Today's Average College Student

However bad you think it is, it’s worse.

However incompetent and uneducated you think American college students are, it’s worse.

As you thrill to the prospect of bringing jobs back to America, you should keep in mind that the human capital required to do many of the most advanced technical jobs simply does not exist.

One is struck, and not in the good sense of the word, at a Substack column by an anonymous college professor. Obviously, he cannot use his name lest his charges burn his house down. He uses the pseudonym, Hilariousbookbinder.

He concludes that today’s students cannot read, cannot write, cannot count and cannot think.

Hilarious explains:

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” 

Evidently, this degree of laziness, of failing to read closely, hurts exam results:

Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

He teaches philosophy. He has discovered that too many students  do not do the assigned reading:

The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok.

My students come to class without the books, which they probably do not own and definitely did not read.

Apparently, these barely literate students do not know how to write either:

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

Of course, the students all use AI to write their papers:

I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.

Worse yet, students no longer think it matters that they attend classes:

Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. Actually it was more than that, since I’m not counting excused absences or students who eventually withdrew. 

A friend in Mathematics told me, “Students are less respectful of the university experience —attendance, lateness, e-mails to me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility.”

Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about some problem.

Hilarious blames it on smartphones. He is not the first to make the observation:

They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

Normally, he would want to fail them all. And yet, that is not a reasonable possibility:

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for awhile, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

You might ask how these students are going to function when they go out into the real world and get jobs. But, that would be one more nightmare you do not need.