For normal people there wasn't a lot of point. Jobs didn't require these. My father, who just retired, had a high school education with no college, yet held what would nowadays require a bachelors in mechanical engineering, at a minimum. He himself considers himself quite lucky to have basically been the last person onto the no-degree train to the middle class.

I think to some degree this is a matter of capital formation not keeping pace with the general increase in education access for the rest of the workforce. We're educating people but our system struggles to produce companies that can gainfully employ them. And by "our system", I do think there's a nontrivial factor in bigcos conspiring to not ever run the labor market as hot as they did in the past decade. They'd rather grow slower than let employees have bargaining power.

So it's in no way a new thing.

I’d argue it’s not vague at all. In the US, I think it can be traced directly to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, starting in 1862. I think that’s when college focus began to move from a liberal arts focus to a vocational focus.

I can guarantee you that my mom went to college so she could get a job (retired teacher). My dad went to school because it was free as a veteran. But he made more as a factory worker.

I don’t know a single person who went to college with me for any other reason than a career.

I also bet those surveys didn’t go to the now Historically Black Colleges and Universities - the only ones that my mom could go to.

If you listen to military recruiters now, they emphasize the ability to be able to get a job after you leave through training.

Also the statistics show that lower income people statistically go into the military.

When you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I can guarantee you that most people’s first priority is to support their addictions to food and shelter and are most concerned with making money to do so. It’s only the privileged who have parents who can support them while they are getting launched who can afford to get degrees in areas like Ancient Chinese Art History or more realistically journalism and work for low pay in high cost of living areas.

It depends on the era. The data says they likely did decades ago, and less likely to share that same view now. Around the 1980s the proportions switched: prior, the majority of freshman had a goal of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” compared to “being very well-off financially”. After the 1980s, that proportion inverted to the majority focused on material success.

Because the 1940s onward had a relatively high proportion of students from lower and middle class backgrounds, I don’t think the social class argument has as much explanatory power as you imply. In other words, the differences is that our cultural attitudes about college have likely changed due to other factors.

Edit: edited to soften tone and give more information. The data comes from UCLAs Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) surveys of incoming freshman. https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/

But just looking at one source it says no community colleges were represented and 60 private colleges and 12 public colleges were represented.

That automatically skews the results to more privileged people who can consider it an outlet to “be a better person in the world and mommy and daddy can support me while I get my unpaid internship in NYC and then become a journalist who can’t support myself” over the people who will eventually have to depend on themselves to exchange enough labor for money to support their need for food and shelter.

https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/HERI-TFS-Brief.pdf

Also notice that 80% went to college to get a job. Where is the related statistic that poorer people spent money and time to go to college without the expectations of getting a better job 50 years ago?

HN guidelines expect intellectual curiosity, not spoon feeding (maybe that's also a change in cultural norms). I've already clearly described the trend and given you multiple avenues to look at the data, if you were curious enough to do so. If it's not apparent, the two goals are not mutually exclusive. Figure 14 of the previously mentioned paper gives you the numbers:

-In 1966,about 85% said developing a philosophy of life is a priority, while about 42% said being very well off financially was a priority

-By 2006, nearly 75% said being very well off financially was a priority while developing a philosophy of life dipped below 50%

In other words, priorities inverted.

>That automatically skews the results to more privileged people

The authors took measures to control for "more privileged" students when comparing public/private data. From the paper:

"By disaggregating CIRP median household income by public and private institutions and comparing each set of reporting students, we are able to tease out the differences in parental income over time relative to each other and relative to the national median household income"

>Where is the related statistic that poorer people spent money and time to go to college without the expectations of getting a better job 50 years ago?

Note the paper also discusses how the relative wealth of parents of incoming freshman has increased. Implying poorer students were a larger share of the student body at the time when developing a philosophy of life was a more dominant priority.

You should read the report and look at the data. It's rare to find longitudinal data that spans so many decades.

You have described the trend with no evidence that people have someone overcome their need for food and shelter with no concrete data and just to look it up.

HN guidelines expect intellectual curiosity, not spoon feeding (maybe that's also a change in cultural norms)

It’s also the norm to back up your assertions with citations and quotes.

And you are cherry picking something that doesn’t support your evidence of something obvious - most people need to work to eat. There is a difference between “building wealth” and not being homeless and hungry. Poor people without the support of mommy and daddy must focus on the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

You did say 40 years ago

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/beyond-the-countercultur...

