Higher Education Is Not Prepared For What's Coming
On college students who can't read, Trump's re-election, and how we got here.
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This past Friday, I was at a meeting of SOTL colleagues listening to a fellow faculty member about her experience trying to get her students to read their textbook. Based on feedback she’s received from students through one-on-one conversations and end-of-semester teaching evaluations, a lot of students tend to use Google, GenAI, or some other online tool to get information for their assignments and exams, despite the fact that their e-textbook has all the information they need (and is searchable with a simple Ctrl+F).
To the horror of many of us in the room, she reported that not only do her college students prefer a Google search, presumably because the top result or “AI summary” gives them the answer immediately whereas a textbook chapter has to be read in full, but many of them don’t know what a Table of Contents or an Index are. They simply never learned what these are in K-12. Our students are floored by the simple task of finding an answer to a question in a textbook, even an electronic textbook, because instead of looking up key words in the Index, they simply scroll and scroll and scroll until they can find what they’re looking for.
This phenomenon, apparently, is nothing new. K-12 teachers have been sounding the alarm for years about the degrading quality of education, particularly since COVID hit in 2020, but like an inland town facing a hurricane for the first time, colleges and universities have had a delayed response until about this year. And we are completely unprepared. For example, at UMass, incoming engineering first-years take a math placement test that determines whether they get into Calculus I or a Pre-Calculus course. It used to be that around 10 students every year don’t get into Calc I proper; now, it’s more like 10 percent of all students. That change happened very rapidly, and it’s only worse in states that have even worse education finding (from what I’ve heard, in some red states, more than half of all students don’t get into Calc I).
I’m by no means the first to talk about this, even in the past month or so. An Atlantic article talks about the ivy league students who can’t read a book cover to cover. A New York Times Op-Ed talks about how students “are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them”, pointing out how to a lot of young people, income seems totally decoupled from productivity. All mention the pandemic and generative AI as a root cause, but few note the broader political circumstances at play.
The fact of the matter is that the reason that students are deeply suffering is not because of cell phones, or AI, or a “lack of discipline”: it’s because of terrible public policy.
In America, a significant portion of school funding comes from local property taxes. This means that more wealthy students have better educations, point blank period. This itself is already inequitable, then you consider the fact that wealth is deeply entangled with race in this country, plus the fact that (legally speaking) schools were only desegregated fairly recently in history (and that many schools are still de facto segregated in 2024). Some school funding comes from the federal government, which would rather give nearly a trillion dollars every year to the military instead of investing in education, to say nothing of George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” which knee-capped public education by making the world revolve around test scores, devaluing education for education’s sake and taking money away from schools that were doing poorly (instead of investing in them even more).
Schools get a majority of their funding from the state, which inevitably means that some states spend more than others depending on how much they value education. As a general rule, left-leaning states are more educated than conservative states, though this is a highly systemic chicken-and-egg issue: states with high poverty spend less on education, less educated people vote Republican, the cycle continues. Republicans have a very adversarial relationship with schools, with education (and how allegedly “woke” it is) being a major issue this past election.
The end result of this drastic gap between what different school districts and states spend on education is a drastic gap in student educational outcomes. From where I stand as an engineering educator, it’s not that all students are doing worse than before but that the gap between the highest-performing students and the lowest-performing students is widening. I have plenty of students who have zero problem reading books, who submit all assignments on time, and who get straight A’s as a result. However, instead of having a Bell curve-like grade distribution where a few students get A’s, a lot of students get B’s and C’s, and a few fail, it’s now more like a bimodal distribution where a lot of students are doing great and a lot of students cannot read to save their lives. Talking to the faculty who shared her story on Friday, this is precisely how her last exam played out.
There’s also something to be said about the trauma of being a politically-aware young person nowadays. On a base psychological level, the feeling of “the adults in my life protect me” is crucial to our survival and well-being. Unfortunately, “the adults” have not being doing shit for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. School shootings still happen regularly, climate change is set to make our swaths of our planet uninhabitable by the century’s end, and numerous genocides are ongoing, all with zero action from our political leaders.
This all leads us into Donald Trump’s re-election, which anecdotally, has students feeling more defeated than ever. Rather than college campuses erupting in protest as they did in 2016 (trust me, I was still an undergrad in 2016, I was there), campuses have been awful quiet. The vibe has been one of absolute dejection: no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we vote, no matter how much we try to correct misinformation, no matter how many of us want to live in a non-climate-hellscape future, no matter how many of us agree that abortion should be a human right, Republicans still win. So why bother? Why care? Apathy is the national moment right now: just take care of yourself and tune out the news to stay sane.
Other than our spiritual destruction, Trump may very well being with him the death of public education as we know it. Setting aside attacks on DEI, which would inevitably lead to fewer students from historically-excluded backgrounds from getting into college, students can kiss student loan forgiveness or anything more radical goodbye, at least for the next four years, if not longer. Writes the INSIGHT Into Diversity staff…
Central to his platform, Trump vowed to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, a move that would shift regulatory power to states and potentially eliminate billions of dollars in scholarship funding for low-income students. A key element of this proposal is to do away with federal oversight and resources for diversity initiatives that many institutions currently rely on to foster inclusive campus environments. Though he would need approval from Congress to completely eliminate the department, Trump will likely seek to reallocate certain responsibilities and reduce funding for the department.
In the worst-case scenario, Trump’s policies will lead to drastically lower enrollment, making it so that only the wealthiest families could afford an advanced degree. Without a doubt, this sudden drop in tuition money would kill many small colleges, and maybe even well-established universities too.
This, of course, has been Republican’s mission for decades. Their goal has always been to systematically destroy public education. They want the general public to be made of uneducated, complacent workers, while only the elites (largely cis white men) have the knowledge needed to control them and maintain their power. This is how universities were first imagined hundreds of years ago, and it’s where we’ll end up again if we don’t fight back.
There are still a lot of question marks right now. Will Trump be able to do all of this, or will the inertia of bureaucracy stall these plans? Will the states step in to defend education as a human right, or will they “obey in advance”? To what degree will the class divide persist in across the higher education landscape? And how the hell do we fight back?
One thing is for sure: teachers, and their allies, are going to have to get their act together. While the higher ed work loves to claim a lack of political bias by way of “objectivity”, a lot of us are going to have to get very political, very quickly. That involves getting active in unions, getting active in state politics, and doing everything we can to help students succeed. We must remember that if a student can’t read, that’s not an individual moral failing: they have been systematically failed by a government who is disinterested in their success. We must learn how to teach with compassion and love at the center of our pedagogy.
I sure hope we can pull it off.
Action Items
If you’re at all associated with a university, please know that your transgender students are suffering right now. They are looking for guidance, not only from a mental health perspective but also a legal one. You and your university should be equipped to help guide students through the process of changing their legal name, accessing hormones, finding community, and more. Luckily, I have just the guide for you!
Currently Reading
Taylor Lorenz, the only person talking about the Internet in a way that makes sense, on why the left can’t have “their own Joe Rogan”.
A great write-up on the 4B movement and its dangers.
A primer on how hormones work (even is cis people!)
An op-ed on the relationship between the rise of fascism and AI.
Watch History
Two excellent videos by Alexander Avila on the election and why we shouldn’t blame trans people for Trump’s win. I love this quote: “You cannot win when your opponent will not play by the rules and nobody will enforce the rules. You can't win an argument with an opponent who can't agree on your reality.”
A cheerful, hope-inspiring video about ice cream and human nature.
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
As of late, it’s been all about “CHROMAKOPIA”, day in, day out.
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna