I have reached an age when my peers keep repeating this. I also experience it, mainly when it comes to reading and general curiosity about society. Students do not have the kind of academic interests we had, they read very little, and they have other interests, the study itself is more about getting a relevant education for a job, and less about academic exploration.
For me, being at the University was a wonder and a gift, after having heard constantly that I could never live from reading books. Actually doing that still feels like I am cheating the system. However, the position of the University in society has changed dramatically since then, and we don't need to do a deep analysis of society to see this, it's enough with a little bit of statistics.
In this statistic we see the educational level of women and men, from 1980 and up to today. I started to study in 1980, at which point 0,7 % of the population were women with a long (more than 4 years) higher education. Not that many men had a longer university education, just 4,3 %, but still, the lack of gender balance was stark.
Today, the balance has tipped. If you look at the shorther education - less than 4 years - women have passed men with a lot, we are looking at 30% vs 20% of the population. More dramatic is however the fact that today 25% of the population, regardless of gender, have a shorter university education, as compared to 8,9% in 1980. In my lifetime, the education level of the entire population has been dramatically altered.
What does this means for today's students? It means that we educate a much larger percentage of the population, which means we educate a lot of people who wouldn't even want to start a University education in my day. And it's not that it was harder to get in. Back then the universities were mostly open, if you had a degree from high school. This was about interest, not ability.
Today, when the students are sorted by ability, they no longer solely study from interest, and since they compete with such a large educated group, they need the degrees on the job market to a much larger extent. So the motivation for study is very different, while we also educate a large subset of people who we would previously not even see at the University.
Basically, what I try to say, very inelegantly: students are not the same today as they were 45 years ago. We can't expect them to behave, perform, or be interested in the same things as back then. It isn't them, and barely not us, it is society that has changed.
Posts
