The average college student today

Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.

Grow up with a safety net, you’ll enjoy the process.

Grow up poor and/or with people depending on you and you focus on the end state?

> If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.

> Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.

But then follow that with:

> Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.

Like... I guess it depends what precisely you mean by "workers" but in my mind at least, if we're thinking similarly, that would be white-collar office workers. And what you describe in the previous quoted section is, IMHO, a perfectly reasonable breakdown of what college is preparing them to do. But then the subsequent line feels like a criticism of the output of that.

I really love this. I'll try and bear this in mind over the next few years.

I'm a mature-aged student going for their second degree (CS the first time, science this time). I am loving the subject but it's hard at the beginning because the amount of new stuff I have to absorb is overwhelming. At the times when I have a bit of a breather -- either when I'm "getting it" or during mid-semester break -- I find the subject (biology) wonderful.

Of course, it has impacted all parts of my life - I think differently than I did before studying engineering, and I sometimes try to apply this problem solving in non-technical parts of life with.. mixed results.

"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. They just have better tools to respond to the same incentives.

I'm not saying it's good - it's clearly an unsustainable trend, but the students are not the ones driving it, so they're not equipped to stop it.

1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994.

https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline

Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.

For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.

I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.

CC students have always felt more motivated in my opinion. But good Lord the quality of the education at the State level is abysmal. I am not saying there aren't quality professors and classes. There are.

There is however an alarming high number of poorly designed classes, nearly broken technology, poorly edited and badly written assignments, and questionable instruction.

I have to compare the quality and price with what I experienced in CC and it just makes me sad and depressed.

I am currently holding my copy of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffiths in my hands; somehow it is rarely more than a metre from where I work!

Are such textbooks still popular and used (i.e. mandatory to purchase) in courses like this?

even if not, try putting the textbook and the question into an AI (I use the paid version of gemini, the $20/ month is the best money you’ll ever spend at college), then as it to explain how to answer the question. Then ask it to generate a similar question, and then give you feedback to you as you try to answer it. Then try and answer it step by step, repeat as many times as you like until you understand and keep getting the right answer, then answer the actual homework question.Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss!

It sounds like your instructor has confused homework with quizzes, and the cheating issue demands some rethinking of the course pace and assessment system.

In physics and related fields, I have found fully worked problems to be very valuable. If your textbook includes some of these, I recommend reviewing them and working similar practice problems if possible. I wonder if things like supplementary texts, khan academy, or tutorials on youtube might help as well.

As you note, systems like ChatGPT could be helpful for explaining or working through problems, but obviously you won't learn anything if you rely on them for doing your own problem sets.

Mind you, I already apply linear algebra daily—I simply refuse to waste my time computing basic operations on matrices by hand when that's why we have computers and partial credit isn't available.

So I quickly realized that, unlike, say, elementary school, a university is not a push system, it's a pull system. If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source. There's still plenty, but nobody is going to force-feed it to you. I read quite a lot beside the required books. I practiced quite a lot beside the lab practice (fortunately wielding a soldering iron or writing programs was a marketable skill; still is, but used to be, too). I asked my professors questions that were not entirely in the books; often that was during a few minutes after a lecture / classes / labs, so I got from them ideas and pointers to new directions to learn by myself.

Was it helpful in my career? Certainly yes, I started doing contract jobs three years before graduation, and then joined a bunch of interesting companies where that knowledge was somehow useful, mostly as a foundation of more specific skills.

I was certainly not alone; I knew (and often was friends with) a bunch of other students who craved knowledge and skills, and we helped each other shake these out of the university, past the transactional bounds. It wasn't all that hard, but it required a conscious effort.

Very certainly a large number of other students did more coasting than knowledge-mining. They got their diplomas, got some white-collar jobs that did not require such deep knowledge of engineering, I suppose, or started unrelated businesses.

Have you considered trying to do the problems yourself, away from the computer, then checking your work with ChatGPT or the like?

4 points per assignment. Pass the assignment to a peer for grading. If they wrote down the problem and attempted it: 3 points. One more point if the logic and steps were followable, even if wrong.

The answers were in the back of the book. The homework grade should reflect attempts and practice, not mastery as that is what exams are for.

But if my classes were 300 people, I couldn't do that.

I also have relaxed deadlines so students can take more time if they need it, and request it in advance.

