Recently I read that my high school is instituting a random drug testing policy. I wrote a letter (that I'm sure they promptly ignored) saying how the thing I most remember about my high school experience is that I was trusted with a high degree of autonomy, and in return I was expected to act responsibly and to think about issues with a seriousness not often expected of teenagers in our society.
It seems like more and more these infantilizing policies are becoming a norm in our society. Instead of trusting human beings and granting them personal autonomy and responsibility, we act like imposing ever-greater layers of rules and controls will produce good citizens. Frankly I think this is a disastrous approach and is creating entitled, helpless, and childish adults. It's a massive disservice to ourselves and our society.
I'll never forget my first day of college. Lots of the other kids in my dorm were running around like crazy people. You could tell they'd never really been free to be themselves and run their own affairs. I felt very different. While it was a significant change to be totally on my own, it felt like a natural extension of the freedom I had slowly been granted over the previous two or three years. I was ready to deal with it. I didn't do everything perfectly, and I could have made better decisions, but by and large I felt like the transition to adulthood was comfortable and natural. The more we impose these command-and-control models, the more I fear we are robbing our children of that same feeling and casting them into adulthood with poorer tools than we were given.
As for me personally, being dropped into Caltech was like going from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds. I didn't even know how to do my own laundry :-) Getting from LAX to the campus by myself across LA was a very intimidating experience. These days parents bring their kids to college and even set up their quarters for them.
Like if I want to go to the movies on a weeknight - I can do that. If I want to travel out of state on the weekend, it’s no problem. Like, there’s nothing stopping me.
If so, that's disturbing given that college was once the time for young people to enjoy their freedom to the fullest. I remember driving from upstate New York to Boston one weekend on a whim with some friends - in the middle of winter, a memorable adventure.
It's a shame. I agree with you that giving students more and more freedom as they grow is tremendously helpful to their ability to adapt and be responsible by the time they reach adulthood.
Additionally, I'd be willing to bet school districts have dedicated legal departments, or lawyers on retainer these days and I'd bet that's a recent change.
I didn't realize that my attendance was tracked, because there was a pretty laissez-faire attitude all-around. Most teachers liked me because when I did show up, I was actively present, and the only moment that might've caused me to suspect something was a conversation with a teacher who, in a very friendly way, told me he couldn't give me copies of the notes from the past year because my attendance had been abysmal.
Still, I didn't really think about any of this until the principal called me in and told me he should really expel me. And yet, he was sympathetic to my situation (severe anxiety) and let me off the hook because my grades were okay.
And so in the final months before college I stayed, made sure to attend classes, and finished with acceptable grades.
The very next year (in part perhaps because of me?) the school modernized their systems and I had to listen to the tales of woe from my younger siblings at the same school. None of them could get even close to my behavior because everything was tracked, quantified, part of the new computer system.
My sister got diagnosed with severe ADHD and one of my brothers went for the third-tier track even though he's just as smart as I am.
I'm convinced that the increased measurement and decreased freedom affected them negatively, and I find it very worrying that the siblings that went on to college seem to have similar issues (because, of course, at university I was one of the least-attending students who somehow still got along with the professors and had decent grades).
To be clear, I'm not excusing myself. In hindsight I wish had attended more and put in more effort and played the game better. I'm just saying that I at least had the freedom, in high school and university, to do things my own way and still do okay. this strikes me as very difficult for my younger siblings, because so much more is measured and quantified and required.
I attended Caltech (BS '01) and given that they allowed us to take exams home with us, it would have been surprising if a professor took attendance. This was part of the overall honor code (http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/explore/about-caltech/hono...) that looking back, I really appreciated as a student.
a. It was strongly recommended in order to do well in the course (a difficult honors course), and
b. He wanted to make the class interesting enough that we wanted to show up.
The class almost always had perfect attendance. It opened my eyes so much.
One former colleague is doing a lot of research and statistics gathering by correlating use of campus swipe cards to grades and other academic warning signs.
If they detect that you’re out late, using soda machines at 3am, bugging out for the weekend, etc they may trigger some of sort intervention.
I think, at least with my group of friends, those from private schools had more growing up to do in a shorter period because they came from schools that over-supported them, so they weren't prepared to be self sufficient.
On the other hand, schools like the one I went to would have a horrible(r) matriculation rate if students were not forced to attend certain classes. It infuriurates me (and I think students who want to fail should be allowed to fail), but ultimately it's a product of the financial incentive structure; more graduates = more $$$.
And forcing attendance of some classes does indeed increase the likelihood of certain borderline students graduating, nobody can deny that.
I disagree. I was offered admission to zero first rate schools, two second rate schools ($$$$$$ tuition), and my backup which is a third rate school (which I am attending for free).
If my backup school didn't exist, I would either be without a degree, or my parents would have a significant dent in their retirement. I'm willing to put up with the BS of third rate schools so that I can at least have a degree and not be scalped, thank you very much.
I'm grateful that my third rate school exists, no matter how shitty it is.
I will grant you, however, that no school should knowingly take $$$$$ from students and give them an useless degree. But a CS degree? It's pretty cool that I can get that from any school and it's the "same" level of degree whether it's from Caltech or Arizona State.
