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If you can bear with me while i attempt a synthesis here, I think this one line captures basically the entire dynamic, but the author seems to seriously underwe

If you can bear with me while i attempt a synthesis here, I think this one line captures basically the entire dynamic, but the author seems to seriously underweight its explanatory value. > The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.

bloppe 2y ago
Sure, but not all degrees are equal. Institutions have reputations based on how smart / effective their graduates tend to be. So by making it harder for the careless ones to graduate, a university can enhance the value of the degree for those that do. Even with the transactional attitude, it would behoove students to want to be pushed.
- casey2 2y ago
  Yet institutions don't do this so your reasoning is faulty. Particularly at the "value of the degree" line. There are few, if any, degrees that provide value and even fewer that provide employable skills. Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.
  - bloppe 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465278 This may be fake, but as somebody who went to a school that took academic rigor very seriously, I'm confident that my degree is the most valuable thing I own. Recruiters from both startups and entrenched companies are constantly reinforcing that belief. The market for degrees may be pretty skewed, but that doesn't mean it's not a real market with supply/demand dynamics
- jt-hill 2y ago
  That is true, but I don't think the students are the ones responsible for the second and third order effects of maintaining academic rigor. They're just playing the game they're given.
  - bloppe 2y ago
    Ya, the current students do not, but future students do. They're the ones who will take their business elsewhere. Schools with slipping standards may not see negative effects in the short term, but people are waking up to the fact that a lot of degrees are nowhere near worth the tuition, and the first schools to go bust will tend to be the ones with the worst cost/benefit ratio.
    - jt-hill 2y ago
      I agree that holding the line and failing the whole class if the whole class deserves it is the only hope universities have of breaking the feedback loop, but the author seems to think that represents an insurmountable coordination problem.
uxp100 2y ago
I can’t find the exact citation at the moment, but I believe that American students were described as viewing the education process as transactional in a wider sense by Max Weber in 1905 (Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism I think?)
- Nition 2y ago
  I can say at least that it was a major point in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).
bruce511 2y ago
You're not wrong, many students approach college as a vocational training facility. I'd say they do want to learn, but the focus is on "learning to get a job". If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process. Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate. These skills, and the understanding of how to use them, are the real goal -the material is just there to keep your interest. Yes, obviously, if you are going into chemistry then learn chemistry and so on. But round out your course with other things. Oceanography can give you insight to computer science, literature can promote better communication. Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers. But if you are at college now, or perhaps going soon, try and see beyond the next assignment. Try and see the process which underlies it. Most of all college is there to teach you to think. So stop doing for just a moment and start thinking. Once you see behind the curtain you can't unsee it. And ironically even if I tell you it's there, I can't make you look. Experience doesn't work like that.
- blandcoffee 2y ago
  Do you think this might be tied to a person’s financial situation? Grow up with a safety net, you’ll enjoy the process. Grow up poor and/or with people depending on you and you focus on the end state?
  - Clubber 2y ago
    I would argue the opposite. Grow up with a safety net and you don't take it seriously. Group poor and/or with people depending on you, you understand the task at hand. I goofed off a lot in college until I was tired of partying and realized I was going nowhere; about end of Sophomore year. All the older folks who paid their own way sure took it seriously. For reference, I'm also GenX. I'm sure motivations range from what I suggested to what you suggested.
    - saturn8601 2y ago
      Both viewpoints can be true at the same time.
hardwaregeek 2y ago
That's part of it, but the author acknowledges that college has been transactional for quite a while. What has exacerbated the issue was COVID and the rise of extremely potent, addictive social media. I wouldn't be surprised if we look back on social media as the digital equivalent of children drinking and smoking weed, i.e. something that causes permanent damage to one's brain.
- jt-hill 2y ago
  The technology may be amplifying the effects because that's what technology does but it is not a change to the underlying dynamics. "The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. They just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. I'm not saying it's good - it's clearly an unsustainable trend, but the students are not the ones driving it, so they're not equipped to stop it.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    >"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. Idk, it's totally possible that as COVID happened and they watched the government lock them in their homes away from each other and forced them to miss important moments in their lives (remote graduations for example), then they watched the rise of EZ-Cheat systems (ChatGPT) which made their creators extremely wealthy, combined with crypto frauds (that our own President does in his free time), they started to think that the way to get ahead in life was to lack character and be lazy...
    - hn_acc1 2y ago
