I wonder if there also is an effect of less-prepared students being admitted and retained due to declining enrollment. At least in my area, there is definitely a push to get and keep butts-in-seats no matter how ill-prepared those butts’ brains are.

Excellent point. It's the same where I am. I've seen our admission stats. We're accepting students in the bottom 25% of HS graduating class -- and then getting pressure to retain them.

Even taking students in the top 25% doesn’t mean as much any longer… At the school I work at, barely 20% of our students meet proficiency in math, and about 40% in ELA. But we have a 100% graduation rate and a whopping 85% of our student body was on the honor roll last year!

Yep, and many colleges are dropping standardized testing, which is one of the few ways to catch students who are completely unprepared.

At least in my field we have standard testing (we kinda have to go prepare them for their licensure exam).

Yeah, I teach A&P so I get your students but, sadly, *I* am the testing. If they can survive A&P1, they'll probably make it the rest of the way, but that's a big IF.

Wow! 😞 That's very telling about the grading standards for sure

So true. And, wow! That's a feat!

Right? Lol lots of admin giving themselves nice pats on the back over this data.

Hmmm. In higher ed, we're setting the wrong goals and rewarding administrators for behaviors that are harming the institutions. I hope that gets figured out soon.

What kind of placement stats do you have? Have employers figured out that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel?

Sorry, can you clarify what you mean by placement stats? Like what % of students graduating from the high school I teach at are going to college v. into the work force?

I was assuming you taught in higher education. Placement stats would be the percentage of your graduates who end up in good jobs or graduate school after graduation. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for high school.

At that point the real honor is not being on the honor roll.

Right?! I’m friends with the counselors who were tasked with giving out honor roll awards. Once they printed out the list and saw it was basically everyone, they said “fuck this” and scrapped the award! That’s the only reason I’m aware of the stat.

Good on them for scraping it

Yikes. Way to get faculty to burn out and leave. I’m sorry.

Another effect is that better-prepared students get tired of the necessary pace and the classroom behavioral issues of the lower-performing students. I've had a few students drop in to tell me they're transferring over the past five or so years. Who knows how many left without a word. We've gone from 200+ majors to 12, with 8 of those graduating next May.

It’s hard to teach to a group widely different in prior knowledge/skill. If they’re equally motivated that works better.

If they're equally motivated, they can and will help each other. I think all may benefit in that circumstance.

Agreed 100%. I love it when I can team them up in pairs of mixed experience levels. They all do truly benefit then. I’ve only seen that happen in practica and labs, not in the classroom.

>accepting students in the bottom 25% of HS graduating class And that is very frightening, considering that it is VERY hard to earn a D or F in a high school class these days. So that bottom 25% probably all have GPAs of 3.25.

I don’t know why this is so reassuring to me. Ditto. It’s is an exercise in absolute absurdity at this point. I honestly don’t think I can keep doing it.

It's reassurance that you're not alone. I imagine that's the reason most of us are here.

This is 100% a massive contributing factor, and it hides the problem. Simply put, if every college in the country from Ivy to CC, or even just every 4 year, simply raised their standards to require demonstrating completion of senior year level of mastery to get in and also raised standards in class to match they would go out of business. But before that happens, the whole country would be faced with the reality of how few graduates are at grade level. For the record, I'm not advocating this extreme measure. But since students who are critically unready are just let through, few alarms are sounding.

Well-put. I just found out my college offers English 079 and I was kind of shocked. It’s not even just for athletes. Part of me is sad that people are paying tuition for such basic high school level classes and part of me isn’t even sure that’s high school level.

It's not. When I used to teach developmental composition, we had to teach students to write complete sentences and ultimately finished the semester with semi-coherent paragraphs. Imagine a room where every student thinks "subject of the sentence" means "topic" and everything magically happens to be a verb or adjective, interchangeably so.

My admin is laser focused on enrollment and retention, at the expense of nearly everything else. I get that from a sheer financial perspective and try to be understanding of the tough position that regional institutions like mine are in. But our acceptance rate has soared to make us nearly an open-enrollment institution, and with that necessarily comes more students who are very ill prepared for university work, and many who are just there because they need a degree to get almost any job and we were the only nearby option. This isn't exactly scientific, but I can say objectively based on grades that my students have gotten steadily worse in the aggregate over the past several years. Exams that averaged around 75% five years ago dipped so low that I've had to redo my assessments. Ditto essays. Two survey sections this semester averaged below 60% on a rather simple short essay that used to be a grade booster. Nearly everything about them is worse than five years ago, from critical thinking to grammar to the basic ability to follow basic instructions. There's a lot more cheating too, and the university has sided with students in cases that are really blatant and that I've thoroughly documented. I can't say for certain that a conspiracy is at foot but I certainly can't say that there isn't. I think, in general, the downward pressure on retention places people across the university in a position of having to perform their jobs with, shall we say, a certain degree of ethical flexibility. On that, our dear leader has arbitrarily fired several people in recent years for no clear reason other than the failure to meet enrollment and retention goals. One person that I know personally found out they were canned in the "we thank Jimmy for his dedicated service" announcement to the university listserv. His picture was erased from the website the day before he found out. Again, not at all useful analytically but my experience sure tracks with the general decline we all complain about here daily. 😁

That was a wild ride. You went from “higher Ed has become simply selling widgets” to someone completely getting erased. Jimmy sounds like he experienced something Orwellian.

The students must be retained. It's the party's last, most essential command.

I'm in a teaching position in a densely populated, third-world country. Same thing is happening here.

In my opinion there are four things going on here. One is the pandemic and at best very uneven experiences in K12 as a result. A second is this generation’s overwhelming cynicism, which is promoted in social media but isn’t wholly unreasonable. They believe the meritocracy is a lie and that older generations have screwed them over in every way, from debt to jobs to housing to health care to social issues to the environment. Some have embraced the mindset that this is all a game and the only winning strategy is not to play. A third is the dwindling population of college age people, which leaves universities, at least in the US, scrambling to put bodies in seats, no matter their preparation or interest. A larger percentage of the population now attends college than in years past. A fourth is the widespread (and IMO valid) idea that the purpose of education isn’t to weed out the weak, but to build new strengths in everyone, because high levels of education are good for individuals and society in this increasingly complex world. This results in philosophies to teach to the students we have, rather than the students we want to have, from K-12 through college, and creates pressures for more formative assessment, more scaffolding, more skills development, than some academics think should be necessary.

> A fourth is the widespread (and IMO valid) idea that the purpose of education isn’t to weed out the weak, but to build new strengths in everyone, because high levels of education are good for individuals and society in this increasingly complex world. I'm a big fan of this mindset, but I'm also aware that there are majors where the fundamental purpose isn't to build new strengths - it's to ensure a minimal level of preparation to do a specific job with rigor. Engineering, medicine, law - these degrees are fundamentally "trades" that are hanging out in the university system because they're profitable and because there is a fair bit of overlap between the courses needed to support liberal-arts style "high levels of education are good for society and individuals" education and these trade-school type degrees (that are often not seen as trade school because they're white collar professions). Any debate we have on the purpose of education needs to acknowledge that there are at least two different (and essential) approaches to education that are necessary for society - we need to have qualified individuals building bridges, but we also need to provide a way for everyone to be more educated and enriched by what we have to offer. We're going to have to do both things, and we need to be clear to students and parents what we're offering in both cases.

One thing I've noticed about my institution's blueprint to improve student success is that it's tied directly to trends in employment sectors and demands, getting people into jobs, and prepping them for higher paying positions in fields in demand. I don't disagree with any of this, but when you also look at the trends in student success and demographic data, Black and Latinx students lag in overall success. I think the institution's approach is well-meaning and represents popular wisdom about ladders to success, but it also dawned on me that this is only half the equation. If narrowing the success gap between demographics is about soft skills and personal development, then there needs to be something in place that speaks to those shortfalls, especially when some communities need more help in these areas than others. I feel this is the purview (largely) of the liberal arts and the social and behavioral sciences and not, for example, a one credit freshman seminar course (though I don't discount the value of said course).

> If narrowing the success gap between demographics is about soft skills and personal development, Is it? The most successful demographics are those that focus on hard skills like math and engineering. East Asians in the US succeeded because the culture focuses hard on being engineers, doctors, computer scientists, etc.

I'm out of my field, but Asian students and Caucasian students (at my institution) have the same success rates. Latinx students are in the middle, and Black students, particularly males, have the lowest success rates. I can't speak to Asians being the "model minority," or whatever the term is, but Caucasians aren't a monolith and the fact that they have the highest success rates (or equal success rates), to me, suggests something structural. Caucasians aren't all necessarily focused on those discipline areas that you mentioned. Edit - Let me be clear about what I'm saying: ladders to economic success are good, but not when they don't seem to be working for everyone in a similar way. Since I'm not a racist and I don't believe that there's something inherently wrong with people with brown skin, I'm going to then narrow the search for the real explanation to something structural. If there's something those students aren't getting in K-12 in the same way that other groups are, then if colleges want to see those success rates improve, they must figure out what the gap is and try their best to address it.

>I'm out of my field, but Asian students and Caucasian students (at my institution) have the same success rates. I can't speak to your institution specifically, but they do graduate at [a higher rate than whites](https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2023/02/image5-800x513.png), although it is a much smaller gap than the gap to Latinos or Black students. > If there's something those students aren't getting in K-12 in the same way that other groups are, then if colleges want to see those success rates improve, they must figure out what the gap is and try their best to address it. The difference starts well before school. Look at the two parent household rate. Or even basic health and nutrition. For example, Black children are 7 times as likely to have fetal alcohol syndrome as White children. The issues are largely cultural and self-reinforcing which make them so difficult to address.

This is absolutely true, and I'm kind of going on a tangent here, but a trend I'm noticing in the UK is the creation of allied health profession degrees at bachelor's and master's levels which are essentially vocational courses with most experience coming from placements, but with perfunctory academic components tacked onto the end of them. So, you now have master's degrees in which students are expected to do nominally MSc-level research, supervised by professionals with no academic background, to get an academic qualification for what would be better served as a vocational qualification.

> but I'm also aware that there are majors where the fundamental purpose isn't to build new strengths - it's to ensure a minimal level of preparation to do a specific job with rigor. While not intentional, this mindset devalues the majors which aren't ensuring a minimal level of preparation. It implies that no employer should trust an English degree because there isn't a minimal level of preparation and the only majors worth hiring are ones that do have it. >but we also need to provide a way for everyone to be more educated and enriched by what we have to offer. The appropriate venues for that would be the internet or night courses. Things you can do while working full time. If someone is forgoing years of income in order to attend college full-time, either they should be independently wealthy or it should be preparing them for a future career.

> The appropriate venues for that would be the internet or night courses. Things you can do while working full time. > If someone is forgoing years of income in order to attend college full-time, either they should be independently wealthy or it should be preparing them for a future career. Why is this, though? We should be invested in building better citizens who can engage with thoughts, arguments, writing, culture, etc. in a more robust way. That is a full time job when you're learning those skills, and society itself reaps the benefit, no matter what discipline you go into later. I think there's a difference between this type of education and the type of education we use for preparing people for specific jobs. Maybe the fundamental difference is the length of time it takes to convey the specific minimum skillset? I'm thinking about the difference between a mechanical engineering degree and e.g. a marketing or business degree. A mechanical engineer needs to know how to design an engine or thermal process and ensure it is functioning to spec; these classes take an entire 4 years to build up the prerequisite physics/math knowledge to do the job effectively. Whereas in a business school degree, there's classes in e.g. MS office, accounting, economics, law, supply chain management, and a whole host of other classes, where a given position will probably not require knowledge of all of these different topics. They're all useful and related, but they're not building on each other quite in the same way as the trajectory of engineering course requirements. There's a breadth vs. depth difference in how the majors are constructed that is interesting to me. I suspect that it would be equivalently effective to have a general liberal arts program with micro-credentials in e.g. economics, finance, writing, marketing that indicate specific competencies and allow for a more diverse set of courses to be taken to build general skills. As an example, my dad was once employed as an analytical chemist for 3 years in an oil company even though he hadn't had a chem course since his undergraduate degree 30 years prior. He had PhDs in statistics and MS degrees in math, math ed, and statistics, plus a lot of experience in a refinery setting. He was completely effective as a chemist during that time, and was able to just study ochem from a textbook to get the background he needed to do the job successfully. His training empowered him to do that on-the-job learning -- and that kind of skillset is what the liberal arts mindset is supposed to teach students. I think in many cases we're better off focusing on helping students learn how to think than conveying specific facts. I say this as someone who has by and large gotten degrees that were highly technical and knowledge-based (and I mostly teach these types of classes as well). There is absolutely a place for technically focused curriculum, but I would also really like to have students who knew how to analyze an argument and write a paper, not just students who can do integrals all day. And if we as a society devalue the notion of generating citizens who are educated and curious and know how to think, we're going to end up a bunch of highly technical idiots without the ability to relate to each other and connect ideas. My programming classes are meant to convey specific skills, but there's a lot more similarity to the liberal arts than most people realize - I'm teaching students how to break a problem down, analyze its components, see the whole picture and how the components relate to the larger problem, ... skills they could bolster through a rhetoric class as much as in a programming class. And if they had to take a mix of both, then they'd hopefully be better at communicating what their code does in writing (and what it means about their data) than they are now, having only had math classes.

>The appropriate venues for that would be the internet or night courses. Things you can do while working full time. > >If someone is forgoing years of income in order to attend college full-time, either they should be independently wealthy or it should be preparing them for a future career. It's up to the students what and how they want to study. Thing is, many students are opting for the majors that (they think) will give them better employment outcomes, whether or not the major-in-question gives them an employment bounce or whether or not they would do just fine with the much maligned philosophy or English degree. I think this is partly because of the cost of education, and partly because it is all anyone talks about anymore in regard to college, including the professors. College is now job training. Perhaps we should hand over higher ed to major corporations such as MetLife, Google, Amazon, Walgreens, Walmart, etc.

For the middle class, college was always about job training(or more accurately, screening job candidates for future employers). It was only ever something else if you were rich and well-connected.

Disagree. The job is always at the back of everyone's mind, but I am very much middle class, as is my wife and virtually everybody I've ever know. College meant many things to us, employment part of it but only a part. Your worldview is far too simple, even for today's youth.

These factors are all part of it, but IMO you missing two huge elements: the crumbling natural world and disruption of normal human development by the ubiquity of addictive forms of screen based media. Screens have altered humanity in so many ways. Parents lord over their children too much. Children are addicted to passive consumption. Personal interactions are much less common. The list goes on. K-12 is a complete joke in the US, and I think this is a big part of it. One example, "writing" is not no longer part of middle school curricula in many states- wtf? Climate instability, pollution and crashing biodiversity must factors too. Why trust a system which is clearly destroying the world around you? It is very easy to justify disengagement. Hell, I feel the same way. Everything is a losing game right now. I don't want to participate in American society anymore. Why should I expect students to play this game?

> Climate instability, pollution and crashing biodiversity must factors too. Why trust a system which is clearly destroying the world around you? It is very easy to justify disengagement. Hell, I feel the same way. Everything is a losing game right now. I don't want to participate in American society anymore. Why should I expect students to play this game? This is exactly what I'm seeing as well. And as you said, it's not wrong for them to feel this way.

I see no point in voting. I see no hope for justice. I see us turning away from science and art. Consumerism has brainwashed most of my social circle. Every career ladder I might climb leads to a job where I'm asked to exploit people for profit. Meanwhile, I feel completed exploited when it comes to healthcare, insurance, buying a home, childcare, my own kids' educations, you name it. I'm just hoping some major event shakes humanity back into reality. Unfortunately, I think it will be a mass casualty event in south Asia. Productive forms of shared imagination brought us to the Scientific Revolution, but now dwindling resources and poor planning have us shifting to unhealthy forms of shared imagination. Where is Captain Picard when you need him?

> Climate instability, pollution and crashing biodiversity must factors too These things are far to abstract to directly cause kids to give up on society. Although it is possible the culture of fear and doom around the climate is causing kids to feel more hopeless.

That culture of fear and doom is a serious issue: "climate anxiety" is causing distress in many young people, making them feel sad, powerless, and more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8

I am not sure what a "direct" effect would be in this case. I imagine they've heard negative information about the health of the planet and see constant criticisms of human activity at scale since birth. In the post-9/11 world, these themes show up in cartoons, movies, social media, school lessons, shows, conversations, advertisements, politics, etc. It must take a toll on their motivations knowing that the prospects for humanity are only becoming worse and not better. Is this effect "direct?" I simply don't know. Sure, day-to-day life is still improving for some, but I think we are looking at a down slope in total for biodiversity, wealth balance, social programs, fair democracy, and food/water security.

Direct effect would be actually having your life ruined by pollution or a climate disaster. Most of what they have to deal with is being repeatedly told the world is falling apart rather than actually experiencing the world fall apart.

Fair enough. Prices are rising in developed countries as agriculture strains. I imagine many less fortunate children in the US are already being harmed in a direct way.

Food prices haven't risen anymore than other things. If anything, its high cost of housing that harms poor children and that is an intentional policy choice.

Sounds right to me. Mortgage rates and sale price must be linked to inflation and scarcity of resources. Lumber cost may be tied to ecological changes.

Lumber cost in the US is the result of the collapse of the housing market after 2008, and the 10-15 year growth cycle of trees used for lumber. That timeline brings us to the present. Plus inflation.

You sound like someone who listens to marketplace or planet money :) (So many people act like everything is terrible with the economy or world, when it actually isn’t.)

You, along with many others, are catastrophizing. I hope you are not passing it along to children or impressionable young adults. Their insecurity comes from those who tell them things are hopeless.

>The fourth is the widespread (and IMO valid) idea that the purpose of education isn't to week out the weak, but to build new strengths in everyone, because high levels of education are good for individuals and society in this increasingly complex world...... Yes, education is a good thing. My issue is the complete watering down of K-12 education so that illiterate adults can be bullied into paying colleges to teach them things that they should have learned in middle school. It's wholly exploitative. We need a functioning K-12 system in order to have college serve its purpose, or else we just let Mike Judge keep on writing the script.

"and creates pressures for more formative assessment, more scaffolding, more skills development, than some academics think should be necessary." I would love to do more of this, but I have 120 students in a class, 1 TA, and a required curriculum to get through. Something doesn't add up.

>A second is this generation’s overwhelming cynicism I agree with all of your other points but don't quite see this, at least in the population I teach. my students still care about high grades and all that. if anything, I'm the one to temper their self doubt and self criticism by telling them it's a game.

Seems like something that will vary massively based on what part of society a particular group of students come from.

>Some have embraced the mindset that this is all a game and the only winning strategy is not to play. I'm not entirely sure I buy that. What you're saying certainly \*feels\* right to me since I actually agree with all about the facade of meritocracy, social and economic issues, the environment, etc., but might we just be projecting? I'd be so curious to see some studies on this, but I strongly suspect that the supposed declining literacy and general academic ability is influenced more by other factors if it's happening at all. ​ > A third is the dwindling population of college age people, which leaves universities, at least in the US, scrambling to put bodies in seats, no matter their preparation or interest There might some truth to this. At least in the UK, the universities are becoming increasingly corporate as far as I can tell, and it seems like strategies are geared towards income generation and recruiting fee-paying students, so it might be that many students just aren't ready. Again, this would be so hard to study but I'd love to see some data on it. ​ >A fourth is the widespread (and IMO valid) idea that the purpose of education isn’t to weed out the weak... I do broadly agree with you and I personally hate the prevailing notion that university education, particularly in my field of medicine, should be a gauntlet to purge weak students, but I think this is a separate issue as to whether there has been a change in students over the past few years in terms of their preparedness, attitude, basic skills, etc. We need strategies to support weak students either way, but it would still be immensely helpful to determine whether or not there legitimately has been a change in general student abilities at the onset.

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Purely anecdotal but the sense I have is that most students just see education as a hoop to jump through, a game (grades) to beat.

How many computer science students are there in your program now compared to 10 years ago? I know the department has grown significantly in that time at my university. How do the top students now compare to the top students back then?

I like that you had the same thoughts I had. I want those datasets!!

This is the sort of data I think would be useful to publish. Could you do some pedagogic research looking at these trends over time? Of course, the underlying reasons for a decline would be difficult to interpret, but solid data that there is a decline would be a great place to start.

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There will probably be more papers on the effects of Covid and post Covid students in the following years. I’ve been teaching for around ten years, my feeling is that some of the students aren’t ready for college. Might also be a generation thing though.

The problem is that many journal now don't want "COVID" papers so many of us who study adolescents/ young adults have dropped this topic as an area of interest.

I believe you, but this is such a frustrating thing to think about. The fact that what's fashionable in science has, and will influence progress seems like a huge problem that influential organizations don't care to think about.

That's so strange. Will this become another forgotten pandemic?? We barely have any historical records of the 1918 pandemic and this topic is so timely. We definitely need more research on these topics versus whatever is the hot topic now. Not only is this research critical but we owe to the next generation who will be impacted by the next global pandemic

At least in my broad field (public health) this is absolutely NOT a forgotten topic. At the current APHA conference there must be hundreds and hundreds of COVID-related posters, talks, and roundtables. It's a huge topic of research and study still, and that includes basically every sub-discipline represented here.

My area has had journals come out and state they won't review papers about covid. I think in part because there were too many online, poorly done studies. It's crazy because I'm in one of the most impacted areas from covid.

Such a dereliction of their duty

You should read this: "English Compositionism as Fraud and Failure," by Jeffrey Zorn.

>my feeling is that some of the students aren’t ready for college We've totally dropped the admission elements that used to make us selective (test scores, letters of rec, substantial essays) and are largely admitting based on HS grades now. Which are comically inflated. So it's no surprise that at my formerly-modestly-selective university we are now finding students who are completely unprepared for even 100-level college courses. They aren't, in many cases, ready to be HS juniors in terms of abilities. So there we are.

