My Students are Getting Worse

[Caracal]

My gut tells me that I've seen something similar in recent years in my intro classes; however, my head reminds me to consider confirmation bias based on vocal subsets of the student population. I'm not sure if those subsets constitute a majority yet, but prolonged / extended adolescence theory may suggest it's becoming the norm.

Always be skeptical of vague feelings that students are getting worse. Teachers have always thought that. We just get older and students change.

Yes, yes, O Socrates.

Plato was the worst. Always writing things down, never speaking up in seminar.

It really is almost universal though, so almost certainly wrong.

[Caracal]

To be fair, this is a corollary to "The thing you are looking for is always in the last place you look."  The ways that students perform as you expect are unremarkable. The things that will stand out are the things you don't expect. So they could marginally improve in several areas and you wouldn't notice, but the area(s) where they decline are the ones that will get your attention.

Right, and the other part of this is that we are always starting over with new students. The longer you teach, the more you get the feeling that they should already know this stuff since we have taught it so many times already. If you notice some thing that students seem to have understood more easily before, that becomes particularly frustrating.

[polly_mer]

To be fair, this is a corollary to "The thing you are looking for is always in the last place you look."  The ways that students perform as you expect are unremarkable. The things that will stand out are the things you don't expect. So they could marginally improve in several areas and you wouldn't notice, but the area(s) where they decline are the ones that will get your attention.

Right, and the other part of this is that we are always starting over with new students. The longer you teach, the more you get the feeling that they should already know this stuff since we have taught it so many times already. If you notice some thing that students seem to have understood more easily before, that becomes particularly frustrating.

On the other hand, those of us who collect data across terms can indeed see trends, especially when the standards are lowered or some other relevant change happens that does change the student body.  It's not necessarily merely a feeling that the students are less prepared/motivated/available, especially when the entering student body is digging deeper into the non-college-ready-but-college-going-nevertheless pool than ever before.

[Juvenal]

My gut tells me that I've seen something similar in recent years in my intro classes; however, my head reminds me to consider confirmation bias based on vocal subsets of the student population. I'm not sure if those subsets constitute a majority yet, but prolonged / extended adolescence theory may suggest it's becoming the norm.

Always be skeptical of vague feelings that students are getting worse. Teachers have always thought that. We just get older and students change.

To be fair, this is a corollary to "The thing you are looking for is always in the last place you look."  The ways that students perform as you expect are unremarkable. The things that will stand out are the things you don't expect. So they could marginally improve in several areas and you wouldn't notice, but the area(s) where they decline are the ones that will get your attention.

Agree.

[Caracal]

On the other hand, those of us who collect data across terms can indeed see trends, especially when the standards are lowered or some other relevant change happens that does change the student body.  It's not necessarily merely a feeling that the students are less prepared/motivated/available, especially when the entering student body is digging deeper into the non-college-ready-but-college-going-nevertheless pool than ever before.

Hmm, except on a national level that isn't actually the trend.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cpa.asp

Basically, enrollment numbers have been steady. I suppose you could make the argument that the students who graduate high school are worse, but I don't see any particularly compelling evidence that is the case. Instead I see a lot of cherry picking for arguments that support everyone's favorite narrative; declension.

On some individual campus there might be a trend for all kinds of reasons, but I think its pretty unlikely there is really some overall decline in quality of students.

I also have to say that on a purely personal level, students who fail because they just aren't prepared for college don't cause me much trouble. They just disappear at some point in the semester. I end up spending more time on students who are perfectly capable of doing the work, but run into various sorts of personal and family obstacles.

[polly_mer]

On some individual campus there might be a trend for all kinds of reasons, but I think its pretty unlikely there is really some overall decline in quality of students.

That means you have not been reading the annual announcements regarding the slippage in college readiness every year. Here's the one for the class of 2019: only 59% college ready in English and 39% in math.

A key reason that the national enrollment numbers haven't tanked is dipping deeper into the unready-but-college-bound-nonetheless pool.

Individual faculty members are likely to only care about students on their campuses and some campuses absolutely are seeing changes in demographics.  Super Dinky saw those changes and we absolutely had data on how our particular enrolled student cohorts were changing.

One really fun term, I served on both the scholarship competition for the high-achieving admitted-for-fall students and the senior capstone paper review committee.  The admitted students who were good enough we invited them to the scholarship competition (interviews and an on-site writing competition with multiple essays on various topics) tended to be better than our average senior based on my interactions teaching seniors who had to take my service classes, attending the presentations held by many departments for their graduating seniors, and reading all the senior capstone papers to fill out the rubrics.  Super Dinky was small enough that the entire graduating class in a given year was under 100 individuals.

