The crisis of higher education is worse than you think

The poor state of students' mental health and academic achievement have little to do with identity stuff and nothing to do with campus protests. They're the results of decades of mismanagement.

If it’s been more than a few years since you’ve attended or taught at a university, you might be surprised by how different campuses feel now, compared to even the late twenty-teens. Much has been written about a negative vibe shift—young people, especially college-aged young adults—are palpably more depressed and anxious than they were before the pandemic. The increase in depression has been especially pronounced among the demographics most likely to attend college: young women, the socially conscious, and people from middle class backgrounds. While we usually can’t quite put our finger on exactly how or why, most of the college instructors I speak to agree that everything just feels off.

My campus went full remote in March of 2020. We didn’t resume any in-person instruction until August of 2021. You’ve probably read a piece or two about the academic unpreparedness of that year’s group of incoming freshman. I assure you it was much worse than however bad you assumed it be—universities large and small bent over backwards to fudge the numbers and make student performance look less disastrous than it was. My colleagues and I were told—first informally, then directly—to go easy on the kids. Then to maybe consider not giving any grades below a B to the ones who showed up at least half the time. Then, uhh, maybe also extend that to the ones who didn’t show up.

At the start of the resumption semester, I was as nervous as I’d ever been. Throughout 18 months of relentless Zoom meetings and farcical teaching sessions, I had seen the charm and vitality drain from my rapidly bloating face. Would I remember how to control my voice? Pace the class? Getting them to speak in a virtual setting was like pulling teeth, but that’s because they all had their cameras off (we were not allowed to ask them to keep them on) and, well, they were probably just as checked out during my fake classes as I was during the fake meetings I “attended,” microphone muted, eyes staring strategically forward into the camera while reading posts and listicles while my colleagues muttered. How was I going to generate conversation when I and everyone else around me hadn’t been able to do so for a year and a half?

I walked into the building for my first class. It was a large class in a large room, the sort with two entrances. As I approached, I noticed the lights were off and the classroom was dead silent. Shit… did I misread my schedule? Pulled out my phone and confirmed that I was in the right place at the right time. Hmm…

Entering that room was the eeriest experience of my professional life. Every seat was full. Every face was dead silent, staring into a glowing rectangle. The lights came on immediately, triggered by the movement of my body. Every last one of the students had been so sedentary, for so long, that the lights had shut themselves off automatically.

I do not take a romantic view of the classroom or the college experience in general. Nevertheless, I ask my reader to please think back to the first days of your school years (even if you didn’t go to college, high school memories will suffice just fine). Think back to the temperate early autumn weather, the buzz of social opportunities, the suppressed-but-sheer excitement of expectation, the sense of alien freedom born of finding oneself within new structures, the laughing, the flirting. Even if you were a wallflower, even if you despised school or were advanced enough along to have grown jaundiced toward these routines, you could still feel them surround you, as undeniable as sunlight.

That’s all gone now. We’ve had years to re-acclimate, and it hasn’t come back. And while our current year’s freshman were barely in high school when the pandemic struck, they can still sense—however subconsciously—that something essential is missing, that this long endeavor costing them 4+ years of their youth and tens of thousands of dollars is now bereft of the vitality that convinced the generations before them that everything was worth it, that they were going to come out okay.

While the pandemic was a severe catalyst, higher ed embarked upon this road to de-vitalization long before COVID. Nationwide, over 50% of undergraduate courses are taught by contingent faculty—the vast bulk of whom are adjuncts or graduate students who earn only a few thousand dollars per course, per semester. An untold number are under the official auspices of a tenured professor who may, at most, design the syllabus and recite lectures from memory, but these sections are nevertheless effectively taught by the graduate assistants, who are the ones answering student questions and grading papers.

As sincere as these instructors may be in professing a love of their students and their jobs, the fact is that kids can tell when the person teaching them is hanging on by a thread. No matter how young, brilliant, energetic, and/or dedicated a teacher may be, students are gonna notice a difference between feedback given to them by someone who’s teaching 20 students for $120k per year and someone who’s teaching 200 students for $35k per year.

I am not exaggerating. In some fields, the numbers are even starker.

The student populations of freshman classes has exploded. The National Council of Teachers of English recommends that first-year writing courses be capped at 15 students, 20 max. At my campus, the norm is 35. In 2020, it was 40 students per section, and overrides were common. The fall semester before COVID, my English 101 course had been assigned a whopping 46 students.

They all only showed up the first couple of days. We were in a room that had about 30 seats, a clock that had never worked, torn carpets, two cracked windows, and an AV setup that still contained a VHS player and would zap out a nasty shock to anyone who brushed against it.

