Over the past several months, I took an informal survey of professors at roughly a dozen colleges and universities across the United States, asking about students who entered their respective schools in the last year or so… and what might be their most outstanding characteristic.

So far, the overwhelming majority reported that the incoming class had the highest percentage of what I term “snowflakes” and “teacups” that they’d ever encountered before in their teaching careers. “Snowflakes” are students who melt into a puddle under the heat of academic pressure, while “teacups” are those who shatter under the slightest pressure. They also reported that they’d never heard so many students say, “I’m so stressed out.”

Yet in terms of academic rigor and pressure, today’s colleges don’t come close to requiring what was required academically of students a generation ago, and definitely not close to what was required fifty years ago. In addition, the classwork, homework, and grading are easier at state institutions, and even at prestigious and supposedly more rigorous elite institutions grading has been documented as far easier than in the past.

So why are so many students so “stressed” and so fragile? Fifty years ago, stress made more sense. A student who flunked out might find himself drafted and on his way to fight in Southeast Asia. Not so today. Uncertainty about life? Well… it seems to me that students in the WWII era, the Korean War era, the Cold War era, and the Vietnam era faced far more uncertainty than students today.

The one area that I can see that could be more stressful is that of financial pressure. Higher education costs more, both absolutely and relatively, than it ever has. But that can’t explain it, not by itself, not when many of these “stressed-out” students are on full-tuition scholarships.

Part of the problem, from what I’ve seen, is that an enormous percentage of these students, well over half, cannot write a series of coherent paragraphs, cannot synthesize and summarize information, and cannot draw a conclusion from a body of information. Critical thinking used to be one of the requirements for students in higher education, and all too many of this generation’s students have multiple-choice and Google-it-up mindsets and have never learned true critical thinking or analytical presentation of information.

No wonder so many are stressed out. They’ve never been truly prepared for higher education.

They’ve also been encouraged to think of themselves as “wonderful.” For most, life has come easily, especially compared to past generations, and those others, for which life has not come easily, are often angry and believe that life should come easily… and that they deserve an easier path.

I’m not saying that all students are like this, because there some that are not, but those who are not, who can think, who can and do work hard, and who don’t expect anything to be given to them – they’re becoming rarer and rarer, while the snowflakes and teacups proliferate. And that doesn’t bode well for the United States.

For some time now, I’ve observed a certain strange difference between the way both individuals and the media differentiate between collegiate coaches and college voice professors.

Both professions prepare students, at least in theory, for a professional career involving both brains and athletic ability. And don’t tell me that’s not true. Professional athletics require more than physical skill these days, and no classical singer can succeed without being an athlete, although I certainly grant that the proportions required in each field differ, as well as differ within each profession.

One obvious difference is that coaches are paid much, much, more than are voice professors. In fact, the top collegiate coaches are not only paid more than the top voice professors; they’re also paid more than the top classical singers.

But it’s more than money. I see news story after news story about coaches, about how they influence and shape young men and women, about how important they are in the lives of those would-be professionals. There’s virtually no coverage of voice professors, even though they also shape and produce professionals on a one-on-one basis, just like athletic coaches do.

It’s almost unknown to the general public that the best of collegiate singers are not only athletes, but competitive athletes, yet the results of those competitions are seldom reported even in collegiate newspapers or websites, let alone in larger media outlets, even when those competitive singers have a better record than an institution’s sports teams.

Classical singers have to memorize an enormous amount of music, sing it professionally with no teammates to help them while performing all alone on a stage. Even in singing opera, each singer is largely performing solo with all eyes on whoever is singing. Singing classical music requires considerable physical stamina… and singers don’t get oxygen between songs.

It’s been said that no one considers singing teachers important in developing singers because anyone can sing, but the majority of people can play some sport, yet sports coaches are paid and heeded.

Of course, the simplest reason why no one pays any attention to voice professors is that classical singing isn’t a big money activity for universities. In fact, developing good singers is one of the most expensive college majors, because it requires even more one-on-one instruction.

All the same…the distinction suggests that both collegiate alumni and the general public have far less interest and understanding of real higher education than they profess, and that both understanding and interest have continued to wane over the years since, over a century ago, there were few collegiate sports, and all were low budget.

And that reflects, in my view, a more than disturbing trend.

