Should Attendance be Compulsory in Universities?

A few months ago, my mother was about to have a surgery, and she was having her much-due cardiological evaluation. I was standing outside the room and got a chance to have a quick chat with the cardiologist. He posed a question, "What percentage of patients in your opinion strictly follow the prescribed lifestyle regimen after a major cardiac procedure like an angioplasty or bypass surgery?" Given the perplexed look on my face, he figured out that I had no idea what the answer was. In his experience, the number was only 12% !!! I didn't believe him and did a quick Google search in front of him. The results were not very far off. Around 75% of patients obediently follow a short-term treatment regimen like a 5-day course of antibiotics, 50% of patients follow a long-term regimen like taking their BP medication in the morning and (hold your breath) only 20% of patients follow the prescribed lifestyle modifications !!! The cardiologist was not very far off. I would believe his numbers more given that participants in academic studies tend to project a better version of themselves. Readers who have had family members go through a cardiac procedure or have themselves gone through one will concur that these are extremely stressful events. It takes months to recover and the constant fear of symptom recurrence or even sudden death is there. Sadly, after such a painful experience, most people simply forget and move on to their lazy couch potato habits and whisky-drinking proclivities. After two pegs, all that pain of doctors cutting the ribs open with a chainsaw to patch a few blood vessels is nicely forgotten.

This brings us to an important question. Even when people know that doing something is bad for them, and they have already seen the consequences, why do they not change their behavior? Why don't they find the energy to wake up every morning at 6 AM and go for a walk? Is it necessary to have that extra ice cream at the end of a party? In this case, the penalties include sudden death or a lifelong disability after a stroke. The answers to all of these questions are obvious. Sustaining any kind of long-term activity even for the preservation of one's own life is very difficult. No more than 10-25% of people are capable of showing such kind of discipline and self-restraint. This is why cardiologists blissfully assume that all patients are guilty until proven innocent. They never believe what patients say. They go by the test results, rightfully so. The solution to any problem is to just add a new medicine or do a surgery.

Why is this the case? The answers need to be searched in our genetic makeup that has formed out of millions of years of evolution. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived an extremely risky and unpredictable life. Food was scarce, a small illness meant death, and non-violence was not a virtue. They practiced the most extreme form of hunting -- endurance hunting (tire the prey to death). The hunting parties had to be totally disciplined and conformant. Any deviation meant being eaten by a tiger or getting a laceration and dying of gangrene. Hence, extreme discipline and dutifulness during the hunt was automatically ensured. What happened to those who either did not want to go and hunt, or were too wayward? Yuval Noah Harari nicely documents that the skulls of such individuals were smashed by young tribesmen, who were at the cusp of adulthood and needed a rite of passage. As bizarre as it may seem, this is how the world of our hunter-gatherer ancestors was.

What did they do in their free time? Bear in mind that calories were scarce. Any activity that consumed calories such as just jumping around trees, exercise, etc., was discouraged by nature. The default behavior in such situations is to just sleep and be lazy as lions are; they sleep 18 hours a day. Once the food ran out, it was time to go for another hunt. This activity required our ancestors to do exactly the reverse -- be ultra-focused, listen to the group leader, be obedient and disciplined, and observe all the rules without questioning.

We human beings thus have two modes. The first one is the ultra-focused alert mode when we are going on a hunt, and the highly lazy mode when there is no immediate threat. Our prehistory sadly did not define an intermediate state because we never had an excess of food. Agriculture is only 10,000 years old, which is less than half a comma in the evolutionary sentence.

Now, how does this evolutionary insight align with the cardiologist's findings? Patients follow short-term treatment regimens because they are in pain and consequently in the alert mode. Nobody follows a long-term diet plan or daily-sugar-check plan because they transition to the lazy mode. Foresight and long-term thinking are not particularly evolutionarily beneficial traits. Given the highly uncertain environment of our ancestors, a locally-optimal greedy choice was almost always the best. Even if it made sense to pool in community resources and build a dam, how many people would be sure that they would live long enough to reap its benefits?

