In a recent Lafayette Journal and Courier guest column, Indiana Education commissioners Teresa Lubbers and Stan Jones made a strange assumption about college students in Indiana.
They claimed that students taking 15 or more credit hours do better in school than those who take less.
From this assertion, they suggest that students who aren’t doing well should take more credits in order to do better.
Not only does this not make any logical sense, it also shows how out of touch with actual college students the Indiana ?education system is.
Correlation does not equal causation. This is a pattern, not an ?explanation.
Numbers don’t exist in a vacuum, and there are always more factors at work, especially with college students today. Most students who are taking less than 15 credit hours are doing so because they have other obligations that require their attention.
For some non-traditional students who are returning to school, they can only take on so many credit hours because of their full-time job or because they need to care for their children.
These extra obligations require time and concentration that cannot be spared. To assume that these people are taking less credit hours simply because they are lazy is inaccurate, insulting and discredits students who are bravely overcoming obstacles that most other full-time students aren’t.
Surely this call for more credit hours is related to the new norm of students staying longer than four years, which looks unproductive for the university they attend. The education system wants students to take on more so that they can graduate earlier and make Indiana look like a more efficient university.
This is an outdated view of higher education. The problem isn’t that students today aren’t trying hard enough.
The job market, due to a large population, and the economy, due to the decisions of past generations, is more challenging to navigate than it was when our parents were in school.
In order to have a chance out of college, students have to constantly be thinking about how to market themselves to ?potential employers.
We have to constantly be working to make ourselves stand out. This means more majors, more internships and more extracurriculars.
On top of this, some students also have to maintain a part-time job in order to combat the high price of their college education.
A member of the editorial board has two part-time jobs, an internship, a full course load and is committed to multiple ?time-consuming extracurriculars.
If such students don’t get straight As, it isn’t because they don’t care about their futures. If they don’t graduate in four years, it wasn’t because they weren’t ?trying hard enough.
We didn’t ask to have to survive in this economic climate, but it is the reality we have to work within.
That is why it is so infuriating when baby boomer bureaucrats who made a lot of the decisions that left the education system in the condition that it’s in try to blame us for not living up to their standards. Our experiences are completely different from what theirs must have been, and this accusation just proves they have no idea what it is like to be a young adult today.
We shouldn’t have to justify our struggles to the people who are responsible for them. We definitely don’t have to take on more than we already do just to placate their outdated and delusional ?expectations.
