I've been in the ed biz for 34 years now, and I am really curious to see how this chain develops.  Those of on the faculty side of the desk are stuck (this is not a complaint) with what comes in the door on the first day of class.  I haven't tried to tally the changes over the last 30 years, save the students of the millennium generation (is that what we're supposed to call them?) are a tad more docile than the students I first taught during the tail end of the Viet Nam war.  Here's a couple of observations, and I'm wondering if they tally with any other faculty who may drop by to comment here.  First...let me say that I teach undergraduates exclusively, in History and American Studies, and about 60/40 per cent  general education requirement students (the havetas) and 40 per cent majors (the wantas)

Observations without proof:

• Men do less well in the required courses than women do.  They're less willing to devote time to things they're made to study, and more vocally resentful of the idea of required courses.
• Women do better on collaborative work then men do.  They're more group oriented in the ways they interact.  They're more willing to assist each other and more subtle about making sure the members of the group pull their weight.
• Women are more willing to make use of academic resources available to them:  tutors, the learning center, and faculty office hours.  Men, especially men who have diagnosed learning disorders (such as dyslexia) are far less likely to avail themselves of the assistance available to them by law.  They feel, somehow, that asking for help is a sign of weakness, and they'll take a lower grade rather than show that particular sign.
• Among the average students (we get those, and I rather like working with those) men are more likely to ask questions related to technical issues (how long, does it have to be typed) and women are more likely to ask clarification questions...what do you mean by. . .
• Neither sex handles the written language well.  They handle it worse, if anything, than students did thirty years ago.  Neither seems to think that grammar matters, or that clothing what they think in powerful language is important. 
• Women are more vocal than they were twenty years ago.  Neither sex is as vocal as it was thirty years ago.  Neither sex is as willing to contradict faculty positions or risk being wrong as the best students were when I began my career.  Some of my colleagues breathe a sigh of relief about this.  I rather miss the fracases into which some class sessions developed.

All in all, I wish my students worried less about what I thought and more about what they thought.  I can see why Americans have been so passive regarding power structures in general and government in particular.  Perhaps the one thing good which might develop out of the current national situation is the reawakening of youthful anger.

 Mike

Does it matter?  Not in the least.  Nor does it matter whether they get "A's" in any other subject.  What matters is whether or not they learn something.  This, of course, raises the question of what they should learn.  There's not the room to go into this in any detail (I'm thinking maybe a regular column/contribution space/or whatever you call it on education in democracy might make a nice addition here) but I'd suggest the following:*

• Critical analysis of ideas, including one's own
• Courage to express the truth as one sees it
• Commitment to developing the strongest control of language in the defense of one's understanding:  never lose an argument through weak writing/speaking skills
• "Losing" a debate to a stronger argument, i.e., changing one's mind, is not losing.  Substituting a superior idea and dismissing an inferior idea is winning all around
• This means keeping an open mind and listening with the same care one takes speaking.
• Question authority:  and, if you find yourself the authority, learn to enjoy being questioned.

When I was a younger teacher my college allowed students the option of taking any course pass/no credit.  There was no F grade.  In moments of feeling insecure about ourselves, some of my colleagues have tried to make us look a bit more like everyone else by such things as instituting the F grade and faculty rank. (When I began, there was no academic pecking order:  all of us were Members of Faculty, rather than Lecturers, Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, or Full Professors.)  I fought all that.  I lost all that.  Oh well.  

Students were (and are) reluctant to take classes on a pass/fail basis: though I mention the option every semester and, in fact, encourage it, I haven't had a student accept that option in at least three years.  I fantasize giving everyone an A the last semester before my retirement.  But I have too much fun still to consider leaving the academic world.

Ideally, there would be no grades at all, and current technology would allow a student's entire oeuvre to be the transcript.  All the papers, projects, whatever, could be digitized and stored on CDS or DVDs, and what one did would be what one carried out the door as a unified portfolio.  This would work for the arts, sciences, humanities, whatever.  I wouldn't be surprised if this became a practice sometime down the road.  There are a few colleges today which provide summative evaluations by faculty on transcripts rather than grades.    

