Uniting Care and Rigor in Education

Those who can, do; those who can't teach; those who can't teach teach teachers to teach. This is unfortunately true in the West today.

From Front Porch Republic

By Elizabeth Stice

Higher education standards may not be up to standard themselves.

Discussions about education often center around the problem de jour. One of the going concerns now is the notion that college has gotten too easy. Higher education standards may not be up to standard themselves. Colleges are credibly accused of practicing grade inflation. There are depressing accounts of students who “can’t read” and who cannot do basic math, even at elite universities. Michigan’s decision to skip letter grades for incoming freshmen has added fuel to the fire. Students can get into elite universities, and graduate, still lacking basic skills. How did we end up here?

Some of the reasons for declining standards are structural. Few administrators are craven enough to want grade inflation. Of course, administrators do want high retention and good graduation rates, including on-time graduation. With the demographic cliff, it seems important that students enjoy the “college experience” and stick around. These judgments are not just based on internal standards and desire for tuition dollars. The government and accrediting bodies make it hard to admit to missing any objectives. Universities are constantly being graded on things unrelated, or inversely related, to academic excellence.

Faculty have their own reasons for participating in declining standards, sometimes without fully realizing their own role. Faculty have the usual human tendency to prefer to be liked, of course, but to maintain employment, non-tenured faculty often need good course evaluations. And faculty are increasingly not tenured. Some faculty need to hit course enrollment minimums to be paid. Students can and will transfer to easier courses. With all of those motivations operating subconsciously, faculty also have a conscious preference not to be harassed. It can be very hard to hold students accountable for cheating, much less hold them accountable for below-standard work. In many cases, neither students nor administrators make life easy for enforcers.

The students are another complicating factor. In many courses, students are implicitly graded against their peers. Nearly all students come from K-12 backgrounds where grade inflation is part of their experience. In red Florida, some middle school students cannot receive a zero on any assignment. If they don’t do it at all, the lowest they can receive is 50%. If they have an IEP, it’s 60%. Blue New York recently decided to move away from requiring the Regent’s Exam to graduate. These kinds of slipping standards are everywhere, including private schools and home school. Even Advanced Placement has an inflationary trend. Now ambitious students take 14 AP exams to prove merit. It’s not easy for colleges to hold students accountable to high standards when they’ve spent their whole lives moving through a system that fails to do so.

There are, of course, thousands of hardworking students who are genuinely excellent. Many of them do not get into the most prestigious universities only because we have many more excellent students in our country than we have spaces in elite institutions. We also have a rising tide of classical education. But the students who studied Latin in high school and write novels of their own for pleasure can, and do, sit side-by-side in class with students who believe that 45 pages of reading in a week is an extreme hardship and have no intention of ever trying to understand fractions.

What college standards are appropriate with incoming students who vary so widely in their abilities? Should everyone from an insufficiently challenging K-12 background be weeded out before their sophomore year? Or should they have an opportunity to advance?

Another reason standards are difficult to maintain in universities is because academics are not, unfortunately, always the top priority. College has become a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of expectations, with mismatched parts. We want students to learn to think for themselves, but we don’t want them to protest things. We want students to be treated like adults, but we want them to have accommodations for everything. Some parents even hire “local moms” to look after their children in college. We want students to be exposed to different beliefs and ideas, but we want to screen syllabi for objectionable readings. We want rigor and sports. We want affordability and luxury. We don’t want students to take out too much in loans, but we also don’t do more to fund higher education or keep its costs in check.

Most people believe that a major purpose of college is to help people transition into adulthood. Well, what is the best way to help young people toward adulthood? If we knew that, we would probably not have an ongoing crisis with young men. In the meantime, we attempt to balance competing goods. We want real standards but we want to give people many chances. The long-term economic benefits of a college degree make it seem cruel to kick someone out too quickly. Emphasis on standards can also harm high-achieving students, many of whom are obsessed with performance. We want them to take assignments seriously, but we also want them to see beyond grades.

These are thorny issues. Some goals in higher education seem genuinely misaligned with a too-narrow emphasis on grades. Even many good students avoid harder classes and professors—and electives—because they are extremely protective of their GPA. Some students would even do more of their own work, rather than relying on AI, if they were less worried about grades. Students are often told, and observe, that certain occupations are closed to them if their GPA is too low.

