Josh, I recall reading "The idea of a Christian college" (the classic by Arthur Holmes) where he argues that college is for developing habits and virtues of thought and character, and asking "wait, where in the modern college experience are students getting to do this? What needs to go so we can make this happen?" (A fellow faculty member said to me, "do you think the administration actually believes this??" - of course implying that the current trend of higher education is pretty antithetical to this idea.) I do think we need to have a view - even from the top - of avoiding scope creep and "filling" of students' days.
However, my experience (as, it sounds like, is yours) is that students come to college already having the desire and the mindset to fill every moment. Is it the college prep mentality of "well-rounded" and lots of extracurriculars? Is it the fact that we even take our phones to the bathroom, lest we have a moment of boredom? Is it the redesign of the high school curriculum, or the de-valuing of education except as a means for employment? Probably all of these, but that just means it sometimes feels like a losing battle to remind students to resist this tendency.
I'm so thankful that you end with some practical ideas. I am teaching a 55+ student Intro to Psychology class this fall that will have predominantly college freshmen. I'm planning to rewrite my assignments to include several that you mention and orient the class towards preparing them for college success. It may not make a big dent in the "cram every moment" mentality, but then again - it might!
Thanks Katie, great thoughts. I also appreciate the reference to "The Idea of a Christian College". I've skimmed parts of it before, but this is a good nudge for me to go back and sit with it for a while this summer and let it marinate a bit.
I'll be curious to hear how you approach your intro psych class in the fall and would love to hear what questions/challenges arise as you try some things out there. I feel like it's important to help students to (re)build these ideas about college as soon after they arrive as possible. They come in with so many preconceptions and pressures. At the very least, we need to acknowledge those and bring them out into the light so that we can examine them and decide if those are really the goals we want to chase after. Perhaps from the list of prototypes, I would most highly recommend working some version of the College View assignment into your class. It's especially valuable when paired with a similar document that articulates our view of work and the world.
The college view assignment is exactly what I was thinking of incorporating - I already have some reflection assignments but don't see too much depth in those, so I'd like to encourage some more contemplation with a bigger assignment.
Good stuff Josh. Another thing to think about here is the role of advising in all this. This is top of mind for me as I teach a six-week asynchronous online course (we're in week 5) and I know several of the students are taking three of these courses right now, on top of working 40+ hours a week. The math just doesn't work -- each of these courses, being 3 credits on a 6-week schedule, is a roughly 20 hour per week commitment, at minimum, and there are immutably only 168 hours in a week. So these students have no margins whatsoever and a lot of them are currently coming unglued.
And somewhere upstream from this, nobody was there looking at their schedules and telling them that this was not OK, or in fact they had people telling them it was perfectly normal. The default goal for much academic advising seems to be to maximize throughput -- take as many classes as possible to make the path the graduation as short as possible -- and possibly to maximize university revenue. I don't think a single one of my students had an advisor saying something like "You CAN take on that kind of workload, but you SHOULDN'T because it's not good for you."
Robert, I can't tell you how often I say that line to students, along with "if you want to have a strong GPA, one rule of thumb is not to take so many classes at once" - and how quick I am to advise dropping classes when they come to me at midterms already burned out because they didn't take my advice when registering. Generally, they don't listen to this advice (though I don't doubt that some of your students just didn't get that advice).
At my institution, students have a strong belief that 1) they should finish college as quickly (and, related, cheaply) as possible and 2) that they can handle any kind of workload (especially if they were fairly good students in high school without trying very hard). Those two beliefs rest upon the bedrock belief that their worth is tied to their productivity, which is an incredibly difficult belief to shake, since it's so culturally engrained. (Thanks, capitalism and protestant work ethic, etc.)
Well, as a parent with a child in college, I am definitely in favor of her finishing college on a reasonable time frame because it's pretty expensive and the financial drain is real. That's yet another factor behind the insane workloads some students take on. Colleges today jack up prices, buoyed by predatory student loan practices, thereby incentivizing course loads that seem to minimize expenses but in fact make things worse in the end.
But of course you're right that the safest/sanest way to get through college in a reasonable time successfully is to avoid soul-crushing, brain-destroying workloads. Go slow to go fast in other words. As I know with my own kid, this is 100% true and also a very hard sell.