Mike

*(I tried to create a button-list, but the preview thingy isn't showing it... hope this winds up readable)

Some of the statistics we've seen show that among affluent whites, boys and girls do just about the same work. It's only among the poor whites and minorities that girls do so much better than girls. Which suggests to me that race and class need to be just as big if not a bigger part of the argument than gender.

But it also suggests to me that the theory of "male entitlement" driven under-achievement is wrong--precisely those males who are likely to feel entitled--the upper class whites--are those who do NOT seem to be slacking off.

This whole thing may be much simpler than we all suspect. Men tend to be sicklier across the board--whether it's because women tend to get the more dominant traits from their two X chromosomes and we end up with all the wacky recessive ones, or because testosterone messes with our immune systems. So boys would be more vulnerable to malnutrition and poor health care than girls. The solution is then not to improve education for boys, but to improve nutrition and health care for all poor children.

I blame "gangsta" culture. It's incredibly pervasive even among kids who's parents are "lower middle class" - like the contractors and relatively prosperous blue collar neighbors of mine. Here in Chicago, black boys and latinos are basically in an entirely different category than their female counterparts. There are plenty of Latino/black girls in the so called magnet schools where you must test in - but not boys.

I think a chief presupposition of these notions about college meritocracy leading to a high status career are dead wrong. One of the worst students in my fraternity house - late papers, so-so grades - y'know. He's by far the richest alum - got himself a seat on the board of trade. I graduated with honors (and I'm pretty sure higher grades) from the same school and he literally makes 100x more than me.

Is the ability to conform - to "jump through hoops" - to "give the teacher what he wants" really the same thing as the ability to rake in the money in the real world?

Where are all these high paying "meaningful" careers? I thought I was gonna get one a' those when I was in college too!

Interesting point: in making women "high powered" did we actually help create more class disparity? Now we've got a society where every "high power" man needs a "high power" wife. So even in households that would be 'upper middle class' with just one "high power" spouse, now we have basically doubled income disparities IF those female held "high power" jobs were to go to men of slightly lesser status, AND these men would head a household with a single income.

You could say everyone's in a dual income family now, but then that comes back to a central question - maybe lack of parental time and attention created in our "latchkey kid" culture helps foster the problems boys are having. If the boy isn't in after school programs like his sister is, then he's even more at risk in spending hours at home unsupervised than he would have been with an at home mom.

“The men don’t seem to hustle as much,” said the same college girl quoted above. “I think it’s a male entitlement thing. They think they can sit back and relax and when they graduate, they’ll still get a good job. They see, to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they’ll be fine.”

I saw this attitude as a teacher in a small government town; the boys were remarkably lazy about school, the girls eager to please, but everybody knew who was going to get the jobs in the end and who wasn't (it was in Japan, a fairly long time ago, where things were more repressive than here).

But I question the idea that college women feel that they will be solely or largely responsible for housework and childcare. Is this still really true, in 2006?  It didn't seem true when I was in college 15 years ago; if girls today still have the views described by the Yale student, I think that the overacheivement problem that you describe isn't so much a matter of the continuing sense of entitlement among boys, so much as the lack of a sense of entitlement among girls.  The fight for equal rights, in the end, may come down to a fight to change expectations, for both genders.

Does it matter if anyone gets an A in Physics?

But I question the idea that college women feel that they will be solely or largely responsible for housework and childcare.

As a recent college grad (2003) from a so-called "Southern Ivy," I agree with the facts of this article.  My female friends tended to be more involved in planning their lives from the moment they set foot on campus then the boys, if not before, for precisely the reasons the article stated: because we knew if we wanted to have families and careers, we'd better hustle to fit it all in. 

 And yes, women still are largely responsible for housework- if nothing else, for arranging and organizing it.  Fact of life, proven again and again by studies.  I think most women are simply done railing against it and are grateful for the help they get. 

Most definitely; and especially for a student intending to major in a science and engineering field.

But the numbers are small* and barely count when trying to figure out what all the grade-mongering is about.