      Isn't it? I mean, the "work hard, save your pennies" method is being intentionally attacked and the "invest everything in crypto" is being rewarded. EVERYTHING is done for the next quarter - and you expect students to learn that "patience in savings and working your way up the ladder" is the way to success?
- throwawaysleep 2y ago
  The transaction has changed a great deal though. GPA used to be more heavily weighted and professors used to be more essential for references. You might bring your transcript to an interview. Now, it seems to be all about projects. Coursework has dwindled in relevance.
deadbabe 2y ago
That’s why most students will never truly find a job – they’re all too busy looking.
- odo1242 2y ago
  What do you mean by that? That doesn’t really make sense
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Makes perfect sense. The things you do to look for a job don’t help you do the job.
    - odo1242 2y ago
      Oh, ok. I was confused because you said find a job, not do a job.
      - deadbabe 2y ago
        If you can’t do a job you won’t get hired.
        odo1242 2y ago
        > The things you do to look for a job don’t help you do the job. > If you can’t do a job you won’t get hired. I mean, these statements seem a bit contradictory though.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
> It is a transaction. That is a purely rational take, but people are seldom rational. My pet theory is that inertia is a huge reason why people choose college. Majority of people who go to college do it as a continuation of 10-12 years of continuous schooling (or partying). As they climb educational or social hierarchies they are constantly reminded that college is a next step. Thus going to college feels far more familiar and less scary than joining the workforce. Thus, going to college is a default choice for many. After the gut decision is made it can be wrapped into whatever rational argument.
- jt-hill 2y ago
  The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.
sky2224 2y ago
As a student currently, I'll also throw in this perspective. The colleges themselves make it feel transactional and not about learning even if I'm interested in doing so. For example, I'm taking a physics course right now (electricity and magnetism). The concepts are difficult for me and I was hoping that the homework would help. So, I go to do the homework, but the homework is online. With the online homework I get five chances to get the problem correct, but there is zero partial credit, zero feedback, and every time I get the answer wrong, it negatively impacts my grade. I have no chance to make mistakes and learn. At least with homework that was handed out back in the day, there was at least the possibility of partial credit being handed out. So my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg. Additionally, since students have been cheating, I think it gives professors a skewed perspective on how much time is actually needed to get work done, so the deadlines get moved up. This means I get even more pressure put on me when I'm just trying to learn and be a good student.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  I agree to some extent. A wild one to me is how schools will limit the number of classes you can take and/or pressure you to graduate on time even if it means choosing a major before you're really ready. That seems like a surefire way to kill any interest in exploring knowledge and replace it with a focus on mechanical box-checking.
  - nradov 2y ago
    They have to make room for incoming freshmen.
- acomjean 2y ago
  In the 90s we had the "Plato" system for chemistry. It was a question/answer terminal in the library. Our Chemistry TA advised us to use it to study for exams as it had a lot of sample questions. It was really good because if you got it wrong, it actually gave you a detailed explanation of how to solve it. It was so helpful to have that. When I used the system, I made a bunch of mistakes but ended up learning from them, and it really helped for the exams. 1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994. https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by. For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.
michaelt 2y ago
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. Only so long as the college doesn't devalue the credential. If I interview a few people with a CS degree from College A and I find they don't know the basics of programming - then the credential loses value; why would I bother interviewing people from such a college? So colleges have to balance the needs of their stakeholders - employers/ graduates want the credential to be a sign of education; and current students who want good grades and less work. The "implied terms of the transaction" have always been that current students have to learn enough that they're not devaluing the credential.
- garciasn 2y ago
  I have interviewed prospective employees who come in with no academic credentials all the way through to those who have completed degree programs at one of the top 50 universities. Regardless of university, students are individuals and shouldn’t be given more or less credit because of the name of the school they attended. Full. Stop. That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one. As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it. Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.
  - noitpmeder 2y ago
    While I agree with you in practice, institution name (of their school, prior employer, ...) is, overall, a hard to escape filter when you're staring down the barrel of thousands of applications per open role. There are other early-out filters you can use, but none of them are perfect in quickly reducing the application count to a tractable number for your HR/hiring managers/engineers to tackle.
jncfhnb 2y ago
