Should College Get Harder?

A.I. is coming for knowledge work, and yet college seems to be getting easier. Does something need to change?

By Joshua Rothman
Source: Should College Get Harder? | The New Yorker

Around twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I taught a class in a special observation room at my university’s teaching center. My students and I sat around a long oval¹ table while cameras recorded us. I can’t remember which novel we discussed, but I do know what I learned when I watched the tape afterward, with a teaching coach. She pointed out that, when I was calling on students, I often looked to my right, missing the raised hands on my left. I didn’t let silences go on long enough, instead speaking just when a student had worked up the courage² to talk. On the plus side³, she noticed I’d been using a technique she liked, which I’d borrowed from a professor of mine: it was like cold-calling⁴, except that⁵, after you’d surprised a student with a challenging question, you told them that you’d circle back in a few minutes, to give them time to consider what they’d say. This, she told me, was “warm-calling⁶.”

Teaching was my favorite part of graduate school, and I signed up for as much training as I could. While I was teaching, or otherwise⁷ focussed on students, my role in the project of higher education made sense⁸ to me: I was spending years learning about literature⁹ so that I could explain it to students who wanted to better themselves. Outside of class, though, the enterprise¹⁰ was murkier¹¹. I knew that what really mattered to my professional advancement was academic research. My teaching skills were basically irrelevant. In fact, I’d been warned that teaching was a distraction from the “real work” of writing articles for my peers.

It sometimes seemed as though coursework was a distraction for my students, too. Although earnest¹² and diligent, they were often so immersed¹³ in extracurricular activities–charity efforts, musical groups, sports, startups¹⁴–that they struggled¹⁵ to find time to study. I myself had been part of a startup as an undergrad, and was familiar with the underlying logic driving extracurricular over commitment¹⁶: grade inflation, which allowed mediocre¹⁷ students to do less work, also made it harder for excellent ones to distinguish themselves academically. All the incentives, for both teachers and students, encouraged doing less in the classroom and more outside of it.

These contradictions weren’t surprising; they reflected the complex nature of the modern university, in which undergraduate pedagogy¹⁸ is just one of several competing priorities. The implicit theory was, essentially, that students would learn what they could from the university’s top-tier researchers, some of whom were brilliant teachers and some of whom were not. Some classes would be difficult, others laughably¹⁹ easy; grades would be uniformly high; and, in any case, there would be plenty to do outside of class. It would be edifying²⁰ to be around so many great minds. When learning didn’t happen through instruction, it would happen through osmosis²¹.

Was this theory persuasive? Twenty years ago, it seemed so–but today the gears may no longer be meshing²². Student debt has become a generational burden, with tens of millions of people taking on federal loans for degrees.At the same time, college seems to have become dramatically easier, in ways that suggest a diminishment of its core functions. In “The Amateur²³ Hour: A History of College Teaching in America,” the education scholar Jonathan Zimmerman observes that, in 2011, about forty-three per cent of college letter grades were As; in 1988, the figure was thirty-one, and, in 1960, it was fifteen. (In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch reports that, in 2024, the average G.P.A. of Harvard’s graduating class was 3.8.) Over roughly²⁴ the same period, “the average amount of studying by people in college declined by almost 50 percent, from 25 to 13 hours per week.” Zimmerman cites a survey finding that, in one semester, half of the respondents from a wide range of institutions hadn’t taken a single course that required writing more than twenty pages, total.

It’s still the case²⁵ that college graduates tend to be higher earners²⁶. And yet the newest data show that people with four-year degrees are now struggling to find jobs. Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, may soon reshape work in a variety of fields; many popular college majors, such as marketing, may prove less valuable than they used to. When A.I. is used by students, it also threatens to turn the classroom into a theatre, in which the act of learning is mimed²⁷ rather than embraced. Students can have chatbots do their work for them, teachers can give that work inflated grades, and everyone can feel good while learning very little. “There’s a mutually agreed upon mediocrity²⁸ between the students and the teachers and administrative faculty,” the folk singer Jesse Welles explains, in his song"College.” “You pretend to try, they’ll pretend you earned the grade.” If you want to be a doctor or an engineer, Welles sings, college might be worth it;otherwise, you might “skip the Adderall²⁹ prescription,” and acquire “a YouTube subscription.”

Since the middle of the past century, the number of Americans in college has increased substantially–in raw numbers³⁰, by roughly a factor of five³¹.This development has felt inevitable, driven by the rise of knowledge work and the opening of higher education to once-excluded³² groups. And yet, in the past decade, enrollment has begun to contract³³, and that contraction is expected to continue. Demography is a potential factor: a decline in the birth rate, which began around 2007, is predicted to result in fewer high-school seniors. But it also seems possible that more people are concluding that college has changed, and isn’t worth the cost. Universities go out of their way³⁴ to seem eternal, but higher education is an industry like any other, with its share of ups and downs³⁵. If college is a bubble, could it begetting ready to burst?

