UDWPA QUESTIONS FOR OCTOBER 2012
(Scroll down for the Oct. 2012 essay.)
QUESTION 1 In their essay, Levine and Cureton state that “nonmaterial goals (that is,
learning to get along with people and formulating the values and goals of one’s life)” used to
be important reasons for attending college. They describe how this has changed and assert that
an increasing number of students believe “that the chief benefit of a college education is
increasing one’s earning power.” Which do you think will bring more future success: being
“focused and career-oriented” in your approach to college or pursuing the “nonmaterial goals”
the authors describe? Why?
Write an essay that answers this question with specific reference to Levine and Cureton’s text.
Your essay should include your own defensible thesis statement and reasons and examples
from your studies, experience, or observations that develop and support it.
OR
QUESTION 2. In their essay, Levine and Cureton argue that what students want from their
colleges is the same thing we all want from our banks and supermarkets: convenient and
efficient delivery of a product. They also suggest that, unlike at historic residential colleges,
students are not benefiting from engagement with professors and other students. Do you think
that students with this banks-and-supermarkets approach to college miss out on these
beneficial interactions?
Write an essay that answers this question with specific reference to Levine and Cureton’s text.
Your essay should include your own defensible thesis statement and reasons and examples
from your studies, experience, or observations that develop and support it.
Collegiate Life: An Obituary
Arthur Levine and Jeanette S. Cureton
Arthur Levine is president of Teachers College, Columbia University.
Jeanette S. Cureton is an academic researcher, formerly at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education and now in Elmhurst, Illinois.
The material in this article is drawn from their jointly authored book,
When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today’s College Student,
which was published in 1998, and presents the results of five years of
research involving many universities and colleges, including
extensive conversations with students and student affairs officers.
In 1858, John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote The Idea of a
University. His ideal was a residential community of students and
teachers devoted to the intellect. To him, a college was “an alma mater,
knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a
treadmill.” Given a choice between an institution that dispensed with
“residence and tutorial superintendence and gave its degrees to any
person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects” or “a
university which ... merely brought a number of young men together for
three or four years,” he chose the latter.
Newman’s ideal was so appealing that it has been embraced regularly
over the years by higher education luminaries from Robert Hutchins and
Paul Goodman to Alexander Meiklejohn and Mortimer Adler. Belief in
it remains a staple of nearly every college curriculum committee in the
country.
But that ideal is moribund today. Except for a relatively small
number of residential liberal arts colleges, institutions of higher
education and their students are moving away from it at an accelerating
pace. The notion of a living-learning community is dead or dying on
most campuses today.
…
DEMOGRAPHICS
A major reason for the changes we describe is simply demographic.
In comparison with their counterparts of the 1960s and 1970s,
undergraduates today are more racially diverse and, on average,
considerably older. In fact, since 1980, the lion’s share of college
enrollment growth has come from students who might be described as
nontraditional. By 1993, 24 percent of all college students were working
fulltime, according to our Undergraduate Survey; at two-year colleges,
this figure had reached 39 percent.
By 1995, 44 percent of all college students were over 25 years old; 54
percent were working; 56 percent were female; and 43 percent were
attending part-time. Currently, fewer than one in six of all
undergraduates fit the traditional stereotype of the American college
student attending full-time, being 18 to 22 years of age, and living on
campus.
What this means is that higher education is not as central to the lives
of today’s undergraduates as it was to previous generations.
Increasingly, college is just one of a multiplicity of activities in which
they are engaged every day. For many, it is not even the most important
of these activities; work and family often overshadow it.
As a consequence, older, part-time, and working students—
especially those with children—often told us in our surveys that they
wanted a different type of relationship with their colleges from the one
undergraduates historically have had. They preferred a relationship like
those they already enjoyed with their bank, the telephone company, and
the supermarket.
WHAT STUDENTS WANT
Think about what you want from your bank. We know what we want:
an ATM on every comer. And when we get to the ATM, we want there
to be no line. We also would like a parking spot right in front of the
ATM, and to have our checks deposited the moment they arrive at the
bank, or perhaps the day before! And we want no mistakes in
processing—unless they are in our favor. We also know what we do not
want from our banks. We do not want them to provide us with softball
leagues, religious counseling, or health services. We can arrange all of
these things for ourselves and don’t wish to pay extra fees for the bank
to offer them.
Students are asking roughly the same thing from their colleges. They
want their colleges to be nearby and to operate at the hours most useful
to them—preferably around the clock. They want convenience: easy,
accessible parking (at the classroom door would not be bad); no lines;
and a polite, helpful, efficient staff. They also want high-quality
education but are eager for low costs. For the most part, they are willing
to comparison shop, and they place a premium on time and money.
They do not want to pay for activities and programs they do not use.