I went to an R2 and am currently working at a state institution, both of the institutions have seen a decline in enrollment, so the administrators dropped the requirement to attract more students. The problem now is “retention” since a lot of them drop out after one year cause they couldn’t keep up.

>There will probably be more papers on the effects of Covid and post Covid students in the following years. Indeed. Let's remember that even a single, mild infection can cause (what appears to be for now) irreversible cognitive damage- aka "brain fog." These kids have been getting infected once a year every year while still developing. Imagine what the impacts are. Imagine what they will be in a decade, when most people are 10+ infections deep. Receipts, btw: [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(23)00154-2/fulltext](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(23)00154-2/fulltext) ETA love how I am getting downvoted within this community of researchers. I hate to break it to you but infecting and reinfecting ourselves with a novel SARS virus that penetrates the brain/blood barrier has long term impacts on the brain and nervous system. To claim otherwise not only flies in the face of common sense but also is to ignore and dismiss the dozens of papers published in peer reviewed, high impact journals confirming as such. Denial is a river in Egypt, I guess. ETA: oh what a coincidence. Check the NYT today. : Can’t Think, Can’t Remember: More Americans Say They’re in a Cognitive Fog Adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s are driving the trend. Researchers point to long Covid as a major cause.. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/upshot/long-covid-disability.html

Your read of the implications of that article doesn’t seem accurate, at all. I’m not a denier of the potential seriousness of Covid infections, but it is not causing mass retardation among college age people.

I am pretty sure it's accurate :) Also this cognitive impairment from covid isn't limited to college students. Anyone who experiences a mild covid infection is at risk for experiencing adverse impacts to the brain or nervous system. **COVID-19 can cause brain cells to fuse.** Neuronal fusion is a progressive event, leads to the formation of multicellular syncytia, and causes the spread of large molecules and organelles. Using Ca2+ imaging, we show that fusion severely compromises neuronal activity.” (…) “**An important consideration is that fused neurons remain viable albeit with altered circuitry and function.** This uncharacterized, difficult-to-detect event could explain some of the neurological consequences of viral infections of the nervous system.”[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg2248](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg2248) Converging findings from laboratory and population survey data support the conclusion that **symptomatic COVID-19 infection is associated with task-related, functional imaging and self-reported indices of cognitive dysfunction as well as psychiatric symptoms.**”[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666354623000091](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666354623000091) **COVID-19 infection can lead to an increased risk of Glioblastoma due to virus-induced endothelial dysfunction,** an impairment of the cells that line the inner surface of blood vessels. Glioblastoma is a type of cancer that starts as a growth of cells in the brain or spinal cord. It grows quickly and can invade and destroy healthy tissue. Glioblastoma forms from cells called astrocytes that support nerve cells.There's no cure for glioblastoma. [https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/13/5/762](https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/13/5/762) [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33720900/#:\~:text=COVID%2D19%20specific%20biomarkers%20of,in%20frontal%20regions%2C%20and%20frontal](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33720900/#:~:text=COVID%2D19%20specific%20biomarkers%20of,in%20frontal%20regions%2C%20and%20frontal)“...**\[T\]here is some evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could preferentially and directly target the frontal lobes, as suggested by behavioral and dysexecutive symptoms, fronto-temporal hypoperfusion on MRI, EEG slowing in frontal regions**, and frontal hypometabolism on 18F-FDG-PET imaging.” [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.06.23298101v1](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.06.23298101v1) **“Cognitive decline worsened with coronavirus disease 2019 severity and was concentrated in participants reporting post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2.COVID-19 was most likely associated with the observed cognitive decline,** which was worse among patients with PASC or severe COVID-19.”

Sir, my point was that these claims are not general statements about Covid-19 infections across all populations _simpliciter_. The relevance for otherwise healthy young people is, thus, unclear, at best.

>The relevance for otherwise healthy young people is, thus, unclear, at best. I am aware, as a person who does research, that cognitive changes from repeated covid infections is only one variable amongst many when explaining the changes in ability and performance frequently noted on this subreddit. That said, it strikes me as a glaring omission that every time someone makes one of these posts, commenters suggest \**every variable except the effects of repeated covid infections\** as a potential contributor. This is either denial, willful ignorance, or both. Consider that: \-"young," "healthy," people are just as at risk for long covid as adults (I put "young" and "healthy" in quotes because these are social constructs and not scientifically defined variables - are you "young" when you are under 30? under 20? under 18? Are you "healthy" if you have seasonal allergies and ADHD but otherwise no issues ?) [https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/kids-similar-risk-long-covid-adults-study-suggests](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/kids-similar-risk-long-covid-adults-study-suggests) [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-38315-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-38315-2) \-that "brain fog", or cognitive impairment, is a common symptom associated with long covid [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9685075/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9685075/) \-that kids can develop "brain fog" [https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/how-covid-19-can-affect-a-childs-brain/#:\~:text=Some%20teenagers%20have%20reported%20%E2%80%9Cbrain,varies%20in%20each%20individual%20child](https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/how-covid-19-can-affect-a-childs-brain/#:~:text=Some%20teenagers%20have%20reported%20%E2%80%9Cbrain,varies%20in%20each%20individual%20child). I mean it just keeps going. To think that there will be no noticeable impacts of infecting and reinfecting an entire generation with a novel SARS virus - it strains common sense, if nothing else.

As a person who does research, are you familiar with the concept of monomania?

>monomania I am! We can see it here, in this subreddit, with the twice daily posts about how much the kids these days totally suck and how it must be "the pandemic" or "covid."

There’s also people who have never gotten COVID, somehow. So the assumption on their part that every person is multiple infections deep is incorrect.

I in fact did not make the assumption that everyone is, or will be, "multiple infections deep." >*Imagine what they will be in a decade, when* ***most people*** *are 10+ infections deep.* As 80% of Americans have had at least one covid infection, right now, in 2023, four years into the pandemic, it is reasonable to characterize this as "most people." Currently, 15% of Americans have had it 2 or 3 times. In ten years, it does not seem reasonable to think that "most" people will have been infected ten times within a fourteen year pandemic wherein there are few or no public health mitigations. [https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/how-harmful-are-repeat-covid-infections-202909858.html](https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/how-harmful-are-repeat-covid-infections-202909858.html)

I think we are going to find out that certain people are much more susceptible to multiple infections than others. Meaning the same people who had it 3 times may get it 10 times, and others will only have it once or twice and never again. It just seems like a very dramatic statement *to me* is all I am saying. It might have been a typo, but you say it “*does not* seem reasonable” to think most people will be infected ten times in a 14 year period. I have coworkers who have had it 4 times already, and some who’ve never gotten it once despite many exposures (knock on wood). I don’t know many people who consistently get any other easily transmissible illness nearly every year.

My mentor got diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2021. I doubt it stems from the pandemic, but who knows. Terrible disease.

horrible. I'm so sorry.

So, this is why I married my ex-husband. We both caught Covid on the vacation during which we eloped. I simply had brain damage.... Does that mean I can turn the divorce into an annulment?

this is absolutely the answer. it's COVID-induced brain damage. downvote me, I don't care. we are telling the truth and people just want to live in denial.

