Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges | Hacker News Reader

Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges

psychologytoday.com

66 pointsevo_989 comments

"Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need to be certain about things. For many of them, failure is seen as catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success are more important than learning and autonomous development."

This is in part a consequence of test-based education. Students have been told for a very long time that failing important tests like the SAT/ACT will have irrevocable consequences that are negative. Most of their learning has occurred in the light of this danger, and so, failure is a big deal. Actual learning or autonomous development are pieces to spruce up the resume after the good scores are in the bag.

I don't think the "irrevocable" part is the main problem of test-based education. You need the test to know where you are. If you prepare well, most important tests in life can be managed. What is really the problem is the systematic punishment of failure. /This/ indeed can have irrevocable consequences for certain personality types. I grew up in France and this "punishment of failure" teaching system is a major problem of France's education system.

Really, it sounds to me as though the main problem might be that these kids are coddled before they reach university and maybe have unrealistic expectations of themselves.

I think they may not have a fair assessment of their own abilities because of prior hand holding.

I haven't seen the emotional catastrophe element that this article talks about. But, I did witness the abuse of the faculty.

I saw the entitlement my generation is often accused of first hand. Many students were hostile, rude and lazy. I gained a reputation for sticking up for professors and calling my fellow students out on their behavior. In part I do blame the staff. Though maybe they couldn't gain control because their hands were tied by policy.

Speak for yourself; I saw quite a bit of overt hostility from the faculty at my schools. Things like berating and humiliating students in front of the class, refusing to meet with students or sign necessary paperwork for them to proceed, and a frequent attitude that teaching classes and dealing with students was the absolute worst part of their day, an unnecessary burden that they didn't have the time for. Quite frankly if I should end up having kids of my own, I'm doubtful whether I will even want them to attend college if it's still the same environment by then. Worse yet, I'm afraid all these articles about millennial entitlement just work to reinforce and justify these attitudes among teachers and faculty.

Out of curiosity, where did you go to school? I've never seen anything as dramatic as you describe.

Ohio State University, Middle Tennessee State University, and Tennessee Tech University. The experiences described were spread across all three. Oddly enough the school where I (mostly) didn't experience those kinds of problems was the local community college I attended for an associates (a better way to get gen ed requirements out of the way, imo).

Yeh, I know my case is anecdotal. I would have loved it if the situation was reversed. A student shouldn't have to stick up for faculty.

For me this wasn't just one class this was many classes and many students. So I think that the entitlement speak is of valid concern.

I do have to say that I did get into a bit of a war with the head of the CS department. He told me to cheat on a group project in order to make him and the department look good by doing all the work myself. I did give him some choice words and yes it was that much harder for me to graduate(this was my senior project). That was the only time I ever saw the lack of morality/respect first hand among faculty.

> Really, it sounds to me as though the main problem might be that these kids are coddled before they reach university and maybe have unrealistic expectations of themselves.

This is a problem I observed and experienced myself. Many kids (especially at elite schools) have been carefully honed to excel in high school and on tests so that they can get into good colleges. They start to think that they are massively intelligent and can do anything as long as they apply the same techniques.

Then they arrive at college, where all of a sudden a massive proportion of the population is at least as smart as them, if not smarter or harder working. Just as they are dealing with a bunch of emotionally roiling events such as living alone and having to make new friends, kaboom, their goes their overinflated sense of self esteem.

Sometimes I wonder whether the problem isn't actually over preparation for testing - because that's where the stress is.

When I was at prep school exams were just a special week at the end of each term (maybe year, it was a while ago) - but not much significant effort was made to prepare in any way. They were simply a measure of how much had been gleaned from lessons.

A couple of weeks later we'd get a special "exam form orders" describing our results in relation to our peers (which happened every fortnight regardless - it's just this one was based on exams). Some people cared more than others, but I don't remember anyone being distraught before or after.

I'm also not sold on the fact that the kind of revision typically practised leads to long term retention - but that's just my humble opinion.

Exactly.

We've set up a system that punishes failure to the point of exclusion. Whereas, creativity and learning can only really flourish in an environment that allows (and hopefully encourages) one to try things which aren't necessarily guaranteed to succeed.

Let's also be sure not to conflate this fact with an anecdotal story about a student who was afraid of a mouse, which is rather silly.

Right. I'm surprised the author of this piece is surprised. As someone as apparently knowledgeable about education as he is, you'd think this would be top of the list. All the grit in the world doesn't matter if the places you apply to want a degree, the right kind of degree, the right schools, with the right grades, and most importantly, that the filters keep getting tighter and the requirements made more ridiculous (since the numbers of people who apply to any given job increases and you need a way to keep that pile of resumes manageable.)

