I recently sat down with a professor from a large university with an excellent reputation. He's deeply immersed in undergraduate issues. I asked him how well-prepared today's kids are for university life. After a long pull on his beer, he said: "The top 20 per cent are great. They're smart and self-directed and they'll succeed anywhere."
Then there are the rest. One of his biggest challenges as a teacher is that they don't know much. He teaches social history, and he can't assume they know what "tenements" were, or "steam locomotives." They're digital whizzes, but they can't do the mental math of "10 per cent off." Despite 12 years of schooling, they arrive at university with a poor stock of general knowledge.
They're nice kids, and they're not dumb. But they haven't been stretched. In high school, they got A's and B's just for showing up.
A couple of weeks ago, a faculty organization released one of those surveys saying that, in the opinion of most professors, students are more unprepared than ever for university. They're immature and disorganized, lack math and writing skills, can't think critically, and believe that research is synonymous with Wikipedia.
These complaints are no doubt as old as Plato, and they're the standard line from members in good standing of the Old Farts Club. But the professor who spoke with me doesn't strike me as an Old Fart. He struck me as a socially progressive guy who's thought hard about the situation.
It's easy to blame the universities for some of these problems. Their undergraduate classes are ridiculously big, and their student/professor ratios are shocking. But perhaps the biggest problem is the mismatch between students' abilities and their aspirations.
Depending on whom you ask, between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of the students admitted to university don't belong there at all. They'd be better off in one of Canada's many colleges, with their excellent applied programs. Yet, the public has been brainwashed into confusing university with education. "If your kid's not going to university, there's a stigma," secondary school principal Tom Schultz told the Ottawa Citizen.
Most families say they want to send their kids to university. The high schools are under tremendous pressure to deliver the marks that will get them in. Meantime, universities need bodies. Bodies bring in tuition, and tuition covers nearly half of a university's operating costs. And once the bodies are in the door, there's a big incentive to retain them. "If the English department, for example, failed all students who should be failed, it would be cutting itself off at the knees," says sociology professor James Côté, co-author of the eye-opening book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis .
It's pretty hard to flunk out of university, so long as you show up most of the time, hand in your assignments eventually, and write the (multiple-choice) tests. You don't have to work very hard, and the culture of disengagement is rampant. According to Prof. Côté, university for many students is a part-time job that takes up no more than 30 hours of their week.
But why should we be shocked at this low-effort, high-reward mentality? Take a look at what official education policy has done to secondary schools, and weep.
Universities typically point the finger at high schools for turning out lousy graduates. But they're pointing in the wrong direction. As one assistant high-school principal explained on Cross-Country Checkup , the CBC's national phone-in show, last Sunday, "We get our marching orders and our mandate from the provincial government. We are judged by our completion and graduation rates. That's what governs us, not what universities want."
In order to boost their high-school graduation rates, many provinces have mandated a no-fail approach. Nowhere is this policy more entrenched than Ontario, where schools are under intense pressure to get their numbers up. "Our hands are tied," said another caller, an Ottawa high-school teacher. "The government does not allow you now to give zeroes for work not done. If you give a kid 10 assignments and he does three, you can't give him a zero for the other ones. The government stance is that this is a behavioural problem, and you need to give them another chance to hand it in. If a student cheats on a major exam, you can't give them zero. The government doesn't tell you what to do the second time he cheats."
Indeed, Ontario's "student success strategy" has worked remarkably well. Since 2003-04, high-school graduation rates have soared nine percentage points, to 77 per cent. The government is shooting for 85 per cent by 2011.
What the public doesn't know is that a lot of this "success" is a sham. Last week, three recently retired teachers from Owen Sound wrote an open letter describing the impossible situation they'd been put in. "Trying to uphold reasonable academic and behavioural expectations took on a nightmarish quality as students were no longer required to complete assignments, do homework, attend class regularly, or be respectful," they wrote. "Teachers were pressured from above to pass students and inflate marks in order to improve grade averages and graduation rates, targets set by the board and ministry."
It's no wonder so many university students are floundering. The teacher's job is no longer to educate them up to a certain standard but to "meet their needs." They come from a background where no one has demanded much of them, where there are no consequences, and life is deadline-free. On top of that, no one has ever given them an accurate assessment of their skills.
"Our students today are just as intelligent and capable and competent as before, but there's been this cultural shift," one high-school teacher says. "We don't want to see them stretch. We don't want them to be uncomfortable with something that's hard. They've been protected from moving beyond their comfort level."
If we had a motto for this vast charade, it might be this: "We pretend to teach them, and they pretend to learn."
The trouble is that giving students a no-consequences education will have plenty of unpleasant consequences for us. A few years ago, our kids merely had to compete with one another. But now they're growing up into a world where they'll be competing with kids educated in India and China and South Korea, where the competition is ferocious.
I've met some of these kids. For them, life is Darwinian. They're going to eat our lunch.