Let us now come to the crux of the article. How is this related to college attendance? Very simple. During the end of class 12 (board and entrance time), the student is in alert mode. Then he transitions to the lazy mode. Without an immediate threat, why will the body expend calories? It is not primed to do so. Next, answer this question, "In how many species other than human beings do adults of a reproductive age get educated and learn new skills or acquire new knowledge?" The answer is none barring a few recorded instances of bonobos and meerkats. However, the children of all species are obedient. Starting from cats, dolphins, cheetahs to crows, ravens and orangutans, the young ones learn passively and sometimes they are actively taught how to hunt. They maintain their attention and are seldom indisciplined. However, the animal kingdom is weak when it comes to adult education. Even our ancestors did not go to college. In fact, college education, as we know it, is only a 20th century invention. In the US it was started by the second world war era GI bill and the Morrill land-grant (1862).

The question that arises is, "Given our genetic reality, how practical is college education for the masses?" The fact that students are up in arms when it comes to any mention of an attendance rule is simply because their adult brains are revolting against a system that is not in line with their evolutionary reality. Once a student complained to me about his classmates who are playing computer games in their hostel rooms. I asked him about the games that they were playing. His answer: Indiana Jones, CounterStrike, FarmVille and Age of Empires. I told him that they are doing exactly what they are meant to do from an evolutionary perspective: go on an adventure (Ind. Jones), fight and kill (CounterStrike), farm (Farmville) and build villages and civilizations (AoE). The evolutionary outliers were sadly both of us.

Hence, one may argue that university education that requires one to be in a continuous-alert-mode for years at a stretch is only for a few exceptions: evolutionary outliers who would have been considered to be a liability 10,000 years ago but suddenly find themselves in a better position now. To a certain extent, this is true. If we remove grades, attendance and homeworks, how many students will genuinely educate themselves? Very few. Perhaps around 10-12% -- around the same number of people that take the cardiologist's advice seriously and keep a check on their sugar and BP. Hence, expecting this number to be higher is quite foolish unless the bar for entry is so high that someone coming in is an absolute nerd -- someone who has shown an extremely high-degree of self-control and long-term thinking throughout her life and qualifies as an absolute exception. This is not going to happen in a 100-student class or even in a 50-student class. Only a university that chooses extremely few students who are super-exceptions can justify a laissez faire policy, and expect that its students will do nobel prize winning work from their hostel rooms. The rest are ordinary mortals and evolutionary rules apply.

Where do we go from here? Do we make attendance compulsory or not? Here are some points that university administrators need to keep in mind.

