People who hear he’s a college professor, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), often reminisce about their time in school, living the life of the mind:
Few tell me, “I’m happy now because I went to college.” But many yearn for the good old days: “How wonderful to be a student again, savoring fascinating new ideas every day!” When I look at college students, though, I see little savoring. Excruciatingly bored students fill the classrooms. Well, “fill” isn’t quite right, because so many don’t bother to show up.
Objecting, “Some students love school, some hate it. The end,” is a cop-out. On average, students are painfully bored. The High School Survey of Student Engagement, probably the single best study of how high school students feel about school, reports that 66% of high school students say they’re bored in class every day. Seventeen percent say they’re bored in every class every day. Only 2% claim they’re never bored in class. Why so bored? Eighty-two percent say the material isn’t interesting; 41% say the material isn’t relevant. Another research team gave beepers to middle school students to capture their feelings in real time. During schoolwork, students were bored 36% of the time, versus 17% for all other activities.
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Research on college boredom is thin but confirms the continuity of pain. A study of British college students found 59% were bored in half or more of their lectures. Only 2% claimed to find none of their lectures boring. Since classroom attendance is usually optional in college, we can also reason from students’ behavior rather than merely inquiring about their feelings. Look at attendance. Students loathe class so much that 25–40% don’t show up.
One could protest that for every disgruntled student who cuts class, there’s an enthusiastic student sucking the marrow out of college. Wishful thinking. Remember: even though college students are generally free to unofficially attend any course, cutting classes is far more common than crashing classes. My teaching is highly rated, and I publicly announce all my courses are open to everyone on earth. Yet guests fill under 5% of my seats.
It’s hard enough to figure out what classes are even being offered by the average university. Learning who teaches them, along with where and when the classes are held, is generally a secret more closely held than most military plans.
A guy standing there lecturing, even a highly entertaining and captivating lecturer, is competing with the internet, both from an information efficiency and entertainment standpoint. He’s screwed.
Best I can tell it looks like auditing rates have dropped by around 40% since 2005, and I can imagine they were higher even before that if we go further back. Add in the fact that college education has been, “democratized,” and universalized, and it’s no wonder fewer people, as a percentage, are auditing classes.
My father really enjoyed college, in fact he used to audit classes frequently in the 1970′s and 80′s and kinda just collected credits at a certain point. When I asked why he would ever do that he looked incredulous and responded, “Because I like learning new things, and it helped direct me towards what books to get out of the library when I found something interesting.” Of course he also went to school during a time where he could work minimum wage and pay for his college education out of pocket, but it put in perspective how radically the internet has effected our methods of gathering information. Getting in my car and driving to a certain location, at a certain time, to hear a guy talk so I can ask questions afterward seems so massively inefficient it would hardly occur to me.
No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.
Phileas Frogg: “No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.”
In other words, what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”?
The marrow is the culture that values the knowledge that can be preserved in books. Colleges still have some of their old books of knowledge, but I question whether the people in charge of the colleges are teaching students to engage with the knowledge. It seems the desire to learn things that are both true and interesting was carried out of the colleges by nerds as soon as Internet access became available to run-of-the-mill civilians. The people sucking on the broken bones of college seem to be sucking on dry bones, not marrow bones.
The energetic disgruntled thinkers are building their own RAG/LLM systems to operate retrieval index services for their home-server data hoards. And then we have the heroic figures, like Alexandra Elbakyan, and those heroes will one day be remembered like the monks of Lindisfarne (875 A.D.) or the Buddhist monks who concealed the Mogao Caves (1000 A.D.).
We may be on the brink of a new Dark Age. Let us hope we have enough monks to save some of the knowledge.