College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 8

Students say the most important factor in choosing a college is academic quality. But the reality is, it’s really hard to tell how much college students actually learn.

While there are a lot of tests to get into college, there are no exit exams to get out. Despite the soaring price of tuition and the fact that most Americans strive to go to college, undergrads often spend little time studying compared to other activities. Instead, they’re working, socializing or partying and, as a result, show limited gains in critical thinking — the hallmark of American higher education.

At the same time, to address mental health concerns, colleges are creating more courses in fields like “the environmental humanities,” Hamilton and Taylor Swift studies and offering more and more wellness days.

So what’s really happening inside classrooms?

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk: Hey, Jon, do you remember that New York University professor who was fired after he was accused of being a little too tough on his students?

Jon: Right. His firing raised all kinds of questions about academic quality and safe spaces and snowflakes.

Maitland Jones lost his job teaching organic chemistry at New York University after students signed a petition saying his course was too hard. “Many of us noticed that not only were student grades going down and student attendance was going down, but their ability to read a question and to answer the right question was going down,” Jones says. Credit: Maitland Jones

Kirk: Yeah. His name is Maitland Jones, and he taught organic chemistry for nearly 60 years, 43 at Princeton and then another 15 at NYU, before he was fired. Jones says he was very popular with many of his students, and he says he loved being in the classroom.

What were your students learning?

Maitland Jones: Well, nominally, they were learning organic chemistry, how to interpret the interplay of structure and reactivity. It’s been quite properly noted that many of these students will go on to medical school.

Kirk: Jon, you know the famous saying, write: ‘Save a life.’

Jon: Right: ‘Fail a pre-med.’

Kirk: Yeah. So we asked Jones, do pre-med students really need to know organic chemistry to become doctors?

Maitland Jones: Most doctors don’t really need to know the details of organic chemistry. And that’s right. But what they do need to know how to do is to problem-solve.

Kirk: Over his decades in the classroom, Jones noticed his students’ ability to problem-solve was declining, and as a result, more of his students were struggling. Jones found himself handing out more and more Fs. Then, during the pandemic, his students started a petition. But it didn’t stop there. The students’ parents called the dean to complain that Jones was being too tough on their kids. I mean, that makes sense, right? The families are doling out $50,000, $60,000 for their kids to go to NYU. They want to make sure they get a return on their investment. Right?

Maitland Jones: Well, I don’t think it’s supposed to be that transactional. At least I would hope it isn’t. You know, I’m an old timer, and I believe that there is value in, well, humanities, and a humanistic approach to teaching science.

Kirk: Ultimately, as the parental complaints piled up, NYU let him go.

Maitland Jones: I was fired.

Kirk: Because you were trying to maintain standards?

Maitland Jones: I think I’ve got to avoid that question.

Kirk: Welcome to College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. Between us, we’ve been covering higher education for years.

Kirk: And in the process, we’ve learned that higher education is a huge, multibillion-dollar-a-year industry. With colleges treating tuition-paying students like customers, and schools increasingly operating like giant corporations.

Jon: So we’re here to tell you some of their most closely held secrets about quality, and what you get for your hard-earned bucks.

Kirk: Today on the show: ‘What Do You Learn and What Will You Earn?’

Okay, so students say one of the most important factors in choosing a college is academic quality or rigor.

Jon: Sure, just behind getting a job. But the reality is that it’s really hard to tell how much students actually learn in college, and whether what they learn will lead to a career. There are a lot of tests to get into college, but there are few exit exams, you know, to demonstrate that you’ve actually learned anything.

Kirk: Perhaps that’s why a declining percentage of Americans see practical value in college degrees. A report from Gallup and Strada Education Network finds that the top reason students attend college is to get a good job. Yet only a quarter of working Americans with college experience strongly agreed that their education was relevant to their work and daily life.

Despite the soaring price of tuition and the fact that most Americans strive to go to college and then get a good job, research shows undergrads often spend a little time studying compared to other activities. Instead, they’re working, socializing or partying, and research finds — get this, Jon — college students show limited gains in critical thinking, the hallmark of American higher education.

