Views From Faculty

Faculty Views Of The Challenges To Public Higher Education

Faculty, especially those from two-year institutions, frequently complained about the large number of students who are not ready for college work and/or have so many external distractions that they cannot keep up their academic work. This observation often emerged spontaneously when faculty were asked about the major problems they faced. In many cases, faculty members were troubled and frustrated by the weak preparation of their students.

I got to tell you, it’s rough. They don’t write. I ask them about it, and there’s many, many students who never really wrote a paper in high school. They never read a whole book in high school. We actually instituted in one of our research paper classes the assignment that they would read a whole book. We discovered a lot of those students had not read a whole book by the time they got to college, which just seems outrageous.

To some degree it’s amazing that some of these students are actually given a high school diploma. You wonder what it was that they studied and learned and what was the whole basis other than seat time.

I’m finding that a lot of our students are not really ready for the college learning environment. They’re not independent learners or thinkers or self-starters. If they leave something at home, they need to call their parents during class to bring it to them. I don’t know if they’ve been overparented, or if they’re the millennium students who have had the helicopter parents who hover and are there to take care of any little problem, but they just don’t really seem to be ready for the college atmosphere.

I think one of the major problems we’re facing is the quality of students that we’re getting in here. I think the school districts are teaching to the tests. Consequently, we’re getting students that might not have been as well prepared now as they would have been 15, 20 years ago.

For me, it’s the quality of the incoming freshmen. It seems like the math and reading capabilities get worse every single year. We have more to do with just getting them up to speed in talking and writing, let alone teaching them economics. I don’t feel it’s my job, but I kind of have to.

I think that speaks back to the students that are ill prepared. You have students coming in taking more remedial classes. Last year we just deemed two more classes did not count toward graduation. This year there are seven classes that do not count toward graduation. I mean it’s amazing. You’re talking about a number of freshmen coming in, placing into those classes. They’re spending money to make sure they have all the resources that they need. For some of them, you want to say, “You know, maybe this wasn’t the place to be.”

So many of them have such complicated lives that the fact they’re even in school sometimes astonishes me. The ones that are actually successful are sometimes unbelievable what they’re juggling in their lives.

Take a couple of steps back here, it has become clear, for many of us, especially in the community colleges, but I think also in four-year colleges, a big problem is people coming in unprepared. Fully half of our students have to take remedial English courses, half math courses. They didn’t get it when they were supposed to get it. I look back to my education, too. Do you know where I got most of my education that really prepared me? It was in the first eight grades where we had to learn to spell words. We had to diagram sentences.

I don’t know if they’re less—they’re less prepared. I think that there’s no doubt that they’re less prepared. I don’t know that they’re less able. I don’t think that they’re less able. The students that are coming to us are intelligent. They just don’t have sometimes the social tools, the academic tools, from that standpoint. That becomes a challenge.

I’ve only taught at one college. I can’t really talk about whether this is a national problem or not. Literacy is a problem, I think, in our entire society. When students come and they’re not prepared to read, write, they’re not going to do the reading because they can’t read. I mean
can’t read more sophisticated things. They’re not going to be able to take essay tests because they can’t write, and they’re not going to be able to do term papers. This also relates to—I’m figuring out right now that since my students don’t want to do the reading, they want to take a shortcut and go to the Internet and try to figure out the, you know—when I’m trying to teach a case on the First Amendment and they go read it on the Internet and it’s all wrong. That’s getting way, way off this subject. Literacy and preparation, that relates to preparation of students. I could go on all night.

Many faculty members also believed that many students are not motivated and responsible enough to succeed in college. Some described a culture of entitlement in which students don’t think they should be required to work hard.

They don’t want to read, they don’t want to do any outside work. They figure if they’re coming into class, that’s it, they don’t have to do anything else. Even though you tell them that for every hour they’re supposed to be doing three on their own, it goes in one ear and out the other.

If I get one or two students who are truly interested or maybe didn’t come into my courses interested, but developed some interest in it, you’re lucky. The students just don’t seem to be interested in anything other than what is in their little realm of existence.

