Bright College Years

Part of the problem, Astin argues, is money. In 2014, the University of Michigan, that state’s flagship, spent $22,728 per student on instructional expenses. Michigan State, next in the pecking order, spent $14,779. Lansing Community College spent $5,884. No one should begrudge University of Michigan students what’s spent on them; some of that sum represents their own tuition dollars and, in any case, the education of our strongest students is a worthwhile public investment. Nonetheless, Lansing Community College’s students can’t be educated on the cheap, either. They need mentoring to succeed in college more than their better-prepared counterparts do.

Community colleges enroll about “one third of the new high school graduates who [enroll] as [full-time] college freshmen.” To fail here is to fail big. More broadly, most colleges and universities, if they are selective at all, are not terribly selective. Yet their graduates are our citizens. Our deplorably low six-year graduation rates suggest that we are not very good at educating quite a few of our students. Astin’s main explanation for our failure is that too many “faculty members . . . value merely being smart more than developing smartness.” Indeed, Astin’s “central thesis” is that professors value being smart more than anything else. For that reason, “most of the students who attend community colleges, not to mention those average or modestly bright students” who get into four-year colleges, “are not particularly welcome . . . from the perspective of . . . faculty.”

This charge against faculty is unjust, but there is something to it. Faculty members probably gravitate toward students who remind them of their younger selves, and whatever affection they may have for their students at Middling University, some would abandon those students mid-lecture if the Ivy League summoned them.

Faculty members also enjoy teaching good learners. That, too, is a noble kind of teaching. That a concert violinist picks up a new technique with ease doesn’t mean she didn’t need to be taught it, and to make something grand possible is, itself, grand. But even at the college level, much teaching is more akin to what grade-school violin teachers do. The pupils are not sure that they like the violin, and may have to learn how to practice and how to benefit from instruction, or to learn better how to learn. Smartness is one name for this ability to learn, and while there is presumably wide natural variation in this capacity, aspects of it are teachable. Teachers can easily forget that students who show little interest in (or aptitude for) their subject are not necessarily fixed in that state. Where a teacher deals primarily with average students, such forgetting greatly limits what he can accomplish.

Still, Astin’s most damaging charge—that faculty consider most of their students unwelcome—is unsupported. Astin gives us just a handful of data points from a survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute. First, when asked what issues are major priorities at their institutions, private university faculty rank “[enhancing] the institution’s national image” above “[promoting] the intellectual development of students.” Does Astin think that faculty members don’t distinguish between their priorities and their institution’s priorities? That they are capable of distinguishing between them is suggested by the fact that 88 percent agree that their teaching is valued by other faculty members in their department but only 22.4 percent think that their institutions reward good teaching.

Second, Astin notes that only about a third of professors consider their students “well prepared academically,” that only about half are satisfied with the quality of their students, and that more than half describe working with underprepared students as a “source of stress.” But Astin neglects other relevant evidence from the same survey: 89.2 percent of faculty agree that “all students have the potential to excel in my course” and 91.4 percent say that “no question is too elementary” for their classrooms. At community colleges, where faculty deal most with below-average students, 85.7 percent agree that faculty are interested in student’s personal problems and 83.5 percent agree that faculty are strongly interested in student’s academic problems. Community college faculty are no less likely than their colleagues to say that their work adds meaning to their lives, and are somewhat more likely to say that they experience joy in their work.

A nonperverse reading of the data suggests that faculty long for better-prepared students but dedicate themselves to the students they actually have. Astin’s description of the typical faculty member, who caters to the brightest and leaves others to sink or swim, describes no faculty member I know, and the data tend to confirm that Astin, in this passionate book, has gotten carried away.

That does not diminish the seriousness of the problem Astin identifies. Even the too-many-people-are-going-to-college crowd doesn’t think that most of the students presently in college should learn a trade instead, so we cannot avoid the problem of how best to educate a group we are evidently not very good at educating. But no sound approach to that problem can accept the misleading idea that, if faculty just cared more, things would begin to turn around. Astin has done good work on how students succeed in college. That kind of (admittedly wonkish) approach is worth more than all his italics.

Jonathan Marks is professor of politics at Ursinus College.