However, even with a full scholarship (the top prize in the competition and many people got at least a half scholarship), many of the scholarship winners did not choose Super Dinky and instead paid more to go elsewhere.

Thus, while our average ACT score was about the same as the average in the state, the 25th percentile just kept dropping and our 75th percentile also did a slow slip as we dipped deeper into the pool of people who wanted to attend college, but were deemed unready by other institutions.  As the official policy change one year put it, we were officially changing from denying admission to people in March only to send them letters in July to ask if they would be willing to come here and be enrolled in developmental classes their first term.  Instead, we would use a complex combination of GPA and ACT score to admit those students upon first application.

At one point in the distant past, Super Dinky had a required sequence of general education classes that were very heavy on writing (about a paper due every two weeks and returned with targeted feedback prior to the next paper that was expected to be an improvement) and nearly all those papers were on file with the registrar's office so we could do longitudinal analysis by student and by cohort. 

It was not anyone's imagination or burnt-out crankiness that the students 10+ years ago under that system were getting a better education as well as starting out much better as entering cohorts.

In recent years, even the students who came to us well prepared and invested in getting an education tended to not graduate from Super Dinky, but instead transferred to much more selective institutions.  We could track this both through the National Student Clearinghouse and through what those students told us on the exit paperwork.  There was a pretty strong correlation between leaving Super Dinky for a better school and being above the 75th percentile in ACT.

Yes, we'd always had students with more heart than academic prowess, but we were now as an institution pretty clearly much more concerned about having checks clear and ensuring people who try are unlikely to fail than previous decades when we admitted a much lower proportion of non-college-ready students and then pushed them hard to become great.

Many non-elite, small institutions are facing similar trade-offs in either providing huge tuition discounts to compete for the college-ready students who can go anywhere or lowering the standards to dip deeper into the pool of college-interested-but-not-academically-college-ready. 

The recent students probably aren't worse at elite institutions and non-tuition-driven institutions.  However, that trade-off in number of paying students and the quality of the students is a standing discussion at many institutions that are adequately addressing changing regional demographics.

[spork]

College enrollment rate of high school graduates says little to nothing about the academic abilities of college students.

When I looked at net price/financial aid data on IPEDS for my employer and other comparable institutions in the same region, I found that students were willing to pay an annual tuition premium of $3K-$5K to attend a university with a better reputation/more prestige. Educational attainment tracks closely with family SES and the regional pool of high school graduates is shrinking not growing. So it's highly likely that the low-tier institutions are admitting/enrolling a greater portion of students with lower academic ability than in the past.

My employer stopped requiring that applicants submit SAT scores not because the test is biased and non-predictive in various ways, but because average SAT scores for incoming classes were lower than those of competitors, which made my employer look less prestigious in comparison.

[Caracal]

On some individual campus there might be a trend for all kinds of reasons, but I think its pretty unlikely there is really some overall decline in quality of students.

That means you have not been reading the annual announcements regarding the slippage in college readiness every year. Here's the one for the class of 2019: only 59% college ready in English and 39% in math.

A key reason that the national enrollment numbers haven't tanked is dipping deeper into the unready-but-college-bound-nonetheless pool.

Individual faculty members are likely to only care about students on their campuses and some campuses absolutely are seeing changes in demographics.  Super Dinky saw those changes and we absolutely had data on how our particular enrolled student cohorts were changing.

But if you look at the actual numbers and then think about how that would correlate to classes, this doesn't really fly. Over the last ten years, the ACT numbers you cite are down about a half percentage point overall. Let's suppose that this has a disproportionate impact on certain sorts of schools like the one you used to work at. We can be really generous and say maybe it has three times the impact. If you're teaching 150 students over a semester, that would still just be two more students a year who weren't college ready, which is basically imperceptible if you think about it within the context of all the other factors, including just normal variation.

Of course, you can also question what things ACT scores are really measuring, variations in who is taking them, etc etc.

[polly_mer]

On some individual campus there might be a trend for all kinds of reasons, but I think its pretty unlikely there is really some overall decline in quality of students.

That means you have not been reading the annual announcements regarding the slippage in college readiness every year. Here's the one for the class of 2019: only 59% college ready in English and 39% in math.

A key reason that the national enrollment numbers haven't tanked is dipping deeper into the unready-but-college-bound-nonetheless pool.

Individual faculty members are likely to only care about students on their campuses and some campuses absolutely are seeing changes in demographics.  Super Dinky saw those changes and we absolutely had data on how our particular enrolled student cohorts were changing.