Notice that before the 60s, neither the poor or especially minorities had access to the schools that were populated (and surveyed) by people who saw college as a way to obtain “self actualization”

Also notice it was in the 60s when schools became accessible to people who weren’t in a high income household and had to stay at home. These students were also more interested in getting better jobs

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286516315_The_Rise_...

And family background - ie people with money was the main determinant of people getting into college before the 1960s

https://lhendricks.org/Research/borrowing/paper.pdg

It has always been people who knew that they weren’t going to be homeless or hungry that could afford to think about higher levels of needs like “self actualization” could focus on that over “I need to get a degree to make sure I’m not homeless, hungry and naked”

You think people are going to get in tens of thousands of debt, without the support of affluent parents as a back stop aren’t mostly concerned about getting a job to pay off said debt?

Those opportunities simply weren’t available to poor people before the 60s. I bet you a paycheck they never surveyed HBCUs in the 60s in the south where attendance was by people trying to deal with and escape the limitations of the Jim Crow south.

And the entire purpose of the GI bill was retraining so that ex military could get a job.

And even then the survey was skewed because an entire class of people who would have gone to college to get a job were excluded

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1129735948/black-vets-were-ex...

Of course if you exclude people who need college to get a job from going to college in the first place and then there is a big influx of people going to college to open of doors, you’re going to get more people saying they see college as a way to have a better life.

They aren’t going to get a Journalism degree and then do unpaid internships to “pursue their passions”

It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention.

Do people actually quit their addiction?

You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points?

But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.

The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price.

It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.

He did say it, but you have to keep reading after that. Fail too many students and you will get called in by the dean for a "discussion" where they basically tell you to stop doing that. For the non-tenured faculty this is not something they can reasonably fight. Maybe tenured faculty could, and they might not get outright fired, but their teaching load could be reduced or students will simply not sign up for their classes once they have a reputation for being a hardass.

Aside from that, nearly every student manages to have some "disability" that requires an accommodation. I had one professor friend tell me a student required an accommodation that they not receive any negative feedback. They literally weren't allowed to tell the student when they were wrong.

They don't seem afraid of activism if it's protesting the current bad thing.

They won’t get denied tenure for protesting the current thing. It’s more likely they could get denied tenure for not loudly protesting the current thing.

As the sibling notes, academics have no problem suddenly finding their voice when they discover a colleague who's secretly harboring mildly right wing views. The open letters, protests, outrage and demands for resignations flow like water until the administration folds, usually about 0.25 seconds later.

The author describes a problem created by the policies of the university leadership, but refuses to lay the blame at their feet. Instead he/she says things like "This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem" and "It’s the phones, stupid." after describing a problem that is 100% caused by the faculty themselves. Because where do the deans come from? Why would they have leverage to dismiss a professor who upheld standards? They came from the faculty, and they have leverage because the faculty created this problem and are willing to propagate it.

They care about things like the US News and World Report rankings, and if students are failing classes and it starts hurting their graduation rate and hurting their ranking, they put a stop to it.

Mass failings while satisfying has an air of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. As a parent I can see the mass pull towards phones, practically impossible to disentangle save for simple surgical regulation.

No one should be allowed to have phones in class. That’s it.

That said, I know for myself that my attention span has gotten shorter. I used to read more. Now I listen to audiobooks. When reading text, even engaging fiction can be a struggle. I read one or two pages and feel the urge to check something else or look at something else or get up and do something. I know this wasn't the case in middle school or high school (late 2000s).

I think it's because of first podcasts and then watching / listening to too thousands of YouTube videos at 2x speed. I've become much more "efficient" at consuming entertainment content - so "efficient" that I can get bored listening to someone telling an interesting story at 1x speed.

The only advantage I have is that I can tell that this has happened and I can work against it by forcing myself to read more. But if things were always like that, how would I know? When you're sleep deprived every day for years, you don't notice how much it is affecting you. It's the same with a short attention span.

[1]: Aside: the omnipresent talk about generations these days is maybe not the best thing to begin with.

I'm in the same boat as you, except that I don't feel I have attention span problems. If what I'm reading is a bad use of time, I switch to something else. If it's not, I have no trouble reading a long article or paper. I frequently read a blog post and discover half an hour later that I just read what would be 30-40 pages if printed out. It doesn't feel like a lot of reading because there's no physical page turning, but it is.