I almost titled this essay with the famous Navy Seal motto: "slow is smooth and smooth is fast." Feels like there is a deep truth there for our students too.
Great point, Robert. Thanks for highlighting the potential for advising to move the needle here. And yes, I love your example of simply doing the math on the hours. Calculating the number of hours that you're expected to spend on a course using the credits seems almost trivial, but far too few students do it.
I'm a bit partial to the crediting systems where every hour you spend each week on the course is explicitly accounted for. Caltech has had the best system that I have experienced. They list each course with three numbers: hours in class, hours in lab, and hours outside of class. So a standard lecture course might be something like 3-0-9. That way, you can simply add up the numbers from all your courses to get a sense of what your total time expectation should be. The simple exercise to count down against the 168 hours/week is golden.
Your comment here has sparked another idea for me: requiring my advisees to submit not only a proposed list of courses, but a complete weekly time budget that accounts for the time they expect to spend not only on their coursework, but on taking care of themselves. In essence, I'd make them fill out the 168-hour spreadsheet. This would give us a pretty clear way to help students see for themselves that "can" and "should" are not the same.
The impression it created for me is that American colleges are about income gathering hence the multitude of courses and hence this creates learners who are collecting certificates and therefore are overloaded with studies for which they really do not have the time for. As opposed to concentrating on a single product outcome of what knowledge is required to help a learner become an expert in the particular occupation they have chosen for themselves. Hence time bcomes the major problem. Correct me if I have misunderstood the problem.
Russell, I think it significantly matters what kind of college. I work at a liberal arts college, which isn't so much focused on income generation (it's expensive, but the cost of tuition has not risen at the level of inflation, and we have a significant endowment that helps keep costs from being exorbitant), but is focused on well-rounded habits of learning. This can be tricky because students don't see the "point" of a math class if they're going into literary arts, or a literature class when they are going to be engineers, etc.; it's also tricky because that means *more classes* as each discipline argues for how important their field is to the core curriculum. This likely plays out very differently in a technically focused education, though I wouldn't be surprised if the issues is still present.
Josh, I recall reading "The idea of a Christian college" (the classic by Arthur Holmes) where he argues that college is for developing habits and virtues of thought and character, and asking "wait, where in the modern college experience are students getting to do this? What needs to go so we can make this happen?" (A fellow faculty member said to me, "do you think the administration actually believes this??" - of course implying that the current trend of higher education is pretty antithetical to this idea.) I do think we need to have a view - even from the top - of avoiding scope creep and "filling" of students' days.
However, my experience (as, it sounds like, is yours) is that students come to college already having the desire and the mindset to fill every moment. Is it the college prep mentality of "well-rounded" and lots of extracurriculars? Is it the fact that we even take our phones to the bathroom, lest we have a moment of boredom? Is it the redesign of the high school curriculum, or the de-valuing of education except as a means for employment? Probably all of these, but that just means it sometimes feels like a losing battle to remind students to resist this tendency.
I'm so thankful that you end with some practical ideas. I am teaching a 55+ student Intro to Psychology class this fall that will have predominantly college freshmen. I'm planning to rewrite my assignments to include several that you mention and orient the class towards preparing them for college success. It may not make a big dent in the "cram every moment" mentality, but then again - it might!
Thanks Katie, great thoughts. I also appreciate the reference to "The Idea of a Christian College". I've skimmed parts of it before, but this is a good nudge for me to go back and sit with it for a while this summer and let it marinate a bit.
I'll be curious to hear how you approach your intro psych class in the fall and would love to hear what questions/challenges arise as you try some things out there. I feel like it's important to help students to (re)build these ideas about college as soon after they arrive as possible. They come in with so many preconceptions and pressures. At the very least, we need to acknowledge those and bring them out into the light so that we can examine them and decide if those are really the goals we want to chase after. Perhaps from the list of prototypes, I would most highly recommend working some version of the College View assignment into your class. It's especially valuable when paired with a similar document that articulates our view of work and the world.
The college view assignment is exactly what I was thinking of incorporating - I already have some reflection assignments but don't see too much depth in those, so I'd like to encourage some more contemplation with a bigger assignment.
