The Dumbing Down of the University - Part 1

What is wrong with our country??? Having served our nation for nearly 25 years in the United States Air Force and Air National Guard...I am deeply concerned about our future.

I have read multiple Pentagon reports that cite the decline of our nation's intellectual prowess and failure to develop skilled trade professionals as two of the most dangerous threats to our national security in the 21st Century.

Recently, I ran across a paper published by Paul Trout entitled "Student Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of the University." This paper was published in Spring 1997, but I feel Paul Trout's words are more true today than ever before. Anti-Intellectualism appears to have infected every part of our society in 2018.

In Paul Trout's paper, he calls for citizens to help spread the word regarding the "Anti-Intellectualism Epidemic" spreading across the United States like wildfire.

Therefore, in my feeble attempt to continue to protect our nation, I will be sharing Paul Trout's publication through a series of social media posts. Please read, share, and take action...our national security and economic prosperity depends on it!

#SmartCitizensUS...Get Smart America!

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Faced with growing numbers of high-school graduates who resent and resist the rigors, demands, and pleasures of higher education, colleges and universities have lowered standards to keep students happy and enrollments up.

The reason, of course, is obvious: body count equals money. As long as larger enrollments mean larger budgets, and larger budgets mean administrative success, enrolling and retaining as many students as possible, regardless of their attitudes or aptitudes, is more important than making sure students achieve, learn, and produce.

This explains why administrators monitor credit hours and student evaluation ratings, but not how much students actually learn. There is no economic incentive to do so. So, over the long haul, enrollment-driven funding weakens commitment to high academic standards (Stone 20-21).

Faculty, of course, are complicit in the dumbing down. Few ever question the recruitment, enrollment, or grading policies that ultimately bring money to their departments. Most department heads and chairs champion educationally fraudulent policies and practices, even when they are ultimately ruinous to staff morale, as long as they believe such policies and practices strengthen the department and protect it from being cannibalized. So, as long as administrators control the purse strings, "there is a great incentive for faculty collectively to support the administrative emphasis on growth" regardless of its negative impact on academic quality and standards (Stone 15).

This explains, in part, the phenomenon of grade inflation, for which faculty must bear most of the blame. "The incentive for institutions to emphasize rigorous grading standards is minuscule" because grade inflation--higher grades for lower achievement--keeps more students on campus, and more students on campus means larger budgets for all (Stone 10). "In essence, there is a substantial body of informed opinion suggesting that grade inflation has come about mainly because enrollment-driven funding has made grade inflation bureaucratically profitable" (Stone 9).

Lower standards and grade inflation make campuses safe for students who have little hunger for knowledge, little love of learning, and almost no appetite for hard work. Although students have many reasons for going to college, a very large number--71.3 percent of the entering class of 1995--do so not to enrich their minds but their pocketbooks. "The only reason most of us are going to school is society says, 'this is your meal ticket'" (Sacks 139).

Careerism, of course, is both a result and a cause of student anti-intellectualism and disengagement. Increasingly, career-minded students see college--or at least required courses--as an imposition between high school and the good life, an obstacle to be gotten over as soon as possible, just like high school was. Core courses are especially resented by career-minded students, who find it difficult to learn material they resent having to study. Since many students believe that college is "a necessary evil to be endured before Wall Street," their top priority "is to get through college with the highest grades and least amount of time, effort, and inconvenience" as possible (Willimon 24; Stone 13; see Toom 122). This is why, as Andrei Toom points out, it makes no sense to students "to understand anything after the test" (Toom 126). What students really want for their tuition dollars are high grades and credentials--the trappings of learning--not real learning itself.

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Works Cited

Bauer, Henry H. "The New Generations: Students Who Don't Study." A paper prepared for the annual meeting of AOAC International, Orlando (FL), 10 September 1996.

Damon, William. Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Damron, John C. "Instructor Personality and The Politics of the Classroom" (revised). 1996. Online posting <[email protected]>.

Esty, Warren. "Idle students are hurting everyone." Exponent 21 April 1995: 5.

Levitt, Paul M. ??? The Chronicle of Higher Education 4 May 1988: B3-B5.

Manno, Bruno V. "The Swamp of College Remedial Education." Academic Questions 9.3 (Summer 1996): 78-82.

Murray, David W. "Racial and Sexual Politics in Testing." Academic Questions 9.3 (Summer 1996): 10-17.

Owen, John D. Why Our Kids Don't Study: An Economist's Perspective. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Sacks, Peter. Generation X Goes to College. Chicago: Open Court, 1996.

Sax, Linda, et. al. eds. The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1995. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, 1995.

Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

Steinberg, Laurence, et. al. Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Stone, J. E. "Inflated Grades, Inflated Enrollment, and Inflated Budgets: An Analysis and Call for Review at the State Level." Education Policy Analysis Archives 3.11 (26 June 1995). Online posting (a peer-reviewed scholarly electronic journal) <https://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/v3n11.html>.

Sykes, Charles J. Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Toom, Andrei. "A Russian Teacher in America." Journal of Mathematical Behavior 12 (1993): 117-139.

Willimon, William H., and Thomas H. Naylor. Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995.

#StudentAnti-Intellectualism, #DumbingDownofOurUniversities, #BoredTeachers, #GetSmartAmerica, #SmartCitizensUS

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