Josipa Roksa: Students are not spending adequate time on academics and academic pursuits. And that has consequences for how much they learn in higher education.

Kirk: That’s Josipa Roksa. She’s a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and coauthor of the book Academically Adrift.

Josipa Roksa: And so the data shows that, you know, many students are not making much progress on the critical-thinking skills over the first two years. And it’s not surprising, if you think about the limited number of time spent in class, limited number of time spent studying, then limited gains in critical-thinking skills makes logical sense. Because you have to actually work and develop those skills. And if you’re not investing the time to do it, you’re not going to develop them.

Kirk: If you’ve listened to our other episodes from the season, and you’ve managed to pay for college, and now you’re hoping to develop critical-thinking skills and trying to figure out what you’re going to learn in college, where do you think, Jon, would be the natural place to start?

Jon: Hmm. The course catalog?

Kik: Yes. The menu, Jon. That’s why I took a long look at how course catalogs have changed and expanded over time.

A few years ago, I went out to Amherst College in western Massachusetts, where Catherine Epstein took me down to the school’s archives.

Catherine Epstein: We have the papers of some relatively famous alums, and then we have lots of information just on the history of the college.

Kirk: Epstein is dean of the faculty at the small liberal arts college. Amherst enrolls about 1,900 students and offers more than 850 courses, many of them small seminars.

Catherine Epstein: So these guys are interested in catalogs.

Archivist: Great. Yeah. We pulled the three that you requested.

Kirk: Sitting around a big oak table, Epstein and I dust off the 1966 leather-bound course catalog and compare it to the 2016 paperback.

Kirk: My catalog only has 223 pages, and that includes the index.

Catherine Epstein: This is the 2015-16 catalog. It has 591 pages.

Kirk: More pages means a lot more choices. In the late 1960s, Amherst and other liberal arts colleges responded to faculty demands and switched from a core curriculum, where students all took the same courses, like English, math, and the history of western civilization, to an open curriculum, giving students many options with very few requirements outside their majors.

Catherine Epstein: You can do anything that you want. If you never want to take a science class, you don’t have to take a science class.

Kirk: As we flip through the 2016 catalog. Epstein gives me a sampling of some of the history department’s offerings, like ‘Birth of the Avant-Garde: Modern Poetry and Culture in France and Russia, 1870 to 1930.’

Kirk: That’s not obscure?

Catherine Epstein: That is not obscure. No.

Kirk: Epstein defends every single course in the catalog.

Catherine Epstein: It’s all good stuff, as long as it’s taught in a rigorous way where students are challenged, where students can express their thoughts.

Kirk: With a $2 billion endowment and a $60,000 sticker price, Amherst can afford to pay faculty to teach all these courses. But as the cost of college continues to soar, critics are raising questions.

Michael Poliakoff is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which finds most of the country’s leading colleges don’t have rigorous general education requirements. Poliakoff keeps tabs on those courses that he thinks are foolish.

Michael Poliakoff: ‘Video Games and the Boundaries of Narrative.’ ‘Knowing Television.’ ‘Disney for Grown-ups.’

Kirk: Poliakoff has spent a lot of time studying the evolution of course catalogs.

Michael Poliakoff: What we’ve seen is the multiplication of course options, often without any real respect for the kind of intellectual nutrition that students need.

Kirk: He thinks too many colleges treat their students like customers. And he points to recent studies that found many college students finish their four years without learning much more than what they came in with.

Professors at Amherst reject that criticism. While some of their courses may sound soft, they say students are in fact learning hard skills.

Nicola Courtright: How to analyze a text. How to understand an argument.

Kirk: Nicola Courtright teaches art history at Amherst. She says the college’s open curriculum creates an ideal learning environment.

Nicola Courtright: Students know that they’re not just taking classes because they should, or they might get a job afterwards. They really have to take it out of fundamental interest.

Kirk: But, Jon, now sticker prices at some colleges like Amherst, Wellesley, Boston University and NYU are breaking the $90,000-a-year barrier. That includes tuition, fees, room and board and a meal plan, and maybe a fancy computer. Other schools aren’t far behind. So as college sticker prices have soared, more and more students and families have a justifiable interest in getting a return on their investment.