The object is to learn stuff. That's where I'm aiming.

Also know that there's a yin and yang here. You're in a broken system--but the system used to be broken in other ways. Your point about there being too many resources strikes me as fascinating and true--and yet we have efforts like Three Blue One Brown taking teaching to a whole new level. People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.

Full. Stop.

That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one.

As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it.

Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.

Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.

When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.

Don't hate the player — hate the game.

If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.

I could see even, that employers themselves would take up the cost to train if they lacked qualified applicants. Imagine for example there wasn't a billion CS students. All the company still need programmers, so what are they going to do?

IMO, instead of funding universities, simply give people a stipend to be used for some sort of educational purpose.

It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention.

Do people actually quit their addiction?

You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points?

But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.

The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price.

It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.

I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role."

In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome?

At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts.

As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.

Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.

Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.

The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.

In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.

The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.

Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.

Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.

Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.

I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes.

But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.

One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.

I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.

I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)

Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.

Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else.

I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).

I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes.

in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.

Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.

And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.

[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/

But, seriously, how's that lack of engagement working out in "the rest of your life"? Meetings? Why bother? Seems like a lecture. Reply to Slack or Email? Does that sound like something you ought to do? Or a judgement call, based on your intuition of their value?

From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.

You raise a good point, but in this situation I would usually either: 1) go to office hours or 2) ask my question to other capable students.

LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Anyone can just go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai to access a tool that will understand their problem, no matter how clumsily formulated, and solve it, or teach them how to solve it, or otherwise address it in a useful fashion. That's pure and quite general force multiplier.

But don't you worry, plenty of corporations and countless startups are hard at work to, like with all computing before, strip down the bicycle and offer you Uber and theme park rides for your mind.

So if I can outsource the mundane, annoying and repetitive parts of SW development (like typing the coding) to a machine, so that I can focus on the parts I enjoy (debugging, requirements gathering, customer interaction, architecture etc), what's wrong with that?

If the end product is good and fulfills the customers needs who cares if a large part of it was written by a machine and not by a human?

I also wish we can go back to the days we were coding in assembly in stead of say JavaScript, but that's not gonna happen professionally for 99% of jobs, you either use JS to ship quickly or get run over by the companies who use JS while you write assembly. ML assisted coding will be the next step.

Which is understandable. All societies are constrained by lack of experts / intelligence. Think about how relatively inaccessible healthcare is, even in rich countries.

The real damage is in the brains and attention spans, traditional school just can't compete with the massive dopamine overstimulus of System A thinking students get every day for an average of 6-8h outside school, by simply requiring focused System B reasoning on tiresome and (comparatively) dull tasks while enforcing dopamine withdrawal.

I've always felt my real education in software engineering started at work.

20 odd years later I lead a large engineering team and see the same with a lot of graduates we hire. There's a few exceptions but most are as clueless as I was at that age.

Given that it is billed as a Python course that is reasonable.

But, to be fair, the intent of the course is almost certainly to provide background in the tools so that you can observe CS concepts learned later. Which is kind of like astronomy majors learning how to use a telescope so that they can observe its concepts. If Google image search provided the same imagery just as well as a telescope, the frustration in being compelled to teach rudimentary telescope operation is understandable. It is not like the sciences are studied for the tools.

You should bring this up with the department chair of your study. The purpose of your CS degree is to build a strong theoretical foundation, replacing programming with prompting directly goes against this.

Besides that, these are ridiculous claims from the teacher. LLMs are powerful but in the end they are still a tool with random output, which needs to be carefully evaluated. Especially Python is my personal view much more subtle than people assume on first contact. Especially the whole numpy universe is like a separate language and quite complicated for a beginner if you want to write fast and efficient code.

I've had courses where LLMs where allowed for projects but we had to provide prompts.

> I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.

Knowing the education system in Germany rather well, I ask myself in which (kind of) educational establishment this happened, since I'd consider this to be rather unusual for at least universities (Universitäten) and Fachhochschulen (some other system of tertiary education that has no analogue in most countries).

Wow! I think this is an extreme comment to make. I get it.. but WOW! It really makes you wonder about the future of universities. If the answer is to let AI do our work.. even to cheat in final exams... what is the point of universities? Not only are we talking about Software Engineers dying.. but so if his lecturer job!

Anyway..

I am developer for over 20 years.

