Why Students Don’t Suffer (Part II)

The Student as Customer

Because of the competitive demands of the globalized economy, students see themselves as customers of the university and are often treated as such by administrators, staff, and faculty.[12] The university is no longer seen as just providing academic knowledge to students but also to beget a social experience with rock climbing walls, computer tablets, and gourmet-style dinning. Education itself is treated as a vocationalized end instead of a lifelong process of inquiry and discovery with universities transforming themselves into brands.[13] Administrators care more about student recruitment and retention than the content of student learning; thus, they spend vast amount of time and resources trying to answer the question that parents and students have when they visit their school, “what am I buying?”

With ever-increasing amounts of debt when they graduate, students are justified in asking whether their time at the university will be worth with the cost.[14] Teachers, especially those in the humanities, are not able to provide a persuasive economic reason when compared to their STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) counterparts and therefore have become obsessed with recruiting students into their programs and retaining the ones they already have.[15] Classes become infomercials to pluck students to their majors. The result is not only a further neglect of the interiority of students’ lives but a reinforcement of seeing them as a customer whose decision-making is driven by economic considerations.

This commodification of the classroom, where students are seen as customers, has been fostered by a culture of assessment and the promotion of technology in teaching. Students are continually assessed in quantitative metrics to confirm students are learning and technology is marketed as a panacea because it accommodates students’ wants in flexible class schedules and their inclinations to use the Internet (i.e., “digital natives”).[16] Teachers therefore are required to assign assessment, often which they have no input into creating, in their classrooms and write reports afterwards to demonstrate that their students are learning.[17] They are also incentivized by administrators with course release-time, monetary compensation, and performance evaluation to incorporate technology into the classroom.[18] Thus, the commodification of the classroom ensures teaching is conducted in standardized, measurable units suitable for technological consumption.

In this environment, students see knowledge as a type of commodity to be packaged and sold rather than a lived experience or enduring wisdom. The classroom is a place to be entertained whether with a professor directly speaking to you or hidden behind a screen online. The relationship between teacher and students–and among students themselves–is seen in contractual. The culture of assessment and the online delivery of knowledge reinforces this customer-service perspective of education because knowledge is presented in discrete measurable units. The messiness of knowledge, the serendipity of discovery, the ineffableness of learning becomes lost in this environment of commodification, quantification, and technological assessment.

The underlying cause for this account of education is many: the increasing power of university accreditation agencies, the transformation of administrators from colleagues to managers, the neoliberal university competing for students and dollars in an era of shrinking state support, the public demand for educational accountability in a period of debt and spiraling costs, the uncritical adulation of the capacity of technology and the culture of Silicon Valley to change education, and a philosophy that believes in the power of number to reveal what is really transpiring in reality.[19] For students, the culture of assessment and technology makes education not a cultivation of their capacity for sympathy and empathy but to harden them for a future life of external affirmation. The culture of assessment, bolstered by a technology that dictates how teaching and learning transpires, purifies education into a sterile exercise of mastery of critical skill sets and ways of knowing.

And when teachers do teach sympathy and empathy in their classroom, it is evaluated by some quantification metric to demonstrate students have learnt. The current culture of assessment and technology do not encourage an environment of introspection, reflection, and self-examination because the quantifiable measurement of these activities fail to reveal wholly and deeply what students experience. The Likert scale cannot capture the complexity of what transpires in the encounter between teacher and students: the teacher’s content and delivery and the students’ reception of it; the personalities and the particular histories of each person on that day; the specific moments of discussions, questions, and conversations; the camaraderie of partaking in a common endeavor; the tedium of fulfilling and evaluating assignments; the process of discovery, curiosity, and reflection. Because these activities and experiences do not conform to the technological design of learning and the quantifiable character of assessment, they do not count. Teachers therefore are pressured to teach in a way to steer students away from the interiority of their lives and to a learning that can be externally sanctioned, measured, and affirmed.

Working within this culture of assessment and technology, teachers can be creative in finding ways to have students reflect upon their character, of how to sympathize and empathize with others unlike them. Teachers can assign content that may challenge students’ sense of meritocracy by showing how chance and serendipity plays an important role in the formation and achievements of people. Certain works – like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, or the film, The Kite Runner – can provide a perspective of how other people live and what are their values are in their interior lives. Teachers can tack on a qualitative assessment in their assignments to prompt students to think and reflect about what they have read. They can encourage discussion, whether in small groups, seminars, or using the Socratic Method, for students to express their view in an environment conducive to reason and civility.