I don’t agree personally. I went to school about 10 ago to a private University (nearly full ride because universities used to care about PSAT performance for no clear reason). My school was heavy on co-ops meaning it was more job outcome focused than most. In my opinion it was mostly a rite of passage thing. It was the first time I was granted independence including personal responsibility, a brand new social network, sex, etc. It was just adulthood with training wheels. I’m not going to argue that sounds like an ideal social structure but it was very useful to me. The raw alternative of jumping into the workforce probably would have led to bad outcomes even if it all worked out economically. The stepping stone to employment felt like it was just sort of assumed like finishing high school. I felt nothing getting either diploma. I might feel some serious existential dread if the market I was entering resembled the one now though.
zamfi 2y ago
Wait, but the point of the piece is that although college has always been transactional, behavior has changed. If so, why would transactional-ism be the cause? Read on: > The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes. And then, crucially: > Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.
- jt-hill 2y ago
  "Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids. When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students. Don't hate the player — hate the game.
  - jackcosgrove 2y ago
    I don't think the author of the piece is saying there has been a cultural change among students, emanating from within. Rather the thesis is that smartphones are the culprit. "Things changed" can encompass the proliferation of smartphones.
    - Olreich 2y ago
      Sure, but the argument is still that the smartphones aren’t the root cause. It’s the transactional nature of the thing. Can’t fail students because money would go down, so keep passing them as they get better equipped to ignore you and have reduced requirements to get a passing grade. The thing that’s changed is how much the transactional nature favors the lazy students, not the smartphones specifically. The reason the argument is so bad that “it’s the smartphones” is because that implies an easy solution that is external to the academic system, when the root cause is internal to the system.
banku_brougham 2y ago
Well said, believe this is it
gammarator 2y ago
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. It’s worth pointing out that this is a perception that has been cultivated. Position the degree as first and foremost a job credential, cut state support, and force students and their parents to directly bear the cost for this supposedly individualized benefit through higher tuition. “The customer is always right” and no learning need occur. “Starving the Beast” is a documentary on this topic: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5444928/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_pl https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5444928/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_p...
- jt-hill 2y ago
  I can't respond to any specifics of the documentary, but it looks to me like the universities themselves are the biggest cultivators of this perception, with the goal of increased enrollment. If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.
- andoando 2y ago
  I see state funded education as making the problem worse. The market just reacts to what is available, and funding everyone to go to college, whether or not its useful or resourceful to do so means companies have a large enough pool of applicants to make it a requirement. I could see even, that employers themselves would take up the cost to train if they lacked qualified applicants. Imagine for example there wasn't a billion CS students. All the company still need programmers, so what are they going to do? IMO, instead of funding universities, simply give people a stipend to be used for some sort of educational purpose.
smelendez 2y ago
Yeah, and the nature of the transaction evolves over time in a way that makes aging professors uncomfortable. I get the sense the author just doesn’t have the same rapport with students they likely once did. Students stop coming to class and don’t go to office hours and they don’t know why. > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. I went to college 20 years ago and lots of professors distributed slides and lecture notes to students. I assume it’s even more common now. Yes, I wouldn’t ask a speaker to let me read their private notes, but that’s not how PowerPoint slides shown in class are generally perceived.
- hn_acc1 2y ago
  Agreed. A course that did not distribute slides / lecture notes 35 years ago when I studied (well known engineering school in Canada) was considered annoying / the prof trying to force students to attend.
- deleted 2y ago
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crooked-v 2y ago
I think plenty of students are there because they want to learn a subject, singular. Everything else is just the unrelated overhead they're stuck with for their white collar job permit.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Does that mean it would be better if the majority of people went to trade schools and left the universities for the minority who want an education for it's own sake?
pj_mukh 2y ago
We don't really have to look for an explanation. The author says it, pure and clear. "It’s the phones, stupid" That's it. Every other variable, including the transactional nature of acquiring a middle class job, has stayed the same. People are just getting dumber [1], and the phones are causing this drop. I am as tech forward as the next person. I think AI deserves the time to figure out what it is. But the phones have basically shown us where all their negatives and positives are. Time to regulate, get the phones out of the schools. If you're in one of these states [2] get behind the active legislation, if not, start it! [1]: https://theweek.com/science/have-we-reached-peak-cognition https://theweek.com/science/have-we-reached-peak-cognition [2]: https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-bans-states-e6d1fe8ddfde33f086d5cd2a19f4c148 https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-bans-states-e6d...
- bumby 2y ago
  The transactional nature hasn’t always been the same, though. It hasn’t always been that way, or at least the nature of the transaction has changed. Decades ago, surveys showed the predominant reason people went to college was “to develop a philosophy for life”. Now the main reason is “to get a good job.”