It is easy to dismiss how students feel about these things when you are not with them all day. The students come to us as more than transcripts; they come as human beings. They arrive in all kinds of ways: eager, earnest, anxious, overwhelmed, underprepared, excellent, curious, incurious, impatient, ambitious, and disaffected. Many of them do feel judged by grading, whether or not they should. And while maintaining the value of education seems to rest on the shoulders of professors, so does the fate of many individual students. Professors often feel the weight that comes with enforcing standards. It is not easy for most professors to let someone fail a class and lose a scholarship, even if students have a right to fail.

This is all downstream of debates about the purpose of higher education. That debate typically has two sides: one side sees college as a path to employment, the other sees college as a place to form virtuous, liberated persons. Some real idealists might even celebrate the goods of learning in and of themselves. You may think these camps settle into different universities, but, in practice, both sides typically work in the same institutions. Institutions are often trying to achieve something of both.

This purpose-paradox of education may be more modern than ancient, but it predates our large universities and high rates of attendance. In “Of Education,” John Milton suggested that one purpose of education is to prepare a man for every occupation, public or private. So perhaps college is appropriately a path to the workforce. Yet Milton also says that education is meant to help us repair the ruins of our first parents and learn “to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.” This standard, even at a Christian college, is harder to aim for than the first.

All of this can make higher education quite a rich place, but it is also a real challenge for assessment. Everyone knows that good grades are meant to reflect good outcomes. But what is a good outcome in the context of contemporary higher education? Opinions diverge. Everyone agrees that nursing should be strict, but after that it can be very fuzzy. Is a win a student who has comprehensively learned the material? Or is a win a student who has learned to contemplate the universe? Ideally students do both, but what if a student only achieves one of the two? And how can we assess some of these things? It’s not entirely clear.

Yet what is at stake is very clear. No student is better off graduating with a lack of competence and knowledge, especially when they have paid to acquire these things. The false confidence caused by grade inflation harms not only individuals, but all of us when we encounter underprepared graduates in positions of real responsibility. All of this was thrown into sharp relief by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent essay, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” The essay has spread like wildfire, because—like many parents—Hannah-Jones made academic choices for her daughter based on something other than academic excellence. In seeking to support public schools that serve diverse populations—a real good!—she sent her daughter to schools where teachers failed to teach or even monitor students—this is bad! And the consequences for such failures are grave. Underprepared students who are passed along run into doors they cannot open and can fall into despair. That is no less true in higher education than in K-12.

The evidence in favor of taking assessment more seriously is compelling and there are plenty of reasons for urgency on this issue. The complexity of the situation prevents a perfect, easy solution. But it does not prevent meaningful action in the right direction.

Structural issues must be addressed within institutions. College itself is not a scam, but there are scam classes (and probably majors) at most schools. These can be identified and eliminated by administrators with integrity. At many universities the profile of academics needs to be elevated and the purpose of education needs to be emphasized. Faculty need administrative support to uphold standards. Whether or not universities should meet students where they are, they can only teach the students they have. We need admissions standards, but the condition of graduates ought to be more important than the condition of freshmen. It should not be possible to finish at a university without learning more than prospective students bargained for. At most schools, this would require a renewed commitment to general education.

As real as these structural issues are, we cannot ignore the need for individual faculty accountability. Whether it’s K-12 or college, people who fail to uphold standards should be dismissed. Having high standards ought to be part of the job. There are some professors who think that if students do the reading and retain a bit, so that later in life they reflect on art or have an appreciation of literature, that is a win. Graduating students favorably disposed to our interests or politics or selves is insufficient. There are other professors who think that students should not even be challenged to take their own notes and some who make no effort to prevent cheating. It’s dishonest to charge students tuition for effortless education.

With the competing aims of education, perfect assessment will never be available. But a target is available to us. Whenever faculty and administrators try to answer the question of what counts as a win in higher education, they should think about what is a win for the students, not themselves. And as we watch the world recoil in horror from undergraduates who are overwhelmed by books and thwarted by fractions, incapable of managing their own note-taking or schedules, it is clear that knowledge acquisition and serious effort are in their best interest. Without some evidence of these things, they are not very employable and they are probably not very enjoyable to be around, either. The ostensibly separate cultures of care and rigor need to be reunited.