance?

vondur 4y ago

Regarding students attending classes. I went to a state university and on a typical lecture day, around 25->30 percent of students didn't show up. I was a Chem major and it blew my mind. This was especially crazy in O-Chem and P-Chem, bot of which have high failure rates. I will admit this is probably more prevalent in a state university compared to a more prestigious school.

rustybelt 4y ago
This one blows my mind. I wasn't the brightest student in college but knew enough to show up everyday. I still remember walking into Calc II on 9/11/2001. The professor (a Jesuit priest) was leading the class in prayer. At least 80% of the kids in that class showed up.