If you can consume an interesting story at 2x speed, there's no moral or personal wrong in wanting to consume it at 2x speed. Just do it! Books are mere technology: they can and should be replaced with something better if it comes along.

But doing the exercises is hard (much like physical exercise, that pain is in fact the signal that you’re making progress). And the more time we spend just consuming, the less natural it feels to work.

It’s so easy to blast through a lecture or speed read a text and feel like you accomplished “learning”. That illusion is destroyed as soon as you have to actually do something (in school, that’s usually write an essay or pass a test).

In other words, the bottleneck has never been how fast you can consume the text. It’s how fast you can do the work to internalize the knowledge.

I wonder if I'll ever be able to fix my attention span.

You are not engaging with the central issue- the education pipeline is depositing students with a far lower attention span and capability than ever before, in college classes, for all subjects, including Math.

You are banging on humanities as it is a ritualistic target. Math and science teachers, including comp sci teachers are pointing this out.

The trend exists.

Unsurprisingly. In the past:

1. Those with lower attention spans generally didn't try to go to college in the first place. They often didn't even graduate from high school[1].

2. If they did try, colleges rejected their application long before they ever arrived on campus. Now colleges seek to accommodate them.

College used to be just for elites. At some point we decided it should be for everyone. When you try to shove more and more people into college, you're going to find out that most people don't have what it takes. It is like us deciding everyone should get to play in the NFL and then wonder why the talent is so poor...

We can't have it both ways.

[1] When I was in high school the graduation rate was only around 60%. Nowadays it is around 90%. That is a substantial shift in relatively few years. Did the students suddenly become better students out of the blue? Of course not.

I rechecked the article, and they’ve been teaching for 30 years. I went through the links (1) (2) and it looks like this has been accelerating since 2010, with one comment saying they noticed it starting in 2006.

1) https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-happening-to-students

2) https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a1...

This is from the article.

Yup. This is exactly when high school graduation rates started to skyrocket – my cohort being from a few years earlier – and with virtually everyone (save those who are completely disabled) graduating by the time we were into the 2010s. That was a significant shift in the landscape, and it happened quickly to boot.

Shove a greater number of people with less ability into education and you are going to notice.

The belief that students are somehow now mentally broken in a way unique and never-before-seen is an enormous claim. These articles never manage to support this claim. Instead they just assert it as if it's so obvious it doesn't require any actual work to show.

Where you see some problem that starts pre-university, what I see is students acting rationally given the system they find themselves in. My own university experience was decades ago but no different except for the absence of smartphones and laptops in the lecture theatres. Bad lecturers, bad material, rampant cheating and fake marking schemes in which there was no connection between work and final grades: all the problems have been there for a very long time. Phones didn't create this problem, educators did. It's just easier for faculty to play pretend when students appear to be staring at the front of the auditorium because they have nothing else to stare at.

It's not just humanities courses and it also affects "elite" universities.

For the graduate NLP course my advisor taught at UMass Amherst, despite allowing ChatGPT for a take home test (this was a couple years ago), 60% of the students broke into two separate collusion rings (one Chinese group and another South Asian) and copied off of each other. They got caught when the answers were wrong, but in a different way than ChatGPT. Despite the seriousness of the rampant cheating, students were not failed out of the course, mainly because it reflects badly on the University if they fail. My advisor had to go through a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy in the process.

Jump forward to Cornell University where I'm currently a postdoc and grade inflation is real. They had to get rid of reporting course-wide median grade beside a student's grade on their transcript [1] to help combat it.

That hasn't prevented the pressure to pass students with high marks despite abysmal performance. I supervised an undergrad's research one semester as an independent study course. That student did very little work and despite multiple promptings over several weeks, would fail to provide their code for me to help debug and provide code review. I ended up giving them a B+, which is somehow considered "failing". The student even reached out after grades were assigned to beg me to reconsider. None of the students I've worked with so far have had the skills I'm pretty sure I mastered by that time (this includes work with undergrads, master's students, and PhD students). I'm continually shocked by the caliber of students here compared to what I assumed before joining.

I trust professors who've been teaching for decades when they say something has qualitatively changed.

[1]: https://registrar.cornell.edu/grades-transcripts/median-grad...

The smart kids use them as tools to complement and accelerate their learning but everyone else mostly just gets dumber from the infinite Oww my Balls adjacent content they're addicted to.

At this professor's Average U, everyone is mostly in the worse camp.