Posted on 12/05/2024 6:21:52 PM PST by Rummyfan
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It’s been said that the greatest gift that comes with a Harvard degree, is never again having to be impressed by a person with a Harvard degree. Apparently this gift now applies to all Ivy and Elite universities.
Engineering types are typically bad writers. That’s why they went into engineering!
How anyone could tackle a college engineering major without having taken algebra in high school is beyond me.
I know many people who had successful careers without college. For example, several people in my family had lifelong careers in the computer field, after they learned to code in trade schools, and their knowledge and experience is still in demand today.
But, nowadays, young Americans are facing a bleak job market. Too many jobs have gone overseas, and too many positions here are filled with foreign workers. So, they all go to college with the hope of finding higher paying work.
One of the main reasons I voted for Trump was for more jobs to come back for U.S. citizens.
If those students were bright, curious and self-directed, they still wouldn’t need degrees for many positions.
But we have a sadly ignorant, shiftless, and not very intelligent generation upon us. Four years of “training” might make them marginally more employable.
Top engineers can almost always write well, but from B+ on down it gets pretty dicey.
I believe you. It’s a shame what’s being pushed in colleges today.
It’s nice that you ended up learning more about literature from friends.
Yes, trade school. What I mean is that most college students today don’t have lofty ideas about receiving a classical education.
They just want jobs. They want to afford a house one day and raise a family. So, they pick majors they hope will get them employed, such as nursing or computer science.
Humanities students might study Latin or Greek mythology, but not many jobs are available for those degrees.
I have to say, I’ve never met a college student who could not read. I suspect the students who complain about reading an entire novel just don’t want to read it.
“ Yes, trade school. What I mean is that most college students today don’t have lofty ideas about receiving a classical education.”
You’re changing the subject
Read the headline
Getting your average, modern college atudent to read more than 5 or 6 pages at a time is a challenge. And their comprehension on said reading after a day or two is nearly nil.
But higher ed is big biz and they get advanced through the system.
Back in the day Gloria Steinem made the claim that the value in a college degree was knowing how unimportant it was.
(She was a Smith College girl herself.)
Are you a college professor? I ask because it sounds like you might be speaking from personal experience with college students.
Oops. I intended for that last post to be a reply to your post #110 where you say they don’t want to read much.
SNL - Common Knowledge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0HGEZXTy8Y
I imagine it’s gotten much worse since this skit was on SNL
You wanted to know why I called colleges the trade schools of today. I answered your question.
Yep. And it is a national phenomenon. Colleges adapt to their level of academic involvement and functioning because it’s really just a big business.
If they’re not reading books at the Ivy League level, just imagine the rest of higher ed. We’ve also now graduated a generation of teachers with close to that level of education themselves.
Ha ha. Average college students wouldn’t be expected to have answers to those questions at all.
I’m serious.
I believe it all started with my generation in the 1980s.
My parents’ generation made a good living without college; many people their age didn’t even graduate high school. Yet, they went on to build businesses and successful careers. Many men learned a skill in the military and then used that skill in their careers as civilians.
In my grandparents’ generation, many people didn’t even finish grade school, yet they went on to run businesses and/or buy and sell property. Many of them became wealthy.
Those were the people I looked up to. But, in the 1980s, more and more people started going to college. I ended up spending all my savings on part-time college for years and never finishing.
Now, it’s reached the point where everyone is expected to have a bachelor’s degree.
There was already significant federal funding luring students in then, but the big disaster began with the expansion of student loans to everybody for everything in 1991:
https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/history-of-student-loans/#basic-educational
And our peak year for enrollment was 2010:
https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
And you’re so right, only about half of Americans were graduating from high school, at least nearly on time, at least through 1980 (now we’re up to about 80%), so even that level of education wasn’t usually required then:
(Sadly, the typical high school grad was better educated then than the typical college grad is now.)
“ You wanted to know why I called colleges the trade schools of today. I answered your question.”
I never asked.
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