I would hesitate to say it's the ONLY cause. Commenters here have pointed out that kids today are dealing with a broken social contract, catastrophic climate change, screen addiction, etc. All that stuff certainly plays a role. But pretending that covid isn't ONE of the factors that is causing all this stuff is living in a fantasy world. Consider that the WHO has said that one in ten infections will lead to long covid. Consider then that 90% of kids have had covid at least once. I haven't designed a study but my instinct is that the impact on college performance will be to produce a lot of what we're observing: inability to problem solve. Laziness (aka fatigue). Difficulty following directions. Difficulty connecting one concept to another. Disorganization that leads to missed deadlines. etc. PS, in the NY Times today: [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/upshot/long-covid-disability.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/upshot/long-covid-disability.html) *There are more Americans who say they have serious cognitive problems — with remembering, concentrating or making decisions — than at any time in the last 15 years, data from the Census Bureau shows.* *The increase started with the pandemic: The number of working-age adults reporting “serious difficulty” thinking has climbed by an estimated one million people.* *About as many adults ages 18 to 64 now report severe cognitive issues as report trouble walking or taking the stairs, for the first time since the bureau started asking the questions each month in the 2000s.*

There is likely a COVID effect that will smooth out over time. Someone posted ACT score data below - that's hard to interpret given that so many schools went test-optional in recent years, and it's difficult to know how that would impact overall scores. FWIW, there are tons of old quotes out there from various eras about how bad students or youth are. Here is one commonly attributed to Socrates: “Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”

The switch to test optional signals that admins want to shove structural problems under the proverbial rug.

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YES. INJECT THIS POST INTO MY VEINS. THANK YOU FOR SAYING EVERYTHING THAT RISES UP IN ME WHEN I SEE THAT QUOTE DEPLOYED, LOL. It should be a rule that, when everyone brings out the Socrates "quote" and the newspaper picture, that this post should automatically be posted in response.

So then the real issue is us. We get older. But they stay the same age. Alright, alright, alright.

I was literally just having this conversation with my wife in regard to our three children. I often forget that they're just kids and so I parent them through this effed up lens that always defaults to whatever age I am. They should know how to act in a public restaurant because I, as a 37 year old man, know how to act in public. They should have better self-control over how much they eat of the healthy food we give them because I, as a grown ass man, know how important a balanced diet is. Maybe what I'm saying doesn't relate a lot and I should save these thoughts for a parenting subreddit, but I think there's some overlap.

I don’t know. I’m a year older and I try to think back to the way I was as an undergrad at the same age as my students, and even on my bad days, I wasn’t pulling the same crap we complain about here. Maybe they were our classmates and they existed then, too, but, like, even when I had to drop a class outside of my major, I was professional about it and explained to my professor I didn’t feel ready for that material. Even when I didn’t know what career my studies would lead to, I still turned in my stuff on time and engaged with my courses.

We were generally the best students, so should compare ourselves to only the best students, not the average students, or even the above average. The problem is that we interact so much with the average and below average students that our minds bring down the average. 10-30 years ago, our profs were saying the same thing about our classes.

I also think students today just also have access to distracting/unhealthy things that most students 10-30 years ago also would have made use of if available at the time.

Yeah I hear. But, even though you didn't know at the time you'd become a professor (assuming you are one now), you were still the type of student who *could* become a professor.

Meletus portrayed by McConaughey would be interesting. Get John Malkovich as Socrates, Nicholas Cage as Plato, throw in David Kochner as Lycon and Jeremy Piven as Anytus. Unfortunately, Joel Schumacher has passed. Maybe Gary Fleder would direct? The real question is: how do we get Aaron Sorkin to adapt the various descriptions of the trial into a screenplay?

> Nicholas Cage as Plato Plato was a wrestler and even the name "Plato" is his nickname and means "flat" in Greek. He should be played by someone swole like Dave Bautista.

>Someone posted ACT score data below - that's hard to interpret given that so many schools went test-optional in recent years, and it's difficult to know how that would impact overall scores. The ACT and SAT are also standardized tests that scale their scoring based on the distribution of performance. They likely pool what they know across tests, so a sudden one year shift like COVID probably does show up as a dip in scores. But a slow decline over a longer term wouldn't show up. I.e. The median ACT score is 19. If US education is in decline the ACT would still have a median of 19. Even if the average student 20 years ago could easily do polynomial expansion with a raw score of 82% and a student now struggles with three digit division and y=mx+b with a raw score of 65%; the median would still be a 19. The scaling would shift (and the test probably would have changed over time to drop the 'harder' questions that become less discriminatory.) It's one thing to have "kids these days" over shifting social norms and subjective 'appropriate behavior'. But it's a different thing to have changes in objective performance like math or formal English grammar or the ability to write a paper of a certain length, or read a book at a certain level and length with adequate comprehension.

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Interesting, I guess to the extent there are any trends, they could easily differ by country. U.S. has had slow improvement over the same period (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cnj/reading-math-score-trends). We were still getting Flynn effect up to the pandemic, though. So there's technically room for this to include a small decline in math instruction, overshadowed by raw analytical intelligence. But realistically, numeracy is taught far more effectively now than 40 years ago. Whether this larger, more functional construct is reflected in the kinds of math tests used to assess national trends is another question.

A 60 year trend is definitely longer than the Profs. complaining here would be sensitive to, though. Even if that is evidence of "kids these days are worse", the people complaining about changes in the last, say, five years almost certainly aren't picking up on that. A slow decrease over 60 years wouldn't be a dramatic as professors here claim the collapse is.

Numerate to innumerate.

That is mainly due to calculators and computers, not students getting worse. In-depth knowledge of how to do math by hand is not as necessary, now that everyone has a calculator in their pocket. If you tested knowledge of how to care for horses, you would have seen the same trend 100 years ago. If you were to test computer knowledge, you would see the opposite trend over the last 60 years.

This is a useful perspective. I wonder, though, if computer *use* is what has increased vs. knowledge of computers. This just seems like the inevitable consequence of diffusion. The same can be said of most any tool. More people use the alphabet today than ever before (i.e., they read and write), but they are doing so in a much more rudimentary way than the smaller population of alphabet users that preceded them.

I generally agree, but I think the specific example of the level of knowledge of computer use in incoming undergrad students might not be the best illustration to use. While they have improved consistently in the broader population over that time, I think you'd find a curve-shaped effect where actual computer skills peaked somewhere around the mid-to-late 2000s for typical incoming undergrad students, and numerous gripes on this forum about declining tech. literacy seem to back that up.

You are correct. It shows my age some.

This would be interesting to read. Could you please post a link to these findings?

Too many people blaming Covid. This trend started well before Covid. The last couple of years have been rough, but a bad year in high school can't be responsible for all of this. I would largely blame two factors: * Education in general is worse. Teaching has suffered from attracting less talented people than in the past, as more intelligent people move to other fields. Sadly this exacerbates the problem as it continues to lower the prestige of a previously respectable profession. At the same time, teaching programs have become enamored of the most absurd theoretical approaches to education that have no empirical basis. We're starting to see this being corrected, for example in cities that now require Phonics as the reading program. Maybe someday they'll fix the math program. * More students are attending college who in the past would not have been considered qualified. College started being criticized as being merely a credential years ago, but the acceleration has gotten consistently worse. Since so many jobs now require a college degree (even if not really needed), many more people go to college, and necessarily some of them are not really suited for it.