Academics used to be the main event at college, surrounded by a lot of sideshows³⁶," Zimmerman told me, when I spoke with him recently. “Now, the sideshows may be the main event.” Even well-intentioned, well-resourced universities have struggled to stop this shift, and Zimmerman finds the roots of the problem in the history of American college teaching. He begins with Mark Hopkins, a professor of philosophy who was the president of Williams College from 1836 to 1872. If Socrates invented the seminar³⁷, Hopkins was his American emissary³⁸: at a time when education was often conducted through large lectures and by means of³⁹ rote recitation⁴⁰, he led students in conversations about the meaning of life. “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other,’ James A.Garfield, who was one of his students, later said. This idea became a lodestar⁴¹ for educators, Zimmerman writes, who came to understand college teaching as a “charismatic⁴²” activity, dependent mainly on the personal vivacity⁴³ of professors.

There are good reasons for holding this view. A gifted teacher can change your life; a curriculum pre-written by a bureaucracy is unlikely to. As K-12 teachers know, administrative supervision of curricula is fraught⁴⁴ with procedural⁴⁵ and political perils⁴⁶. Colleges, Zimmerman shows, have navigated this territory by staying true to⁴⁷ Garfield’s vision. Decade by decade, they grew larger and more institutionally complex, with flowcharts⁴⁸ full of provosts⁴⁹–but, as “more and more of American higher education came under the bureaucratic umbrella, teaching mostly remained outside of it.” Today, administrators micromanage⁵⁰ every aspect of college life, but the design and implementation of coursework remains mostly a private matter for individual professors to decide for themselves.

Although there have been many efforts to reform pedagogy in American higher education, they have been largely anti-bureaucratic, Zimmerman writes, with reformers aiming to make teaching “more personal,” by supporting decentralization and idiosyncrasy⁵¹. In the years after the First World War, for instance, leading universities introduced discussion sections, or “preceptorials⁵²,” so that students could get more one-on-one time with teachers who might inspire them. In the nineteen-seventies, a progressive movement in higher ed⁵³ took this idea further, encouraging professors to emphasize free-wheeling⁵⁴ discussion over top-down instruction. Many students liked the hyper-conversational⁵⁵ style. Others noticed that it was possible to have great classroom discussions without learning much. Zimmerman quotes one student complaining about “groovy⁵⁶” professors. Another notes that he doesn’t have to go to class for touchy-feely⁵⁷ conversations; he can have them in his dorm.

There have been a few piecemeal⁵⁸ attempts to exercise more direct control over what happens in the college classroom. The establishment of “centers for teaching and learning,” like the one I attended, aimed to educate professors about pedagogical best practices. (One obstacle, Zimmerman observes, is that specialists in education are often looked down upon by other professors, who see them as “the least scholarly members of the academic guild⁵⁹.”) In the nineteen-eighties, “portfolio assessment⁶⁰” policies required professors to submit their syllabi⁶¹ to committees of their peers; occasionally, state legislatures or other groups have asked universities to justify themselves by means of³⁹ charters and metrics⁶² (and, sometimes,compelled them to pass political litmus tests⁶³).These initiatives⁶⁴, and others like them, have succeeded, failed, or backfired, to varying degrees. But none have changed the underlying reality that college teaching is in many ways “an amateur enterprise” for professors, who conduct it in their own ways while being primarily evaluated on their research.

The incredible thing, given all this⁶⁵, is that college teaching is as good as it is. This is a testament⁶⁶ to the passion and seriousness with which so many professors approach⁶⁷ their work as teachers (and, also, to the genuine curiosity and ambition of their students). To a great degree, Zimmerman argues, it’s precisely because professors take teaching seriously that they resist outside interference. “By the 1980s, across every kind of four-year institution, the amount of⁶⁸ time faculty spent teaching was inversely related to their salaries,” Zimmerman finds. (This continues to be true, he says, even at many small colleges that seek to focus on students.) Yet throughout academia, he writes, “faculty members at every level threw themselves into teaching despite—or even because of—its lack of material reward.” He quotes Michael Sherry, a historian at Northwestern University: “What devalues⁶⁹ teaching in professional terms might also be just what makes it valuable to us as individuals,” Sherry wrote. “It is ours, not the profession’s.” The purity of the classroom experience is one of the reasons people become professors in the first place⁷⁰. Hopkins wanted to sit on that log, too.