I’m not sure on why it has happened in all cases. In STEM, particularly engineering, the pace of technology necessitates that students gain a more general education that gives an overview of things rather than getting into the “bug dust.” When they leave school many are asked to support all this legacy tech that we still use and they’re often back at ground zero. In other words, since we can’t teach them everything, we just summarize most of it and graduates are worse off than if we had made them get into the complexities of some of it. They’re not learning to do very complex things like they used to. When we have new engineers in the last five years or so we have had to train them on the very rock bottom basics. We never had to do that before. It does not seem to matter where they graduated from or what their GPA was either. The good news is they do learn fast when we train them.
In humanities, the publish or perish environment and some political meddling has sent it down a strange path. Perhaps this is why here. Last few courses I had felt more like cult indoctrination than classical education. Sure we learned some stuff, but I left deeply concerned about the learning environment. The garbage papers that are being published, sheesh.
Across the board there is an obvious lowering of the bar. Not easily seen on paper though. GPA requirements may stay the same but when you have GPA ranges above 4.0 and there is rampant grade inflation in High Schools essentially anyone can get into college. Not that it’s a bad thing, but we don’t want to dilute secondary education. There seems to be more pressure just to pass people along and to give higher grades. Getting a “C” is almost unheard of when 30 years ago in some classes that was a good grade when there may have only been one A (if any) awarded with perhaps two B’s out of a class of say 30.
Since COVID, online and/or remote classes have made most programs cookie cutter, check off box style learning. Cheating is rampant and hard to police. The back and forth interaction with other students and the instructor is generally missing. The people that went to school during COVID and we are just hiring truly scare me. It is not their fault either.