In short, students increasingly are bringing to higher education
exactly the same consumer expectations they have for every other
commercial establishment with which they deal. Their focus is on
convenience, quality, service, and cost.
They believe that since they are paying for their education, faculty
should give them the education they want; they make larger demands on
faculty than past students ever have. They are also the target audience
for alternatives to traditional higher education. They are likely to be
drawn to distance education, which offers the convenience of instruction
at home or the office.
They are prime candidates for stripped-down versions of college,
located in the suburbs and business districts of our cities, that offer lowcost instruction made possible by heavy faculty teaching loads, mostly
part-time faculties, limited selections of majors, and few electives.
Proprietary institutions of this type are springing up around the country.
On campus, students are behaving like consumers, too. More than
nine out of 10 chief student affairs officers told us in last year’s Student
Affairs Survey that student power in college governance has increased
during the 1990s (or at least has remained the same), but that undergraduates are less interested in being involved in campus governance
than in the past.
A small minority of undergraduates continues to want voting power or
control over admissions decisions, faculty appointments, bachelor’s
degree requirements, and the content of courses; however, a decreasing
percentage desires similar roles in residential regulations and
undergraduate discipline, areas in which students would seem most
likely to want control. Overall, the proportion of students who want
voting or controlling roles in institutional governance is at its lowest
level in a quarter century, according to comparisons between our 1993
Undergraduate Survey and the 1969 and 1976 Carnegie Council surveys.
This is precisely the same attitude most of us hold with regard to the
commercial enterprises we patronize. We don’t want to be bothered with
running the bank or the supermarket; we simply want them to do their
jobs and do them well—to give us what we need without hassles or
headaches. That is, help the consumers and don’t get in their way.
Students today are saying precisely the same things about their colleges.
SOCIAL LIFE
In general, with increasing pressures on students, collegiate social life
occupies a smaller part of their lives. In the words of an undergraduate at
the University of the District of Columbia, “Life is just work, school,
and home.” In fact, one-fifth of those queried on our campus site visits
(21 percent) defined their social lives in terms of studying; for another
11 percent, sleeping was all they cared about. When we asked students at
the University of Colorado for the best adjective to describe this
generation, the most common choice was “tired.”
But not all of the retreat from social life is time-based. Chief student
affairs officers describe students as loners more often now than in the
past. Requests for single rooms in residence halls have skyrocketed. The
thought of having a roommate is less appealing than it once was.
Similarly, group activities that once connected students on college
campuses are losing their appeal and are becoming more individualized.
For instance, the venue for television watching has moved from the
lounge to the dorm room. Film viewing has shifted from the theater to
the home VCR. With student rooms a virtual menagerie of electronic and
food-preparation equipment, students are living their lives in ways that
allow them to avoid venturing out if they so choose.
STUDENT ORGANIZATIONAL MITOSIS
None of this is to say that collegiate social life is dead, but its profile
and location have changed. On campus, there is probably a greater
diversity of activities available than ever before, but each activity—in
the words of the chief student affairs officer of the University of
Southern Mississippi—“appeals to smaller pockets of students.”
This is, in many respects, the consequence of student organizational
mitosis and the proliferation of the divides between undergraduates. For
instance, the business club on one college campus divided into more than
a dozen groups—including women’s; black; Hispanic; gay, lesbian, and
bisexual; and Asian and Filipino business clubs.
Deans of students regularly told us last year that “there is less largergroup socializing” and that “more people are doing things individually
and in separate groups than campus-wide.” In contrast to the Carnegie
Council’s 1979 study, current students describe themselves in terms of
their differences, not their commonalities. Increasingly, they say they
associate with people who are like themselves rather than different.
In the main, when students do take time to have fun, they are leaving
campus to do so. Our Campus Site Visits study indicated that drinking
is the primary form of recreation for 63 percent of students, followed
closely by going to clubs and bars (59 percent) and simply getting off
campus (52 percent). By contrast, the latter two activities were not
mentioned in the Carnegie Council’s 1979 study.
Drinking was not a surprise. It was the first choice in our earlier study,
but there is more binge drinking today. Drinking to get drunk has
become the great escape for undergraduates.
Escaping from campus is a trend that goes hand in hand with the high
numbers of students living in off-campus housing—more than triple the
percentage in the late 1960s. Only 30 percent of students we surveyed
reported living on campus. Add to this the fact that students are also
spending less time on campus because of jobs and part-time attendance,
and the result is that increasingly campuses are places in which
instruction is the principal activity. Living and social life occur
elsewhere.
…
ACADEMICS
Although instruction remains the principal on-campus activity that
brings undergraduates together, the academic arena is experiencing its
own form of student disengagement. Pursuit of academic goals is clearly
utilitarian. It’s as if students have struck a bargain with their colleges.
