Re:The average college student today
by bloppe on Sunday March 30, 2025 @03:34PM
(#43526863)
Sure, but not all degrees are equal. Institutions have reputations based on how smart / effective their graduates tend to be. So by making it harder for the careless ones to graduate, a university can enhance the value of the degree for those that do. Even with the transactional attitude, it would behoove students to want to be pushed.
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Yet institutions don't do this so your reasoning is faulty. Particularly at the "value of the degree" line. There are few, if any, degrees that provide value and even fewer that provide employable skills.
Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465278
This may be fake, but as somebody who went to a school that took academic rigor very seriously, I'm confident that my degree is the most valuable thing I own. Recruiters from both startups and entrenched companies are constantly reinforcing that belief.
The market for degrees may be pretty skewed, but that doesn't mean it's not a real market with supply/demand dynamics
That is true, but I don't think the students are the ones responsible for the second and third order effects of maintaining academic rigor. They're just playing the game they're given.
Ya, the current students do not, but future students do. They're the ones who will take their business elsewhere.
Schools with slipping standards may not see negative effects in the short term, but people are waking up to the fact that a lot of degrees are nowhere near worth the tuition, and the first schools to go bust will tend to be the ones with the worst cost/benefit ratio.
I agree that holding the line and failing the whole class if the whole class deserves it is the only hope universities have of breaking the feedback loop, but the author seems to think that represents an insurmountable coordination problem.