Yup. In fact I'm currently studying for a GMAT for a finance masters' entrance exam (don't ask me why) and in my first day I already lost count of how many times I've read or heard in study material/videos that 'it doesn't matter if you understand the question or know the answer, if you can strategically derive what the multiple choice answer should be'.

Why is this even a thing? Because the tests are done under quite a bit of time pressure and not answering a question doesn't count for 0, it actually penalises your score.

So here I am, in my early 20s with a bachelors, decent education, co-founded and ran a profitable startup for a few years, and I'm studying for a test by learning how to game the test, rather than learning the knowledge that's supposed to be tested.

In fact, a quick anecdote, I literally just read the introduction to the official gmat review which in the very first pages talks about a chunk of the book that'll be on 'guessing technique', and states 'What differentiates good test takers from great test takers is the ability to guess in such a way as to maximize the chances for a correct answer.' just to give you an idea about what top universities expect me to spend my time on in order for them to decide whether to accept me or not. Isn't that insane? It then follows 'With some practice and some insight into how ACT writes its wrong answers, you can increase your odds of guessing correctly from the 20 percent of a completely random guess to 50 percent or higher.' Note that this guessing aspect can make all the difference between scoring just well vs sufficiently for entry somewhere.

If I fail the test, I can't get into the school. The school that offers courses that I've already taken a few years back which were never certified, to learn things that I've already applied in the workspace, just so I can land a job that I can demonstrably already do, in part because the company doesn't want to take the risk of hiring me without this degree (unless I have exceptional work experience, something you generally only get recognised for sans a diploma after your 30s), and in part because the government in my country is pushing finance guys to be certified.

So do I want to take a risk? No not really, not in this environment. Do I really care for this test? Absolutely not. The degree? Nope. But I'm expected to care to actually land a job, and if I don't land that job, I can only get ahead on a combination of extreme grit, reinventing the wheel and a fair bit of luck by pushing out on my own. But that doesn't mean I see this GMAT or this Master's as a 'measure of success', it's a pointless exercise I'd rather do without, but failing it disqualifies me from many opportunities and puts me on a path of most resistance. I feel some decades ago there was still a sense of career mobility, now a master's degree is becoming a default requirement that often isn't anywhere near enough. With all these formal and strict requirements, there's not a lot of room for a focus autonomous learning, only on the periphery, as it's usually not certified/accredited and thereby not recognised and thereby not of value when applying for a job. Software engineering (portfolio) experience feels like a rare exception to this rule.

If you think about it, this is often the case in the working world too. It often matters less whether you know something than whether you know how to strategically derive something. This involves an element of risk.

In tests specifically, you can usually knock out a couple obvious wrong answers. Then, if you are still not sure, you are supposed to decide which is the best answer. You take a risk with that decision.

To give an analogy from programming, say you are not sure of which algorithm applies best to a situation. You are stuck between two solutions which both look good. You can either stay stuck all day meticulously deciding which is best, or you can actually get work done and take a risk on which one you feel works best in the situation.

If you take your time on deciding which works best, surprise, a competitor took a hunch on a solution, got to market first, and put your company out of business. It doesn't even matter if your solution was better in the long run. (See: Windows vs Mac OS in the 90s)

It's not just blind guesses. It's deciding which guess gives you the best chance of getting it right. This is what 'guessing technique' is about. Of course, you don't go in to a test not knowing anything at all, then you will end up at the 20% of a completely random guess. You go in with a solid foundation, giving you the ability to answer the "easy questions", and giving you the tools you need to get "50% of higher" on the other questions.

"So do I want to take a risk?" Absolutely, you do. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The alternative is extreme grit and reinventing the wheel, which (for the vast majority of people) leads to quick burnout and psychological issues.

Nah. Today I reached the chapter and it talks about for example, if you have 4 multiple choice questions, choose the one which has the most similarities to other questions. Why? Because questions are designed to have misleading options for answers, such that the answers will have some elements of the right answer in them to mislead you, making it quite unlikely that an answer which is radically different from all the others is the right answer, and making it more likely than average (randomly guessing, 1/4) that an answer which is similar to others is the right answer.

So if one answer is x^2+y/sqr(z) and another is 15y/sqr(z) and a third is 15/xy/sqr(z), then they suggest c because you have the most elements in common with the other answers, 15, x, y/sqr(z). This is literally in a McGraw-Hill (one of the 3 big billion-dollar education publishers) book on the GMAT.