They’re going to class all right, but they’re going by the book: they’re
doing what’s necessary to fulfill degree requirements and gain skills for
a job, but then they’re out the door. They’re focused and career-oriented,
and see college as instrumental in leading to a lucrative career. “Taskoriented students who focus on jobs” is how a Georgia Tech student
affairs official labeled them.
Although students do not believe that a college education provides a
money-back guarantee of future success, they feel that without one, a
good job—much less a lucrative or prestigious job—is impossible to
obtain. At the very least, it’s a kind of insurance policy to hedge bets
against the future. As a student at Portland (Oregon) Community College
put it, “College is the difference between white-collar and blue-collar
work.” Fifty-seven percent of undergraduates we surveyed in 1993
believed that the chief benefit of a college education is increasing one’s
earning power—an 11 percentage-point increase since 1976.
By contrast, the value placed on nonmaterial goals (that is, learning to
get along with people and formulating the values and goals of one’s life)
has plummeted since the late 1960s, dropping from 71 and 76 percent
respectively to 50 and 47 percent. Whereas in 1969 these personal and
philosophic goals were cited by students as the primary reasons for attending college, in 1993, students placed them at the bottom of the list.
…
The 1997 Student Affairs Survey revealed that at 74 percent of
campuses, faculty complaints about students are on the rise. One result is
that students and faculty are spending less time on campus together.
With work and part-time attendance, students increasingly are coming to
campus just for their classes.
THE FUTURE
The overwhelming majority of college students believe they will be
successful. But their fears about relationships, romance, and their
future happiness were continuing themes in every focus group. Their
concerns about finances were overwhelming. There was not one focus
group in which students did not ask whether they would be able to
repay their student loans, afford to complete college, get a good job, or
avoid moving home with Mom and Dad.
The college graduate driving a cab or working at the Gap was a
universal anecdote. There was more mythology here than there were
concrete examples, however. College graduates being forced to drive
taxis is one of the great American legends, rivaled only by the tale of
George Washington and the cherry tree.
Finances were a constant topic of discussion. Students told us of the
need to drop out, stop out, and attend college part-time because of
tuition costs. They told us of the lengths they had to go to pay tuition—
even giving blood. More than one in five (21 percent) who participated
in the Undergraduate Survey said that someone who helped pay their
tuition had been out of work while they attended college.
At heart, undergraduates are worried about whether we can make it as
a society, and whether they can actually make it personally. In our
surveys, the majority did say they expected to do better than their
parents. But in our focus groups, students regularly told us, “We’re
going to be the first generation that doesn’t surpass our parents in
making more money.” “How will I buy a house?” “How will I send my
kids to college?”
This is a generation of students desperately clinging to the
American Dream. Nearly nine out of 10 (88 percent) students are
optimistic about their personal futures, but their hope, though broadly
professed, is fragile and gossamer-like. Their lives are being
challenged at every turn: in their families, their communities, their
nation, and their world. This is a generation where hope and fear
collide.
CONCLUSION
In sum, these changes in America’s undergraduates add up to a
requiem for historic notions of collegiate life—the ivory tower, the
living-learning community, the residential college, and all the rest. But
the changes are not sudden; they began even before Cardinal Newman
wrote his classic. Most are a natural consequence of the democratization
of higher education. This is what happens when 65 percent of all high
school graduates go on to college and higher education is open to the
nation’s population across the lifespan. Four years of living in residence
becomes a luxury few can afford.
So how should higher education respond? Dismissing the present or
recalling a golden era lost are not particularly helpful—for the most part
the changes are permanent. But there are a few things colleges can do.
The first is to focus. Most colleges have less time with their students
on campus than in the past. They need to be very clear about what they
want to accomplish with students and dramatically reduce the laundry
lists of values and goals that constitute the typical mission statement.
The second is to use all opportunities available to educate students.
Required events, such as orientation, should be used to educate rather
than to deal with logistics. The awards a college gives should represent
the values it most wants to teach. The same is true for speakers. The
in-house newsletter can be used to educate. And of course, maybe the
best advice is that almost any event can be used for educational
purposes if the food and music are good enough.
Third, build on the strengths unique to every generation of students.
For instance, current undergraduates, as part of their off-campus
activities, are involved in public service—an astounding 64 percent of
them, according to the Undergraduate Survey. Service learning, then,
becomes an excellent vehicle to build into the curriculum and cocurriculum of most colleges.
Fourth, work to eliminate the forces that push students off campus
unnecessarily. For example, most colleges talk a great deal about
multiculturalism, but in general have not translated the rhetoric into a
climate that will make the campus more hospitable to current students.
In like manner, using financial aid more to meet need than to reward
merit would lessen the necessity for students to work while attending
college. These are steps any college with the will and commitment can
take. Both campus life and our students would benefit greatly.