Something that I’ve talked with my colleagues about is the issue of entitlement. There is the sense that they believe: “I showed up for class. I deserve at least a B. What do you
mean I have to read? I don’t have time to read. I’ve got to work.” There is often this shock that I see when I say something like, “Read the book. Use the Web site. Use the study guide,” It’s almost like a foreign concept to them. They’ve been passed along.

Students only want to know what’s going to be on the test. When I tell them there’s going be an essay, “Well, how long does it have to be?” They’re prepared to do the least amount of work for the greatest reward.

It’s becoming more and more frequent that students are not understanding their responsibility. If I ask for a five-page paper, they’ll turn in a four-page paper. They feel comfortable with turning in partial assignments, turning in assignments late without feeling some accountability or
responsibility with that.

A lot of the parents are pushing them to go to college because they have to be in school to be on the parents’ insurance. The kids don’t really want to be at a community college, because they want to be on a four-year college setting, and the two-year colleges don’t have the dorms
and don’t have the college setting.

Some faculty members also complained that the presence of so many unprepared and unmotivated students results in lower standards and a poorer-quality experience for those who are ready to learn.

The problem that it poses for me is that when I’m teaching to 70 students, some of them are going to ace no matter what exam I give them, and some have to have the perfect multiple choice question to even have a chance. There’s no choice but to dumb it down a little, otherwise you leave them behind, and that affects my ability for that upper 30 percent to really get as much as they could get.

The problem with No Child Left Behind is we’re finding that if we can’t get those students who are, for lack of a better term, “challenged” to catch up, we’re getting the accelerated students to slow down. We’re still corralling them and herding them.

What happens at that level is we get very low common denominator critical cognitive skill questions on the tests because they’re cheap, both to make and to grade. That becomes the level at which our education goes. We’ve quit teaching critical thinking. We’ve quit teaching some of
the things that all of us got in our educational career, because they’re simply not being tested.

You know what they’re doing where I teach? They’re diminishing the core. They’re taking it down from a 33-credit core to a 21-credit core which is what we’re working on now. We are diminishing the quality of higher education so that we can get everybody through, so that everybody can get that credential that society wants them to have.

As a result of these factors, many faculty members believed that the quality of education has significantly deteriorated already.

My feeling is they are learning less. My course is watered down from when I started 20 years ago. I can barely get them to read. My freshmen probably read 30 pages a week, and I had my sophomores reading 60 pages a week, and I just had them quit. I had them come and they wouldn’t do the reading, so I’m down to 40 pages a week. I still don’t get them to do that.

I would like to mention the word standards and erosion of standards. There is a substantial erosion of the standards.

I think over my 42 years of full-time college and university teaching. I’ve experienced tremendous pressures on myself, and I’ve witnessed it among my colleagues, too, to reduce the extent of the reading assignments that we give our students. I think part of the reason is the increasing inability of the students to come up with—to have the ability to do the assignments. Also, grade inflation, the extent to which, I mean, if everyone else is giving them B’s and A’s for what I consider to be C work, they’re not going to be too interested in taking my courses when they know they can very easily get an easier experience from a colleague.

I am concerned about the diminishing quality of the educational experience. I think I see it all over the place. I agree that online courses are a real problem. I think it’s hard to keep students accountable. You know, for years students have been much more interested in credits than in education. We’re making it very simple for them now to pick up those credits.

I don’t think what you’re learning today is comparable to what it was 20 years ago, in terms of expectations and stuff. Now, that’s moving to the master’s degree. Everyone is going to have to have a master’s degree, and so the expectation is that we’re going to have run 30, 40 students now through a master’s degree in psychology. It’s moving up into the doctorate degree now, too.

Many faculty members felt that the emphasis on retention, which they believe is coming from the state and college administrations is misdirected. Faculty members, especially in community colleges, often said that students drop out either because they have already gotten what they need or because of external pressures that the institutions have no control over.

This is already part of our issue that they are basing funding partly on our graduation rates. It’s problematic. If a student doesn’t want the two-year degree, then what are we going to do to force them to do that? It’s often their choice, not about the quality of what we’re doing. It’s about what they need.