The class was so over-packed that students—nearly all paying between $8,000-$18,000 per semester—had to sit on the floor, which had not been vacuumed for a very long time. I raised concerns, of course, but I was assured this was no big deal because enough of them were sure to drop out before too long.

But hopefully not too soon. The goal was to reach what an administrator privately described as “the golden zone,” about 3 weeks into the semester, the point at which we could still retain 100% of their financial aid funding without providing them with any services. If that aid came from a grant, great. If it was a loan, well, that student just learned an $8,000 lesson.

You don’t need to be a policy expert to understand how arrangements such as this are untenable. The simplest response would be hire more instructors at a decent pay rate and reduce class sizes, but this is simply off the table. Like nearly every other American institution, universities are now fully captured by the logic of private equity—labor costs are an inefficiency (except for upper management). Administration would sooner fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars for unusable tech than bring on a few dozen more full-time instructors.

And, oh… the tech. Why spend 50 bucks on a whiteboard and some dry erase markers when for a mere $10,000 you can get an electronic whiteboard that serves the same purpose but is always broken? “Course management” software suites such as Blackboard and Canvas—which have been adopted at campuses nationwide—provide prefabricated reading lists, assignment prompts, and even auto-grading features for student papers. Every course looks and feels the same: rote, standardized, inhuman. Accessing course materials and submitting papers is now as lively and personal as requesting a password change for your credit card account.

I recently asked students the last time they read any printed materials for more than a few seconds at a stretch. At first, they didn’t appear to understand the question. “I mean, when did you read something longer than a paragraph or two that was physically in front of you, on paper, not on a screen.” Most couldn’t remember. Some said high school. Only a few students—all presently enrolled and in good standing at an accredited university—said they had to read any printed materials for any of their classes.

Some teachers did assign physical books, but they were expensive, and anyone with a Reddit account and a bare minimum of wherewithal can find a free pdf of basically anything after just a few minutes of searching. Even then, why bother actually reading it? Just skim for a bit and do a CRTL+F for any of the terms that come up when you electronically access the quiz. You’re gonna be staring at a screen anyway. How’s the instructor gonna know if you click over to the reading in the middle of a test?

Studies have long shown that screen reading is horrible for comprehension. The modern internet is designed to be distracting. Instead of ingesting large portions of text for extended periods of time, the vagaries of digital text cause us to click away after every few sentences.

This wasn’t that big of a deal when the internet was still the place where you read articles like “Travis Kelce Said WHAT??” and “8 Discontinued Wine Cooler Flavors We Can’t Live Without.” Now the the internet is sole venue through which a vast majority of students access all text, these limitations pose a much more pressing set of problems. And universities have gone all-in to ensure these problems are going to keep getting worse.

But it’s not just the limitations inherent to digital text that are hampering student achievement. Personal computing has been “appified” to such a degree that the functionality of most software has been needlessly limited, and young people lack basic computer skills because they’ve never had to do anything more complicated than clicking on an icon.

In 2019, I was troubled by the number of students who were drafting papers on their phones and did not know how to do simple tasks like changing font sizes or indenting paragraphs with the Tab button. I scheduled a class visit to one of our campus’ few remaining computer labs (nationwide, computer labs have been purged from most universities, under the assumption that every student already has a laptop. They don’t).

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s open up Word and get started.”

A few students began clicking. The bulk of them did not move.

“Come on, let’s get Word open and we can go through some basics.”

Silence. Motionlessness. Five minutes passed. I began to wander the room. Only about one in five students had managed to open the program. Many had opened Chrome and typed something like “open word.” Others were still stuck on the log in screen.

The problem? They did not know how to double click an icon to launch software.

Students do not understand the concept of a hard drive. They don’t know what a “file” is, or that you can save your work directly to your computer. And that’s just the basic stuff! When it comes to relatively complex e-skills, they’re completely lost. They don’t know how to set a date range on an internet search, differentiate the results that pop up on the “All” tab vs. the “News” tab on google, or click on the superscripts in wikipedia to access direct sources. We stopped teaching them these basic skills in the early 2010s, as policymakers assured us that it would be a waste of time to cover the basics with young people who are “digital natives.” And by pushing to make teaching and learning as centralized as automated as possible, colleges provide zero incentive for students to learn any of this.

Man… I don’t know. I could keep going. Maybe I should have broken this up into multiple pieces. The point is: things are bad in higher ed. Very bad. And every single pedagogical trend is bound to make them worse. It doesn’t matter if the proposals are coming from the activist fringe who want to ban grading and racially segregate classrooms, or the from the bloodthirsty neoliberal administrators who will gladly eliminate 80% of faculty the second AI instruction becomes somewhat passable—everyone is insane and incompetent and are students are suffering because of it.