But if you look at the actual numbers and then think about how that would correlate to classes, this doesn't really fly. Over the last ten years, the ACT numbers you cite are down about a half percentage point overall. Let's suppose that this has a disproportionate impact on certain sorts of schools like the one you used to work at. We can be really generous and say maybe it has three times the impact. If you're teaching 150 students over a semester, that would still just be two more students a year who weren't college ready, which is basically imperceptible if you think about it within the context of all the other factors, including just normal variation.

The average score is different from the spread in scores.  I'm talking about the spread in scores.  I will also mention that an ACT of 20 is below college ready so being only average is not good, especially looking at numbers indicating how many people taking the ACT score below college ready on every measure (36% of ACT takers in the last administration). 

Sure, the mean isn't changing all that quickly, but the number of people who aren't college ready and yet are in college somewhere is increasing.  That's what's behind the rise in developmental education--a thing unheard of decades ago when only a small fraction of the US went to college.  In one year when I was at Super Dinky, 2/3 of the entering class were enrolled in at least one developmental course.  Super Dinky's developmental program was under three years old at that point and had only been implemented because the entering cohorts had become so underqualified that implementing developmental education was the only way to get enough enrolled students to keep the doors open.

A concrete example for those who aren't up on their distributions will compare Berea College and Super Dinky because they are about the same size while both being rural colleges.  According to College ScoreCard, Berea College has a 25th ACT percentile of 22 and a 75th ACT percentile of 27 with a 35% acceptance rate.  That means most of the students attending Berea are college ready.  Berea has a 65% graduation rate with most of the non-graduates transferring somewhere else.

In contrast, Super Dinky had a 25th ACT percentile of 16 with a 75th ACT percentile of 22 with an acceptance rate above 70%.  At the time I was there, Super Dinky had a graduation rate in the low 30s with most of the high-achieving students transferring elsewhere and the low-achieving students simply not coming back, even though their academic records would allow them to continue.  With the 50th percentile at 20, Super Dinky was enrolling students consistent with the state average of 20, but remember 20 on the ACT is below college ready.  Changing the 50th percentile to 19 or 21 on a year-by-year basis does nothing to affect the fact that most of the students were not college ready.  20+ years ago, few people with an ACT of 16 were attending college.

When I did research on our competitors in the region, we all had about the same 50th percentile score of 20ish.  However, most of our competitors cut off the bottom around 18 while we had 25% of our incoming class below 16.  Other institutions were doing much better at enrolling students at the 20ish level than we were and so, while the means are similar, the range of student abilities on campus were not.

Yes, we can argue about what the ACT measures, but I'm telling you that nothing in Super Dinky's data indicate that we only had a handful of students who weren't college ready in a sea of college-ready students.  However, we were frequently told that at our cost, the good students with choices picked elsewhere for a better experience (more electives, more majors, more activities) at the same price or a much cheaper experience at the regional comprehensives.  One of my favorite stories was the parent who flat out told the financial aid director "Yes, with financial aid, you now cost the same out of pocket as <regional competitor>.  However, they are worth $15k per year and Super Dinky is not".

I'm also telling you that I had many experiences in helping evaluate student work in which people who had been at Super Dinky for more than a decade argued pretty hard that graduating seniors could not be expected to do work at the level that was standard for entering first-year students in other non-elite places that did have few students who were dramatically below college ready, even though the 50th percentile is near national average.  That's the difference between having experience with students who really only have an eighth-grade education entering college and having experience with college-ready students entering college.

"three times the impact" is not being really generous; it's completely ignoring the huge shift from nice enough kids who were slightly underprepared to a majority of students such that a college-prepared student with a 24 ACT stands out as being stellar compared to their cohort mates.

[apl68]

Many non-elite, small institutions are facing similar trade-offs in either providing huge tuition discounts to compete for the college-ready students who can go anywhere or lowering the standards to dip deeper into the pool of college-interested-but-not-academically-college-ready. 

The recent students probably aren't worse at elite institutions and non-tuition-driven institutions.  However, that trade-off in number of paying students and the quality of the students is a standing discussion at many institutions that are adequately addressing changing regional demographics.

During her last years teaching at my non-elite, small alma mater my mother said that she perceived a definite decline in the general readiness of students.  Having to lower standards in order to keep up enrollment numbers would be a plausible explanation for what she believed she observed.  Another area in which Alma Mater seems to be reflecting national trends, if not to the catastrophic degree some schools may have seen.