It bugs me that retention is the big issue. There seems to be this emphasis on retention as the indicator of success. I disagree with that. I mean, my sense is that if a student realizes that this is not the place for me and this is where I can do better, maybe that’s success.

I don’t know that that’s a bad thing if a student drops out, maybe he is saying, “I want to take a college classes. I don’t need a degree. I’ve already got a degree. Don’t need another one. I just want to learn something.”

We teach these returning adults who take one class or two classes at a time, so asking us to graduate them in a timely fashion isn’t even meaningful from our perspective.

I have students who are really doing well. They’re great, and then tragedy happens in their life, they disappear. Do I get measured for that?

Yeah, think about all these people who are being laid off right now. A lot of them, they don’t want to get complete degrees. They just want to get a few courses they think will help them get in the job market. They’ll be well-served by what community and technical colleges do.

See, people apply this four-year model onto the two-year school. We’re just not the same kind of institution. Our students come for a semester maybe and then they transfer or they complete a program or not complete a program. Again, it’s this idea that every student that comes in is supposed to somehow get a degree at the end of it. That is not how our institutions work.

In stark contrast with what we heard from state financial officials, faculty members often said that the problem is not that too few students graduate, but that too many students who are not ready for college are being sent to college and pushed through.

I think sometimes counselors are gearing everybody up for college, for college, for college, but everybody is not going to college and everybody doesn’t need to go to college. They should do a better job at advising kids on their options in terms of making a good living in the workforce.

I think a big problem facing higher education is the idea that everybody should get into college. I don’t think everybody is designed to go to college. Not everybody needs to go to college. I know that’s shooting ourselves in the foot, because that’s where our jobs are. The more people show up at our schools, the more jobs we get. Not everybody needs to go to college. Not everybody should. Not everybody’s prepared.

I hate to get this started off on the wrong note here, but I think the population of college students is already probably larger than it ought to be.

Our foreign students think it is wonderful that we let everyone into college because some of them are over here because they didn’t make it back home. They think it’s fascinating, but I tend to think more and more that it’s damaging our education system to be so open door, for the expectation that anybody can have a college degree and everybody should.

What we’re all dancing around and haven’t actually talked about is that—we would never say this in the classroom, but sometimes you want to say to a student, “Maybe this isn’t the place for you. You don’t have to go to college.”

I think there’s too many who go right away when they’re 18, and they should wait longer. I went to college for one year back in 1981, and then I quit for four years. When I came back in my twenties, I was so much more prepared. My best students are older students.

They think it’s automatic; you are 18, you’ve got to go to college. There are other things you can do for five or six years. Lots of things they can do.

Someone should actually get up there and put up a billboard saying, “You don’t have to go to college.” We push, push, push. I mean, you are glorified if you go to college.

The idea that everybody should get into college, that it should be paid for by somebody else. One of the biggest problems I see is students who don’t have to pay right now. You know what? They’d care a little bit more. I see students who really don’t give a rip.

The majority of faculty members we spoke to recoiled at the idea that colleges and universities should be evaluated and incentivized by the number of students who complete courses, programs and degrees. Many seemed to see this as the equivalent of “social promotion” in high schools—a strategy that would increase the number of people with degrees but decrease the actual level of education in the society. It would be, in other words, the exact opposite of what the country needs.

Definitely don’t reward schools for having more students. I mean, that puts the teachers under pressure just to pass them.

I think all higher education institutions need more incentives. As long as productivity translates to maintaining quality and academic standards, that’s good. The only thing I would be leery about is incentives to graduate more students that were not tied very closely to maintaining academic standards.

So what if you graduate more people and hand more people a piece of paper? It doesn’t necessarily mean that piece of paper means anything.

Yep. We’ll be forced to lower standards and graduate more numbers. That’s why you get paid. You know what? You’re going to find ways to get that done.