Jon: Ah, yes. The ROI. It makes sense. I mean, you can’t blame them. If you’re going to pay a steep price tag and take out loans and take on debt, you probably want to know what you’re actually getting for your money, and whether it will lead to a job where you can pay off those loans.

Kirk: New data show that how much you earn over a lifetime largely depends on your choice of major internships and getting a well-paying first job after graduation.

Jon: Yeah, but five and even 10 years after graduation, about half of college-educated workers remain underemployed, meaning they’re ending up in jobs where the degrees they earned aren’t needed. The research organization Burning Glass Institute recently tracked the career paths of 10 million people who entered the job market over the past decade. It found even 10 years out, the number of grads in jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials is 52 percent. Advocates want colleges to be more open about what students and their families get for their investment.

Jane Swift: Just like the college admissions process, it is not transparent. It needs to be more transparent.

Kirk: Jane Swift is president of Education at Work, a nonprofit that helps match students with Fortune 500 companies that have workforce shortages.

Jane Swift: Both the people who pay — students — as well as people who hire you have a hard time qualifying exactly what it is that you gain. And I think that there needs to be better efforts to articulate that.

Kirk: Swift is also the former governor of Massachusetts, a state — you might have noticed — with a few colleges and universities. And she says while some of these schools are doing better than others, she’d like to see the federal government hold them all accountable under the so-called Gainful Employment Rule.

Jon: Right, the Gainful Employment Rule that sounds very wonky.

Kirk: Yeah, this long-delayed regulation from the U.S. Education Department is finally set to go into effect in 2026. And, basically, here’s how it works: Students who enroll in an academic program that leaves graduates with debt they can’t afford will have to sign a disclosure agreement. The agreement says that they understand their education might not lead to a well-paying job. The Education Department says the goal is to provide families with more information about the costs and risks, but it only applies to for profit colleges and non-degree programs. Jane Swift points out that colleges and the higher ed lobby strongly oppose it.

Jane Swift: I think they believe it’s a veiled attempt to regulate out for-profit education. And it’s, you know, all students need jobs no matter where you go to college. If it’s good policy, it should be good policy for everyone.

Kirk: By everyone, she means not just for-profit and non-degree programs, but all degree programs.

Jane Swift: I think there’s good players and value in degrees in both nonprofit and for-profit. I think what we really need to understand is what are the outcomes and how can you improve your ability to achieve a positive outcome? You know, I have a liberal arts degree. Two of my three daughters received a liberal arts degree and one received a math degree. But my aspirations for all three of them with that investment were the same. It was a j-o-b at the end of that investment.

Kirk: Swift says more college students need to have work-based learning opportunities, working both before they go to college and then during their college careers, so they can get a job. She says these experiences can give them skills that aren’t taught in the classroom.

Since his days as an engineering professor at Iowa State, Richard Miller has long advocated for more transparency about what students learn and earn.

Richard Miller:  I’m the former president of Olin College of Engineering, where I spent 21 years, and since leaving there, I’ve begun working with others to develop a coalition aimed at changing higher education more broadly.

Most students attend college with the objective of finding their first career. Something like half of all of them, if you interview them, will tell you, ‘The reason I’m here is for my first career.’ But faculty don’t normally think that way. Faculty think about, it’s deeper than that. It’s about changing your life. And that’s kind of a disconnect here in who’s hearing what message.

Kirk: That disconnect appears to be widening. Some students just aren’t going to college straight out of high school. And those who do enroll are increasingly selecting career-focused majors. Fewer college students are majoring in liberal arts subjects like philosophy or English and political science, like you did, Jon.

Jon: Yeah, or history, like you did, Kirk. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of students graduating with a degree in the humanities has fallen by half.

Skepticism about the value of a liberal arts degree is now pretty widespread. In his Netflix special, Kid Gorgeous, comedian John Mulaney riffs about the cost of his English degree from Georgetown.