I have kids -- both are not even teenagers... but there are times I think to myself "is it worth them learning XYZ" because of AI?

By the time my eldest get his first job.. we are talking (atleast) around year 2032. We have to accept that AI is going to do some pretty cool things. HOWEVER, I still "believe" that AI will work alongside software developers. We still need to communicate with it - to do that, you need to understand how to communicate with it.

Point is, if any of my kids express interest in computer programming in the next year or so, I will HAPPILY encourage them to invest time in it. What I have to accept is that they will use AI.. a lot.. to build something in their chosen language.

I can see this being a typical question for new coders:-

"Can you create a flappy bird game in python"

Sure.. AI might spit something out in a matter of minutes and it might even work, but are they really learning? I think I would encourage my kids to ban using AI for (around) 4 days a week.

At the end of the day it is very difficult to know our future. Sometimes I have to think about my future.. not just my kids. I mean, would my job as a software engineer be over? If so, when? What would I do?

Overall It doesn't not bother me because I do think my role will transition with AI but for the younger generation, it can be a grey area understanding where they fit in all this.

I try to be optimistic that the next 100 years will be a very exiciting time for the human race (if we do not destroy ourselves beforehand)

To counter your lecturer, I am reminded of a John Carmack quote: "Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul"

Not even low-level -- any programming. If you really like to code, you are going to learn it whether in School, College, or University. To me, the best times I learned was outside of official education, shutting myself away in my bedroom. "Official education" is nothing more that doing what you are told for a peice of paper. What is its worth these days?

Whether AI exists or not - those that like coding will invest the time to code. This is what will seperate average to good programmers or developers. What seperates a good programmer to a great programmer will be their lack or AI generated code... to DIY!

Thats my view... but this is a large topic and I am only scratching the surface.

I've used AI as a crutch for a time, and felt my skills get worse. Now I've set it up to never have it give me entire solutions, just examples and tips on how to get it done.

I've struggled with Shader Programming for a while, tried to learn it from different sources and failed a lot. It felt like something unreachable for me, I don't really know why really. But with the help of an AI that's fine-tuned for mentoring, I really understood some of the concepts. It outlined what I should do and asked socratic questions that made me think. I've gotten way better at it and actually have a pretty solid understanding of the concepts now (well, I think).

But sometimes at work I do give in and get it to write an entire script for me, out of laziness and maybe boredom. Their significant advances as of late with "extended thinking" and the likes made them much more likely to one-shot the writing of a slightly complex script... Which in turn made it harder to not just say "hey, that sounds like boring work, let's have the AI do the biggest part of it and I'll patch up the rest".

Basically most people will be idiots, except for the mental exercise type people who like using their mental muscles.

So education will stop being a way to move up in life.

There are still ways that LLMs can be used in that case, eg having them review your code, suggest alternatives to your code, eg more idiomatic ways to do sth, when you delve into sth new etc, and treat their output critically of course, but actually writing one's code is important for some kinds of understanding.

This can be very useful when you are learning programming.

You don't always have a tutor available and you shouldn't only rely on tutors.

It might be useful when you start learning a new programming language/framework, but you should learn on how to articulate a problem and search for solutions, e.g. going through stackoverflow posts and identify if the post applies and solves your problem.

After a while (took way too long for me) you realize that the best way to solve problems is by looking up the documentation/manpage of a project/programming language/whatever and really try to understand the problem at its core.

Real coding can, unfortunately, be as bad as that or worse. Here is one very famous HN comment from 2018, and I know what he is talking about because participating in this madness was my first job after university, dispelling a lot of my illusions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

I went into that job (of porting Oracle to another Unix platform for an Oracle platform partner) full of enthusiasm and gave up finding any meaning or enjoyment after the first few weeks, or trying to understand or improve anything. If AI could do at least some of that job it would actually a big plus.

(it's the working-on-Oracle-code comment if you didn't already guess it)

I think there's a good chance code becomes more like biology. You can understand the details, but there are sooo many of them, and there are way too many connections directly and indirectly across layers. You have to find higher level methods because it's too much for a direct comprehension.

