8 ms·

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

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
    [deleted]
- atomicnumber3 2y ago
  It's because academia has, from antiquity to just vaguely recently, been a playground for the children of the rich to either pursue erudite passions or just to schmooze and make friends with other rich people's kids. For normal people there wasn't a lot of point. Jobs didn't require these. My father, who just retired, had a high school education with no college, yet held what would nowadays require a bachelors in mechanical engineering, at a minimum. He himself considers himself quite lucky to have basically been the last person onto the no-degree train to the middle class. I think to some degree this is a matter of capital formation not keeping pace with the general increase in education access for the rest of the workforce. We're educating people but our system struggles to produce companies that can gainfully employ them. And by "our system", I do think there's a nontrivial factor in bigcos conspiring to not ever run the labor market as hot as they did in the past decade. They'd rather grow slower than let employees have bargaining power.
  - guappa 2y ago
    I don't know why americans have this strange idea, but the first university in italy was created to learn law, which lead to a very well remunerated job. So it's in no way a new thing.
    - bumby 2y ago
      It’s not entirely new (especially for the professional class like lawyers), but as the poster indicated, it’s relatively new for the middle class
  - bumby 2y ago
    >vaguely recently I’d argue it’s not vague at all. In the US, I think it can be traced directly to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, starting in 1862. I think that’s when college focus began to move from a liberal arts focus to a vocational focus.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Then those surveys were only of privileged students who had the connections and the family backing to not worry about thier livelihood. I can guarantee you that my mom went to college so she could get a job (retired teacher). My dad went to school because it was free as a veteran. But he made more as a factory worker. I don’t know a single person who went to college with me for any other reason than a career. I also bet those surveys didn’t go to the now Historically Black Colleges and Universities - the only ones that my mom could go to.
  - bumby 2y ago
    I disagree. Because starting in the 1940s, there were large masses of less privileged people going to college on account of the GI Bill. They still had different views about college than we see currently (anecdotes not withstanding).
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Do you think people coming out of the military - many with no skills that they thought could help them get a job after they left - went to college to be better citizens of the world and not to get a job? If you listen to military recruiters now, they emphasize the ability to be able to get a job after you leave through training. Also the statistics show that lower income people statistically go into the military. When you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I can guarantee you that most people’s first priority is to support their addictions to food and shelter and are most concerned with making money to do so. It’s only the privileged who have parents who can support them while they are getting launched who can afford to get degrees in areas like Ancient Chinese Art History or more realistically journalism and work for low pay in high cost of living areas.
      - bumby 2y ago
        >went to college to be better citizens of the world and not to get a job? It depends on the era. The data says they likely did decades ago, and less likely to share that same view now. Around the 1980s the proportions switched: prior, the majority of freshman had a goal of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” compared to “being very well-off financially”. After the 1980s, that proportion inverted to the majority focused on material success. Because the 1940s onward had a relatively high proportion of students from lower and middle class backgrounds, I don’t think the social class argument has as much explanatory power as you imply. In other words, the differences is that our cultural attitudes about college have likely changed due to other factors. Edit: edited to soften tone and give more information. The data comes from UCLAs Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) surveys of incoming freshman. https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/ https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/
m463 2y ago
I wonder how many people here (outside of college) spend lots of times on their phones (or their other types of screens) It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention. Do people actually quit their addiction?
doctorpangloss 2y ago
Yeah... There are exponentially more legacy applicants to colleges today than there were 30 years ago. By definition. You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points? But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/when-it-comes-to-politics-having-a-dad-who-came-before-you-helps-a-lot/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Nah. Humanities professors keep claiming it's phones because that's visible to them when they lecture but read what they're saying carefully and the actual cause is obvious: students don't take it seriously because the professors don't. The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price. It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.
- mbac32768 2y ago
  My vibe is that phones have this bimodal effect on cognition, which further confuses the debate. The smart kids use them as tools to complement and accelerate their learning but everyone else mostly just gets dumber from the infinite Oww my Balls adjacent content they're addicted to. At this professor's Average U, everyone is mostly in the worse camp.
- pj_mukh 2y ago
  Nah, University is too late to fix this. But clearly kids aren’t fully “passing” their high school and probably middle school skills. Mass failings while satisfying has an air of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. As a parent I can see the mass pull towards phones, practically impossible to disentangle save for simple surgical regulation. No one should be allowed to have phones in class. That’s it.
- imgabe 2y ago
  > Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! He did say it, but you have to keep reading after that. Fail too many students and you will get called in by the dean for a "discussion" where they basically tell you to stop doing that. For the non-tenured faculty this is not something they can reasonably fight. Maybe tenured faculty could, and they might not get outright fired, but their teaching load could be reduced or students will simply not sign up for their classes once they have a reputation for being a hardass. Aside from that, nearly every student manages to have some "disability" that requires an accommodation. I had one professor friend tell me a student required an accommodation that they not receive any negative feedback. They literally weren't allowed to tell the student when they were wrong.