John Mulaney: Yes, you heard me. An English major. I paid $120,000. How dare you clap? How dare you clap for the worst financial decision I ever made in my life? I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen. And then I didn’t.

Kirk: Despite this growing skepticism, college humanities programs have been found to still offer value. A 2023 report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences concluded humanities majors’ incomes are 40 percent higher than those with a high school degree. At the same time, humanities professors defend new emerging courses or fields, like ‘Taylor Swift and her World’ or the Environmental humanities. They say both are directly relevant to students’ lives and, of course, boost enrollment in their struggling departments.

Richard Miller, an engineer by training, is deeply skeptical of this approach.

Richard Miller: As the country and I think as the world is moving towards addressing sustainability, you can see lots of investments in this area. There’s going to be a lot of careers built on this, but most of those careers are going to require more than having read something about it. It’s going to require some science background and will require understanding how to use what we’ve learned to make an impact.

We’ve got a whole video, by the way, about the rise of the environmental humanities and what it says about the state of higher education, on the GBH News YouTube channel. So check it out. Okay, for now, Miller says too many students are being led to a buffet of college courses and then wondering, hmm, what’s on the menu?

Richard Miller: So they flip through the catalog and they say, ‘Oh, here’s a course in environmental science. It’s taught by the, you know, the Geology Department. But look, they have all these courses in chemistry that are required in mathematics. And I didn’t take a lot of that in high school. Be really hard to do that. Oh, but here’s a course in environmental humanities. Okay. It doesn’t have those science course backgrounds. What’s the difference? This is accessible to me. So I’m going to study this,’ which is great. But you have to realize that when they get to the end of the road, somebody needs to help them understand what career opportunities are with these different labels on them. And I think, personally, higher education could do a much better job of informing kids what the outcome is with these different fields.

Kirk: At the end of the day, these students will become graduates who are facing a job market, right? And they don’t all have the same market value.

Jon: Another way you can learn about the market value of certain degrees and programs is from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. This nonprofit does a detailed study about incomes and jobs for people with different academic backgrounds. We’ll also post a link to that on our landing page.

Kirk: Okay, let’s be clear here, because in many ways, Jon, colleges and universities are operating like large corporations that resist transparency. Corporations with bosses who need to make budget decisions based on customer demand. So if there’s a sudden student interest in, let’s say, Taylor Swift studies or sports management or climate change literature, they ditch those low-enrollment courses in 18th-century literature or modern poetry and culture, and France and Russia, 1870 to 1930, after the old professor retires. Then they reallocate that faculty position to another department, like computer science or data analytics, which has growing enrollment.

Jon: Yeah, and this is happening everywhere, as colleges try to balance their budgets and make their courses more relevant and more marketable.

Kirk: Sure. But more old-school faculty think students and families are too focused on their return on investment. And higher education should take this opportunity, when it’s under so much public scrutiny, to reimagine general education. They say academic programs should broaden students’ understanding of the world and strengthen their critical-thinking skills, write clearly, speak with confidence and consider differing viewpoints.

Andrew Delbanco: We really want to be careful about losing the broader purpose of college, which in this country has always been an institution that gives young people an opportunity. And that kind of gray space between adolescence and adulthood gives them an opportunity to think about who they are, and more particularly, who they want to be.

Kirk: That’s Andrew Delbanco. He teaches American studies at Columbia, and he’s president of the Teagle Foundation, which is helping dozens of colleges reimagine their curriculum.

Andrew Delbanco: Our country, after all, claims to be different from all other countries because we tell our citizens, you have freedom. What it means to be an American is that you can decide for yourself by what means you wish to pursue happiness. That phrase that is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. And so college has been a very important institution for hundreds of years, by which we try to make good on that promise.

Kirk: That promise to pursue happiness sounds amazing, right? But what specifically are college students learning, and how do we know it will lead to a career?

Andrew Delbanco: We know, frankly, way too little about what students are learning. We give our diplomas out on the basis of earned credits. But we have very little idea what those credits really represent, in the sense of what what’s actually happened to the student’s mind in the course of earning those credits. I mean, every teacher likes to think that they’ve got some reasonable evaluation system in place, which is called grading. But we all know that we have rampant grade inflation. So even the grading system tells us very little about whether students are learning a lot or a little or nothing much at all. So this is a big problem.