I saw a main code contributor in a startup I worked at work kind of like that. Not all his fault, forced to move too quickly and the code was so ill defined, not even the big boss knowing what they wanted and only talking in meta terms and always coming up with new sometimes contradicting ideas. The code was very hard to comprehend and debug, especially since much of it was distributed algorithms. So his approach was running it with demo data, observing higher level outcomes, and tweaking this or that component until it kind of worked. It never worked reliably, it was demo-quality software at best. But he managed to implement all the new ideas from management at least.

I found that style interesting and could not dismiss it outright, even though I really really did not want to have to debug that thing in production. But I saw something different from what I was used to, focus on a higher level, working when you just can't have the same depth of understanding of what you are doing as one would traditionally like. Given my Oracle experience, I saw how this would be a useful style IRL for many big long-running projects, like that Oracle code, that you had no chance of comprehending or improving without "rm -rf" and a restart which you could not do.

I think education needs to also show these more "biology-level complexity" and more statistical higher level approaches. Much of our software is getting too complex for the traditional low-level methods.

I see LLMs as just part of such a toolkit for the future. On the one hand, there is supplying code for "traditional" smaller projects, where you still have hope to be in control and have at least the seniors fully understand the system. On the other hand, LLMs could help with too-complex systems, not with making them understandable, that is impossible for those messy systems, but with being able to still productively work with them, add new features and debug issues. Code such as in the Oracle case. A new tool for even higher levels of messiness and complexity in our systems, which we won't be able to engineer away due to real life constraints.

That's exactly what I've seen as well. The students don't even read the code, let alone try to reason through how it works. They just develop hand-eye coordination for copy-pasting.

> Rather than simple laziness, it was often because they felt intimidated by their lack of knowledge and wanted to be more productive.

Part of it really is laziness, but what you say is also true. Unfortunately, this is the nature of learning. Reading or listening is by itself a weak stimulus for building neural pathways. You need to actively recall and apply, and struggle with problems until they yield. It is so much easier to look up a solution somewhere. And now you don't even to look anything up anymore -- just ask.

I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about.

Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me

This was definitely the case for me.

However, it always left me with the idea of “then why did I study?”. To get a job, of course, but in retrospect a better path might’ve been to work and then study at a later phase in life.

If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.

Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.

Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.

You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.

I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.

The hardest course I took at uni had a final oral exam and weekly homework assignment. Your final grade would be the average of all the homework assignments, but the final oral exam decided if you passed (with previous mentioned grade) or failed.

I thought that was a great way to do it, you can cheat your way through the course but in the end you’ll fail the oral exam. However, it was more subjective.

I think you chose well

It's surprising that this isn't done everywhere.

Note, kids from year 4 (9 years old) in many parts of Australia do have a Chromebook.

I am part of the generation that grew up with MMORPG's from early childhood (I was about 9 years old when I made my first RuneScape account), but approaching 30, I don't game at all anymore for the exact same reasons I don't touch cannabis anymore. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, it's all the same thing for teenagers. At a neurological level, these platforms are as highly addicting and neural-network-altering as actual psychoactive pharmaceuticals, legal or otherwise.

Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.

I vaguely recall too students back in the era where our biggest distraction was MSN messenger and our university forums. They kept both off until late at night.

We're letting people experience the downsides of the attention economy when it's almost (if not entirely) too late to avoid the negatives.

I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV. Cutting back to chronological feeds might improve some things but I don't think that's the root of the issue.

I would suggest the primary difference between then and now is accessibility. As a kid, my screen time was limited not just by my parents indulgence but the social pressure from using a shared device. Smart phones let you carry your personal distraction with you.

I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.

Instead, tax ad impressions per day per user on a sliding scale that makes it quickly unprofitable to display more than a handful of ads and use the money to fund media literacy classes in schools. Restrict the number and types of advertising that can be shown to children and adolescents, like forbidding animated ads.

Why is this obvious? Unless you’re talking CS = Programming a specific language, I think it’d be better for the K-12 version of CS to be completely analog save for maybe a “lab” for students in later years of high school.

I make sure that my daughter (6) sees me writing in my notebook, reading, making things etc. More often than not, she then wants to join in.

I will hold out giving her a smartphone as long as possible, and up until she has one, I will try and show her all the other fun things.

From my own experience and that of fellow parents that I talked to, explanations will be dismissed outright by the all-knowing teenagers, and any attempt to have a rational conversation on the topic will fail. Just like any addict, kids will deny that they are addicted. I had to act once the smartphone addiction reached a disaster level. What worked the best for me was "no you cannot bring your phone to school or use it before the homework is done, that's my decision and I don't have to provide you with any explanation." Did this generate some resentment and a few tantrums? You bet, but I got the result I wanted, peace of mind and homework done on time. I disagree with you.

