A Professor's Observations of College Students Today
I was a public relations major at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in the early 90’s. The same professor taught several of my upper-level classes, conducted around a conference table. Naturally, this set-up and small class-size bred connection.
After graduation when I landed in political fundraising and event planning, I knew my professor, whose key focus area was politics, would want to know. Not only was she thrilled to hear, she invited me to speak to one of her classes so they could learn from a recent grad what a public relations degree in the field of politics might look like. That was thirty years ago.
Fast-forward to this past November. I was reading my SMU alumni magazine, which I just started receiving again after decades of the school not having an updated address for me. And in all those years, I hadn’t thought about my professor but there she was featured in the magazine. Seeing her on the page prompted me to find her on LinkedIn. Long-story-short, a few weeks ago we met for lunch at the George W. Bush Presidential Library cafe on SMU’s campus.
Considering we never had a relationship outside the classroom, I wasn’t sure where our conversation would take us. But we were not lacking in words! In addition to our work lives and university ties, we covered parts of our personal stories and faith, our shared love for reading fiction (Theo of Golden is a favorite of both ours) and travel. I left excited by our reconnection—and thinking about her response to this question of mine:
“After being on a college campus for all these decades, what do you notice in today’s students that is different than students of the past?”
I think you’ll find her responses interesting. Certainly what follows is not true of all young adults, but enough to be noticeable.
Her two observations with my added input:
1. Young adults today lack critical thinking.
While several factors contribute to the overall decline in critical thinking, the primary culprit is technology. These are students who have grown up with technology and are very tech savvy in once sense, and yet they lack discernment in what they take in. They have trouble differentiating between reputable news sources and misinformation. (As side: I think that’s becoming harder for all age people!)
Furthermore, with the sheer amount of digital consumption, students today (and again, maybe all of us) have shorter attention spans and greater mental exhaustion. This leads to a lack of in-depth reading and evaluating. Add in AI, and though useful in some contexts, an overreliance on it has created “cognitive laziness.”
Today’s young people also tend toward an over-reliance on feelings and social conformity. Effectually this means rather than critically evaluating a subject matter, such as a political viewpoint or theological statement, they accept as truth what emotionally appeals to them with little independent thinking. To be fair, I see this too in our culture at large. This seems particularly troublesome in the lack of discernment of truth in the books we read and the “influencers” we follow (across domains of faith, health, parenting, politics), blindly accepting as truth whatever they proclaim.
Interestingly, my professor also commented on how our education systems fail to build critical thinkers when the focus is more on memorization and getting a good grade than applying logic and analyzation. Specifically she mentioned her personal issue with rubrics. A rubric, if you don’t know, is a scoring guide outlining the exact criteria for a particular assignment. You could say it’s a roadmap to success, which means a student just needs to follow the rubric for a perfect score. I had these in grad school and I finished with 4.0, not sure this would’ve been the case without rubrics. But that doesn’t mean it was best for me, or any student, when the focus becomes compliance and alignment with a teacher/professor’s mindset over understanding, creativity, and learning. For this reason, my professor does not adhere to the expectation of handing these out. The students complain, but what she is aiming for in them she believes will be of better help when they reach the workplace, and I agree!
2. Young adults today crumble under adversity.
In counseling teenagers and young adults, I frequently see too this reality and its something I talk about in relation to overparenting. When we bubble wrap our kids or jump in to intervene to keep them from experiencing hard, we leave them ill-prepared for life.
In my book, Parenting Ahead, I have a whole chapter on the theology of suffering, and why it’s more important we help our children know, “in this life you will have trouble,” than to try to keep them from it. Resilience is built through adversity. But if they haven’t endured through anything hard in their younger years, they can’t handle when life doesn’t go their way. In part, this connects to the mental health struggles of college students.
But I was intrigued to learn from my professor how their lack of resilience is noticeable in the classroom. This is the point in our conversation when she discussed how higher education (and certainly our K-12 schools) caters to their immaturity and/or adversity intolerance, naming the disservice of the rubric. Additionally, she notices that when a student experiences adversity in areas of their life outside academics, it is difficult, sometimes impossible, for them to compartmentalize the hard and still show up for class and the work they have. While they may can get away with this in college, this will not be the case when it comes to expectations of an employer.
As parents, we need to consider the long-range implication of our parenting. I know we want happy kids, but when their happiness becomes our ruling idol, and above-all-driver, we produce kids that can’t be content or withstand anything other than that. This mean than that:
We need to allow them to struggle and fail.
We need to not rush in to fix.
We need to let them feel uncomfortable.
We need to allow them to suffer consequences.
And depending on their school environment we may want to initiate conversations of change that helps better set-up students for long-term, not short-term, success. At the very least we can do our part when it comes to schooling and extra-curriculars, by not intervening on their behalf with teacher’s grading or a coach’s decision. Instead, we can equip our kids to have conversations themselves.
All from one lunch with an old professor/new friend!
Here are a few questions for discussion and/or self-reflection:
Are the two observations about young people today things you’ve noticed, and if so, how? What else do you notice?
With your own children what do you see has either contributed to or guarded against these realities?
If you have children at home, what changes would you make? What about anything you might do differently with already grown young adult children?
As for yourself, where might a lack of critical thinking show up and how might you change this?
I hope you will further consider the topic by sharing this Substack with those you could have a follow-up conversation with. And if this post spurs you to reconnect with someone from your past, I’ld love to hear about it!
Growing in grace together,
Kristen