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    Decades ago college was for the people who were financially secure and could choose a life of the mind. Now it's a prerequisite for almost any real job. Guess what, the programmers grinding Leetcode aren't doing it for the thrill of solving a puzzle either.
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      This was true pre-GI-Bill, maybe, which puts it way out at the edge of living memory. It took a while for it to become a requirement for such a large proportion of jobs, but that's when the shift got going, and in a hurry.
    - deleted 2y ago
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8bitsrule 2y ago
>The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. I was one of those 'rounds to zero' students, in the physical sciences, long ago. I wanted to learn how to verify a hypothesis by looking at the evidence. And after 4 years, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of significant lab exposure. What we did get was cookbook labs, mostly on the very basic stuff. What we also got after that was theory, theory and more theory. Usually from unenthused teachers, going through the motions. From my perspective, it was mostly a waste of time. Years later I learned what Feynman meant when he said "Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." Maybe if I'd heard that, I've have dropped out after two years instead of hoping I'd get to the part where someone cared.
csomar 2y ago
Not only that but he is shooting the messenger > My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time. They (the prof class) created this situation. They could have upheld their standards and seen the number of students go down but they preferred to fill their classrooms at the expense of quality. This is like a manager who is complaining that no one can code while offering McDonalds hourly rates.
- niceguy1827 2y ago
  Did you finish reading? The author said later on that holding the bar high wasn't an option since it would risk his job. The blame should be on the universities, not on the professors who don't have much power to fix the problem.
  - sahila 2y ago
    But how far do you go with the blame? If the universities hold the bar high, they'll risk their funding from parents not wanting to enroll their child and the government not funding a failing school. The blame should be on society? I think professors are in a good place to actually step up and say no. They're all highly educated individuals who can likely leave academia and get jobs in the private sector. They're best set up to break the cycle.
- sonzohan 2y ago
  Professor here. We did not create it, we responded to administration prioritizing profit over performance and prestige. They passed the decision down to us instructors by threatening our employment if we failed too many students. Since tenure is heavily dependent on student outcomes, giving a student a lower grade than what they think they deserved will almost certainly result in negative feedback, which threatens your tenure. For non-tenured faculty it could result in a contract non-renewal. I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role." In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome? At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars." Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts. As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.
ookdatnog 2y ago
I think most teachers are not naive wrt the transactional perception of education in their students. However, what keeps a passionate teacher going is the belief that, if they do their job well, at least some significant subset of students will take genuine interest in the material. I don't think it's naive to hope for that, I've seen this happen a lot when I was a student. What OOP is lamenting is that that's no longer possible.
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aprilthird2021 2y ago
The problem is that the value the students get out of the transaction is being lowered by their own actions in the class
danschuller 2y ago
It's telling this sentence has the student as one to blame, when it's a structural issue and the weight of the blame rests more heavily on the shoulders of the universities.
gonzobonzo 2y ago
> The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. Further - even if someone wants to learn these subjects, most don't see the value in paying for a college course to learn them. Close to no one, after receiving a college degree in a subject, says "I want to learn more about X, I'm going to go ahead and pay $4,000 to take a class in it at the nearby college." Plenty of people learn things after they graduate. Just about everyone does so in a better manner than a college course. Colleges are only viable because they dangle degrees over students' heads, and then they complain that students are only coming for the degrees.
mbs159 2y ago
The reason why I wanted to study CS in university was because I was curious, not because of possible job offers you get if you have a degree. When I applied I thought that this was the primary motivator for others as well. Turns out I was very wrong, although I did meet a few students who were studying mainly for their curiosity.
no_wizard 2y ago
They have a university for this now, its called Western Governors University. They did the steps, got all the regional accreditations etc. but its all self driven and structured to cater to speed running a college degree. You can learn alot at WGU, don't get me wrong, but they are clearly just fine if you are there simply to speed run getting that diploma.
neycoda 2y ago
And now the white-collar jobs are being replaced by vibe AI app-making. It seems most of college now isn't for most people. Maybe the kids can save their money and just make vibe apps.
timtas 2y ago
Then what a tragic misuse of societal resources. A simple IQ test would be a better signal to employers than a massively overpriced four year charade.
- tptacek 2y ago
  If that were actually the case, companies would be using simple IQ tests.