They may be 'forbidden fruit', but does that means that it would lead to more use of them?

Do you think people drank more in 2020 or 1920 during prohibition?

Do you think people smoked more weed in 2025 or, say, 1985 when it was less legal?

Do you think there is more gambling in 2025, or in 1925 when the laws banning it were still fresh?

I think you'll reach the conclusion that outright banning does in fact reduce the usage of the vice.

I think it should be fine to outright ban them in certain contexts, like classroom learning; just as they are outright banned (usually) in theaters or playhouses or places of worship.

And to cite your example, even in the most liberal jurisdictions I think it's not acceptable for students to take drugs in the classroom. Phones are basically the same thing.

How many 10 years old smoke weed, have sex, and drink alcohol ?

10 years old spending hours per days on their phone on the other hand...

I can only speak anecdotally. Way before smartphones were invented, I had enforced limits on computer time to 1-2 hours a day via time tracking software. All this did was breed resentment between me and my parents that led to conflict and punishment. As soon as I got to college I was back to being on my computer all night nearly every day, relieved that I didn't have to put up with them anymore.

The technology restriction wasn't the beginning and end of my mentality all through college. The true cause was how I was raised and my relationship with my parents. They were the only real bullies I've ever had.

People will always attack apps, algorithms and corporations since they're easy to feel powerless about. But if a developing person is given good enough reason to doomscroll so that they able to forget the pain that was imbued in them from an early age, then 1) the outcome in the article results, 2) a major underlying factor in the analysis of why we're failing young people will be missed, and people will assume it's solely the fault of addictive "algorithms" and capitalism, and 3) it's unlikely that people are going to open up about stressors as personal as childhood trauma (a cause) as opposed to behavioral addictions like doomscrolling (a symptom), so the focus will be on attacking and regulating the symptoms, and this cycle of trauma will only exacerbate and repeat itself.

A certain level of trauma can steal decades away from developing persons and set them up for failure, with or without smartphones, and smartphones only make their problems worse. Not to mention, past a certain age people start to blame you for your own failings, even though many of them have roots in actions taken against you that were not your fault, and this only contributes to feelings of misery and hopelessness. Knowing this firsthand, it's no wonder so many people find little else interesting than doomscrolling all day - myself included.

You can regulate apps and restrict smartphones, but I have no idea how to fix bad parenting/emotional trauma at scale. What goes on in families is private by its nature, emotional abuse is legitimized if you never lay a hand on the child and some arbitrary standard of defiance is crossed, and intergenerational trauma can have completely arbitrary causes going back decades, which end up transmitted as meaningless stressors to a victim trapped in an endless search of anything at all to hold close to them...

Discrete maths back in my days was one of those almost universal weed-out classes which got rid of people with limited abstract thinking ability who weren't willing or able to get over that with hard work. Very heavy correlation between how well you did in that class and core CS subjects.

I might suffer from a bias, but what I did was study to pass the test. I don't expect everyone to pass every exam as I don't expect everyone to get a degree. Universities need to be hard if they want to keep their reputation and not be outlived by online courses on YouTube. A degree, more than a certificate that the student attended some classes, should prove that a person is capable of thinking, studying and doing hard work.

I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”

I you even know how often I've heard students complain about "having my A taken away from me". It's insane, but it's also what to expect from a society just like you described who has been told that the point of school is to get good grades.

Now, a lot of students here are discovering that minmaxing to get a high GPA in a degree like compsci lands them firmly in jobless land if they failed to use those 4 years in an environment of learning to actually learn things. Doesn't even have to be from courses, things like student groups and competitions, research opportunities, etc.

Employers don't really want people whose sole interest is to do nothing and be rewarded for it.

I most certainly will transmitting a different set of values to my kids. Not going to go full straight A’s psychopath because I’ve seen what that’s done to some peers, but unless I win the lottery my kids will not be being told to just “do what they love” (unless they happen to love applied math lol)

A) the median university student in the USA?

B) the median university student in China?

Hint: in China, university admissions is based in large part on students's performance on the 高考, a national entrance exam, taken at the end of high school.