It has nothing to do with any real world, practical application, and it's completely different from what you describe which are completely sensible approximation techniques. These aren't approximation techniques, they're guessing techniques and it's total bs. It's not teaching you a strategy to learning, to approaching problems to find meaningful solutions, or to approximate answers to questions, it's teaching you purely to game a test and the real world doesn't work like that.

Hmm, what I describe is what I learned when taking the SAT years ago. Never took the GMAT though, not sure how different it would be. The suggestion does sound ridiculous, although they are telling you how they design the test.

I would hope in later chapters they talk about good approximation techniques, and leave the similarities technique as an absolute last resort.

How about instead of placing the blame on helicoptering, which may in fact be part of the problem, we consider something else: students being realistic about what failure means to their future.

We're in an era of hypercompetition, increased barriers to entry for even menial jobs, massive wealth concentration, vanished upward mobility (and easy downward mobility), stagnant wages, credentialism, offshoring/outsourcing, and vanished company loyalty. Viewed in this light, reactions of students to every negative statement or bad grade is completely rational: with the incredible number of people applying for each job, and the ever-increasing requirements to get one (looking at GPAs, etc.), students know that even minor issues now can mean large issues in the future.

Maybe students aren't hypersensitive; instead they're hyper-attuned to the realities they're facing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3999248

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_...

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/how_elite_firms....

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/ernest-y...

Another thing I'd add, which is related, is that grit, while important is far from sufficient for success. It would be great if this was more widely appreciated. I wrote a short post on it: https://medium.com/@opirmusic/the-character-hypothesis-neces...

Side note: I tried to comment on the article, but the spam filter there is incredibly aggressive.

Anecdotal experience vaguely related to this—when I was in college (2010-2014) most people I knew weren't there to learn for the joy of learning, they were there to get a job they could support themselves with. Most of them believed there was no possible way to live above the poverty line without a college degree and were accordingly desperate in their efforts to earn one. A "hard" or "unfair" class was several thousand dollars down the drain and a potential future of eternal poverty, not a learning experience. I often heard the expectation stated by my peers that everyone should pass a class as long as they put in a good faith effort, because that was only "fair."

I don't know from personal experience, but I imagine it was much easier to be blase and accepting of failure when you could pay for two semester's worth of classes with one summer job (my summer job paid double minimum wage and still couldn't cover more than 4 credits, and I went to a public in-state university).

So, to rephrase, most of your classmates had a grossly distorted view of the importance of minor academic setbacks as well as a ridiculous sense of entitlement, which supports what the article was saying.

Your comment is the equivalent of "no, it's not, nananana"…

No, it's not (heh) — it's actually a faithful translation of what he said. His description of his peers is a description of students who have an objectively wrong perception, lack resilience, and are emotionally fragile, which is what the article is talking about.

(Your characterization seems odd to me anyway. I don't see where the person I was responding to made an assertion that something is so I don't know how you could read my response as being "no, it's not"; he simply provided an anecdote of his peers' mindset and I rephrased it.)

The description of college being expensive enough to be extremely harmful to the students well being is not inaccurate. The rest is true they did act entitled but then they expect that they have a right to a meaningful life which (in their eyes) requires both college and money.

Your grand-parent comment was about refuting the conjecture that it's due to helicopter parenting or a weakness of the students; then your parent comment was written as a supporting anecdote, and finally your comment claimed that the anecdote is not in support of the refutation at all, however without showing any efforts to explain why ("nananana").

My point was more along the lines of—failing a course is goes beyond being just a "minor academic setback" for a lot of people. It's really only that if one of the following applies to you: [there are multiple thousands of dollars available to you to retake the course, you don't need the specific course to graduate and have a GPA that can handle the F, you have some sort of future worked out for yourself where you don't need a college degree to make a living]. I knew people on scholarships where an F in a course was absolutely the end of a chance at a college degree (and thus, in their minds, the end of their shot at a middle class lifestyle) because of the terms of the scholarship and their inability to pay for classes otherwise. One girl was on a particularly stringent scholarship that she would have lost if she ever earned below a B- in any of her classes, regardless of her overall GPA—I could see her being hysterical over a C and I don't think her emotional fragility would be entirely misplaced. Her parents made too much to qualify her for government aid, but they weren't able/willing to pay for her classes.

Were people being entitled? Yes, definitely, almost everyone I knew felt entitled to a C- or above just for showing up to class every day, turning in the work, and paying the exorbitant tuition fees in the first place. But a poor grade was a multiple thousand dollar loss at best to people widely incapable of making more than minimum wage. I think the general emotional response is warranted in a lot of cases.

You make it sound like if you're not #1 in your class you'll be living homeless on the street. This is the exact type of exaggeration the article is discussing. There are many things in between Nobel Prize Winner and unemployed.