Kirk: It’s a huge problem for the higher ed industry. I think it’s safe to say everyone agrees on that. But Delbanco and other academics worry that colleges are cheating young people and the country if they focus too much on job training and gainful employment and don’t give them the chance to pause, learn and then think deeply.

Andrew Delbanco: We want to have democratic-informed citizens in our country, people who are thoughtful about history, have some idea of what the big issues of the day are about and what our democratic institutions are about, why we have checks and balances [in] government, where all the power is not concentrated in one branch or another. We want young people to reflect on their responsibilities as citizens, not just their opportunities as consumers.

Kirk: Delbanco says colleges shouldn’t tell students what to think or believe, but challenge them and ask them hard questions.

Andrew Delbanco: That’s what a college should be, and we need colleges to continue to be that for the sake of the students and for the sake of our democracy.

Kirk: And, Jon, for the record, Delbanco defends the incredible growing course catalog at Amherst and other colleges.

Andrew Delbanco: One reason has gotten so much larger than it used to be is because there’s more knowledge, right? I mean, especially in the sciences, the proliferation of specialized knowledge is mind boggling.

Kirk: To stay relevant. Delbanco says more and more schools are placing a special, renewed emphasis on the importance of general education.

Andrew Delbanco: Which is the term we use to describe that moment at the beginning of college, before the student has decided which specialty is right for him or her. The college has to put up in front of incoming students a serious general education experience so that they’re not plunged immediately into this bewildering, overwhelming, you know, endless menu of choices.

Jon: One of the schools tweaking its gen ed courses is Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where the sticker price is now approaching $100,000 a year. Remember, Kirk, the Chivas Regal effect?

Kirk: Oh, yeah. Well, if you’re charging that much for your whiskey or your degrees, you’ve got to do some quality control from time to time, right?

Well, so colleges and universities now reimagine their curriculum every 20, 25 years. It’s like, I don’t know, the cicadas or something like that.

Jon: Sarah Igo chairs the American History Department at Vanderbilt and is an intellectual historian.

Kirk: Intellectual historian? What does that mean?

Sarah Igo: What that means is I study the history of ideas rather than, say, public policy or economic development or wars or that kind of thing. I study the stuff of culture and ideas and how those change.

Kirk: When it comes to ideas, what kind of ideas are students learning in college and why don’t we know?

Sarah Igo: It’s a great question. A hard question to answer. Students are learning all kinds of things, of course, in college. And we don’t know because we probably haven’t been as attentive as we should be about evaluating and assessing what they know and how they know and how they learn, as I would argue, what is more important than either of the things: how to ask questions to get them further along the path toward either of those objectives.

Jon: As an intellectual historian, Igo says, historically, what students learn can’t be captured in a single answer or data point.

Sarah Igo: Because universities and colleges offer such an incredible wealth of options — electives, majors, minors, small credential programs. It’s the wealth of what is offered. And then the number of pathways through is really quite astonishing and would have astonished someone looking at college, or who went to college 100 years ago, or honestly even 75 years ago. The big explosion in electives and kind of choose your own adventure really happened after the mid century, mid 20th century.

Kirk: Okay, Vanderbilt has been around for 150 years. Why is the university reimagining its general education now? What’s the goal?

Sarah Igo: We are, I would say, part of a kind of movement. I won’t say back because it’s not back. It’s definitely forward. But a kind of move toward a more common understanding of what students need from their college education, and particularly what they need to understand is the value of a liberal arts education, which, you know, has gotten kind of battered in public culture in recent decades, and maybe especially in the last year or so.

Jon: Kirk, I went to a conference recently of higher education people, and they had a panel about this. And they concluded that two of the most unpopular words in the English language right now in America are ‘liberal’ and ‘arts.’ That’s why Vanderbilt a few years ago committed to taking a hard look at what students and graduates really need to succeed today. But Igo says the committee charged with reimagining gen ed quickly ran into a brick wall.