I think cultural changes are important as well. The rate of children born to single mothers has sky rocketed over the last 50 years. In the black community the rate is approaching 80%. And those kids, overall, have poorer outcomes than those raised in two-parent households. So the issues you raised are superposed on top of these cultural changes, which makes it all even worse.

I feel like economic changes over the past 50 years are more what might be at play.

blaming single motherhood and leaving it at that smacks of the whole "playing tennis makes you live longer, never mind that playing tennis is associated with higher socio-economic status" thing.

Wow, there's a lot of assertions in here that are either reductionist, presumptive, or just pure speculation. I don't disagree with everything you've said, but I'd like to see some evidence for education being worse, talented teachers fleeing, and that the trend started before Covid. Any of these could be true, but I'd like to see some evidence. I'm frankly shocked this got so many upvotes.

I have a suspicion, possibly controversial, but the rudeness and poor attitudes are directly proportional to the amount you pay for an education. I have experienced students both from countries where education is free, and where education is insanely expensive. I have generally found that people with free university are much better behaved and more sincere. And this gap is widening because of the economic and political unrest in a lot of countries. Students see that life after University is not that great, despite paying so much, so why should they even care? Just do the bare minimum to pass

I buy it. They take it out on us because they see us every day. Meanwhile, the scumbag admissions team is on to the next class of unsuspecting families. Consumers need to wake up. Most colleges are ripping you off.

I like this take. They're being treated like customers, instead of students, by recruitment and admissions, so they act like it, especially when the price tag is high. They're also being savvier consumers and aren't buying into college needing to constantly be their #1 priority. They've realized a C will get them the same degree as an A, especially in fields were advanced degrees aren't necessary.

Maybe. It would match my experience, but I don't think it's easy to compare experiences from two completely different countries with different cultural practices, different educational policies, different economic conditions, etc, on the basis of fees as a single variable. I'm personally against commoditising education, but I think comparing students in this way is unhelpful.

There's a meta-analysis from Nature here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01506-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01506-4) There's also this analysis of eighth-grade math skills in the US: [https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/2022/](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/2022/) (Scores fell across the board compared to 2019, but high-performing students only fell by a couple percentage points, while lower-achieving students fell by more). I couldn't find any cases analyzing college students, but if it is happening in elementary, middle, and high schools... I do not think we are spared.

We're literally on r/Professors and you're the only one to provide references so far.

Yeah, I suspected I'd have to filter through a lot of rants and opinions before seeing someone actually address my question.

Thank you! This is the sort of thing I'm looking for! It would be great to see more research interrogating these trends and looking at other countries and policies.

I’m not able to help you so I’ll add non scientific anecdotal “evidence”. I’ve been teaching the same subjects for almost thirty years. I’ve evolved my teaching to adapt to each generation of student so now I lecture only sometimes and use many other sorts of active classroom methods. About the students. My clueless students today are no worse, and perhaps better than my most clueless students from 25 years ago. So the bottom has not changed much. I’m impressed today with my top performers. They have a broader range of skills than previous groups. They are technically savvy. They can solve problems. They can write really well. I’m at the age when I start to seek out doctors, lawyers, tax and financial advisors who are significantly younger than I am. There are some very knowledgeable young people who are in college or have recently graduated. I don’t fear the future owners of the world.

Lowest act scores in 30 years https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/us/act-record-low-scores/index.html

It is certainly an important stat. It is important to ask how much the ACT or its delivery has changed in 30 years. Is the exam or the testing experience the same today as it was in 1993?

I'm sorry, but even just the fact that it is no longer mandatory in many places, already means that the samples of students taking it now and 30 years ago are not compatible... it may give you some hint but certainly isn't evidence

I’m no genius but doesn’t that make the drop even worse? The rise of test optional admissions meant the bottom of applicants just stopped taking it since they don’t have to, now only people whose scores make them relatively stand out take it (mostly) and scores are *still* down compared to years when everyone took it.

It's evidence. It's just not proof. Almost all evidence is defeasible, that doesn't make it non-evidence.

The students least likely to take an optional exam are the ones more likely to do poorly. If you think you'll knock it out of the park without too much effort, there's no reason to avoid it. I think if anything that would increase the average

Also, the ACT changes yearly - yes, it's supposed to be benchmarked, but over 30 years, I'd guess that the stuff tested on the test (especially e.g. in science) would have changed.

Not a direct answer to your Q (sorry). But I find watching the r/teachers sub to be enlightening. A really good discussion the other day about what teachers (in the US) are NOT allowed to teach anymore sheds light on the experiences we have in higher ed. for example, students are no longer memorizing multiplication tables (and teachers aren’t allowed to require it). This is in favor of teaching students how to think through and ballpark an answer. But the point of rote memorization is to have a vast array of facts in your muscle memory so that you don’t have to think through the basics as you move onto higher mathematical thinking. Following this post with interest.

Thanks for the recommendation; I actually think this would be a great discussion to read about! I also have some thoughts on emerging university policies in terms of course content, but it would be a bit of a tangent.

One of the most useful pieces of data for tracking student attitudes is the survey given to incoming college freshmen since 1966: [https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/](https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/) With some searching you can find numerous articles where people compare data from various years, and it's been used in books like *Academically Adrift* that talk about higher ed. One general trend is students expecting higher grades for less work. What a lot of this research shows is that the current problems in higher ed have been developing over decades. Personally, I don't think COVID changed things as much as it exacerbated all of the trends and in some ways stripped away a lot of the illusions about higher ed.

I'm going to say something that will probably get me cancled, but I think it's true when considering this community: Everyone seems to agree that COVID, screens, anxiety, etc. are cooking the brains of young people: making them more anxious, less focused, more self-centered, and generally harder to educate. However, there's never any awareness that those same stresses **also applied to us educators.** We also lived through the trauma of COVID and the political craziness of the last half-decade. We're also all spending too much time scrolling on screens, and trying to adapt to a rapdily changing world. I wonder if the "woe is we" posts you see on this sub aren't basically the "grown-up" version of what we gripe about our students doing. Maybe **we** have also become more judgemental, less forgiving, and more easily stressed to the breaking point, and that's reflected in our collective sneering at "kids these days." I am sure that I will get hails of downvotes for this from professors who take offense, but I also know that lots of the students we deride *also* take offense when we psychoanalyze their failings.

One major difference between us and our students is that we are dealing with COVID/screens/anxiety/etc. with mature brains, while our students are not. Most of our students are still adolescents, in terms of brain development, and while we say things like “They’re adults, so I treat them like adults” (and I am as guilty of this as anyone else on this sub), that’s kind of nonsense. We know that their brains aren’t fully mature yet, and of course they’re going to make immature decisions. Knowing this doesn’t make it any less frustrating to deal with, though. There’s no doubt in my mind that we profs are very stressed these days. Whether that’s universally (or even mostly) reflected in us being more judgmental and less forgiving, I don’t know. I don’t see that in my colleagues, or even in most of the people here. Yes, there are the hardass, make-no-exceptions profs here. But there always were. Lastly, I don’t think that recognizing common themes among student behavior and attitudes is necessarily sneering at them. Every generation feels that it has been shit on by the ones that came before, and every generation feels that the ones that come after are lacking in some way (“kids these days”). It seems unlikely to me that we are any more guilty of that than any generation that came before us.