There are some left, but those middle positions are 1) no longer safe in the way they were once perceived to be and 2) vanishing faster all the time. The trend shows that "hollowing out" has been occurring for quite a while:

http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/04/27/how-do-yo...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/28/ho...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/the-holl...

The choice is more between "member of various elite / professional jobs" and "Starbucks"; there is no exaggeration.

As with several other comments in this thread, I think your worries about are exaggerated and even wrong.

The fact is that the common American has far more than anyone has in the past, and even the poor aren't fairing too badly, according to the US Census as reported here [1]

Your comments about vanishing upward mobility are very much debatable. There's plenty of reason to think that mobility hasn't changed. [2]

Perhaps even more surprising to some, while the middle class may indeed be shrinking, statistics show that this is happening by squeezing them up toward higher incomes [3] (this doesn't contradict #2, since it's a difference in counting income ranges versus n-tile demographics)

It's really not such an awful world out here. Some people just seem to want us to think so.

[1] http://dailysignal.com/2015/09/16/are-there-really-40-millio...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/business/upward-mobility-h...

[3] https://www.aei.org/publication/yes-the-middle-class-has-bee...

EDIT : in para #1 I said "Senate" when I meant "Census"

Try these, the data in the other direction is very strong:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/the-downward-ramp....

http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/04/27/how-do-yo...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/28/ho...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/the-holl...

Not just a US phenomenon either. Here's a UK perspective:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9000951/the-missing-midd...

I'll grant that my points are in some ways controversial.

But the very fact that someone can come up with a study at all that disagrees with your argument is sufficient to prove that statements like what we're seeing in this thread - "if you're not in the top 1% you're doomed to a life of drudging misery" are absurdly exaggerated.

That 1% claim is hugely absolutist, so it takes only very weak evidence that broad swathes of the country are content and even happy, to disprove the chicken little argument.

Some of those statements might be hyperbolic to a degree, but it's really a question of degree, not the overall trends. My personal characterization was 'The choice is more between "member of various elite / professional jobs" and "Starbucks"', which I don't think is all that hyperbolic if you look at the actual "hollowing out" data from Autor, Stiglitz, et al.

If you read only one link, make it this one: http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 - the study is one of the universally acknowledged and well-respected around. As far as the happiness quotient for the broad swathes, I think the polls do contradict you:

http://www.pollingreport.com/right.htm

Edit: here's one from the AEI, a right-learning source you linked to (Tyler Cowen, a popular right-libertarian blogger's book "Average is Over" deals with this as well. Definitely worth a read if you haven't):

https://www.aei.org/publication/more-evidence-average-is-ove...

No, the students are indeed hypersensitive and they (and you) have a grossly distorted perception of the impact of objectively minor setbacks.

Getting a C on a paper won't ruin anyone's life, nor for that matter would failing an entire course (which is basically impossible to do these days anyway, unless you willfully refuse to even try).

Such academic hiccups are not catastrophic and the proper response is not for a student to raise holy hell about how unfair the world is and how the professor smells bad and how they should totally be given a special exemption to re-do things until they get the grade they desire.

Failure should be received as a signal that a student needs to work harder or change something in the way they're approaching their education. Nothing more.

(And obviously the state of the economy has nothing to do with why a grown adult would feel the need to seek counseling because someone called them a bad name or they saw a mouse.)

I'm definitely not addressing people scared of mice or bad words, those things may well be explained by helicoptering as I stated in my first sentence; I am addressing "hypersensitivity" to bad grades, which I think is rational.

Failing a class often has devastating consequences in college. Scholarship programs generally have strict GPA requirements, and once lost cannot be regained. Nursing programs are particularly harsh. Failing a class by a percentage point may trigger the student needing to retake an entire year's worth of classes, regardless of the grades received in the other courses. The cost of an additional full year of tuition is not a hiccup.

> Getting a C...is basically impossible to do these days anyway...

Depends where you go. A great many respectable schools can be brutal depending on your major. I had an undergrad class that had a 50% failure/drop rate, and I've had two graduate courses with 50-60% failure/drop rates.

>the proper response is not for a student to raise holy hell about how unfair the world is and how the professor smells bad and how they should totally be given a special exemption to re-do things until they get the grade they desire

It's very interesting that this comes up so often with regard to Millenials. I'm a Millenial, and have been a TA in graduate courses targeted at working professionals. I have never seen anyone argue like these folks do. (Average age is late-30's to mid-40's.) Here's a sample exchange:

"I have been developing software longer than you've been alive! Your tests must be wrong - there is absolutely no way that my code failed."