bloppe 2y ago

Sure, but not all degrees are equal. Institutions have reputations based on how smart / effective their graduates tend to be. So by making it harder for the careless ones to graduate, a university can enhance the value of the degree for those that do. Even with the transactional attitude, it would behoove students to want to be pushed.

casey2 2y ago
Yet institutions don't do this so your reasoning is faulty. Particularly at the "value of the degree" line. There are few, if any, degrees that provide value and even fewer that provide employable skills. Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.
- bloppe 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465278 This may be fake, but as somebody who went to a school that took academic rigor very seriously, I'm confident that my degree is the most valuable thing I own. Recruiters from both startups and entrenched companies are constantly reinforcing that belief. The market for degrees may be pretty skewed, but that doesn't mean it's not a real market with supply/demand dynamics
jt-hill 2y ago
That is true, but I don't think the students are the ones responsible for the second and third order effects of maintaining academic rigor. They're just playing the game they're given.
- bloppe 2y ago
  Ya, the current students do not, but future students do. They're the ones who will take their business elsewhere. Schools with slipping standards may not see negative effects in the short term, but people are waking up to the fact that a lot of degrees are nowhere near worth the tuition, and the first schools to go bust will tend to be the ones with the worst cost/benefit ratio.
  - jt-hill 2y ago
    I agree that holding the line and failing the whole class if the whole class deserves it is the only hope universities have of breaking the feedback loop, but the author seems to think that represents an insurmountable coordination problem.

uxp100 2y ago

I can’t find the exact citation at the moment, but I believe that American students were described as viewing the education process as transactional in a wider sense by Max Weber in 1905 (Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism I think?)

Nition 2y ago
I can say at least that it was a major point in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).

bruce511 2y ago

You're not wrong, many students approach college as a vocational training facility. I'd say they do want to learn, but the focus is on "learning to get a job". If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process. Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate. These skills, and the understanding of how to use them, are the real goal -the material is just there to keep your interest. Yes, obviously, if you are going into chemistry then learn chemistry and so on. But round out your course with other things. Oceanography can give you insight to computer science, literature can promote better communication. Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers. But if you are at college now, or perhaps going soon, try and see beyond the next assignment. Try and see the process which underlies it. Most of all college is there to teach you to think. So stop doing for just a moment and start thinking. Once you see behind the curtain you can't unsee it. And ironically even if I tell you it's there, I can't make you look. Experience doesn't work like that.

blandcoffee 2y ago
Do you think this might be tied to a person’s financial situation? Grow up with a safety net, you’ll enjoy the process. Grow up poor and/or with people depending on you and you focus on the end state?
- Clubber 2y ago
  I would argue the opposite. Grow up with a safety net and you don't take it seriously. Group poor and/or with people depending on you, you understand the task at hand. I goofed off a lot in college until I was tired of partying and realized I was going nowhere; about end of Sophomore year. All the older folks who paid their own way sure took it seriously. For reference, I'm also GenX. I'm sure motivations range from what I suggested to what you suggested.
  - saturn8601 2y ago
    Both viewpoints can be true at the same time.

hardwaregeek 2y ago

That's part of it, but the author acknowledges that college has been transactional for quite a while. What has exacerbated the issue was COVID and the rise of extremely potent, addictive social media. I wouldn't be surprised if we look back on social media as the digital equivalent of children drinking and smoking weed, i.e. something that causes permanent damage to one's brain.

jt-hill 2y ago
The technology may be amplifying the effects because that's what technology does but it is not a change to the underlying dynamics. "The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. They just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. I'm not saying it's good - it's clearly an unsustainable trend, but the students are not the ones driving it, so they're not equipped to stop it.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  >"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. Idk, it's totally possible that as COVID happened and they watched the government lock them in their homes away from each other and forced them to miss important moments in their lives (remote graduations for example), then they watched the rise of EZ-Cheat systems (ChatGPT) which made their creators extremely wealthy, combined with crypto frauds (that our own President does in his free time), they started to think that the way to get ahead in life was to lack character and be lazy...
  - hn_acc1 2y ago
    Isn't it? I mean, the "work hard, save your pennies" method is being intentionally attacked and the "invest everything in crypto" is being rewarded. EVERYTHING is done for the next quarter - and you expect students to learn that "patience in savings and working your way up the ladder" is the way to success?
throwawaysleep 2y ago
The transaction has changed a great deal though. GPA used to be more heavily weighted and professors used to be more essential for references. You might bring your transcript to an interview. Now, it seems to be all about projects. Coursework has dwindled in relevance.