I don’t like this reward schools for having more students reach degree completion, because that’s a whole other ball game. They’ll just be sending them out. Oh, we got to get rewarded, we’ll just graduate them. That’s just like, you know, in high school where they start pushing them through. I don’t like that one.

What happened in high schools is they got pressured to graduate more students, so they graduated more students. It didn’t mean they were well educated, but they graduated them, right?

Or easier classes. I could graduate a whole mess of students, I just have to, boom, lower my standards, I can get more money, easy, so no on that one.

What sort of pressures would administration put on faculty, then, if graduating more increases their bottom line? I don’t want pressure to pass students that shouldn’t be passed.

You tell a community college or whatever that you’re going to give them whatever to graduate more students, they will graduate more students. They will graduate them by the thousands, and they will be as poorly, or more poorly educated than they are right now, because it is simply a quantifiable goal. It’s simply more heads, more bodies, out of the chairs.

Many faculty members were also suspicious of efforts to collect more data and conduct more assessments.

Looking back over 40 years, I’ve seen it all happen. I’ve seen these people running around. They called it behavioral objectives when I first started. Now they’re calling it assessment. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of money.

That’s one of those things where you’re going to have people just collecting papers and collecting information. You’re going to have three or four people who are really self-important running around collecting all of this information. You’re not going to get anything from it. It has to be—if it’s done well, it’s an excellent idea.

Data collection, when you’re doing it wrong, is either meaningless or you can interpret it to back up whatever you want to be true. There’s too much of that going on.

The other point is, it’s almost impossible to measure good teaching. We’d like to say we can, but if we ask everyone in here, we’d all say, “Oh, we’re wonderful teachers,” and if you ask all your colleagues, you’ll never find one that says, “I’m a bad teacher.” I did have some that have said, “Gosh, I’m not really turning out any research or anything. I just am too busy. I really don’t publish articles or books or have research projects, but I am a really good teacher.” I think that’s the problem that the administration has in dealing with this. I think administrations would love to reward good teaching. I don’t think they really know how, because it’s very difficult to get concrete markers.

The tests have begun to wag the dog in this process. What happens is, we’re willing to open and close institutions on the basis of test results, but we’re not willing to put money into the construction of test questions.

A lot of that is generated by our accreditation institutions. Since the Spellings Report, they’ve insisted on the whole accountability—what do you teach your students? Can you prove that you’re teaching them this? If you’re talking about your skills and your class, it’s usually not an issue. Now they’re getting into, well, you say you’re turning out good citizens who can communicate. Well, prove it. Give us some sort of test where you can give us numbers. We’re not really equipped to do that. We’re shuffling our way through that. It’s creating huge amounts of paperwork for everybody, because we’re fooling our way through these assessment devices.

Many faculty members were also skeptical about proposals to increase productivity by having high school students do more college work as part of “dual–credit” programs. Many of those interviewed believed that offering college courses in high schools might be a good enrichment program for some, but they did not see these as a genuine substitute for college courses.

Our legislature is really pushing the idea of offering college classes in the high schools, and the community colleges are responding to it because there is so much money there. But that means we’re conforming to their schedules, to their extracurricular activities, and to their maturity level, especially teaching history to high school juniors. It won’t be college work. They’ll get college credit, but it won’t be college work.

The problems are the interface between the college system and the high school system. When we taught college classes in one of the high schools, what we found was that students are bused or drive their own cars from their high school to the school where we had the classes, which causes all kinds of problems in the process. They have 10 minutes to get back and forth. The bus takes 25 minutes to make the circuit of the high school, so we have students coming in at all different times during the period. We have announcements that appear at random times over the PA system as though they are from the voice of God.

I had a student who was irate with the government instructor. She came into my office and she said, “This man is abusing me, and I want it to stop. He is trying to force me to read the textbook, and he is testing me over the textbook, and that is not fair. I’ve never had to do that before in my life.” I [asked], “Haven’t you gotten textbooks in every grade?” She said, “Yes, we get the textbooks. They check them out in the fall. We put them in the bottom of our lockers, and we check them back in at the spring. The teachers tell us what is going to be on the test and that’s what we study.” She said, “Furthermore, this rigmarole about history, this is not important. I am a cheerleader, and that’s what’s important. I have to stay a cheerleader, and I won’t if I don’t make a passing grade in this course.”