Sorry, but everyone else seemed to pass just fine. Look, the bug is right there in your code.

"Well, that's not fair! You didn't include that edge case in the problem statement, and my solution works fine for everything else. Besides, I only need to add a two-line `if` statement to handle it, so give me half credit."

(Aside, I am stunned by how often I'm _told_ how to grade by Boomers & Xers.) You were already given partial credit; your final grade is consistent with the grading guidelines for the assignment.

"Well, are you going to curve at least? My employer won't reimburse if I don't get at least a B."

The grading criteria are covered in the course syllabus.

Don't get me wrong - Millenials are a pain in the neck, too. But fragile egos, demanding personalities, and pouting over poor marks are not unique to the young.

> Another thing I'd add, which is related, is that grit, while important is far from sufficient for success.

This, 1k times. I've worked hard to be successful and I see lots of people who've failed because they won't put in the effort so it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking they lack grit.

Then I get a big ol' dose of reality when I see my brother-in-laws who work harder every day than I've ever had to work. Or I see my father-in-law who worked at a factory for years, destroyed his back, and at the time of retirement made somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/4 what I make.

It's important to work hard, but it's also important to aim that hard work in the right direction.

"What failure means to their future" can't be the explanation. I read the comment thread attached to the article before coming back here - heresy, I know - and the very first thing that leapt out at me was a long series of comments from middle-school teachers about how they saw the same thing. Clearly kids that age aren't thinking much about how a bad grade will affect their ability for a job. For one thing, at that stage in their academic careers it doesn't. Even if it did, and even in towns with excellent schools (like my own), that's just not something middle schoolers are worldly enough to worry about. If they're showing the same symptoms as the college students, there's clearly something else going on.

Articles like this remind me of "old economy steve".

Please, Professor with tenure and a pension, tell us how children facing an increasingly winner-take-all world in which failure actually is catastrophic are too afraid to take risks.

That's an argument for why it's reasonable to be wary of taking financial risks. It's not an argument for why it's reasonable to call the police and a psychotherapist because you saw a mouse in your apartment.

You'll always find people like that in University.

The interesting thing is the younger generation treating education like a commodity. And given tuition costs, they have a right to. This will inevitably cause tension between the academics and the students.

The most damaging cause it will have is on society long term, as higher learning traditionally has been used for demonstrating the capability of an individual. Instead we're seeing the capability for obtaining ~$30k debt.

> You'll always find people like that in University.

The point of the article was that we are finding more people like that, on average, than we were in the past.

People's feelings aren't necessarily reasonable. If you grow up almost exclusively in an environment where failure can snowball fairly easily, which school is, and everyone tells you it's really important not to fail in that context, whether or not that's true, then that will be likely to be a large part of the pattern of emotion you have when confronting failures outside that context.

an increasingly winner-take-all world in which failure actually is catastrophic

I find this surprising. In what way is, in today's world, failure any more catastrophic than at any time in the past?

Are there very many examples of people who have never failed at anything? For the rest of the population who has experienced failures, am I to understand that we're now doomed?

Student wages are lower, student debt is higher.

I think a similar development can also be seen in countries without any tuition fees, but my sample size could be too small to say that with certainty.

But that's not winner-take-all, that's just a situation where investment must carefully be coordinated against projected future returns.

I am also waiting for an explanation of this winner-take-all idea. A couple/few posters have mentioned it. Sounds quite depressing.

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303...

Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the highest brackets. The delta between someone in the top 5% and the top 1% has increased markedly. Competition for that 1% slot has increased dramatically. Tenure-track positions now have thousands of applicants.

In tech, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. made tens of thousands of millionaires. Google made, say, thousands. Facebook made, say, hundreds. Instagram made ten. (I exaggerate for comic effect.)

I don't entirely disagree with the authors general point: kids are extremely shielded today, but I don't think he is properly sympathetic to the context in which kids (and parents) find themselves in. To the point of a comical lack of self-awareness. (In fairness this is an article in psychologytoday.)

Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the highest brackets.

You're making the classic zero sum game error. And the language of the rest of your reply should reveal this: " Microsoft, Oracle, etc. made tens of thousands of millionaires"

Notice where I quoted you, I emphasized the word "made". This was indeed the correct word to use, because Gates, Ellison, etc., did indeed create something. They got rich not by taking something away from me or you or anyone else. They got rich by building something new, something so compelling that people willingly gave them money, and considered themselves better off having done it.

The creation of Windows, of Oracle, etc., made the world a better place. And some of that betterment is reflecting in the wallets of those guys. They're not holding anything that would rightfully be yours, they made the economic pie bigger, and are enjoying a portion of that growth.