deadbabe 2y ago

That’s why most students will never truly find a job – they’re all too busy looking.

odo1242 2y ago
What do you mean by that? That doesn’t really make sense
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Makes perfect sense. The things you do to look for a job don’t help you do the job.
  - odo1242 2y ago
    Oh, ok. I was confused because you said find a job, not do a job.
    - deadbabe 2y ago
      If you can’t do a job you won’t get hired.
      - odo1242 2y ago
        > The things you do to look for a job don’t help you do the job. > If you can’t do a job you won’t get hired. I mean, these statements seem a bit contradictory though.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

> It is a transaction. That is a purely rational take, but people are seldom rational. My pet theory is that inertia is a huge reason why people choose college. Majority of people who go to college do it as a continuation of 10-12 years of continuous schooling (or partying). As they climb educational or social hierarchies they are constantly reminded that college is a next step. Thus going to college feels far more familiar and less scary than joining the workforce. Thus, going to college is a default choice for many. After the gut decision is made it can be wrapped into whatever rational argument.

jt-hill 2y ago
The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.

sky2224 2y ago

As a student currently, I'll also throw in this perspective. The colleges themselves make it feel transactional and not about learning even if I'm interested in doing so. For example, I'm taking a physics course right now (electricity and magnetism). The concepts are difficult for me and I was hoping that the homework would help. So, I go to do the homework, but the homework is online. With the online homework I get five chances to get the problem correct, but there is zero partial credit, zero feedback, and every time I get the answer wrong, it negatively impacts my grade. I have no chance to make mistakes and learn. At least with homework that was handed out back in the day, there was at least the possibility of partial credit being handed out. So my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg. Additionally, since students have been cheating, I think it gives professors a skewed perspective on how much time is actually needed to get work done, so the deadlines get moved up. This means I get even more pressure put on me when I'm just trying to learn and be a good student.

BrenBarn 2y ago
I agree to some extent. A wild one to me is how schools will limit the number of classes you can take and/or pressure you to graduate on time even if it means choosing a major before you're really ready. That seems like a surefire way to kill any interest in exploring knowledge and replace it with a focus on mechanical box-checking.
- nradov 2y ago
  They have to make room for incoming freshmen.
acomjean 2y ago
In the 90s we had the "Plato" system for chemistry. It was a question/answer terminal in the library. Our Chemistry TA advised us to use it to study for exams as it had a lot of sample questions. It was really good because if you got it wrong, it actually gave you a detailed explanation of how to solve it. It was so helpful to have that. When I used the system, I made a bunch of mistakes but ended up learning from them, and it really helped for the exams. 1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994. https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by. For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.

michaelt 2y ago

> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. Only so long as the college doesn't devalue the credential. If I interview a few people with a CS degree from College A and I find they don't know the basics of programming - then the credential loses value; why would I bother interviewing people from such a college? So colleges have to balance the needs of their stakeholders - employers/ graduates want the credential to be a sign of education; and current students who want good grades and less work. The "implied terms of the transaction" have always been that current students have to learn enough that they're not devaluing the credential.

garciasn 2y ago
I have interviewed prospective employees who come in with no academic credentials all the way through to those who have completed degree programs at one of the top 50 universities. Regardless of university, students are individuals and shouldn’t be given more or less credit because of the name of the school they attended. Full. Stop. That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one. As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it. Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.
- noitpmeder 2y ago
  While I agree with you in practice, institution name (of their school, prior employer, ...) is, overall, a hard to escape filter when you're staring down the barrel of thousands of applications per open role. There are other early-out filters you can use, but none of them are perfect in quickly reducing the application count to a tractable number for your HR/hiring managers/engineers to tackle.