Right. I think we could improve high school, but I don’t think that means reducing the number of years spent in college.

Most faculty members we spoke with were also much more skeptical about technology and online learning as a possible solution. Many believed it translates into more work for the faculty member or less learning for the student.

There is a push on campuses for online courses, because they’re cheaper and you don’t have to furnish a classroom and take up space. I’m not against online. I think many online courses are incredibly good, but many are very bad, but it’s cheaper. Students know that if you can get into an online course, you should get into an online course rather than the classroom, because it’s generally easier.

We’re going blindly in this area without considering the need to have that classroom contact. Maybe I’m a traditionalist in that sense, but I think that you cannot get the same emphasis with a computer and a keyboard and a monitor that you can in the actual classroom.

I have some concerns about the quality of online education also. I think it works very well for some students, but you have to be a mature student. You have to be able to manage your own time, and so I worry sort of about costeffectiveness, meaning just cramming more students into either online sections or larger and larger lecture halls. That’s not going to work for students that are minimally prepared to begin with.

I think online learning is a good concept, but I don’t think the courses are equivalent in most cases. I think the students are actually being underserved. It costs them less, but they’re really not getting what they’re paying for in many cases.

We’ve been pushing for more and more online courses. I think it’s been found pretty much nationally that the retention among distant education students tends to be significantly lower than that among the students taking classes in a traditional setting.

I think there’s a real push to move to the University of Phoenix model of college instruction, where there is no particular campus. There is no particular faculty. The course is advertised. If the course makes it, then they go out and hire somebody to teach it, and that person is contract labor at that point, to come in and teach the course. They find a place for the course to be, and the course is administered. They have very little overhead on this kind of situation.

I have a very traditional view of education, where I think face-to-face is much more important in how many students learn versus the online. And online you can learn definitions, you can learn basically to read text, but in terms of actually absorbing and developing that critical thinking, I think face-to-face is important.

In general, faculty members were concerned about the whole notion of “productivity” and business models applied to higher education. They often interpreted calls for productivity as an attempt to increase class sizes and decrease quality.

There was an old skit on I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel were working on this line with chocolates. As chocolates came down the line, they were putting something in the damned chocolate. I’m not exactly sure. All of a sudden there’s a demand on them to produce more chocolates,
so here came more chocolates. They’re trying to do this, and eventually the chocolates that came out didn’t have any cherries in them or whatever they were supposed to have and they fell on the floor. I think that’s kind of where I see we’re going. There’s only so many chocolates that you can stuff, for lack of a better term. It’s a horrible analogy, and I apologize.

People think that somehow lecturing to 40 students is the same as lecturing to 20 students. Fine, it probably is. But we don’t lecture that much anyway. You try grading 40 papers instead of 20 papers, then we’re talking about the issue.

I’m okay with the idea of increasing productivity as long as it sticks with administrative functions. I always worry about it leaching over into curricular areas.

How the heck you going to measure it? How do you measure productivity in higher education?

I think the first problem is definition. The two questions I’m hearing on either side of me—what is education? We don’t have any consensus of that in this country. What do we think is productive education is another thing that—none of these terms have a universal acceptance in terms of what they mean. Part of our problem in education is just that. Anything can be it. Our state legislators define education differently than we do. It would be difficult to get consensus probably in this room as to what good education is. I think the problem is definition, in terms of what are we talking about, before we can intelligently address the question of should we be more efficient or more productive.

I think there are maybe some things we could do at the margin to improve our efficiency a little bit, but I think huge moves in the direction of cost-effectiveness are going to translate into watered-down quality.

That’s the way education has been since I’ve been in it. We’ve been always been asked to do more with less, and we’re getting students who are less prepared, yet we’re still expected to take them as far as we can take that ultimately prepared student in 16 weeks. In theory, yeah, we’re asked to do more with more, but we really don’t have more.