I agree with your general point regarding wealth, although I do think it's worth considering that absolute real wages are down significantly from their peak, and academia, in particular, is a brutally tough place to get a stable job now.

Humans generally rate themselves in relative terms: how are they doing compared to the people "around them". This wealth gradient has become more extreme in the last thirty years, leading to more intense competition for the higher slots. Additionally, modern media has brought more people "around us." I say this descriptively and without any value judgement, simply to explain the current behavior of children and parents.

It's a long conversation that is hard to carry out in HN comments, but suffice to say that despite the fact that I lean stoic, I cut parents and kids quite a lot of slack given the context they find themselves in.

Thanks for your rational response. I think what you're describing is very much the point, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel it a bit myself.

But if there exists a tiny set of super-rich people, that only affects our perceptions, and doesn't do anything to actually make our life worse. Most of us will never even come into contact with the stratospherically rich; why should their theoretical existence bother us?

Disproving my own point a bit... I actually do regularly come into contact with one such person. My employer is a billionaire (or so says Forbes magazine), and I interact with her regularly. But, believe it or not, she's a real person. She drives her own car, I've bumped into her at CostCo, and so on. And I'm really glad that she is so successful, because her success is the success of the company that puts food on my table, pays my mortgage, etc. I can see that it's her skill, her work, that has built the enterprise, and I'm grateful that she continues to invest those into its success. And for what it's worth, I know that she personally feels the responsibility of the livelihood of a couple of thousand employees on her shoulders.

"Winner" is a reflection of social status in this context, it's not a measure of some objective state.

Maybe the root cause is the "devil take the hindmost" attitude that came in with Reagan and the general decline of the welfare state.

It's funny how the obesity epidemic started in the 1980's too...

Not directly related to the article content, but did anyone notice the odd caption/credit under the top article image? It reads "Source: Google images approved for reuse." which I haven't seen before.

A quick reverse image search reveals that it's by this guy on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/topgold/6273248505/) and carries a CC Attribution license, which this article is clearly not in compliance with. It's a publisher owned website an you would think they know a bit about copyright.

>"Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world."

After 3+ years of university, this has felt like a form of doublethink on the part of some professors and almost all administrators when it comes to grades and grade deflation. On one hand, you hear that "students shouldn't worry so much about the grade" and "what you learned is more important than what grade you got".

On the other, more realistic side of things, they've contributed towards and support a nearly one dimensional system of graduate and professional schools where a high GPA is almost everything for acceptance. Top med schools and graduate schools almost entirely accept students with A or A- GPAs, regardless of the student's other relevant experiences or accomplishments, and often regardless of the quality or rigor of the student's undergraduate institution. Therefore for any student at an elite university with the (honestly modest) goal of becoming a doctor, anything less than an A- (on a curve with the brightest students in the country, no less) is a failure because the same faculty and administrators pushing this kind of study lock them out of achieving their goals for it. Faculty and administrators in education have created an elaborate hoop jumping game of achieving impossibly high and fairly meaningless scores, and then get angry when students (a) are alienated by something they used to enjoy and (b) decide to play the game!

The same professors who have the audacity to feel insulted when students merely ask if certain content will be on the test or how final grades will be distributed then turn around and tell students that their B+ average will hugely limit them from achieving their goals when in an advisory role.

This is why I'm a huge fan of grade inflation- truth is, university grades are a poor metric of future performance, and generally only serve to creatively restrict, alienate, and limit students at the college level. Grade inflation largely eliminates the fairly useless choking pressures of the grading system.

Faculty grade on totally arbitrary metrics, what is a "curve" and what grade does it mean you get. And then are mystified when students are upset that their grades were arbitrary. How do they know how much to curve it? Who knows, it's basically just a whim. Yes they say they grade on a standard distribution, but that could be equally meaningless--depending on how the exam is scored in the first place.

I've been explicitly told by professors (who I would obviously prefer not to name) that they considered a C grade to be failing, and that more than one or two B's during your academic career is unacceptable, at least if you're planning on grad school. So I agree it to be somewhat hypocritical to then turn around and wonder why students react to their grades this way.

You do not have to get into a "top med school" to be a doctor. Going to a bottom-tier med school is not "the end of the world." Know what they call doctors who graduated from the lowest-ranked med school? "Doctor."

You don't even have to be a doctor. A friend of mine is a P.A. (2 years of post-college schooling). He was history major who had to fill in his P.A. pre-reqs at a community college. Now he does 90 percent of what doctors do. That's not the "end of the world" either.