Sarah Igo: We didn’t actually have an idea of what general education was or what it should be. We actually didn’t even have a vocabulary for it. And so, our first effort was to kind of figure out, you know, for students in the 21st century, what is a meaningful liberal arts education? How do we help them, see that value? How do we help our own faculty articulate what that is? And what does it mean? We need to reform about how we’re doing things.

Jon: Igo says she and other university leaders decided students needed some common intellectual experience.

Sarah Igo: It doesn’t need to be a canon. Doesn’t need to be western civ. Doesn’t need to be a kind of older model of a foundation or a core. But students actually would really benefit from faculty designing a program, especially in the first year, that all students take in common, to get a chance to understand the richness and breadth of a liberal arts education. Right? Read something from philosophy, read something from economics, read something from neuroscience, that are circling around the same question perhaps. That’s how our new curriculum is designed. And mentor them in small groups where the idea is to think about big questions, but also to learn how to read and write in ways that will serve them well for the rest of their college career and beyond.

Kirk: Chemist Renã Robinson is one of the Vanderbilt faculty mentors.

Renã Robinson: I teach the science, technology and values core course for undergraduate freshman students. But I also teach upper-level chemistry courses and graduate-level chemistry courses and things like mass spectrometry.

Kirk: Do you teach organic chemistry?

Renã Robinson: Absolutely not.

Kirk: Okay, so what do students get out of this new program? Like, if I’m a chemist or chemistry student, what why do I need general education?

Renã Robinson: I think what general education does is it causes you to question the history behind some of the things that you’re learning. It gives you an opportunity to ask questions about how does the way that I’m being taught and the material that I’m being taught provide value to me or provide value to society? And, I think, for our students to learn how to think critically. General education is a great space to do that because when they get into courses like chemistry and upper-level chemistry courses, we want them to be critical thinkers, especially around data that they’re generating or data that we’re providing them in classes and these hard, sometimes abstract phenomena. And so if they have the skill set to already think critically, then they can do well when they get to these classes.

Kirk: Robinson says reimagining gen ed helps, but what’s really important is a good evaluation mechanism, something to understand what students are learning.

Renã Robinson: So in this core pilot course, there is an assessment of what students know and what they’re thinking about, the topic, generally before they come into the course, and then there are surveys that are given to the students throughout the course and at the end of it. And there are also surveys that are given to faculty who work piloting and teaching these different types of courses throughout, as well as some of the faculty that are helping to coordinate the courses across different sections.

Chloe Whalen: My name is Chloe Whalen, and I am a communication of science and technology major. It’s the new kind of arts and science program at Vanderbilt.

Jon: Whalen is from a small town in Illinois. The daughter of a teacher and a firefighter, she received generous financial aid to attend Vanderbilt, and her parents are helping her pay the rest. She and her parents want a return on that investment — a j-o-b at the end. So Whalen says academic quality in choosing a college was extremely important to her.

Chloe Whalen: Like, at the end of the day, you know, you go to college for the academics. Yes, you know, you want there to be good sports teams, if you’re into that. You hope that the dining food isn’t too bad. But at the end of the day, like, if the college doesn’t have good academics, what are you spending your money on? It’s basically just a summer camp where you go to a few classes.

Kirk: In her first semester on campus, the new gen ed class she enrolled in was called ‘Being Human: Encountering Others.’

Chloe Whalen: When I signed up for it, I was, like, this sounds like I’m just going to be sitting around, like, thinking, just like an old, like, Greek philosopher. And I was kind of, like, I feel, like that’s going to get a little boring. Like, am I really paying to go to college just to sit and talk about, like, the meaning of life? You know, I don’t really know how I really felt about that. I came in thinking it was going to be my least favorite class that semester, and it ended up actually being my favorite.

Kirk: Why was it your favorite?

Chloe Whalen: The level of discussion we had in that class was really good, and I felt like every time we were all very engaged in it. We all had thoughts and opinions to share, and it really did make me think a lot about kind of why I was here. Like, not just on earth, like, at college and, like. what that says about my future and what I want for it. And also, just, like, human nature, what sets us apart? Why are we the species that, you know, wears clothes and has, like, different languages and also, you know, does things like go to college —what makes us do that?