jncfhnb 2y ago

I don’t agree personally. I went to school about 10 ago to a private University (nearly full ride because universities used to care about PSAT performance for no clear reason). My school was heavy on co-ops meaning it was more job outcome focused than most. In my opinion it was mostly a rite of passage thing. It was the first time I was granted independence including personal responsibility, a brand new social network, sex, etc. It was just adulthood with training wheels. I’m not going to argue that sounds like an ideal social structure but it was very useful to me. The raw alternative of jumping into the workforce probably would have led to bad outcomes even if it all worked out economically. The stepping stone to employment felt like it was just sort of assumed like finishing high school. I felt nothing getting either diploma. I might feel some serious existential dread if the market I was entering resembled the one now though.

zamfi 2y ago

Wait, but the point of the piece is that although college has always been transactional, behavior has changed. If so, why would transactional-ism be the cause? Read on: > The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes. And then, crucially: > Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.

jt-hill 2y ago
"Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids. When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students. Don't hate the player — hate the game.
- jackcosgrove 2y ago
  I don't think the author of the piece is saying there has been a cultural change among students, emanating from within. Rather the thesis is that smartphones are the culprit. "Things changed" can encompass the proliferation of smartphones.
  - Olreich 2y ago
    Sure, but the argument is still that the smartphones aren’t the root cause. It’s the transactional nature of the thing. Can’t fail students because money would go down, so keep passing them as they get better equipped to ignore you and have reduced requirements to get a passing grade. The thing that’s changed is how much the transactional nature favors the lazy students, not the smartphones specifically. The reason the argument is so bad that “it’s the smartphones” is because that implies an easy solution that is external to the academic system, when the root cause is internal to the system.

banku_brougham 2y ago

Well said, believe this is it

gammarator 2y ago

> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. It’s worth pointing out that this is a perception that has been cultivated. Position the degree as first and foremost a job credential, cut state support, and force students and their parents to directly bear the cost for this supposedly individualized benefit through higher tuition. “The customer is always right” and no learning need occur. “Starving the Beast” is a documentary on this topic: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5444928/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_pl https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5444928/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_p...

jt-hill 2y ago
I can't respond to any specifics of the documentary, but it looks to me like the universities themselves are the biggest cultivators of this perception, with the goal of increased enrollment. If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.
andoando 2y ago
I see state funded education as making the problem worse. The market just reacts to what is available, and funding everyone to go to college, whether or not its useful or resourceful to do so means companies have a large enough pool of applicants to make it a requirement. I could see even, that employers themselves would take up the cost to train if they lacked qualified applicants. Imagine for example there wasn't a billion CS students. All the company still need programmers, so what are they going to do? IMO, instead of funding universities, simply give people a stipend to be used for some sort of educational purpose.

smelendez 2y ago

Yeah, and the nature of the transaction evolves over time in a way that makes aging professors uncomfortable. I get the sense the author just doesn’t have the same rapport with students they likely once did. Students stop coming to class and don’t go to office hours and they don’t know why. > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. I went to college 20 years ago and lots of professors distributed slides and lecture notes to students. I assume it’s even more common now. Yes, I wouldn’t ask a speaker to let me read their private notes, but that’s not how PowerPoint slides shown in class are generally perceived.

hn_acc1 2y ago
Agreed. A course that did not distribute slides / lecture notes 35 years ago when I studied (well known engineering school in Canada) was considered annoying / the prof trying to force students to attend.
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crooked-v 2y ago

I think plenty of students are there because they want to learn a subject, singular. Everything else is just the unrelated overhead they're stuck with for their white collar job permit.

goatlover 2y ago
Does that mean it would be better if the majority of people went to trade schools and left the universities for the minority who want an education for it's own sake?

pj_mukh 2y ago

We don't really have to look for an explanation. The author says it, pure and clear. "It’s the phones, stupid" That's it. Every other variable, including the transactional nature of acquiring a middle class job, has stayed the same. People are just getting dumber [1], and the phones are causing this drop. I am as tech forward as the next person. I think AI deserves the time to figure out what it is. But the phones have basically shown us where all their negatives and positives are. Time to regulate, get the phones out of the schools. If you're in one of these states [2] get behind the active legislation, if not, start it! [1]: https://theweek.com/science/have-we-reached-peak-cognition https://theweek.com/science/have-we-reached-peak-cognition [2]: https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-bans-states-e6d1fe8ddfde33f086d5cd2a19f4c148 https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-bans-states-e6d...

