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Notes -
Students get renowned NYU professor fired for giving low grades
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html
A quarter of students signed a petition that an organic chemistry class was too hard, and the professor teaching it was fired. The professor, Maitland Jones, had taught organic chemistry for decades, at NYU and Princeton before it. He had also written a widely used textbook on it. Causes cited include MJ being an asshole; COVID educational policies; and a general downward trend in student quality preceding COVID. One thing that isn't mentioned is that NYU adopted an SAT-optional test policy for the class entering in 2020.
This is why educational policies matter at every level. As a cohort degrades in quality, downstream institutions face pressure to adapt curricula and policies to satisfy those students. The next downstream organization then faces the same pressure. If the student was good enough to graduate high school, shouldn't they be good enough to go to college? If a student got into a university, shouldn't they be good enough to pass all their classes? If a student graduated from undergrad, shouldn't they have a shot at doctoral and professional degrees? If they got into med school, shouldn't they be able to graduate? If they got an MD, shouldn't they able to be a practicing surgeon?
Anyone who understands the consequences of "education as a right" should have seen this coming. I understand the plight of the students that despite growing awareness of rampant credentialism, college degrees correlate with higher and higher incomes, that train doesn't seem to show any signs of slowing down. If something is a "right" and if so much of your life trajectory depends on it, it doesn't seem to unlikely that people will "fight" to attain that thing in every way possible.
And I really do mean every way possible, I'm a recent college graduate and cheating among my peer groups is rampant post covid. I don't know what pills everyone around me swallowed but even some of the most conscientious students I know would do things that they themselves and any reasonable person would have considered cheating 2 years ago.
I graduated college with a meh GPA of 3.2 (Electrical Engineering fwiw) and sometimes I feel like an idiot for not cheating myself because this will hamper the graduate school I can get into given literally almost every student around me cheated their asses off, I'm assuming every institution is going to "adjust" for this. Really bleak time to be a college student.
The value of the undergraduate degree is forever tarnished. The forward thinking zoomers I speak to already subconsciously speak such that a masters is the new bachelors. Almost every ambitious zoomer I peronsally know going into college is talking about graduate school already.
When would you say “education as a right” really took off? The professor in question is quoted as identifying the decline ten years ago, though exacerbated during COVID.
It seems to me that the “life depends on it” is doing most of the work here. A downwards spiral of cheating and credentialism is compatible with people feeling entitled to a “right,” but also with people perceiving that their existing plan isn’t worth anything. The rising work hours needed to afford school has definitely been in the news for a while, and there’s an impression that the marginal job requires higher credential. That could explain increased demand/desperation without any entitlement or just deserts.
I don't really know.
But if I had to make a guess, it would be around the same time wokism took off. "Education" being a "human right" is a very common talking point amongst leftists. Often framed as a failing of America relative to Europe where they "care" about peoples rights and give it off for free.
Not really a stretch to assert that this line of thinking is very attractive to a blank-slatist; The idea that competence can just be imbued in people and time spent in class can ameliorate the difference between the rich and the poor. That if a bad person sees enough PSA's they will stop being bad, just raise more awareness bro; That people wouldn't have wrong (conservative) thoughts if they could be "educated" otherwise.
A certain subset of young, urban, (mostly female), liberal people have a huge chunk of their personality wrapped around their schooling (not education in the platonic sense), and it's obvious that that demographic has disproportionate power in dominating discourse.
I think the entitlement is blatantly self evident. The article linked in the OP is a good example.
Dude, there are 200,000 humanities grads every year (pre covid idk how that impacted it). How many profitable substacks are made every year? How many are run by humanities grads?
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