I associate the word productivity with a business model that I don’t think necessarily maps well onto higher education.

For me, talking about productivity would raise a red flag, because we have this mind-set in the United States that anything that’s good in business is automatically going to be good in the public sector. Let’s just move it right on over without filtering it through anything. I think the same thing happens with education. All of a sudden we say, yeah. In the business world we have these performance measurements because we want to improve productivity, so that’s okay. But if we’re going to bring that mind-set into education, all of us are the ones that are going to be in trouble, because we’re going to be held to standards: “Your students have to do this. You have to do this, and you have to do this.” We’re going to have these lists of performance measures that if we’re not meeting, we’ll be stuck.

It’s that business word again. That productivity, what does that mean? It usually means that we are doing more with less.

What it calls to mind is things like business models, like if you don’t have 22 students enrolled in this class, we’re going to drop the class, because it’s not costefficient to run it.

This drive for business efficiency is not necessarily compatible with good education.

When faculty members were asked what solutions they favor, they most frequently mentioned improving K–12 education.

I’d go back even before high school. I think they’re on their track before they go to high school. As what I said, head start. I really think it’s that pre–public school, it’s the elementary schools that feed into the junior high and high schools. I substitute taught in junior high and high school
for a while, and I wouldn’t go back there for twice the pay you pay me now. I really think the problem starts a lot earlier than high school.

Yeah, bump it back to the high school level. Make sure that they know that they’re numerate and literate, that they know some of the basic stuff. I go through and I’m grading papers, and some stuff I see is ridiculous. Some students are very high achievers. Some students are really good. There’s so many that just don’t have the basics down at all. I don’t know how you’re going to pick them up when they’re 18, 19, 20 years old, when they haven’t learned good study skills in the past, and all of a sudden make them into good students and make them into the future—people with PhDs in math and science. I don’t know how you’re going to do that.

Obviously, if we’re looking at more successful people in college for less money, you can’t start at college. You have to start back in high school, junior high school. Get the students prepared before they finish high school.

I was going to say if they want to be effective with their money, do a better job of preparing students for college, because we use up lot of time and resources just correcting problems, because it’s open enrollment. What it means is that you have a high school diploma, but the high school diploma really doesn’t guarantee a minimum level of academic achievement, a preparation for college.

Testing faculty priorities

In one of our last focus groups, we began to probe more deeply into how faculty members think about the relationship between increasing graduation rates and increasing quality. The financial officers interviewed for the project often stressed the goal of improving productivity and graduation rates without diminishing quality. Implicitly, they were telling us that they wanted to hold quality constant while making improvements in productivity or completion areas. We put this question directly to our faculty respondents, asking: “Which is better, holding quality constant while increasing the number of graduates or holding the number of graduates constant while improving quality?” The faculty members unanimously chose to emphasize quality, and several said they would support quality improvement even if it meant decreasing the number of graduates. In many cases, they argued that quality could best be increased by decreasing the number of graduates. In other words, this view is nearly the polar opposite of that voiced by many of the financial officers and other policymakers.

How to improve higher education with the same amount of money going in? The right way to do it is to focus your resources on a smaller number of students. The best way not to do it is to double my workload. The best way to get a poor education for students is to double my workload for the same kind of pay, the same kinds of resources—whatever. Then, I can be spread so thin, I’m not doing a decent job anywhere. If we focus more resources on a smaller number of students, I think the percentage of them that succeed goes up, and I think the actual number of students that are truly successful goes up.

This is awful, but what came to me was, forget about retention and go back to where you have the motivated student and the teacher deals with them, and you don’t worry about coddling people or trying to make numbers. If we weren’t worrying about retention, then we’d be focused
on the students that we knew really wanted to be there.

I’d rather improve the education experience for the numbers of students that are coming in already. Some of the people here, I think maybe we reached a limit in terms of what percentage of the population is going to college.

It is maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy as the number of students declines over the next 5 to 10 years, but I would rather we focus on a higher quality than getting even more people into the system.

It doesn’t matter that more people have degrees. We need better high school diplomas.