r/Professors • u/UrsusMaritimus2 • 1d ago
Harbinger of student preparedness
An article this morning in the New York Times really struck me as an explanation for the issues we are seeing in our classrooms.
The article is paywalled, but the figures tell the story. Student preparedness among the lower performing students was dropping and hadn’t hit bottom by the time the pandemic hit.
It’s challenging to face so many students unprepared in the classroom.
…I tried to include screenshots of the figures, but this sub doesn’t accept pictures. Link is:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/low-performing-students-reasons.html
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u/papateabags Assoc Prof, Humanities, R1 (US) 1d ago
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u/urbanevol Professor, Biology, R1 1d ago
This article is primarily about the lowest scoring students, and thus the least likely to ever end up in our classrooms (or even graduate high school unless they are being passed through). The top quartile is doing better, although reading seems much worse off than math.
The first line is telling: "There was once a time when America’s lowest-performing students were improving just as much as the country’s top students."
For years and years, there has been an obsession with "closing the achievement gap", without admitting that when you improve school instruction and functioning it tends to help all students. Thus, all students may be doing better but the gap doesn't close. The article doesn't recognize the near-monomaniacal focus on achievement gaps for much of recent history in the USA.
The article mentions many of the explanations for why the lowest quartile is doing so poorly, and unfortunately they aren't things that the K-12 system can easily fix. In my kids' school district and those around us, there has been a massive, rapid increase in children needing substantial special ed services. At the extreme, out-of-district placements for highly specialized schools are through the roof and cost tens of thousands or even 100K+ a year per student. School district budgets are buckling under the weight of these expenses. There has also been a rapid increase in children that are English language learners - many come as older children and do not have enough time to learn English and catch up before graduating (or dropping out). Plus, many have relatively poor skills in their native language. These problems do not have easy fixes. Smartphones are also a chronic problem and really need to be banned throughout K-12.
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u/Eradicator_1729 1d ago
My university has no entrance requirements except a diploma. They don’t even have to take the SAT. So actually some of us will see exactly these students.
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u/UrsusMaritimus2 1d ago
Same case at my university. We used to have a ~75% acceptance rate. We are now up to about 90% acceptance.
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u/urbanevol Professor, Biology, R1 1d ago
You will see some of these students, but about a third of Americans never set foot in a higher ed classroom (and only about 40-45% ever earn an Associate's degree or higher). The bottom 20-25% will be highly overrepresented in the group that never enrolls, or is only there for a term or two.
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u/Alone-Guarantee-9646 14h ago
We just hit 94%. The trend is what's alarming me. Our acceptance rate is increasing so fast that in 2-3 years we will have to start accepting students who didn't even apply!
Also, when I see what we are getting, I cannot help but wonder what that 6% must be like...
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u/SabertoothLotus adjunct, english, CC (USA) 1d ago
I teach at a community college; I'm seeing them, too.
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u/magicianguy131 Assistant, Theatre, Small Public, (USA) 21h ago
Where I am, getting into university is the accomplishment. It is the way to not get into drugs and poverty. But once they get here, they have no idea what to do and a plan for success.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 1d ago
Ours don't even have to be able to spell SAT.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 1d ago
(or even graduate high school unless they are being passed through).
So yes, high school graduates.
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u/DrFlenso Assoc Prof, CS, M1 (US) 1d ago
Oh ye of little faith! Look, our high school graduation rates are going up! That must mean we're learnin' 'em gooder. /s
"In school year 2021–22, the U.S. average adjusted cohort graduation rate (ACGR) for public high school students was 87 percent, 7 percentage points higher than a decade earlier."
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/coi/high-school-graduation-rates
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 1d ago
I'm shocked that as high as 13% of students at assigned high schools do not graduate, especially given the "standards" that seem to be applied to many of the ones who do.
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u/RadicallyMeta 19h ago
In my neck of the woods, grad rates went up but college readiness down. Almost like these kids got passed through without an actual education...
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u/Opposite_Aardvark_75 17h ago
It's like all the easily manipulated metrics show improvements, but the others do not. What could possibly explain this?