Another friend is an ER nurse. Guess what? He makes a nice living and his life is great.

This is the sort of "catastrophe inflation" the parent article is talking about. There's a huge difference between not achieving a personal goal (example: top med school), and an actual catastrophe (example: your child drowns while fleeing a civil war).

There will be many personal goals that you will not achieve during your lifetime. That's not a disaster, that's just life. That's when "what you've learned" becomes more important than your grades.

"The modulus of resilience and the modulus of toughness were calculated from the area under the engineering stress versus engineering strain curves, as outlined in Appendix C. Both are useful for determining the amount of energy the students can absorb before yielding and fracture."

This is a side effect of a winner-take-all economy. Merely graduating from college just isn't enough any more. If you're not in the 1%, you're a loser and will have crap jobs for the rest of your life, or at least until the college loans are paid off.

I think it's a side effect of the expectation of not having a crap job.

For all of human history, 99.9% of people have had crap jobs.

Life gets a lot better if you are OK with that, but young people are not OK with that today.

What's worse is that in more recent history, you could get by pretty good with a crap job. You wouldn't have luxury items, but you'd have most of what was needed to live a normal life. But today, if you have a crap job, you don't earn enough to cover even the basics of life. Not because the basics are more expensive (in relation to pay), but for many people there are more basics that are required than previously. For example, either you have a car that constantly needs work done on it, or you have car payments (and often times both). And add in mandatory car insurance (full coverage required if you have a loan). Without the car you can't get to work (unless you are in a major city with good transportation options). In fact, the biggest struggle that I've witnessed people (esp. single parents) having isn't food or housing, but just maintaining a reliable transportation option to get to work and run the kids back and forth to daycare.

The cost of 1) transportation 2) education 3) healthcare is insane, in the US. Unfortunately, I don't see any of these changing anytime soon.

Also housing.

Mostly housing. In 1950, the typical rent in New York City was 10% of income.

Are you sure? Seen from western Europe, it always seems Americans have gigantic houses for quite reasonable prices. Outside really large cities.

In exchange for living far away from city centers you can have a large amount of private owned living space. Then you require a car, you are somewhat isolated from socialization, and your commute generally becomes longer, and as a result of people moving out of cities the cities become less pleasant too, as they are full of cars and empty out at night as people go home.

But you do get a big house, yeah.

Also the choice of housing size relative to distance from the city core/transportation is made by real estate developers. Many Americans get pushed into buying bigger houses than they need and then they feel the need to buy bigger furniture and more stuff to fill it up.

Even if you're consider "poor" by American standards, you do not have a problem with earning "enough to cover even the basics of life".

Quoting from [1]

"According to the government’s own reports, the typical American defined as poor by the Census Bureau has a car, air conditioning, and cable or satellite TV. Half of the poor have computers, 43 percent have Internet, and 40 percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.

"Far from being overcrowded, poor Americans have more living space in their home than the average non-poor person in Western Europe. Some 42 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes; on average, this is a well-maintained three-bedroom house with one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio."

And that's just the poor people. In this article, we're talking about people who at least have the resources to attend college.

[1] http://dailysignal.com/2015/09/16/are-there-really-40-millio...

EDIT: remove duplicate word in first sentence.

Oh, I agree that poor by American standards are still good compared to world wide or historical standards. The problem is that if everyone around you has a car, you really can't get by without one (due to society expectations, such as being able to get from where you live to a job that could be 30 miles away). Whereas if everyone around you didn't have transportation, then jobs, stores, and housing would be closer together. And in the past (and in poorer areas of the world), daycare is provided by family instead of having to pay half your income to cover it. Not to mention that it is more miserable to go from school or work or stores with A/C and then go home to a house without it. Whereas if you aren't exposed to A/C anywhere else in the summer, you can acclimate to the heat better.

I see what you mean: we're bidding up the cost of entry into white-collar society, and people feel pressure to keep up with it. But...

1. The fact that someone has something you don't doesn't make you worse off in an absolute sense. I have trouble making the moral leap that we need to do something that will amount to handicapping those who have earned wealth, based only on feelings of envy in the broader population.

2. In any case, it kind of proves my main point: it's not true that only 1% is successful, and the rest of us are doomed to desperate drudgery. Your explanation demonstrates that a lot of us - indeed, enough of us to set a standard of sorts - achieve success. So the point that keeps coming up in this thread about it being a winner-take-all world where any failure dooms one to purgatory is clearly false.

1. If the infrastructure is then built solely for people that have that something you don't, then you are worse off compared to a situation where everyone does not have it and the infrastructure reflects that. This is not just about jealousy.

