Despite college administrators’ best efforts, most of them are failing to prepare students for the real world. Part of that, though, is the students’ fault.
According to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, college kids don’t respond well when you tell them that good grades take hard work. They may just lower their expectations.
“The coaching interventions make some students realize that more effort is needed to attain good grades but, rather than working harder, they settle by adjusting grade expectations downwards,” the paper reads.
But efforts administrators use to coddle their students have also backfired. The trigger warnings that faculty members have come to swear by are of no help either. A new study by researchers at Harvard found that trigger warnings not only don’t help victims of trauma, but also may hurt them.
“Trigger warnings alert trauma survivors about potentially disturbing forthcoming content,” the abstract reads. “However, most empirical studies on trigger warnings indicate that they are either functionally inert or cause small adverse side effects.”
Trigger warnings appear to generate the anxiety they are meant to prevent.
Even Slate writer Shannon Palus was convinced. In an article titled, “The Latest Study on Trigger Warnings Finally Convinced Me They’re Not Worth It,” she wrote: “Trigger warnings may have been developed under incredibly well-meaning pretenses, but they have now failed to prove useful in study after study.”
There may be no direct correlation between colleges’ inability to spur students toward hard work and their attempts to coddle young minds, but these two recent reports suggest an interesting connection: If students aren’t strong enough to read potentially disturbing material without a warning, they’re not strong enough to study eight hours a week. When universities want their students to succeed, they need to stop sending them mixed messages.
If academic success is the payoff of hard work, then knowledge develops through learning from difficult, potentially alarming, material. The old adage says that literature, like art, should “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
Trigger warnings shouldn’t warn students away from learning. Plus, as many studies have already shown, they fail in any case to “comfort the disturbed.”