As long-time readers of this blog may have discerned, I have quite a few links to higher education, including a three-year stretch as a college lecturer. I’m anything but pleased with what I perceive as the trends in so-called higher education, because in areas outside the hard sciences, what I’m seeing in the vast majority of universities and colleges is the unbridled growth of “consumerism,” where institutions are competing for the favor of students and where numbers rule with little understanding of what those numbers really mean and what the result of chasing them is turning out to be.

Right now, the big push is for student retention, but in all universities, the results are dismaying, because teachers are subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, pressured not to flunk non-performing students. In the more “competitive” institutions, grade inflation is rampant. The average grade point average at highly selective colleges is now right around a B+. The national average GPA is slightly above a B, a full grade increase over the average GPA a generation ago. Part of this grade inflation is the result of student evaluations being factored into the performance evaluations of college teachers, because teachers who are demanding and who don’t give “easy” grades get lower evaluations, and that jeopardizes their being able to hold their jobs – no matter what administrators claim.

Students apparently now can’t even calculate their grades. My wife the professor provides the formula so that any student can calculate his or her current grade at any time in the semester. So do most professors at the institution, but the students at her university, and indeed, throughout the country, are pushing for real-time current grades being electronically available. Even with computers, this takes a considerable amount of time, because the grades have to be entered into a separate system, whereas under the old system a professor only had to enter and calculate periodically, rather than continuously.

These days, a course syllabus resembles a legal contract, partly because of federal regulations, and partly because of student pressure, but what’s ironic is that most students don’t actually read the entire syllabus, and some don’t read it at all and don’t listen when a professor tells them the important parts. Then they complain that they didn’t know something that was spelled out in the syllabus.

Students are also demanding multiple choice tests [imagine that]. That just might be because there’s only a small percentage who can actually learn material and accurately synthesize it, and then write a logical and factual essay test or paper, despite all the administration and educational rhetoric about teaching “critical thinking.” I’m sorry, but if a student can’t frame and write a logical assembly of facts to support or rebut a point, that student’s critical thinking ability is limited.

As for studying… that’s suffered as well. A generation ago, the average full-time student spent 28 hours a week outside of class studying. Today, it’s less than 14 hours, and tests have shown that 46% of students learn almost nothing in their first two years of college [and most of the drop-outs or failures fall within this group].

Then, there’s the problem of student comfort. Most students today don’t really want to be challenged intellectually, even though learning new things and ways of looking at them is one of the necessities for really learning. Learning new things makes most of them uncomfortable. You think not? Then why all the problem over trigger warnings and the like? They also have a very limited attention span, except, apparently, for video games and cell phones, which may be why some education gurus are suggesting curriculum revamping based on video games. Imagine, learning based on what students find interesting rather than learning based on making necessary knowledge interesting, but apparently little that isn’t electronic is interesting to this generation.

Too many of today’s students don’t like to learn basic facts, and they don’t seem to understand that without knowing basic facts, they can’t progress to understanding the more complex features of the field in which they’re studying. Not only that, but the majority of them take little personal responsibility for learning. Both the students and the administrators are requiring teachers not only to teach, but to motivate all the students. I’m obviously old-fashioned, but it seems to me that students need to motivate themselves.

The more dedicated college teachers are struggling with how to deal with these issues without dumbing down their curricula or succumbing to grade inflation, but their creativity in dealing with this is hampered by ever more prescriptive requirements from administrators, ranging from more and more regulations impacting every aspect of their job to actual instructions to emphasize teaching to the “various student learning styles.” Teaching to a variety of learning styles effectively means teaching less content because it requires presenting the same material in different ways. Add to that the recent requirements for dealing with student psychological difficulties, effectively requiring professors to be psychologists as well.

To all that, add the fact that, over the last generation, cost pressures have resulted in university faculties shifting from roughly two-thirds being full-time to less than a third now being full-time with benefits. Since part-time faculty don’t have benefits and are paid poorly, they often have to take adjunct positions at more than one institution. This isn’t conducive to getting the best teaching or teachers.

It’s almost as if administrators have decided that college teachers are essentially intellectual factory workers whose job is to process “X” number of students per year and pass them through, keeping the students happy, whether they learn anything or not… or whether they can use facts, think, and analyze the elements of a complex problem or situation.

Welcome to Higher Education: 2018.

…before Republicans and others who supported Trump will acknowledge their mistake? Will they ever?