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
  [deleted]
atomicnumber3 2y ago
It's because academia has, from antiquity to just vaguely recently, been a playground for the children of the rich to either pursue erudite passions or just to schmooze and make friends with other rich people's kids. For normal people there wasn't a lot of point. Jobs didn't require these. My father, who just retired, had a high school education with no college, yet held what would nowadays require a bachelors in mechanical engineering, at a minimum. He himself considers himself quite lucky to have basically been the last person onto the no-degree train to the middle class. I think to some degree this is a matter of capital formation not keeping pace with the general increase in education access for the rest of the workforce. We're educating people but our system struggles to produce companies that can gainfully employ them. And by "our system", I do think there's a nontrivial factor in bigcos conspiring to not ever run the labor market as hot as they did in the past decade. They'd rather grow slower than let employees have bargaining power.
- guappa 2y ago
  I don't know why americans have this strange idea, but the first university in italy was created to learn law, which lead to a very well remunerated job. So it's in no way a new thing.
  - bumby 2y ago
    It’s not entirely new (especially for the professional class like lawyers), but as the poster indicated, it’s relatively new for the middle class
- bumby 2y ago
  >vaguely recently I’d argue it’s not vague at all. In the US, I think it can be traced directly to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, starting in 1862. I think that’s when college focus began to move from a liberal arts focus to a vocational focus.
scarface_74 2y ago
Then those surveys were only of privileged students who had the connections and the family backing to not worry about thier livelihood. I can guarantee you that my mom went to college so she could get a job (retired teacher). My dad went to school because it was free as a veteran. But he made more as a factory worker. I don’t know a single person who went to college with me for any other reason than a career. I also bet those surveys didn’t go to the now Historically Black Colleges and Universities - the only ones that my mom could go to.
- bumby 2y ago
  I disagree. Because starting in the 1940s, there were large masses of less privileged people going to college on account of the GI Bill. They still had different views about college than we see currently (anecdotes not withstanding).
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Do you think people coming out of the military - many with no skills that they thought could help them get a job after they left - went to college to be better citizens of the world and not to get a job? If you listen to military recruiters now, they emphasize the ability to be able to get a job after you leave through training. Also the statistics show that lower income people statistically go into the military. When you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I can guarantee you that most people’s first priority is to support their addictions to food and shelter and are most concerned with making money to do so. It’s only the privileged who have parents who can support them while they are getting launched who can afford to get degrees in areas like Ancient Chinese Art History or more realistically journalism and work for low pay in high cost of living areas.
    - bumby 2y ago
      >went to college to be better citizens of the world and not to get a job? It depends on the era. The data says they likely did decades ago, and less likely to share that same view now. Around the 1980s the proportions switched: prior, the majority of freshman had a goal of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” compared to “being very well-off financially”. After the 1980s, that proportion inverted to the majority focused on material success. Because the 1940s onward had a relatively high proportion of students from lower and middle class backgrounds, I don’t think the social class argument has as much explanatory power as you imply. In other words, the differences is that our cultural attitudes about college have likely changed due to other factors. Edit: edited to soften tone and give more information. The data comes from UCLAs Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) surveys of incoming freshman. https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/ https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/

m463 2y ago

I wonder how many people here (outside of college) spend lots of times on their phones (or their other types of screens) It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention. Do people actually quit their addiction?

doctorpangloss 2y ago

Yeah... There are exponentially more legacy applicants to colleges today than there were 30 years ago. By definition. You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points? But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/when-it-comes-to-politics-having-a-dad-who-came-before-you-helps-a-lot/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.

mike_hearn 2y ago

Nah. Humanities professors keep claiming it's phones because that's visible to them when they lecture but read what they're saying carefully and the actual cause is obvious: students don't take it seriously because the professors don't. The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price. It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.

mbac32768 2y ago
My vibe is that phones have this bimodal effect on cognition, which further confuses the debate. The smart kids use them as tools to complement and accelerate their learning but everyone else mostly just gets dumber from the infinite Oww my Balls adjacent content they're addicted to. At this professor's Average U, everyone is mostly in the worse camp.
pj_mukh 2y ago
Nah, University is too late to fix this. But clearly kids aren’t fully “passing” their high school and probably middle school skills. Mass failings while satisfying has an air of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. As a parent I can see the mass pull towards phones, practically impossible to disentangle save for simple surgical regulation. No one should be allowed to have phones in class. That’s it.
imgabe 2y ago
> Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! He did say it, but you have to keep reading after that. Fail too many students and you will get called in by the dean for a "discussion" where they basically tell you to stop doing that. For the non-tenured faculty this is not something they can reasonably fight. Maybe tenured faculty could, and they might not get outright fired, but their teaching load could be reduced or students will simply not sign up for their classes once they have a reputation for being a hardass. Aside from that, nearly every student manages to have some "disability" that requires an accommodation. I had one professor friend tell me a student required an accommodation that they not receive any negative feedback. They literally weren't allowed to tell the student when they were wrong.