We were treated like adults, and attendance was entirely optional for most lectures and tutorials. If you failed a paper because you didn't go to any lectures, that was your problem.
That remains true whether that's a Scandinavian model of fully-paid schools, a US public university model of a partially taxpayer funded & partially student funded or even a private university if it ultimately results in a taxpayer funded loan forgiveness or other subsidy.
I totally agree with your school's stance, but I acknowledge tha the current financial incentive structure prevents my school from having the same.
The cream in terms of demonstrated capacity for academic performance, which probably has very little correlation to readiness to be treated as an adult. There selection criteria is why they can afford to have rigorous coursework as the basic freshman core, but not why their decision to treat the young adults attending as adults works.
If anything, that policy is part of the selection system: the people that aren't ready for that treatment don't cause problems for other people as much as they would in other systems, they just fail out fairly quickly.
My words may have been misleading. What I'm trying to say is the kind of student that gets admission to Caltech is not the kind of student to neglect going to class out of laziness or whatever and fail out because of that.
Well, I was. I tried repeatedly to skip class and still pass. It did not work. The low point was finals week, first semester, sophomore year. I was looking at flunking out. I had serious pain in my gut from stress.
I squeaked by.
That was it for me. I decided that I was never again going to miss a lecture, always take notes properly, never again skip homework (doing homework was not required), and I would master every single homework problem on time.
That worked for me. I started getting B's, eventually turning into A's.
Just because a student has issues with discipline or motivation I shouldn't let them fail. Tracking attendance improves academic results so I'm not sure what the advantage is to not tracking it.
When I teach classes, if a student does not perform the requisite work to complete the course, I’ve no interest in their success. I am an instructor, not a motivator.
And why do we need instructors? Let's just give each student some textbooks and their exam schedule. If they can't succeed we're not interested in their success.
The Darwinist argument can always be used to withdraw any and all levels of support. You can't use it to justify just the level of support you prefer.
As a college student, you are paying to receive a service. The college fulfilled their obligation that you paid for. Your only obligation is to pay the bill that you agreed to. You are not obliged to make use of the services provided.
It's not the same situation at all.
Service providers can fire customers. If you pay for membership of a club but never attend functions, the club will end your membership.
If the service aims to provide a community or is invested in the success of its customers then it should fire customers who are not invested in their own success.
Not to mention how many students are not customers. They are sponsored by parents and scholarships and heavily subsidized. All these stakeholders have a vested interest in academic success. Tracking attendance is better for all of them.
It's ironic you mention psychologists. Therapists, personal trainers, life coaches, and other 1-to-1 service providers are the most likely to fire a customer for not attending. I personally know someone whose vocal coach made an ultimatum about attendance and ended up firing the customer. This is all very much adult.
In the end it's the sad consumerization of higher education in America. The pricing makes students so bitter as to demand "better service" rather than "better education". A university is more like a job in most of the world.
College isn't a job for the student, it's a training and certification program that the student is paying for. The accreditation agencies that validate that the program is appropriate for the certifications being offered generally do not require attendance tracking, because regularity of attendance isn't what is being certified.
> Why does being an adult university student mean you can be absent for months and still succeed?
Attendance tracking in schools for children serves a number of purposes related to the fact that the students are children, including that students are not entrusted to review the syllabus and evaluate the level of engagement required for success on their own. Most students can't be absent for months and succeed, and if they try they will fail. Attendance tracking isn't needed for that if your assessment, grading, and academic standards are working properly (and attendance tracking doesn't fix the problem if they are not.)
> And why do we need instructors?
Because those are among the educational resources students are paying for (though there are universities where that is less the case than traditional universities, such as the competency-based WGU, which has won high praise from many corners.)
This was the policy at the community college I went to. No one took attendance, and it was the students' responsibility to make sure they did the work and prepared themselves for exams if they chose not to show up.
One interesting consequence of this is the faculty and students become collaborators rather than adversaries.
At LSE, they used iClickers while I was there for a few lecture hall courses. At least one (LSE100) requires attendance unless one wants to miss their chance of getting a First on the module.
If you don’t mind me asking, what Hou(v)se were you in?
Caltech is quite a bit smaller, only 130 undergrads in my graduation class, or something like that (don't recall exactly).
Bill Gross is likely the most famous alumnus of my class. Quite a few in my class (79) became quite wealthy in the tech business, though not the really big money.
That is really interesting that your class size was only 130, AFAICT nowadays they're ~240. At least, the classes of 2022 and 2023 were in that ballpark. (I wonder if Caltech has become less selective, or has just received more applicants?)
Idealab has an active presence on campus even today, so Bill Gross seems to have left his mark :-)
One pushback I've heard from administators on this idea is that it's really hard to answer certain Federal aid questions when the student drops out, like 'when did they last attend class?' if you don't take attendance. And the student Visa programs apparently require attestations about both attending and passing classes.
In my experience, uninterested students just slept or played on their phone
Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance.
The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend.
I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and enjoying being treated as an adult for the first time in my life. Nobody was telling me to go to class, admonishing me for not going, giving me credit for attendance or docking me for not.
The freshman EE class professor was famous (infamous?) for scheduling his lectures at 8AM, because he only wanted the interested students showing up at them.