Good stuff Josh. Another thing to think about here is the role of advising in all this. This is top of mind for me as I teach a six-week asynchronous online course (we're in week 5) and I know several of the students are taking three of these courses right now, on top of working 40+ hours a week. The math just doesn't work -- each of these courses, being 3 credits on a 6-week schedule, is a roughly 20 hour per week commitment, at minimum, and there are immutably only 168 hours in a week. So these students have no margins whatsoever and a lot of them are currently coming unglued.
And somewhere upstream from this, nobody was there looking at their schedules and telling them that this was not OK, or in fact they had people telling them it was perfectly normal. The default goal for much academic advising seems to be to maximize throughput -- take as many classes as possible to make the path the graduation as short as possible -- and possibly to maximize university revenue. I don't think a single one of my students had an advisor saying something like "You CAN take on that kind of workload, but you SHOULDN'T because it's not good for you."
Robert, I can't tell you how often I say that line to students, along with "if you want to have a strong GPA, one rule of thumb is not to take so many classes at once" - and how quick I am to advise dropping classes when they come to me at midterms already burned out because they didn't take my advice when registering. Generally, they don't listen to this advice (though I don't doubt that some of your students just didn't get that advice).
At my institution, students have a strong belief that 1) they should finish college as quickly (and, related, cheaply) as possible and 2) that they can handle any kind of workload (especially if they were fairly good students in high school without trying very hard). Those two beliefs rest upon the bedrock belief that their worth is tied to their productivity, which is an incredibly difficult belief to shake, since it's so culturally engrained. (Thanks, capitalism and protestant work ethic, etc.)
Well, as a parent with a child in college, I am definitely in favor of her finishing college on a reasonable time frame because it's pretty expensive and the financial drain is real. That's yet another factor behind the insane workloads some students take on. Colleges today jack up prices, buoyed by predatory student loan practices, thereby incentivizing course loads that seem to minimize expenses but in fact make things worse in the end.
But of course you're right that the safest/sanest way to get through college in a reasonable time successfully is to avoid soul-crushing, brain-destroying workloads. Go slow to go fast in other words. As I know with my own kid, this is 100% true and also a very hard sell.
I almost titled this essay with the famous Navy Seal motto: "slow is smooth and smooth is fast." Feels like there is a deep truth there for our students too.
Great point, Robert. Thanks for highlighting the potential for advising to move the needle here. And yes, I love your example of simply doing the math on the hours. Calculating the number of hours that you're expected to spend on a course using the credits seems almost trivial, but far too few students do it.
I'm a bit partial to the crediting systems where every hour you spend each week on the course is explicitly accounted for. Caltech has had the best system that I have experienced. They list each course with three numbers: hours in class, hours in lab, and hours outside of class. So a standard lecture course might be something like 3-0-9. That way, you can simply add up the numbers from all your courses to get a sense of what your total time expectation should be. The simple exercise to count down against the 168 hours/week is golden.
Your comment here has sparked another idea for me: requiring my advisees to submit not only a proposed list of courses, but a complete weekly time budget that accounts for the time they expect to spend not only on their coursework, but on taking care of themselves. In essence, I'd make them fill out the 168-hour spreadsheet. This would give us a pretty clear way to help students see for themselves that "can" and "should" are not the same.
Interesting read.
The impression it created for me is that American colleges are about income gathering hence the multitude of courses and hence this creates learners who are collecting certificates and therefore are overloaded with studies for which they really do not have the time for. As opposed to concentrating on a single product outcome of what knowledge is required to help a learner become an expert in the particular occupation they have chosen for themselves. Hence time bcomes the major problem. Correct me if I have misunderstood the problem.
Russell, I think it significantly matters what kind of college. I work at a liberal arts college, which isn't so much focused on income generation (it's expensive, but the cost of tuition has not risen at the level of inflation, and we have a significant endowment that helps keep costs from being exorbitant), but is focused on well-rounded habits of learning. This can be tricky because students don't see the "point" of a math class if they're going into literary arts, or a literature class when they are going to be engineers, etc.; it's also tricky because that means *more classes* as each discipline argues for how important their field is to the core curriculum. This likely plays out very differently in a technically focused education, though I wouldn't be surprised if the issues is still present.