The Kids: They Think They’re Alright
Posted on January 6th, 2013 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
The BBC reports that while American college students think more highly of themselves than any time in the past half-century or so, they’re actually less-skilled and less-hardworking than at any time in the less half-century or so.
According to a survey of some 9, 000, 000 American college freshmen which began in 1966,
…over the past four decades, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of students who describe themselves as being “above average” for academic ability, drive to achieve, mathematical ability and self-confidence.
But…
…while the Freshman Survey shows that students are increasingly likely to label themselves as gifted in writing ability, objective test scores indicate that actual writing ability has gone down since the 1960s.
And while the freshmen say that they’re working harder, the number of hours they actually work—never very high—is actually significantly less than students of, say, 20 years ago.
Jean Twengue, a psychologist who’s studied the data, draws this conclusion:
Twenge blames the growth of narcissistic attitudes on a range of trends - including parenting styles, celebrity culture, social media and access to easy credit, which allows people to appear more successful than they are.
I’m buying it…but I wonder what people who actually deal with college freshmen think. Anyone?
3 Responses
1/6/2024 9:45 pm
This reminds me of a riff I did a few years ago, proposing a set of curricular requirements designed “to cut us all down to size, students and faculty alike.” So I have this sense, but whether things are getting better or worse, I can’t say. Most of the students I deal with these days are used to being told they are wrong, because they are students of engineering and computer science, so my sample is probably not helpful anyway.
But there is an interesting counter-narrative in the air, that students are under too much stress and the College needs to do more to relieve the pressure. Cf. Committee to Examine Stress. This doesn’t really feel right to me. A certain level of stress is productive, and people living without stress probably don’t ask themselves as many hard questions as they should.
1/7/2024 3:06 pm
I haven’t had students who think too highly of themselves and their aptitude: as ever, as students transition to college, they are concerned about making the cut in a newly more competitive or demanding environment.
I have found that my students seem, at least to me, to have less resilience or “grit.” What sets my most successful students apart from others is not aptitude alone, but the ability to work through failures and set-backs. I see more and more students struggling with this. They seem to have little experience and few resources to deal with set-backs, practically and emotionally. So these stresses overwhelm them.
The unfortunate thing is that the skills that get students into college (focused increasingly on amassing credentials) is not the same as what will help them achieve in college and after. For this reason, I’ve advocated for more opportunities for failure, but students will avoid these at all costs.
1/9/2024 1:04 pm
While Twenge is probably right about broad cultural trends, I think the “self-esteem movement” that started in public education 30 or so years ago has to take a lot of the more direct blame for student abilities and attitudes today. No one in my experience has shown this more clearly than the student who said indignantly in class once, “I don’t think we should get marked down just because we get the answer wrong.”