Kirk: That’s a great question.

Kirk: That’s a great question. And it’s one that I had to spend a lot of time thinking about last semester.

Kirk: So why did you go?

Chloe Whalen: I kind of felt like it’d be a missed opportunity to not go to college, just because I’d always done well in school. You know academics always came easy to me. So I was, like, well, I got to go to college, and I guess I just decided, like, once I got past that sense of, like, obligation that I had felt and really thought about what makes me want to do this and not just the feeling that I have to.

Jon: It’s easy to say kids today don’t learn as well or as much as they used to. Sarah Igo, the intellectual historian, says she does think we’re in a moment where a whole lot of things are conspiring to make traditional learning more difficult.

Sarah Igo: Beyond Covid, beyond mental health crises, which are, of course, related, I think I would put first the war for attention on students’ brains. It’s really clear. And students are quite frank about this. You ask them, you know, about the reading for a class. They’ll say that they don’t read, they can’t read uninterrupted, that they can’t sit and read for a chunk of time. And that chunk of time, I think, is getting smaller and smaller. Too many things whistling, buzzing, etc. And there are some steps we can take to deal with that. I mean, one of the things we’re experimenting with, which I’m most excited about, is devoting some of our classes in the first-year class sessions to reading. I mean, this whole period for an hour in 15 minutes, all we’re going to do is read together.

Jon: And that brings us back to Maitland Jones, the organic chemist we heard at the top of this episode, who reportedly was fired for being too tough on his students. Jones says reducing digital distractions and increasing in-person attendance really matter.

Maitland Jones: Absolutely. Here’s an experiment: Give an exam on Friday. It’s graded that night. The students get their grades either late Friday night or Saturday morning. So they all know. The first lecture, Monday or Tuesday, you pass around a yellow pad and ask the students to just write their score. No names, nothing like that. Just the number, right? So you can get the average score of the people in class. And since you know the overall average, you can back out the average score for those who are not in class. And there’s a 20-point difference. So yes, it really matters whether you have your body in that classroom.

Kirk: Jones says it’s increasingly tempting to say, oh, you know, students are just struggling with the effects of Covid and mental health. But he says that’s not right.

Maitland Jones: The decline in student attendance and students’ ability to read and answer the right question was happening well before that. Covid was important because the sort of gentle decline and how things were going fell off a cliff. But it was happening before. And for 10 or 12 years, many of us noticed that not only were student grades going down and student attendance was going down, but their ability to read a question and to answer the right question was going down. There was an epidemic in answering the wrong question.

Kirk: So what was happening 10 years ago? Jones says the decline coincided with the widespread adoption of the iPhone.

Maitland Jones: It’s unbelievably seductive, and like social media in general, it’s so seductive that it seems to have dragged students away from certainly the classroom and, in a way, from the notion that learning requires pretty serious effort.

Kirk: Today, at 86 years old, Jones is retired and living in rural new Jersey in a renovated barn.

Maitland Jones: It’s got a great big room and a very good piano.

Kirk: With his newfound free time, he organizes jazz concerts, and he recently co-produced a six TV set of the complete works of Thelonius Monk.

Maitland Jones: Which, by the way, is absolutely great, thanks to the musicians.

Kirk: Do you miss the classroom and the lab? Would you still like to be teaching?

Maitland Jones: I would. On the other hand, how many years was it? Forty-three and 15? That’s a lot of years.

Kirk: A pretty good run.

Maitland Jones: I wouldn’t say that I didn’t have a good time doing.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsconnect@wgbh.org, or leave us a voicemail at 617-300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate.

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza. …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer. Production assistance from Diane Adame.

Jon: Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. All of our music is from college bands. The theme song and original music in this episode is by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

Kirk: College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

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 Students say the most important factor in choosing a college is academic quality. But the reality is, it’s really hard to tell how much college students actually learn. While there are a lot of tests to get into college, there are no exit exams to get out. Despite the soaring price of tuition and the
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