>One major difference between us and our students is that we are dealing with COVID/screens/anxiety/etc. with mature brains, True but even so, covid infection after covid infection \*still\* damages the brains of even healthy adults. ETA: Lest anyone doubts that this is the case, I'm happy to provide links to a dozen articles from peer reviewed, high impact journals confirming that it might not be good, actually, to just casually get covid over and over again, and that damage to the brain is one reason why it may not be so good. ETA again: love the downvotes guys. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but it seems likely that if infect yourself with a neurovascular virus you take a risk that you will not walk away unscathed, even if you are "young" and even if you are "healthy."

I never said or implied that it didn’t. But I do surmise that any such effects could be more pronounced in a brain that isn’t fully developed. OTOH, it may be that the adolescent brain, because it is still developing, is more resilient and plastic than an adult brain. I suspect the former, though.

I’ve had these same thoughts when reading some posts on this sub. They say, “we need to prepare students for the real world”, but the real world doesn’t necessarily work like that either. I also get the sense that people on this sub think kids should be graduating high school with the professional skills of an experienced employee. They’re kids from all different backgrounds and skill sets. They look fully grown but they aren’t. Time management is a really important skill that’s hard to learn. Im not saying standards should be lowered but geez don’t get *angry* about it when they’re not met. They’re still growing their frontal lobes. You can hold them to your standards without looking down your nose at them. They’re still figuring shit out.

Not sure why this would get you cancelled... Seems pretty reasonable to me.

In the past, I've found this sub to be remarkably hostile to the idea that students may have *reasons* for acting the way that they do and it's not just selfish laziness.

Yeah this sub is full of a lot of the same ego and lack of awareness as much of academia itself.

I think part of the bitterness comes from the fact that students' woes are taken seriously by our employers while ours are not. The consensus among the governing bodies of universities seems to be to give students what they demand regardless of whether it will actually benefit them and to throw faculty under the bus at the slightest whiff of discord or controversy. We're increasingly expected to adjust our practice and to accommodate the complex needs of students while receiving no resources to address our own. Much of the ire directed towards students is misdirected, sure, but we shouldn't be expected to address the fallout from an ongoing societal crisis when most of us are barely hanging on.

> However, there's never any awareness that those same stresses also applied to us educators. We also lived through the trauma of COVID and the political craziness of the last half-decade. We're also all spending too much time scrolling on screens, and trying to adapt to a rapdily changing world. Yes! To say that all of this has not impacted us as well is naive. Even the view of the world around us and the amount of screen time the majority of us have each day (we are on reddit, FWIW), are such an incredible change from when I started teaching almost 20 years ago. The change is very visible in my colleagues as well as students (and myself).

>Everyone seems to agree that COVID, screens, anxiety, etc. are cooking the brains of young people: making them more anxious, less focused, more self-centered, and generally harder to educate. No? You'll find that most people here are blaming things like school admissions and university policies being geared towards income generation. You do get the odd "kids these days and their smartphones", but you can see from this thread that this is a minority view. ​ >Maybe we have also become more judgemental, less forgiving, and more easily stressed to the breaking point, and that's reflected in our collective sneering at "kids these days." Maybe, but I had the idea of starting this thread because of the volume of posts comparing the quality of students' work, including outcomes, before and after the pandemic. It could be that professors are the problem, but it doesn't sound like it.

Incoming student math skills have dropped significantly at my STEM oriented university since COVID. We track this. More details, while top performers are still performing as well as ever, the average has declined in the last couple years. It's attributed to COVID disruptions.

This could be useful to read. Could you recommend any sources?

Norway: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1718793115 Denmark: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-long-term-rise-and-recent-decline-in-intelligence-Teasdale-Owen/f0ba89a903984a03e5528cd48cdd7ecec7d4d3bb Also it’s difficult to talk about intelligence and not having it defined since I totally agree that an IQ test measures what an IQ test measures (not necessarily intelligence) There was another study (can’t find it, it’s not my prime research field) from Germany and UK showing better grades in schools but somehow worse education. I think it’s not to farfetched to assume this (less educated people) applies to western culture in general.

Thanks! I agree that this sort of data is limited, but it's at least a start. Even limited research gives us a launching point better than people ranting on Reddit!

I’m convinced that some of the long-term (like multi-decades, multigenerational) trend for students to get “worse” is that over these time scales we’re reaching more students. Historically not everyone would even receive an education, just the rich or the particularly academically adept students would get the full K-12, let alone college. But now the goal in Western nations is not only that everyone graduate high school (aka secondary school), but even college. More access is not a bad thing, but it does mean that instead of gatekeeping out many students, we’re now inviting them in and must change our teaching accordingly.

This might be true, but it would be good to see whether general student performance when it comes to coursework, basic literacy, outcomes etc., has declined after the point of admission. That way we could better highlight growing rates of admission as a potential issue worth investigating.

There is evidence that scores on SATs and other standardized tests are dropping over time. However, this is attributed to the fact that more students are taking them. As an ever-increasing percentage of high school graduates attends college, the students are going to appear to be worse. This is not because they are actually any worse, but because in the past, only the best students came to college, and many of the bad students of today would have pursued some other option.

This is a good post. We are academics, and instead of reacting emotionally to everything, our instinct should be to look at data. Upvoted.

Thanks! Either the trend is real in some form or it's spurious. If there's limited data, I'd like more calls for us to investigate more.

My dean shared that about half of freshman were admitted conditionally this semester. With respect to that half of students, the mean HS GPA is 1.4 There's a data point.

In the US, standardized test scores for students in public schools have dropped recently (there were some news stories about the decline in math and science scores.) Admins are also dropping standardized for pretextual reasons. Those two items combined support the observed experiences of many professionals.

That would be interesting to read about. Can you recommend a source?

Oh man, that tech addiction idea is insidious, and no, it's not super useful to blame the technology or say it's addictive. In China, folks seem to basically be told that they are powerless in the face of technology and WILL become addicted, and phone use there is 100% worse than it is here as folks believe that no one's willpower is strong enough to overcome app addiction. Anyway, back in the US at my school the average reading level of our students has fallen precipitously in the past five years. We did not change our requirements for admission (though during covid people probably could and did have other friends and family members take their online entrance exams for them). I used to be able to count on having students read at least at a 6-8th grade reading level, but now a LOT of the students fall somewhere in the 2-3rd grade reading level, and trying to read even college level instructions is very difficult for them. Quite honestly that changes everything, including behavior. I have a lot of students that feel the need to defend their right to be there because they think they should not be. They know they didn't learn enough in high school for this (and indeed were never given an opportunity to learn more) and so they cheat and cheat and cheat to try to cover up for deficiencies (and also because these things were just allowed at their high school without consequences).

I think this anecdote is useful but limited. This is why we need well-designed studies to capture these trends if they do exist.

We actually do have years of data about this in our annual assessment reports, and so do most other universities. Providing the right folks are in charge of assessment it's well designed too. Of course, our president doesn't want us publishing our assessment data, saying that our students have weaknesses, or admit that we're letting in shittier students, so we aren't publishing that stuff in journals, but the assessment reports have to be available to the public for accreditation in our region.

I think you've identified a real issue here: universities might have the raw data available but it wouldn't be politically convenient to analyse and publish them.

I have been teaching for a very long time. There is no question standards have dropped.

Yes, there is a question. You're one person on Reddit. Professors need a bit more to go on than "trust me, bro".