Teachers can also work with other university programs to cultivate sympathy and empathy in students. For example, the invitation of a speaker from the office of diversity into the classroom can followed by an assignment that employs reason, logic, and evidence to analyze the presentation. It would be an opportunity to teach students both a critical skill set and a different perspective that would foster their sympathy and empathy for others unlike them: What were the concerns of the speaker? Are they consistent with one another or contradictory, and how so? What evidence supports the speaker’s claims? What theory or paradigm best accounts for the speaker’s position? Are the solutions proposed feasible and effective or utopian and emotive? How does the speaker’s experiences differ from yours and do these differences account for your divergent opinions? What role does experience play in shaping one’s way to see the world and what is the role of reason in making sense of one’s experience?

Special programs are also another way for teachers to develop students’ sympathy and empathy: internships, study abroad, service-learning, civic engagement, and other outside of the classroom experiences are opportunities for students to be with others unlike themselves and thereby sympathize and empathize with them.[20] However, teachers must cautious about, knowing that the practicality of these programs is often at the cost of their academic rigor. Teachers should aim to blend both academic standards and experiential learning together in the formation of a student’s intellect and sociability while, at the same time, provide assignments that prompt reflection of in his or her interior life.

But if teachers want to cultivate students’ interior lives, they are confronted with the challenge of creating more work for themselves by adding non-quantifiable and non-technological components in their classroom. The chance to do more work without compensation hardly seems like an enticing proposition. Teachers therefore work within their universities to change how assessment is designed so that assessment is part of the classroom exercises rather than being something additional and external to it. Assessment already is taking place in the classroom, as evaluated by the students’ grade. Thus, teachers should be able to use their own evaluations as the assessment of student learning rather than having something externally imposed upon them.

Another approach is to design assessment so that it is flexible enough to accommodate the variety of contents and the multiplicity of its delivery in the classroom (e.g., qualitative, quantitative, technological, non-technological). There should not be a one-size-fits-all approach to assessment such that it drives what and how is being taught; instead, the assessment should be a template that permits a multitude of ways to teach and evaluate. This way the dual approach of assessment and grades as separate activities in the classroom is erased and become one and the same.

Notes

[12] D. Bok (2003) Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press); C. Newfield (2016) The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press); L. Bunce, A. Baird, S. E. Jones, (2017) “The Student-as-Consumer Approach in Higher Education and its Effect on Academic Performance,” Studies in Higher Education 40/11: 1958-78.

[13] B. Ansell and J. Gingrich (2017) “Mismatch: University’s Education and Labor Market Institutions” PS: Political Science & Politics 50/2, 423-25; L. Graf and J. W. Powell (2017) “How Employer Interests and Investments Shape Advanced Skill Formation,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50/2, 418-22.

[14] W. Zumeta, D. W. Brenman, P M. Callahn, J. E. Finney (2012) Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press); J. Best and E. Best (2014) The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press); C. Eaton (2017) “Still Public: State Universities and America’s New Student-Debt Coalitions,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50/2, 408-12.

[15] L. Trepanier (2017) Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books).

[16] J. Palfrey and U. Gasser (2008) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books); L. Trepanier (2008) Technology, Science, and Democracy (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press).

[17] L. Suskie (2010) “Why Are We Assessing?” Inside Higher Ed, October 26. Available at https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/10/26/why-are-we-assessing.

[18] R. M. Palloff and K. Pratt (2011). Excellent Online Instructor Strategies for Professional Development (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley).

[19] A. Hacker and C. Dreifu (2010) Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About (New York: Times Book); N. S. Riley (2011) The Faculty Lounges, and Other Reasons, Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid for (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee); M. C. Taylor (2010) Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (New York: Kopf); W. Zumeta (2012) Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization; J. Best (2014) The Student Loan Mess; S. R. Gallagher (2016) The Future of University Credentials: New Development at the Intersection of Higher Education and Hiring (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); B. Caplan (2018) The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press); R. Kelchen (2018) Higher Education Accountability (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press); S. D. Phillips and K. Kisner, eds. (2018) Accreditation on the Edge: Challenging Quality Assurance in Higher Education (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press).

[20] R. Zemsky, G. R. Wegner, and A. J. Duffield (2018) Making Sense of the College Curriculum: Faculty Stories, Conflict, and Accommodation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).