In my years of teaching college courses, I’ve never seen more students struggle so much as in the last two years. That’s especially the case this current year . I have a suspicion as to why this is.
One can’t consider everyone in any group as being the same, but there are patterns and tendencies. In my article about generations, I offered a theory to understand generations by identifying major life events occurring at individuals’ most impressionable ages of 5 to 17. Here is that article in full.
The last generation that I named was the COVID-19 generation. The lock downs and high levels of anxiety in 2020 and 2021 took a toll on many people in all age groups. The pandemic probably had a greater affect on young people in their formative years. Using the concept that those formative ages are 5 to 17 years old, we would define the COVID generation as people born between 2003 and 2015. Also in my article, I offered a look to the future.
We will see over the next two decades how these people, in 2021 under the age of 25, respond to the pandemic’s aftereffects.
Drilling down further, there’s a microgeneration within the COVID-19 generation who were 13 or 14 years old in 2020. People that age would have had two years of high school disrupted by the pandemic, in particular, their earliest high school years. Those years would have affected them in various ways, including their relationship with education. In those highly formative years, these people would have had less ability to gain experience in being engaged, dedicated students.
They’re Now Here
I had been teaching online college philosophy courses for years when the pandemic hit. I was already prepared for those two years that disrupted college courses. In 2020, everyone was floundering, and the freshman class of 2020 were no more lost than most of their professors. Everyone was struggling to figure out things, and I helped my colleagues transition their courses to online delivery.
Students who graduated high school in 2020 and 2021 had a rough last two years of high school, but their transition to college courses online was less jarring. College seniors had the most difficult transition, in my opinion, because they had three year’s of routine disrupted. The freshmen were fresher in their view of what college was.
Courses gradually returned to in-person delivery by late 2021. By the time that the freshman class of 2022 entered college, they had had their middle two years of high school disrupted by the pandemic, but their transition to college was smoothed by the added wrinkle that colleges and universities were abundantly deferential to the incoming freshmen as everyone desperately wanted to get back to “normal.”
The microgeneration of those born in 2006 and 2007 graduated from high school in 2023 and 2024 respectively. These student cohorts would have entered high school in the pandemic years. For many, that transition to that higher level would have been rough. They seem to be having a similarly rough transition to college.
I see a decided difference between these new students compared to even the previous few years. Something has changed. This term, I’m seeing the highest number ever of college students withdraw from courses. They start the courses disengaged and lethargic, and just give up. Those who stay in the courses are also less enthused, connected, and dedicated than students in the past — even compared to last year.
I will never pretend I was a great student, but I never was as bad as some. There are many things I don’t understand, and what some young people do and why remains a mystery. I had similar thoughts back when I was at university looking at the immature and self-destructive things students did. Experience and wisdom have not brought any enlightenment to me on the foolishness of some young people.
Now, I teach university students, and I’ve always seen foolish behavior. In every course I teach, I give deadlines for assignments and an absolute drop-dead deadline for all work to be submitted for the course. Every year, there are one or two students who, in the last few days of the term, suddenly emerge to express great concern over their missing assignments and impending failure of the course. A typical message from these students is, “I’m sorry I haven’t been handing in assignments, is there any way I can pass the course?” These messages come to me with only a few days before the end of term, when the students hope that I will allow them to complete several weeks of work in several days.
For years, these sudden end-of-term emergencies used to happen once or twice a year. This year, they’ve cropped up four times a semester. The COVID-19 microgeneration has arrived, and they are less primed to cope with responsibility, and more primed to seek exceptions from normal procedures.
I could rattle off a bunch of numbers of how many students missed deadlines, how many missed deadlines by a month or more, and so on, for this term that just ended. I could relate how several students contacted me about what more they could do to raise their grade after grades for the university were officially finalized and posted. “Hey, I know we lost the game yesterday, but could I have a few more at bats?” Suffice to say that in my 20-plus years of teaching, I’ve never seen such a high level of apathy, disconnect, and lack of responsibility. Students get the grades they earn, and this term I saw the lowest median grade in my teaching history. And it isn’t just me; most of my colleagues report the same.
I worry about some of these young people, and I worry that the in-coming class of next year could be worse. I don’t blame social media, I don’t blame “wokeness” whatever that is, and I don’t blame AI (I don’t see any increase in cheating by students). I blame the pandemic and the failure of high schools to help students and society in general for not caring about education.
Every individual is responsible for their actions, but no one acts within a vacuum — people act freely within the constraints their environment puts on them. The social environment we’ve created is not supportive for individuals of any age to excel intellectually. We especially don’t give young people enough support. We could do much better for them, which would be better for us all.
All-in-all, I respect and admire most young people for their perseverance in a difficult time of transition in life. A year ago, I wrote a short piece about this. I hope that next year I can write an article that is positive about where we as a society are headed.
Youth Is Wasted on the Young
But not for the reason most people thinkdgilesphilosopher.medium.com