Sinking Standards And Indoctrination: A Veteran's View Of The College Experience

When I graduated high school I immediately enlisted in the military. After months completing OSUT at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and a brief vacation home for HRAP, I was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. Over the next few years, my education would come in the form of deployments, field training exercises, structured self-development courses, and professional development schools. I wanted something more though. I looked forward to a time where my career would be at such an optempo as to allow for me to complete my formal civilian education. That time never came. Instead, I found myself medically retired at the age of twenty-four. After a brief stint of wallowing in my own self-pity, I decided to get my life back on track and, ten years after graduating high school, I found myself front and center in a college classroom.

I had previously imagined how college would be. I was never a great student in high school; more often than not, I was a slacker who managed to skate by with good test scores. In my head, I thought that, at best, I would be roughly a B student if I put some real effort into my work. Due to the VA educational benefits that I had earned, I did not have to split my time between working some part time job to pay the bills and use my spare time to complete schoolwork. No, I could completely dedicate myself to my studies. I soon found that my vision of what college would be was nothing close to the reality of it.

I soon found that I was not expected to put in the kind of effort that I had set out to do. Surrounded by hordes of young kids, ranging in ages between 18 and 22 mostly, I was easily one of the oldest people in each classroom. Most of the students didn’t do the assigned readings, turned in homework late, and scored terribly on midterms and finals; did they know something I didn’t? Yes, they did. It would seem that the American education system had morphed from a place to broaden one’s formal education and promote critical thinking to a daycare of sorts where these teenagers and early-twenty-somethings could prolong their childhoods for a few more years while the teachers, in what can only be rationalized as an effort to keep their jobs “useful”, tossed passing grades on to transcripts. Eventually, without learning how to even properly format a paper, these students would graduate with Bachelor’s Degrees in their various disciplines. This is not at all an exaggeration, sadly.

Just recently, I completed a condensed three credit hour course during the summer 2018 semester. I didn’t have to study, I didn’t open up the books after the first week, and I spent most of the lecture time arguing with the professor. I ended up with a final grade of over 99%. How did this happen? Well, because the course was simple to begin with. I was always going to get a low ‘A’, but the reason that it was nearly a perfect grade was because the professor continually added extra points to exams and assignments in order to ensure that every student received a passing grade. If this sounds asinine to you, it should. The idiotic professor’s disgusting and intellectually dishonest practice allowed me to receive a 121% on an exam just so a few more undeserving idiots could pass. This is what the American education system has become.

Now, I have spoken before about a professor that I have become quite close to; in fact, if it were not for our professional, student-teacher relationship, I may go as far as to say we were friends. She has not yet been taken in by this system of inflating grades to ensure the survival of her position, but even she has voiced how the standards that students are being held to are abysmal at best. Reading comprehension is non-existent, the ability to write a coherent paper of over a page and a half is rare, and it would seem that grades are seen, by students, as not earned by virtue of hard-work and demonstrated understanding but rather they are bought and paid for via their tuition. This may be a symptom of the rampant entitlement that seems to be almost ubiquitous amongst this up and coming generation. Sadly, I belong to this generation.

At the very same time that students are being shuffled through their university education, many professors take the opportunity to vomit their vile personal beliefs from the lectern. In the army we always joked about fighting communists as if it were a thing of the distant past, but it would seem alive and well. I never imagined having to defend the American way of life in a classroom and yet, time after time, I find myself defending the constitution, capitalism, and the rule of law from whole groups who believe that the founding fathers had it all wrong. If the fact that students were getting unearned diplomas was not enough to anger me, listening to students and professors preach the many blessings of communism surely did the trick.

After two more semesters I will graduate with my BA in English; I am on track to graduate with honors. I will be throwing my application for admission to a short list of institutions and I have no doubt that I will be allowed to attend one of them. I can only hope that graduate school will not be tainted with the same practices as undergrad.

If attending college has taught me one thing so far, it is that traditional, four year degrees should not be sought by everyone. In fact, I have become a firm believer in the value of technical schools and trades. Were it possible to go into my field, teaching, without a liberal arts degree, I would. What has become apparent is that the often spoken lie that one cannot be a success without a college degree has been espoused so many times that we all seem to believe it and that is sad. I have an entire group of very close friends who have never attended college, some of them dropped out of high school, and they are all on their way to making far more money in their careers than I can ever hope to make as a college English professor. Perhaps we would be better off if students understood the value of some of these careers or at least understood the necessity of hard work.