Rooms for Debate at the Times

Saw the NYT editorial I did, but I was actually struck by a line in your post above, the passage that reads:”…a rite of passage for parents and children, the trips to college campuses to drop off 19-year-olds for freshman year.”19 year olds. Back in the late 1950s and 60s, we who were dropped off at college campuses were mostly 18, and a good many of us were 17. And yet my overwhelming experience of undergraduates over the past 15, and especially the past 8 or ten years, is that while they are a year older than we were, they are as a group from 18 to 24 months less mature. Have you or any other readers noticed this, and if so, why is this the case?

Guesses:1. Economic. Another year for the parents to save up for college, and negotiate the loan/aid thicket; a year for the kid to work and save up some money.2. Résumé. Another year for the applicant to pad the résumé with volunteering, world travel, getting better at some extra-curricular specialty.3. Sowing wild oats. Get the partying out of the kid’s system while tending to (1) and (2), so he or she will be better able to settle down and study.4. Sick of school. If the kid went to pre-school (more prevalent in today’s freshman that those of a half-century ago), that’s fifteen or sixteen years straight of school. Not unreasonable to want a break from teachers.5. Luxury. Some of the families who can afford to send their children to private universities to the tune of a quarter of a mil over four years, can also afford to send them on an English-gentleman’s/lady’s grand tour, only instead of after university, it precedes university.

Well Mr Plexed (4), what do you suppose the modal age of entering freshmen is? In the 40s and 50s, school entering age cutoff was often 31 January of the year FOLLOWING the year the child entered 1st grade. (Kindergarten were spotty and often unattended.) So a child could enter 1st grade right after Labor Day of , say 1954 –if said child would have turned 6 on or before 31 January 1955, i.e. y + 1. Now, fast forward 12 years–say 1956. Many students graduating high school in y + 12 are 18 but quite a number are still 17 and will be 17 when they enter college in the Fall. The cohort of graduating h s seniors only started turning 18 in Febuary. But then starting I think in the late 50s or 60s, maybe as late as the 70s in some places, the 1st grade entering cutoff date was advanced several months, into y, i.e. the year entering 1st grade. Some places made it 31 August, some 1 September, some 15 September, a few even as late as 1 October, but the general result since then has been that nearly everybody entering 1st grade was or would be 6 well before Columbus’ Day, and that 1st grade cohort will start turning 7 in the Fall, right after school starts. Again, fast fwd to y + 12. Most students now graduating from high school are 19 or will be by or very soon after they enter college in the Fall. The leading edge of them will begin turning 20 during the early part of the Fall semester, even allowing for the fact that most colleges can’t read calendars and start their “Fall” semesterd in mid to late August. So the typical straight-through-the-grades-and-start-college-Fall- after-high-school-graduation entering freshman is at least 5 months older in 2010 than the counterpart entering freshman hort was in 1960. And in 1960, entering freshmen who turned 18 in the late Spring or Summer were among the elder members of their class. But in 2010 freshmen who turned 19 in the late Spring or Summer are among the younger ones in their class. So we know why entering freshmen in the last score of years or more are a year older than those having entering in mid 20th century or earlier. So why are they as a group, i.e. the “modal” student, less and not more mature than those earlier entering freshmen?

Hi Goxewu (6). My (5) is probably a bit convoluted; I’ll try again, a condensed version this time. One correction – in my first paragraph in 5, my fast fwrd “1956″ should have been to “1966″. Typographical error, not arithmetic. A child who entered 1st grade in Sept 1954 will have graduate 12th grade High School in May or June 1966, barring mishaps along the way. Children could enter 1st grade (y) in 1954 at age 5 if they would turn 6 on or before 31 Jan 1955 (y + 1). (The date of course varied a little among the Sovereign States and territories. I think it may have even been 1 March in a couple of jurisdictions.)They’re 19 when they enter college as freshmen because they were all 6 before they started first grade and they started turning 7 right after school started in their 1st grade year. In my (1st grade 1949) and I gather your age cohort range, Goxewu (6), some of us were 6 when we started first grade but many of us were still 5 and our cohort would not start turning 7 until Febuary following the Fall we entered 1st grade. This is because the deadline date for turning 6 to enter 1st grade was moved up — way up. So most of us were 17 and a few of us 18 when we graduated high school. Most kids graduating high school in the last two or three decades have been 19, with a few of em still 18. So the typical college freshman now is 19 when they enter college, having turned 19 during their 12th grade year or Summer thenfollowing, while most of us were still 17, having only begun turning 18 in Feb before graduation from high school. It’s not because they’re postponing anything that the freshmen are older than we were, but because the cut off date for turning 6 to enter first grade is right at the beginning of school. So, I repeat the question. Why then are they generally from a year and a half to two years less mature than we were?