Notes are definitionally lossy. If they weren't lossy, they'd be a transcript.

The act of compressing a lecture into notes helps students learn. Merely transcribing does not imply understanding.

I noticed that the rare few professors who didn't upload their powerpoints, were mostly the ones who would just recite the content of their slides in class (almost) word-for-word.

Hell, the "industry languages" are just now more broadly adopting good language design ideas that have been around in academic contexts for decades.

I'm not sure how to do it, but we really need a return to a society in which intellectual curiosity and sophisticated debate are viewed as worthwhile—our incessant desire to just maximize profit as quickly as possible over anything else and the sharp division between "the intellectual domain" of academy and "the real world" of industry needs to blur and evaporate.

My central question is what are other countries doing that we aren't? Because other countries aren't seeing such a dire and systematic drop in student's academic ability. Germany being the most notable for how it directs its resources, even though its a fairly rigid in many respects.

I don't get the sense that parents in Europe are overwhelmingly more involved in the schools either, but I have limited purview into that specifically, having only had the pleasure of meeting europeans of different backgrounds (UK, Sweden, Germany most specifically) via work, its a limited subset of understanding, however most of the folks I've worked with who grew up in any of these European countries really seemed to believe in hands off parenting even more so, and experienced it often in kind.

I have one theory, which is that education is highly politicized in the US in a way that perhaps its not in other western countries. This has been happening since the 1960s but it really accelerated in the last 30 years or so.

One could make the argument that they can't even do anything. They exist at this point mostly because if they didn't, we'd have packs of naked feral 10 year olds roaming the streets and butchering any human they found for cannibalism. Have you ever seen a reddit thread where someone randomly thanks the gods because the kids finally school age and they can stop spending $40,000/year (or more) on daycare?

But, I think, in the coming decades all these problems will evaporate like some nightmare that fades away upon waking... public schools will continue to close at ever-increasing rates as our population rapidly ages.

How is a college realistically supposed to reject a guy with a clearly qualifying 28 or 29 on the ACT? You're going to have to give a helluv-an explanation for that, because I can guarantee, you do that to too many kids and the politicians are gonna come after you.

The problem is enormous. That kids can pass these entrance exams without being truly literate is what makes this issue so intractable.

To me, the only politically and socially acceptable option is to fail them in their college coursework. We don't do that though. Most students live by the "curve".

Yes, that.

Also how did this happen?

And also, middle-school (high-school? what is it called on the US?) children are supposed to be able to read a small text and understand it too. This is one of those things everybody should be able to do, and employers have good reasons to require.

Many years ago when I went to university my state created a fund to pay a certain portion of a student's credit hours. This was implemented in my second or third year from what I remember. I noticed that my direct out of pocket cost (or really how large the loan I took out was) never went down from before this program and after. The university was pretty flush with funding though.

Isn't it? Isn't being realistic about your skills in relation to the rest of the world in the current time and place (as opposed to some idealistic past that may or may not have ever existed) a way to "fix this" at a societal level?

Whether or not it's easy or even possible to live a middle-class without starting a business or getting a college degree is irrelevant to whether or not we should be giving college degrees to people who submit this as an answer to a final exam:

> > With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives [sic] we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase [sic] life is short and you never gonna [sic] know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause [sic] sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

Where on earth did you go to school?

Meanwhile, students who need to actually understand what they are learning (I can't memorize like others) before passing a test often end up with worse grades but a better understanding.

Absolutely broken system.

It was their parents who worked really hard and they didn't go college. It was peak blue collar.

> I'm a tenured philosophy professor with an Ivy League PhD.

When (for many people) going to college almost necessarily means accruing 5-figure to 6-figure debt at the infancy of their careers, they sure as shit better have some sort of marketable skill to justify and remedy that debt coming out of it.

I understand the sentiment of higher education being useful for broadening one's horizons, challenging you, teaching you how to think etc; but you should be arguing in the _positive_ for these things to be available to everyone without a paywall.

this would be fine if it didn't cost as much as a new car and my career did not depend on it. I can broaden my horizons for free at library

To be fair, for a person with several years of industry experience it feels like the ratio of applicants to openings for tech jobs really is some absurdly high number - high enough to where you can be out of experience-appropriate work for years, plural.

I don't know if the overall market can generalize to university internships however, which may be the disconnect.

