Friends:
This is a troubling report that references deep wells of college student alienation in research not only conducted before the pandemic but also before (in places like Texas and Florida) the dismantling of DEI programs that are fully about this very issue of promoting students' sense of belonging.
Do note that this finding of student alienation conducted by Harvard researchers Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner is based on 1,000 hour-long conversations.
The finding that students don't read books or assigned readings for class is something that one hears professors complain about. It's clear that this transactional sense of a college degree is not just lifeless, but dispiriting.
This never motivated me either. Rather it was about becoming in the full sense of the word, involving an inner-engineering that has made, and continues to make, my life and career whole. It gets me out of bed in the morning. How powerful to think that what we learn can help us to become agents of change, where learning serves the purpose of social justice.
Resumé building and instrumental approaches are necessary, but vacuous, as motivations for college-going and career pursuits. In contrast, how exciting to think that what we learn as guiding us toward skillful verbal action that will help us to live peacefully in all of our relationships. College should also be about understanding this very suffering that these researchers found so that we can liberate ourselves from this void that is obviously not engaging the higher parts of our consciousness that resist violence and aggression, while promoting peace, compassion, and the right use of will, our volition. After all, as this piece suggests, we are what we feel and perceive, as well as what we do.
My wish for our college students is that 2024 induces this more meaningful and enlightening sense of the college experience and that we, as staff and faculty, are more intentionally a part of this unfolding. In the wake of a retreat from diversity, equity, and inclusion policy, this matter could not be more urgent.
Peace/paz,
-Angela Valenzuela
Students Are Missing the Point of College
Too many of them are alienated from their institutions. Here’s what to do about it.
A lack of engagement among college students has been widely reported. Professors readily offer anecdotes of students missing classes, turning in papers late, and dropping out entirely. Naturally, much of this, of late, has been attributed to the pandemic — a cascade of catastrophes, to paraphrase one faculty member’s remarks to The Chronicle, that encompass physical, emotional, and social challenges. The narrative has stuck, and administrators and faculty members are starting to give advice about how to solve the “student-disengagement crisis.”
While it’s possible that today’s students seem more disconnected than ever before, the lack of student engagement is a longstanding issue — a contemporary form of the “anomie” Émile Durkheim detailed well over a century ago. At the heart of the disengagement is a lack of belonging, one amply documented by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary’s “The Need to Belong,” and by the higher ed-focused research of Jennifer Case and Anthony Jack, among others.
On the surface, the pandemic seems the sole explanation for the apathy and emptiness felt among college students in 2022, but this would be to deny historical precedent. Distressed and dissatisfied young people have repeatedly separated themselves from mainstream society — whether it be the “uncommitted” youth of the 1950s or the “young radicals” of the 1960s and 1970s. Disengagement is not going to evaporate as we get back to “normal” on campus, whatever that might entail. Anomie among college students is not new — and it’s not just focused on academics.
Just before the pandemic, the two of us completed a major study. Over five years, we interviewed more than 2,000 people across 10 campuses: 1,000 students, 500 faculty members and administrators, and 500 parents, trustees, young alums, and job recruiters. In our comprehensive, pre-pandemic study, fully one-third of college students expressed alienation. Further, students reported not just a lack of engagement with academics, but also feelings of alienation from their peers and their colleges. Importantly, we did not ask students directly about whether they felt a sense of belonging or alienation, rather they shared these feelings in response to open-ended questions about their goals for college, their experiences in the classroom and on campus, and their perspectives on higher ed in general.
What leads to students feeling so disconnected from college, and how could such feelings be so widespread?
In our 1,000 hour-long conversations with students, we found that nearly half of them miss the point of college. They don’t see value in what they are learning, nor do they understand why they take classes in different fields or read books that do not seem directly related to their major. They approach college with a “transactional” view — their overarching goal is to build a résumé with stellar grades, which they believe will help them secure a job post-college. Many see nothing wrong with using any means necessary to achieve the desired résumé, and most acknowledge that cheating is prevalent on campus. In short, they are more concerned with the pursuit of earning than the process of learning.
This is not to say that the current state of affairs is students’ fault. Messages from secondary schools (and from family members) have helped form their narrow view of college. Their high-school experiences prepared them to get into college, but did little, it seems, to educate them about the purpose of college. As a result, most college students don’t appreciate the expertise of their faculty, nor value what these scholars do, nor understand what they are generally not prepared to do (for instance, why faculty members might not feel comfortable in the role of therapist or life coach). Students often feel that professors aren’t available to meet their needs. And yet those same professors report that students rarely come to office hours or take them up on offers to meet for coffee or lunch.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find that students become more disenchanted with their college experience over time. In comparing 500 first-year students to 500 graduating students, more graduating students expressed feelings of alienation than did first-year students.
An example: Reflecting on her college experience (in 2015), a graduating student at a highly selective school described her apathy to us:
“I’m just here for college because I thought that was something that you had to do … Now I’m just sort of sullenly sulking my way through and, like, hating it, and hating myself, hating anyone around me … That’s, like, not the way it should be … If you are going in with th[ose] kind of intentions … it’s bad for you, and it’s bad for everyone else around you.”
This deep-rooted alienation will not be easy to repair. But in our view, colleges can significantly enhance the prospects of belonging by promulgating a single, primary purpose of college — that it is a place to focus on learning and transforming one’s mind. Students need to be “onboarded” to this mission by faculty members, administrators, and staff members who model, support, and believe in it. Common experiences like core academic courses or service activities should help diverse groups of students forge connections with each other — and in doing so, reinforce the intellectual mission. If an institution wants to include a second mission — for example, a focus on religion, civic participation, or entrepreneurship — that ancillary mission needs to be carefully “intertwined” in class and across the campus with the primary intellectual mission.
To be sure, some of the advice offered by other higher ed-watchers may help: rewarding students for participation in class discussion; easing up on grading policies; offering other benefits to get students to come and remain more regularly on campus (food pantries, mental-health services, or perhaps even free parking). But these are only temporary fixes. In order to dissolve longstanding student alienation, colleges need to reflect on and embody their central educational missions; they should use all means possible to help students connect with that mission, believe in it, embody it, and gain from it over the course of a lifetime.
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