Trump hasn’t been true to much of anything in his entire life. Not to his three wives. Not to keeping his word. Not to actually doing the entire job.

Evangelicals supported him over Clinton, largely because of Hillary’s spouse, and because she’s a woman, and women in power have never been all that acceptable to traditionalist patriarchal believers, let alone appealing. Can anyone accurately claim that Trump is either more religious or moral than Clinton? Anyone who does has a different view of morality than is set forth the Bible that evangelicals hold so dearly.

More than a few business interests supported Trump largely, it appears, on his promise to cut taxes, totally ignoring the massive deficits those cuts will create, and,the fact that, after the first year, the tax structure won’t increase demand, not to mention, interestingly enough, turning their backs on the Republican Party’s former longstanding rhetoric about the need for fiscal responsibility.

Trump promised to drain the swamp of Washington, D.C. Instead, he’s brought a degree of insider dealings and cronyism not seen since the wide-scale corruption of the Harding Administration almost a century ago.

For all the rhetoric, I don’t see any increase in jobs in the coal industry. Nor any massive on-shoring or return of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

And the firing of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe two days before he could take full retirement was incredibly petty, especially since McCabe is actually a Republican. Neither decency nor loyalty in that action.

Trump’s been quoted, as least once, and possibly more often, as saying that people will believe whatever you tell them, if you just keep telling them that. And, unhappily, he’s proved that, at least for more than thirty percent of Americans, he’s absolutely right.

And that’s why, despite his dishonesty, immorality, lack of understanding of either government or economics, his increasing alienation of foreign heads of state of present allies, and his treachery in dealing with both subordinates and Republican politicians, he’s likely to remain President for some considerable time… and that makes the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate complicit in all that the President has done and will continue to do.

In the latest issue of The Atlantic, writer and scientist Alison Gopnik lays out the basis for one of the greatest and most unacknowledged value conflicts in American life – the conflict between family/community and higher-level professional success. She doesn’t quite put it that way because she’s exploring the associated problem of contempt, and why those who value family and community are contemptuous of those who place a higher value on professional success while a large segment of the “professional” class, especially scientists, academics, and creative artists, are at least equally contemptuous of those who exalt home, family, religion, and community above professional success and values and all they entail.

Although I never quite thought of it in those terms, my brother and I, while sharing many political views, are on opposite sides in prioritizing what is and has been most important in our lives. That’s not to say that we both weren’t ambitious, yet, in the end, we somehow switched priorities along the way. I certainly started out more in the traditional mold, serving as a Naval officer as had my father and grandfather and then returning to Denver and preparing to go to law school in order to join my father’s law firm, while my brother, upon graduation from college, took a job with a large and prestigious multinational financial institution. Three years later, he was back in Denver, if still in the financial area, where he has remained ever since. He’s the one who holds the family traditions dearest, and who, to some degree, sacrificed opportunities to remain part of a community he has always valued.

While I valued, and still do, family, I found that I could not accept the “legal” tradition, decided against law school, and then discovered that there was no way to provide for a growing family, to write, and, frankly, to make something more of myself while remaining in Denver at that time. My opportunities, such as they were, lay in the staff side of politics and in Washington, D.C. My wife, the professional singer and voice and opera professional, found that she could not succeed in her field without frequent moves and often great inconvenience, not if she wanted to remain involved in music on a professional level. Those conflicts led to both of us ending up single, meeting years later, and marrying.

Whether most people want to acknowledge it or not, professional success in many fields often entails and sometimes demands relocations and moves. Professionals and others who make those moves are effectively prioritizing their professional beliefs and values above the traditional model of a lifetime close to family and in the same community. There are also other conflicts that arise as well.

For example, when industries change, traditionalists don’t like the idea of having to move to find a job, because not only is there the strain of unemployment, but also the strain of losing community and family support.

There is no single absolute “right” way to prioritize one’s life; that has to depend on the individual. The problem today is that most people and most politicians don’t recognize that there is an unrecognized and growing rift between “traditionalists” and those whose lives are, for lack of a better term, “professionally values oriented.” The “contempt” problem that Gopnik addresses arises from the fact that each group, either consciously or unconsciously, believes that its priorities should be the basis for government, when, in a modern high-tech world, government needs to accept and recognize both sets of priorities, at least to the degree that neither group’s priorities should be imposed by law upon the other, except in cases of public safety.