1. If attendance is not compulsory and there is no carrot-and-stick mechanism, the outcomes are going to be really bad, regardless of the teaching quality. Adult students will transition to the "lazy mode" and simply hibernate -- conserve calories by sleeping in their rooms. Their sub-conscious brains will direct their conscious brains to keep finding justifications, howsoever lame they may be. Days will turn into weeks and weeks into months. Many students who have the habit of sleeping never realize how they got to third year -- it feels like they had joined the college just yesterday. Many would call such a state "depression". I would call this state purposelessness.
2. Once students stop attending classes, they will fall off the social and educational grid. They will start showing signs of addiction to computer games, alcohol, and "substances" of all kinds. Once someone is high on a drug, you never know what he or she is going to do starting from harming others to self-harm. The "lazy mode" was always meant to be a short-term situation. Once the deer meat ran out, the tribe had to be on the run again. In this case, the "lazy mode" can continue for four years and this situation is definitely risky for everyone around. Our ancestors never faced such a situation, and nor should we. A reproductive-age adult just sleeping for four years is unnatural to say the least.
3. This logic that teachers are incompetent, classes are boring, and I can produce wonders on my own is humbug. It is true that a lot of teachers are indeed incompetent and their classes work like an anaesthesia-grade sleeping pill. However, sleeping in the hostel room is not going to produce any benefit either, even though this is the natural tendency. Nothing productive ever comes out of exclusive hostel-room study regardless of what students think. Students will get so used to the lazy mode that they will become highly indisciplined in their subsequent job life. Barring a few, they will not find the energy to work 40-hour weeks for at least 50 weeks a year. That is when India inc. will start screaming about 70- and 90-hour weeks hoping that they at least get a third of that in terms of real useful work. Sincerity is like a muscle and once someone has been lazy for years at a stretch, the sincerity muscle is thin as a nanowire. There is a good chance that it may never come back in life. Things get even worse when there is parental support for bunking college and spending weeks at home when classes are going on. Managing such students when they join a job becomes a huge challenge. This is why many serious companies often ignore B.Techs from top colleges, and prefer M.Techs, instead. The latter group of students have more self-regulation and can attend office without taking leaves for weeks at a stretch. This is a highly desirable trait in a modern corporate. Attitude trumps aptitude.
4. Unless there is a minimum attendance in the class and there is a cohort of sincere students, teachers will lose the motivation to teach. Nobody likes to teach to the wall. A good teacher is like an artist, who needs an interested audience. Unless a minimum participation can be guaranteed, universities will never be able to attract good guest teachers from reputed universities to teach modules. Teaching to a sparsely populated class is quite an eerie feeling that the teaching community hates.
5. Hence, it is the job of the university to provide an environment that is similar to the evolution-inspired lazy-alert-lazy-alert-... cycle. Unless there is some pressure and an immediate need (interpret it as a threat) that raises the adrenaline level, students will not transition from "lazy" to "alert" mode. There thus has to be some degree of internal meritocracy and reward-punishment system for students to keep them engaged, else 100% laziness will set in. NEP-2020 (New Education Policy) suggested a great idea, which is a multiple-exit system. Ideally speaking, if a student does not want to study more and his brain wants to perform the evolutionary role -- earn a living and start a family -- then he/she should be allowed to do so. What is the need for every student to do a 4-year B.Tech or a 3-year B.A.? If their brains and bodies say that have had enough, let them go with a smaller degree. The NEP in that sense is a fantastic and far-reaching document.
6. The moment the lazy-alert balance swings too much to either side, all hell can break loose. If the rules are made very lax, then nobody will attend classes or take academics seriously. Even if students show up to classes, they will just sleep and learn nothing. After they pass out, it will be hard to make out if they have studied for four years or never even gone to college. If the system sways too much to the "alert" side, then students will be up in arms. Starting from dharnas to protests to complaining about the stress pandemic to media foxes getting involved -- everything will happen. If there is a suicide for an absolutely disconnected reason, the entire blame will fall on the attendance rule. Clever actors will use this event to demand "attendance concessions". This will lead to a fresh wave of disturbance and disrupt and disturb everybody. Beyond a certain point, adult students cannot be forced to do something; this is something that sadly many academics don't realize.

The moral of the story is that the modern university is an evolutionary outlier. But is sadly a reality and will endure as an institution. Therefore, allowing students to do what they wish is absolutely the wrong thing to do, even though their natural tendency is to statistically slide towards laziness. This is equivalent to the cardiologist allowing his patients to drink whiskey and eat 5 samosas everyday. On the other hand, keeping thousands of adult students in the "alert" mode requires a lot of muscle power and stomach to digest student protests and disruption. Hence, a balance has to be maintained by working out a middle ground: somewhere between evolution-induced laziness, the need for order in a university campus and the nation's requirement for highly trained manpower.

Some ideas in this space (towards a workable middle ground):

• Multiple exit options (based on NEP 2020). Certicate after the first year, Diploma after the second, B.Sc after the third and B.Tech after the fourth. For most industries, two years of post-high-school study are enough.
• Inter- and intra-course variability: Teach hard and easy versions of the same course. Those doing the hard version get extra points, which can be used to get extra facilities, better placement opportunities and better career advancement options. There has to be something for everybody: the alert ones and the lazy ones.
• Do not allow or ignore any form of indiscipline or mass protests. The latter often indicates imbalanced policies and a course correction is needed. Students are clearly in a track that demands much more than what they can put in. Some should leave the program, some should transition to an easier stream and some should be given some time to transition to the alert-mode (if they can and are willing).

A more balanced, mature and realistic approach can help us produce much better learning outcomes and also create a more productive workforce. Students should leave the education system when the benefits of further training are significantly lower than the benefits of entering the workforce. There is no point in keeping them in college and forcing them to attend classes.