However, I remember one time in the recent past where I was offered to interview for a position that was designed for recent graduates with no industry experience. They offered this to me knowing I had graduated long ago and already had industry work for a while. My conclusion was that after a whole two months of interviewing candidates, they simply could not find any recent graduates qualified enough for their own recent graduates opening.

I did feel some guilt being offered that position knowing it was supposed to have gone towards someone with far fewer opportunities to get hired than me. I don't know if this is an indication of the state of universities, recent graduates, hiring managers who write up the postings and don't know what they actually want, the job market in general, or some other factor I haven't considered...

I like that approach, as it combines the training of attention span and memorizing.

I've come to the painful realization that we are not only losing our attention span --our capacity to concentrate--, we are also concurrently losing our deep memorizing abilities --our capacity to retain the information we managed to intake--. So it's really a double whammy effect, making it even more difficult to revert.

But the entry to the next class level requires a passing grade on the final exam, and DON'T water that down.

And of course, the exorbitant cost of college was unmentioned. These people are buying two new cars a year to go there. That uod the ante on the transactionalism substantially, and colleges everywhere would rather mint b+ degrees for 250k than impose standards

Sure, I agree it's a systemic problem that needs to be addressed holistically, but I also need a plan for what to do in my classroom right now with these particular students. And I don't feel good about either passing those who haven't learned the material or failing 80% of the class.

I believe proctored math placement tests are still common upon matriculation at less-selective colleges (e.g., directional public schools). Usually Accuplacer or done in ALEKS. That said, the outcome these days may be corequisite section placement rather than remedial course placement. Colleges have to balance readiness against the graduation delays that remediation adds (which often lead students to drop out entirely).

That not negation of the article and is instead questioning the extent to which their observations are accurate vs caricatures influenced by an outlook on their customers that is already, in software terms, “user hostile”.

The last time I taught in college was about 8 years ago at a school with a similar demographic fit, and I can recognize a fair bit of what the author say but not at all to this degree. I still work in the industry and there’s a post-Covid shift that I think strongly explains a sharp downshift in students feeling attendance is important, but I think that aught to resonate with the HN crowd with respect to a now-common feeling that dogmatic adherence to mandatory full work-from-office isn’t necessary or worker friendly. Consider all the more how that feeling would take hold for young students that spent significant formative years just prior to college being fully or highly remote.

On literacy, that’s an area I have some analytical experience in. As far as I have seen, at least a fair bit of this perception is from the fact that students view homework etc as low-stakes writing but higher stakes get more attention and the end product reflects more ability than might otherwise be shown. Also, the professor in this article may simply not be adept at getting the best results from a group of students that sense the dislike aimed their way. However my analysis side also predates ChatGPT.

I know some of the early translations of e.g. Nietzche sometimes end up saying the opposite of what might have been intended, which is a downer.

Parents cover the fees and give the kids an allowance for the rest; either the kids budget poorly or the allowance fails to really account for just how expensive the first few weeks are with all the books you're expected to buy?

And sure, there is more contemporary philosophy, and it's great he's keeping the books affordable. But if it's anything early 20th century or prior, don't be so surprised people are going to read what's in the public domain instead.

Since that ruling many independent booksellers in the US started importing those foreign editions and selling them through online marketplaces such as Abe Books and Biblio.

Here are some examples of the savings. Lets say you are a math student, and your introductory calculus is taught from the first volume of Apostol's Calculus, your multivariable calculus taught from the second volume, and you real and complex analysis class uses Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis.

The US editions of those will set you back around $220 for the first volume of Apostol, around $140 for the second volume, and around $240 for Rudin.

On Abe Books you can get the international editions of the Apostol books from a US seller for $24.39 for volume 1 and $23.40 for volume 2 with free shipping. There are several more US sellers with then in the $30-40 range.

For the Rudin book $22.06 will get it from a US seller on Abe Books with free shipping. There are few more US sellers in the $35-50 range.

Biblio isn't as good on these particular books. They are available at comparable price but only from Indian sellers with shipping from India.

I haven't seen the international edition of Rudin but I have both the US and international editions of both volumes of Apostol and the text is the same. It is the physical form that differs. The US edition is hardback printed on finer paper. The international edition is a paperback printed on rougher paper and the pages are smaller.

[1] Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013)