Well, Im not going to take the time to do it but it oughtn’t be too hard to chase down statistics on the modal age in years, or years and months maybe, of entering freshmen for Fall 2008 or maybe even 2009. And many in our age cohort were 17 when we entered college as freshmen and were 21 when we got our diplomas. I took first grade as base rather than kindergarten because in the 40s and 50s many children did not go to kindergarten. But it still holds. If your children were was five entering kindergarten, they would have been six when he entered first grade. But my point was that in our age cohort, many children turned 6 only months after starting first grade. Nowadays, most high school seniors can vote in real elections (as opposed to “student government” elections). We couldn’t most of us have voted even if the Vote at 18 ammendment had been fully ratified. Most high school senior males are (supposed to be) registered with Selective Service; I didnt register with Caddo Parish Local Board No. 10 until several weeks after graduating from high school. And I was among the older ones in my class, not among the younger ones. (B’day in late mid June.) Nope, nothing to do with either of the Mayan Calendars. Or even the Celtic one where New Years came on 1 November. They’re just older than we were, mostly because school officials decided, maybe rightly, that they ought not have 1st grade classes with a significant proportion of 5 year olds. So why are they notably less mature? If you didn’t find recent underclassmen to be, that would be interesting to know too.

As you say, we have sort of hijacked this into a sidebar, so I’ll be brief. Thank you for your appraisal and impressions. That is what I asked for and collections of those can comprise data. In my sense of maturity, it has more to do with such things as what they can and will versus can’t or won’t do for themselves, confusion of ordinary adequacy with exemplary stellar performance and accomplishment thinking they’re still in high school, or an unwillingness to understand/accept a difference btwn college and high school,assuming that everything is negotiable and feeling abused and ill- used when they find something isn’t,the inability to recognize that what was cute at 14 might not be cute at 19 or 20. &c.,

Re #11:In contrasting the way my undergraduate peers behave in terms of “maturity,” I’m talking about the difference over a 50-year gap, which may too great for a productive discussion. A 25- or 30-year difference (i.e., the difference between the current generation of students and Prof. Bauerlein’s) might better serve the conversation. In short, we need the testimony of a younger set of geezers. Nevertheless:* In my imperfect memory, we were pretty good at doing things ourselves–if we were told exactly what to do and how to do it. Automaton does not equal mature. The same thing goes for things being “negotiable”; the most successful people–in terms of money and power–I know are those to whom (and one of them says it as a mantra), “EVERYTHING is negotiable.”* I don’t think it’s so much that today’s student confuses mere adequacy with stellar performance, it’s that, simply put, the “gentleman’s C” has become the “gentleman’s B” or even the “gentleman’s B+.” Why? Two main reasons, I think: 1) K-12 education in which “self-esteem” is such a big deal, and every student is “special,” and 2) the absolute cowardice of college faculty in grade inflation. (Every college I’ve ever been associated with has stated in its handbooks that “average” performance in a class gets a C, and that B-level performance is noticeably a cut above that.) In previous “Brainstorm” discussions of grade inflation, though, there’s always the whine that since promotions, pay raises and non-tenured jobs themselves depened substantially on student evaluations, the students who evaluate faculty have to be bribed with inflated grades.* College itself has become more high-school-like because of the dysfunction of high schools. For that, take your pick(s) from a menu of causes: social dysfunctions in teenagers unloaded on the high schools, general contempt for public schools as expressed in the failures of bond issues, tax increases, etc., intractable teachers’ unions opposing most kinds of merit distinctions in individual teachers, and so on. Another cause is the fact that a college degree has become as common a job-getting necessity as a high-school diploma was a few generations ago. (And the fact that, not having many jobs for kids with high-school diplomas, our society warehouses them in college.)* Personally, I find absolutely no difference in the what-was-cute-at-14 factor between (in the memory of) my peers and today’s students.Re #12:A lot of the time students spend talking to teachers outside of class is to “negotiate” things. The view-book image of the student walking with a professor along a leafy campus pathway, discussing to no practical import (a deadline, a grade) some philosophical matter arising out of that day’s class, is largely a ficition. But Prof. Foster and Prof. Bauerlein can hash that one out.In general, one of the things today’s students don’t (yet) suffer, is the oldster’s enervatingly predictable, “Things were better in the old days.”

Re #14:Agreed (from what I’ve seen).But whose fault in the main: “immature” or distractedly multi-tasking students, or faculty with too big a class load (especially adjuncts, who teach a greater and greater percentage of classes and who often teach at two or three different schools simultaneously to make ends meet)? Many full-time TT academics I know tell me their office hours are so crammed with standard advisement, grade protests, and the like, that there’s no time to lean back and philosophize with a student about the greater meaning of an assignment, or the class. My guess (and it’s an unscientific guess) is that it’s about 60-40 the fault of–to put my lefty spin on it–the corporatized, cost-efficient, number-crunching administrations’ effect on faculty schedules. English (after 101), history and philosophy classes don’t help enough to prepare cogs for the cubicle machine, so schools sure aren’t going to pay professors to teach just two classes per semester and spend a lot of time sitting around gassing with students about the meaning of life.