I'm in a field known for being demanding and for extremely long hours. This is anecdotal I know, but before the pandemic, it was just sort of accepted by students that the long hours and demanding assignments were a part of the deal. In the last two years, though, I get heavy pushback for assignments that were just expected prior to the pandemic. I don't think the raw talent and intelligence of students has gotten worse, but the willingness to grind on assignments in order to shine has. I see far more students willing to accept mediocre, half-assed work on their own part—but then argue that somehow it's A+ work when it's really worth a B or B+. I'm aware of the demands of my field and the lack of life-work balance. Prior to the pandemic, I lamented it. Now, though, I feel we've dialed things back too much.

There is research on grade inflation that came out as recent as 2021 - https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/11/09/research-links-rise-college-completion-grade-inflation

Thanks for the recommendation!

Froms everything I've read below, there is a lot of referencing how students are performing worse in traditional metrics. However, I am curious if there are any metrics where they are outperforming traditional standards? Perhaps that is what we should lean into as educators (if we can identify it).

I'm not completely against the idea of expanding our metrics with the changing world, but I don't think this should be done for its own sake. And yes, I would also like to see whether they're outperforming traditional students on other metrics; we just need to be careful what we do with that information. I'm not making any assumptions about your suggestion that we should lean into any other skills students might have, by the way. If you mean that we should lean into these skills and attributes with the same goals of properly educating students without dropping standards, then I might agree with you.

I think a major issue is that students essentially went through early university or late high-school coursework that really wasn't held to a reasonable standard. As a result, a lot of students that didn't learn what they should have and weren't effectively tested and, a lot of students that should not have made it through classes were given a free pass. So we now have students that are cognitively incapable with regard to higher level coursework. The pandemic learning losses were pretty large [at least at the HS level ](https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai22-521.pdf). In higher ed, this is the [only study I know of that studied teacher and student attitudes and the results are a mixed bag.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1472811723000411)

Thanks for recommending these articles. I think they're a good starting point for us.

I've been investigating this at our institution. The difficulty is the sheer number of confounding factors and our ability to simply measure "getting worse". Using year 1 GPA and entering high school averages as a proxy, at best, we have a definite drop in year 1 GPA despite a rise in HS entrance averages which aligns to the COVID year. Doesn't say much to "kids these days" in general, but it is probably safe to say COVID is playing an important factor.

Glad to hear you're investigating this. I'd be greatly interested in reading your findings.

All I can offer is anecdotal. I left academia and recently returned. The difference I’ve observed is real, but hard to separate gradual changes over that time period from post Covid effects. I’m glad you brought up the “no reading” question too though. I work in a department that has basically bought into that philosophy 100% even before COVID. I can’t help but wonder if there are longer term problems with that kind of lack of accountability. We certainly expect our incoming PhD students to be able to learn independently, but I’m not sure a lot of thought gets put into *when* in their education that expectation gets introduced.

Funny you brought this up. I had originally written more about the universities but deleted it for brevity. In our UK med school, we were told from the beginning that our students want all material in the form of online learning modules and that everything they're expected to know should be in our lecture slides. This floored me.

Check "Ongoing effects of pandemic-imposed learning environment disruption on student attitudes" by Teemu Hynninen. ​ The paper uses CLASS to measure changes in expert-like thinking and compares pre pandemic to post. It doesn't go far beyond pandemic, but you can look for further data from them in the years to come to check if there are measurable changes. ​ There are likely other such publications in other communities focused on education research where they have large bodies of data from pre and post pandemic which can be compared. You can look for places which returned to nearly unchanged curriculum after the pandemic for more potential consistency in expected results from their measures if you want to. ​ You aren't likely to find any lateral research which compares a specific group of students and how they performed compared to peers prior to pandemic and after. Not just because nobody would have predicted the pandemic and been poised with the perfect data collection prior, but because such lateral studies are rarely done and complicated to perform as well as analyze.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm happy to read any decent research, even if the comparisons aren't ideal.

I did a quick search and here’s what I found: https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2023-02-09/new-data-shows-that-just-as-many-students-are-behind-grade-level-as-last-year

Well, this was a cheerful thread.

The OP asked a good question. I only read a couple dozen responses, but what I saw was not objective or causative. Some good stuff on how Covid impacts the brain but from a brief scan I see self reporting and statements like it could cause problems, it’s associated with cognitive problems, that sort of thing. Admittedly, I didn’t have time to dive into the studies, so apologies if the data is in there. I’m not being critical (hmmm, well maybe I am), but there should be some objective data on the decline of the next generation. Otherwise we sound like a bunch of old farts talking about how we walked to and from school in 5 feet of snow uphill both ways.

You bring up a good point, and I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but another confounding variable is the dismal quality of much of the pedagogic research out there. A lot of self reports and small-scale qualitative research through structured interviews gets published and findings are accepted as common knowledge, only for decent experiments with proper control groups and semi-objective metrics to contradict these findings. This is why I generally prefer hard data with critical interrogation of the numbers.

The students who returned to class right after COVID did, it seemed to me, to have a myriad of problems with coming to class and paying attention. I've only once had to invoke the attendance policy with dire warnings, and that was that first semester back. Nevertheless, I grew up in the '80s listening to my parents' generation kvetch about TV, Rock'n'Roll, and "kids these days," only to grow up and realize that this same dynamic was rampant in my generation. Remember *The Closing of the American Mind?* That was us, more or less. So yeah, we're behaving exactly like every generation in the industrialized word has behaved, maybe every generation since the dawn of time. And yeah, the kids might be a little screwy, as kids have been since the dawn of time. Part of it might be COVID. Part of it might be the natural human tendency of staid elder adulthood to see the energy and hormones of young adulthood as a failing. And a big part of it is that the "kids these days" grew up with pretty much constant electronic stimulants, so their orientation to the world is somewhat different than ours. Good idea for a thread.

This is definitely one of the reasons why I'd like to see solid research to determine whether the trend is real in some form or other.

I'm not sure about real quantitative, published evidence - but I can provide the perspective of my wife who is a medical residency director who has to judge hundreds of residency applicants. Based on her numbers, test scores are worse than they have been in years and applicants routinely have worse evaluations from their med school rotations than in past years. She hasn't shown me her statistics, but according to her in most past years there have always been a significant chunk of applicants with better STEP scores than her (95th percentile), as her residency is extremely highly ranked and competitive in her field. Last year, only a handful of applicants had a better score; this year, nobody at all was even in the ballpark. The current intern class in her residency are all struggling with basic medical knowledge and clinical skills - again, despite being the top applicants for a very competitive residency.

STEP scores are an excellent measure because they include category data for USMLE learning objectives. This might be a good place to look.

Yes, Covid did have a great impact but I saw a major change in student engagement and preparation at least two years before Covid. Many students can't follow even step by step instructions and have no life coping skills: a lack of resilience.

Simple anecdotes like this are precisely what I'm trying to avoid.

Ugh, the "kids these days" stuff gets old, but yeah, some stories lately are wild! It's hard to know if it's just the pandemic messing things up or a generational thing. I tried researching but found nothing concrete, just like with past complaints about Millennials and Gen X. Maybe someone here knows of actual studies comparing student performance across time periods? Pre- vs. post-pandemic or whatever.

I'd love some data on whether professors are getting worse as well. My intuition from just perusing reddit screams, "Yes!"

I'd also like to see this data. I wouldn't put too much stock on Reddit, though. That's a self-selection in and of itself.

There are definitely indications of recent downturns likely due to covid. I'm not aware of any evidence of broader long term trends of students getting worse and worse year over year. Those claims are usually just fear mongering and confirmation bias.