[Caracal]

On some individual campus there might be a trend for all kinds of reasons, but I think its pretty unlikely there is really some overall decline in quality of students.

That means you have not been reading the annual announcements regarding the slippage in college readiness every year. Here's the one for the class of 2019: only 59% college ready in English and 39% in math.

A key reason that the national enrollment numbers haven't tanked is dipping deeper into the unready-but-college-bound-nonetheless pool.

Individual faculty members are likely to only care about students on their campuses and some campuses absolutely are seeing changes in demographics.  Super Dinky saw those changes and we absolutely had data on how our particular enrolled student cohorts were changing.

One really fun term, I served on both the scholarship competition for the high-achieving admitted-for-fall students and the senior capstone paper review committee.  The admitted students who were good enough we invited them to the scholarship competition (interviews and an on-site writing competition with multiple essays on various topics) tended to be better than our average senior based on my interactions teaching seniors who had to take my service classes, attending the presentations held by many departments for their graduating seniors, and reading all the senior capstone papers to fill out the rubrics.  Super Dinky was small enough that the entire graduating class in a given year was under 100 individuals.

However, even with a full scholarship (the top prize in the competition and many people got at least a half scholarship), many of the scholarship winners did not choose Super Dinky and instead paid more to go elsewhere.

Thus, while our average ACT score was about the same as the average in the state, the 25th percentile just kept dropping and our 75th percentile also did a slow slip as we dipped deeper into the pool of people who wanted to attend college, but were deemed unready by other institutions.  As the official policy change one year put it, we were officially changing from denying admission to people in March only to send them letters in July to ask if they would be willing to come here and be enrolled in developmental classes their first term.  Instead, we would use a complex combination of GPA and ACT score to admit those students upon first application.

At one point in the distant past, Super Dinky had a required sequence of general education classes that were very heavy on writing (about a paper due every two weeks and returned with targeted feedback prior to the next paper that was expected to be an improvement) and nearly all those papers were on file with the registrar's office so we could do longitudinal analysis by student and by cohort. 

It was not anyone's imagination or burnt-out crankiness that the students 10+ years ago under that system were getting a better education as well as starting out much better as entering cohorts.

In recent years, even the students who came to us well prepared and invested in getting an education tended to not graduate from Super Dinky, but instead transferred to much more selective institutions.  We could track this both through the National Student Clearinghouse and through what those students told us on the exit paperwork.  There was a pretty strong correlation between leaving Super Dinky for a better school and being above the 75th percentile in ACT.

Yes, we'd always had students with more heart than academic prowess, but we were now as an institution pretty clearly much more concerned about having checks clear and ensuring people who try are unlikely to fail than previous decades when we admitted a much lower proportion of non-college-ready students and then pushed them hard to become great.

Many non-elite, small institutions are facing similar trade-offs in either providing huge tuition discounts to compete for the college-ready students who can go anywhere or lowering the standards to dip deeper into the pool of college-interested-but-not-academically-college-ready. 

The recent students probably aren't worse at elite institutions and non-tuition-driven institutions.  However, that trade-off in number of paying students and the quality of the students is a standing discussion at many institutions that are adequately addressing changing regional demographics.

I'm sort of a skeptic by nature anyway, but as a historian I tend to think of myself as a professional skeptic. People have always been able to find evidence for the things that they want to believe for various reasons. The evidence tends to be compelling enough if you accept the basic preconditions under which people were operating, but the basic methods and arguments tend to seem absurd if you find those preconditions or assumptions unconvincing (or horrifying in many cases) Often it looks pretty obvious that people convince themselves they are just looking at evidence dispassionately, but are actually seeing what they want to see. If you look at this thread, you see a lot of slippage between anecdote and evidence.

I'm not going to try to argue this all out with you, because at some point it becomes kind of pointless. Obviously there are some metrics by which you can make convincing seeming arguments about a decline in "college readiness." But, the metrics are all problematic in a variety of ways and may not be measuring what we think they are. None of them just appeared out of thin air. They are all created by people with various sorts of ideas and none of them are some sort of impartial measurement.

As teachers, I think its worth being careful about embracing these sorts of narratives about how our students are getting "worse." It might be worth asking where these ideas come from and what sort of assumptions are being made about what students should be like. I think I'm a better teacher when I'm curious about my students rather than depressed about them.

[Aster]

Yes, history is an excellent guide to showing how much things can change over time.

I sometimes look at the college exams I took when I was a student. Most are so different than what I see now.

Looking through master's theses and dissertations from the 1960's is also a real eye opener.

I'm glad that it's not 1912.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744163