* 25% of entering freshman intend to major in a science and engineering field, but only 40% of them will get a degree in one of those fields. C-IDEA 2000

And yes, women still are largely responsible for housework- if nothing else, for arranging and organizing it. Fact of life, proven again and again by studies. I think most women are simply done railing against it and are grateful for the help they get.

This is true, but it's not the main issue.  The main issue is childcare, not housework.  Those women who have careers have to figure out whether to (a) get full-time help, which is expensive; (b) put their kids in daycare, which is often very hard to do; (c) put their career on hold and stay at home, which is also expensive if you rely on two incomes or (d) hope that their husbands want to stay at home.  Option D is the rarest, to be sure, but it's more common than it used to be, although it is the most expensive option of all for all but the minority of households where the wife earns more than the husband.  For most familiies, it comes down to A, B or C. 

I have no way to prove this, but I would suspect that if you were to ask most women what they would like at the time they actually have children, their answer would be different from when they were college students.  Many women think they want to continue their careers after kids but then when confronted with the reality of putting an infant in daycare a few months after birth or the expense of hiring a nanny, they realize it's not such an easy choice.  And that's not even counting any "maternal instinct" or anything else that might compel women to stop their careers.

It's just not as simple as saying women are cheated out of their careers by restrictive gender roles.

Then doesn't it follow that to a history major, an A is important?

I don't know what the answer is to this issue. I believe continuing education should be available to everyone for free, but then, I am aware that resources are limited (for various reasons) and those who work in education need to be compensated like everyone else. Grades are one way of allotting resources.

Fully being aware that anecdote is not the singular of data, I'm thinking of the men I know who teach in elementary school, and, in many cases, it's a second career. Their first careers happened to involve holding real authority, or having had major sucesses (Steve Wozniak, anyone)?

For example, some retired military personnel are going into elementary school, sometimes helped by an outreach program. They are often successful since it is forgotten that teaching is often a major part of any senior officer or NCO's job. Their maturity lets criticisms of "sissy" jobs bounce of their back.

The person I know best who did this indeed abandoned the practice of law, which bored him, to become the stay-at-home parent. When his son was old enough to go to school, John had been getting his education credentials, and soon was a highly successful elementary school teacher.

To a lesser extent, I've seen related things for high school. One friend, who has a doctorate in cognitive psychology and undergraduate training in mathematics education, has gone back to high school teaching for personal satisfaction. She's not a researcher by nature, but worked well as a manager of researchers until politics overwhelmed her. She's still open to being an academic administrator at the college level, as long as she does actual teaching and is also a mentor of young researchers, including finding grant financing for them.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Then doesn't it follow that to a history major, an A is important?

I think it has something to do with the untoward consequences likely to result from a failure to understand Bernoulli's Theorem and laminar flow as opposed to those attendant upon sleeping through the lecture on Ranke-ish historiography.

This may well be my own personal bias kicking in, but this passage struck me as a bit odd:

She has a dean's scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her time at American, made the dean's list almost every term and also led the campus women's initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor's degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master's.

"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month.' That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."

This article seems to be creating a "boy crisis" at the expense of what always seemed to me to be a key part of a liberal work environment - time away from work. The "crisis" is that, if I read the article correctly, men in college feel more free to take advantage of this time than women, who feel obligated to fill that time in with non-leisure activities than men do. The Times piece almost reads like it's expected for you to have three jobs, four internships, and finish your master's in four years, and that those who fail to do so are somehow delinquent in their studies.

What we value is job training.

Which may not be altogether a bad thing.

But then, college arts faculties would have to start teaching useful skills: rhetoric and writing, logic, mathematics and statistics. There's all too much student dilettantism and all too many faculty recruiting undergraduates for a quick intro to their specialized academic fields in order to justify the former's continued employment.

She just doesn't realize the guy's practicing to operate a Predator -- and all for her future security. Talk about being ungrateful!

I wasn't making a moral judgement on job training, I was pointing out that while we all pretend that a well rounded education is something we value, it isn't. In fact, anyone with a liberal arts/fine arts degree is a figure of sport who wasted his college opportunity.

You can't just blame gangsta culture--the gender gap exists with poor, white, rural kids as well.