Something I’ve been thinking about lately: How many of the problems we have with students come from the fact that they have to take too many classes?
The standard requirement for a BA is 120 credit hours. That means that to graduate in four years, you need to take 5 classes a semester. And that’s assuming you pass everything; that you don’t need any remedial or other non-credit classes; that all your transfer credits are accepted (an especially big issue for students who transfer to 4-year schools from community colleges); that you don’t have any problems with distribution requirements; and so on. Realistically, for many students even 5 classes a semester is not going to be enough.
And in many cases those five classes are on top of jobs, even full-time jobs, and on top of caring for children or other family members. Especially for nontraditional students, expecting a schedule of five classes every semester seems unrealistic. And if you want to finish in four years, five classes a semester is the best case.
A lot of students should be taking lighter loads. But the thing is, financial aid is often contingent on maintaining full-time status. So even if someone knows they are not in a position to take five classes and put an acceptable level of effort into each one, the financial penalties for a more realistic schedule may be prohibitive.
These aren’t such big problems at selective liberal arts colleges, where most students are traditional college-age without family responsibilities, don’t have to support themselves, aren’t taking remedial classes, get good advising and come in with AP credits. And students who don’t depend on financial aid have more flexibility about adjusting their courseload. But at most public universities, the system seems designed to ensure there will be a significant number of students taking more classes than they have time for.
Just speaking for myself, I never took five courses in a semester as undergraduate. With lots of credit from AP exams and so on, I didn’t have to. I never worked during the semesters, except for things like writing for campus newspapers. And when I felt like I needed to cut back to part-time for personal reasons, I wasn’t financially penalized for it.
It’s a crazy setup, when you think about it. The combination of financial aid contingent on fulltime status; AP credit; non-credit remediation courses; and problems with transferring credit from community colleges, means that we end up demanding the least from the students with the most advantages, and the most from the students with the least advantages. AP credit and the like seems especially perverse — it literally means that, the better the high school you went to, the less work you are required to do to earn a BA.
We all know about how excessive workloads undermine the quality of teaching, but I think we sometimes forget that the same goes for students. Just like with adjuncts as opposed to full time faculty, students from weak high schools, or who start their college education at community colleges, are asked to do more work for the same reward. And then we get angry at them for not living up to the standards of the better prepared students who are asked to do less. Just something to think about the next time someone doesn’t read the syllabus, or turn in their work, or show up for office hours.
What are the problems that you are referring to here? Do we honestly think that students are not sitting idle watching TV, playing games, or sleeping?
Being human beings, I’m sure they spend time sleeping.
They better find enough time to sleep. It’s essential for mental health, and to the ability to learn. Shortchanging sleep is shortsighted.
I agree with this at least as applied to me. For me, what was great about college was free time. And I had free time because my AP credits allowed me to take just 4 classes a semester.
With free time, you can study whatever you like using the virtually unlimited academic resources of the university. Classes were interesting, but it is the stuff I pursued on my own outside of class that I enjoyed the most and that still remains the most interesting to me.
But I don’t know if this is a typical situation. Would most students with more free time use it that way? Probably not. But then again they might still have more fun with it nonetheless.
Part of the issue here is the poor state of high education is such that what is considered “AP” credits — stuff like basic essay writing and reading in English 101 classes, single variable calculus in math classes, basic history classes, etc, should really be part of the “prep” high school curriculum, and is part of the prep curriculum in many high schools. But now the universities are taking kids from high schools that don’t really qualify as “prep” or from kids that attended these high schools but missed these classes, and so the first two years of college is spent on high school remediation. In other nations, a university education can be complete in only 3 years because a good chunk of this stuff is taught in high school.
But now, students are even falling further behind, not only not coming in with single variable calculus, but really needing instruction in trigonometry and other subjects that used to be covered in freshman or sophomore level classes in high school, which forces remediation classes for the remediation classes, effectively adding another year.
The problem here isn’t with the university, but with the high schools and lower admissions standards. Well, part of the problem is with the university in the sense that the U.S. has the highest university attendance rates, and we force people to attend universities that don’t have the prep work done, and as the percentage of the population that attends a university keeps increasing without changing the high school curricula, this issue will only get worse. Soon, the university will need to teach algebra, then, trigonometry, then calculus, and finally it will begin to start teaching university subjects when the student is already in their fourth year. Then we’ll have 7 year undergrads even though the list of requirements to get the degree hasn’t changed.
“AP credit and the like seems especially perverse — it literally means that, the better the high school you went to, the less work you are required to do to earn a BA.”
Why is that perverse? If you learned more in high school then you are closer to mastering the corpus of knowledge you need to earn the BA, so the less you have to study in college. How could it be otherwise?
Are you saying that non-AP students should have less onerous BA requirements than AP students? What if AP students say they worked harder than other students in their AP classes so it’s fair that they work a little less in college?
In a world where access to AP credit was solely determined by aptitude, maybe. But if there is a structural inequality (eg low-income students who go to poorly-funded schools because they live in low-income areas are unable to do AP courses because their school was not able to provide them), then it would penalise poor students. You could probably adjust it by having a financial aid for poor high-school students which allowed them to get better secondary education, including AP courses. This would be equivalent to a grammar-school or assisted place scheme, which we had in the UK some time ago; however, this also opens up a whole other set of issues.
If we’re asking how should higher ed be different I can imagine a spectrum of valid answers, out to abolishing it. This post isn’t about that, it’s just venting my annoyance with instructors who complain about their students without thinking about their often unreasonable courseload, and the institutional pressures that keep them from lowering it. (I really can’t stand teachers who complain about their students.) Especially when, as almost always, they are quite aware of how much better their teaching would be if their own workload was less.
As far as immediate reforms, I have no problem with AP credits. Just make it easier for students without them to stretch out their college education iver five or six years.
“If we’re asking how should higher ed be different I can imagine a spectrum of valid answers, out to abolishing it.”
I’m partial to that last option. It’s pretty clear that there is no meaningful rationale for a college education other than as a signifier of class privilege and submissiveness to pointless work assignments by professors / bosses. So why drag more people into college?