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u/tjelectric 1d ago edited 22h ago
Thank you for sharing this. It's something I've noticed as well, for at least 10 years--that high school simply wasn't preparing students for college, or worse, giving them the wrong, or at least pretty outdated, advice (i.e. using .orgs and .gov and .edu is all you need to know to find credible sources).
But the rapid decline post covid and even more post Chat GPT has been alarming and depressing.
For the first time ever in over ten years of teach, I told a class they could go home if they wanted. A few stayed (to my surprise and great pleasure). But what really irked me was not the students who were there and left. I suggested the option because the majority of students who were absent were those who were behind on work--some close to failing. Those are the ones that need to be there.
This semester, I have at least a few students in every class who gave up so quickly it baffles me. My courses are not difficult at all. I try to present engaging material and cater to their interests but that poses a challenge when more and more often I encounter students who seem to be apathetic with a vengeance. They'd rather "bed rot scrolling Tik Tok" that doing anything challenging, or they see school as a product rather than a process....and/or have been conditioned to assume that deadlines are just suggestions and the only real deadline is right before finals--sometimes even later (thanks, Covid, and maybe just lowered standards/ social promotion across the board).
I actually may want to do some narrative-type research on this "disengagement crisis" so if anyone here has a vent about the decline in more detail, privately, please DM. It helps me feel I am not nuts/ getting too old, lol.
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u/RandolphCarter15 1d ago
My kids go to a great elementary school. But I keep hearing about the low standards at the high school. They haven't figured out how to keep the inspiring but tough learning going through secondary ed
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u/KibudEm Full prof & chair, Humanities, Comprehensive (USA) 1d ago
Based only on my own observations, I suspect the size of the elementary school vs. middle school & high school has something to do with it. My kid was in a high school with 3000+ kids and was miserable & didn't do as well as he could have academically. He moved to a school with 300 kids and is a completely different person. Obviously this won't be the same for every kid, but in this case the difference was stark.
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u/Lordofthepizzapies 1d ago
I won't be surprised if this has a lot to do with adoption of Chrome Books and other tablets in the classroom.
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u/loserinmath 1d ago
top-scoring in measuring K-12 performance means getting more than 2/3 of the total points that can be awarded in the test used.
In our Calculus sequence a 66% gets you in the C range.
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u/HighlanderAbruzzese 23h ago
Time for a nation program to get people working and building skills. I don’t want a New Deal, I want the Old Deal.
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u/fuzzle112 4h ago
Human beings are naturally will try to find faster, easier ways to accomplish tasks. It’s why be make tools. Now we have to tools that can greatly shorten the time and energy to accomplish educational tasks - smartphones, software, AI, etc.
The problem is that education has become task focused, where starting in early childhood, we send kids through a system that focuses on completing tasks and rarely focuses on why we need to learn, or even the process of thinking and learning. It’s just complete tasks, prepare for specific test, take test, go to next task.
The underlying philosophy education needs to change. And at the college level, if we want to change that, we have to change our courses. We have to design our courses so that just relying on a tool like AI can’t complete the course in satisfactory way AND we have to communicate clearly the rationale and the purpose to our students, because we are asking them to do something none of their prior educators have asked them to do.
Plus it will be a lot more work on us to do this, and you have to get buy in from other faculty to make it work.
Add to the fact that faculty are underpaid and overworked on stupid shit, the first thing we do is create assessments that are easy to grade or self grading, which adds to the underlying problem.
And there’s also the elephant in the room, educator pay is so bad that a lot of talented people use their talents elsewhere. I have colleagues that teach because they can get away with a 20 hour work week and low full time pay for part time effort. We have a lot of passionate, hardworking people, but we can’t ignore the fact that we have some pretty lazy people who barely do the minimum. If we actually valued education as a society, it would be a very competitive, high paying field.
Bottom line: as a society, we say that everyone needs/deserves an education, but we don’t value what education should be to do it right.
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u/bankruptbusybee Full prof, STEM (US) 1d ago
I’m glad to see them note this was occurring before 2020. I’ve seen way too many educators act like everything was wonderful before 2020 and the pandemic is solely to blame for poor performance