You have a very poor grasp of human history. "Jobs" haven't existed for most of it. The modern job mostly didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution.

Most of human history was subsistence living, which by most anthropological estimates included a lot of free time and quite a bit of control over your day-to-day life. Assuming of course you didn't starve to death or other common ways of dying.

Even if you are referring to the period of human history with civilizations that began with the Neolithic revolution, "jobs" just didn't exist. You WERE a farmer, or a miller, or X. You didn't get "hired" or "fired". It wasn't always great, but is also wasn't anything really similar to the modern job.

>Assuming of course you didn't starve to death or other common ways of dying.

This is part of the reason why people were desperate to give up subsistence living. Urbanization happened over the past couple hundred years because people saw more opportunity in cities than they could ever have with subsistence living. They would not starve to death anymore, at the very least. Their "jobs", or ways to make a living to help expand the definition for you, were very crappy, and filled with existential uncertainty, as opposed to the uncertainty of being "hired" or "fired".

Really? "It's always sucked, accept that it has sucked and therefore will suck. Do not attempt to change the status-quo."

Do you really think there isn't a better way to set things up? That nobody should try to fix this really shitty status quo? I seriously hope you're wrong because that is one of the most depressing sentiments about the state of humanity I've hard.

Until 1980 or so, graduation from college usually ensured not having a crap job, and usually provided some job security for decades. This is no longer the case.

If you're not in the 1%, you're a loser and will have crap jobs for the rest of your life

This seems a silly claim to me. Do you have any citations showing that folks who aren't in the set of college grads in the top 1% wind up with crappy lives? (or for its complement, that >99% of the population has a crappy life)

Calling the cops and needing counseling after seeing a mouse... Oh I am soo happy I didn't stay in academia. The professors are the ones who have to deal with the emotional trainwrecks that result from 18 years of overly praised and insulated child raising.

It'll be interesting to see the next gen of parenting advice after this gets sorted out. "Have you let your child fail today?"

Although anecdotal, I've always seen a strong correlation between candidates that are capable of sharing strong examples of past failures and employees that excel. Like anything else, coping and persistence require practice. There is value in failure.

> "Have you let your child fail today?"

That's something that is being taught in some schools.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16879336

(I submitted that four years ago.)

Even more interesting is watching these people trickle into the professional environment. Universities need to accommodate this stuff, to an extent, because the students are their customers. Managers do not.

The inevitable blowback from helicopter parenting. It will probably take decades for society to fully recover.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent

I have a friend who has helicopter parents. The parents would take rotating shifts to fly out and live with them while they were at university (and not in residence) to keep an eye on them. To an extent it's robbed them of their independence and they've lost direction in their life.

The parents truly mean well and love their children, but people don't become strong by relying on a crutch their whole life.

I have ran into several people who have had parents schedule and come in for (!) job interviews alongside their kids.

I vow never to hire someone who comes in for an interview accompanied by their parent (unless it's support for a physical disability).

Can't such helicopter parents see the perception problem that they're creating?

"There has been an increase in diagnosable mental health problems, but there has also been a decrease in the ability of many young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life."

Isn't this the bigger deal than student resilience?

Increase in diagnosis may not be increase in incidence, but could be decreased stigma, easier access to diagnosis, wider understanding of when to seek help etc.

I see here all over the place (only) comments about the grading and in general the current state of education as the root of the issue and what is to do about it, but as the title says the issue is the resilience. Although what I'm going to say may sound like a joke, it isn't meant to be one: Our society does not have enough (or any kind of) psychological resilience testing. Currently all of us are allowed to take any kind of risks regardless of the capacity for risk-bearing and its consequences. All of us want the cherry on the top of the cake and therefore jump at it, even the ones of us that do not feel competitive enough. That is reckless, and the consequences of immature decisions then falls on the rest of society which will have to deal with the broken ones. Yes, the education may be too damaging than it has to be and if so an attention in this regard is welcomed, but there also should be a better selection of candidates. It does not have any sense nor it is moral to let ignorant wannabes to throw themselves at something that may clearly surpass their potential.

George Carlin knew what he was talking about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6wOt2iXdc4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ryuJDTpEc

Pure wisdom.

Although George Carlin certainly had some hilariously entertaining things to say about parenting (and no doubt insightful to some degree), it seems he didn't necessarily have such a stellar parenting record himself:

http://www.amazon.com/Carlin-Home-Companion-Growing-George/d...

good... this is the purpose of going away to college. Helps to trigger independence and self sufficiency. The amount of people I know personally who had a TOTAL change in personality between the ages of 17 and 23... is just about everyone I know...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm glad I'm no longer in academia.

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