bumby 2y ago
The transactional nature hasn’t always been the same, though. It hasn’t always been that way, or at least the nature of the transaction has changed. Decades ago, surveys showed the predominant reason people went to college was “to develop a philosophy for life”. Now the main reason is “to get a good job.”
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  Decades ago college was for the people who were financially secure and could choose a life of the mind. Now it's a prerequisite for almost any real job. Guess what, the programmers grinding Leetcode aren't doing it for the thrill of solving a puzzle either.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    This was true pre-GI-Bill, maybe, which puts it way out at the edge of living memory. It took a while for it to become a requirement for such a large proportion of jobs, but that's when the shift got going, and in a hurry.
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8bitsrule 2y ago

>The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. I was one of those 'rounds to zero' students, in the physical sciences, long ago. I wanted to learn how to verify a hypothesis by looking at the evidence. And after 4 years, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of significant lab exposure. What we did get was cookbook labs, mostly on the very basic stuff. What we also got after that was theory, theory and more theory. Usually from unenthused teachers, going through the motions. From my perspective, it was mostly a waste of time. Years later I learned what Feynman meant when he said "Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." Maybe if I'd heard that, I've have dropped out after two years instead of hoping I'd get to the part where someone cared.

csomar 2y ago

Not only that but he is shooting the messenger > My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time. They (the prof class) created this situation. They could have upheld their standards and seen the number of students go down but they preferred to fill their classrooms at the expense of quality. This is like a manager who is complaining that no one can code while offering McDonalds hourly rates.

niceguy1827 2y ago
Did you finish reading? The author said later on that holding the bar high wasn't an option since it would risk his job. The blame should be on the universities, not on the professors who don't have much power to fix the problem.
- sahila 2y ago
  But how far do you go with the blame? If the universities hold the bar high, they'll risk their funding from parents not wanting to enroll their child and the government not funding a failing school. The blame should be on society? I think professors are in a good place to actually step up and say no. They're all highly educated individuals who can likely leave academia and get jobs in the private sector. They're best set up to break the cycle.
sonzohan 2y ago
Professor here. We did not create it, we responded to administration prioritizing profit over performance and prestige. They passed the decision down to us instructors by threatening our employment if we failed too many students. Since tenure is heavily dependent on student outcomes, giving a student a lower grade than what they think they deserved will almost certainly result in negative feedback, which threatens your tenure. For non-tenured faculty it could result in a contract non-renewal. I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role." In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome? At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars." Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts. As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.

ookdatnog 2y ago

I think most teachers are not naive wrt the transactional perception of education in their students. However, what keeps a passionate teacher going is the belief that, if they do their job well, at least some significant subset of students will take genuine interest in the material. I don't think it's naive to hope for that, I've seen this happen a lot when I was a student. What OOP is lamenting is that that's no longer possible.

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aprilthird2021 2y ago

The problem is that the value the students get out of the transaction is being lowered by their own actions in the class

danschuller 2y ago

It's telling this sentence has the student as one to blame, when it's a structural issue and the weight of the blame rests more heavily on the shoulders of the universities.

gonzobonzo 2y ago

> The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. Further - even if someone wants to learn these subjects, most don't see the value in paying for a college course to learn them. Close to no one, after receiving a college degree in a subject, says "I want to learn more about X, I'm going to go ahead and pay $4,000 to take a class in it at the nearby college." Plenty of people learn things after they graduate. Just about everyone does so in a better manner than a college course. Colleges are only viable because they dangle degrees over students' heads, and then they complain that students are only coming for the degrees.

mbs159 2y ago

The reason why I wanted to study CS in university was because I was curious, not because of possible job offers you get if you have a degree. When I applied I thought that this was the primary motivator for others as well. Turns out I was very wrong, although I did meet a few students who were studying mainly for their curiosity.

no_wizard 2y ago

They have a university for this now, its called Western Governors University. They did the steps, got all the regional accreditations etc. but its all self driven and structured to cater to speed running a college degree. You can learn alot at WGU, don't get me wrong, but they are clearly just fine if you are there simply to speed run getting that diploma.

neycoda 2y ago

And now the white-collar jobs are being replaced by vibe AI app-making. It seems most of college now isn't for most people. Maybe the kids can save their money and just make vibe apps.

timtas 2y ago

Then what a tragic misuse of societal resources. A simple IQ test would be a better signal to employers than a massively overpriced four year charade.

tptacek 2y ago
If that were actually the case, companies would be using simple IQ tests.