Skimming through college
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If the average college student doesn’t have an internship or job, isn’t involved in numerous organizations on campus, doesn’t get less than seven hours of sleep, and isn’t expected to complete 200 plus pages of reading per week, then is he really a college student?
The fact that the American educational system is not what it was fifty years ago is self-evident. It is not enough nowadays to get a bachelor’s degree and land a job the next day. Employers expect more than just a 4.0 GPA on your resume. This translates into jobs, extracurriculars, leadership roles, volunteer work, and the list goes on. While professors are well aware of this situation, they choose to set unrealistic expectations in their classrooms regarding coursework and reading material.
The inevitable result? Skimming. Skimming through hundreds of pages of reading, glancing up and down paragraphs, highlighting topic sentences and perusing the page for keywords. It’s a deadly habit that college students have perfected over the years (it should be listed as one of the soft skills on our resumes). When professors are approached with this problem by their students their response is, “Well, it’s an upper division course. What did you expect?”
Naturally.
Because a student who is taking three or four upper division courses should expect to have a hundred pages of reading per class every week, on top of writing assignments and projects.
With the amount of coursework students are required to complete, it becomes impossible to fully absorb and retain the information in their textbooks. This defeats the whole purpose of learning –– if students cannot commit enough time to their studies and must resort to flipping through pages of dense reading, how are they expected to comprehend the subject material and have a holistic understanding of their courses?
With the rising cost of college tuition in the U.S., students are feeling the pressure of their impending loans and increasing student debt. Some are forced to take on multiple jobs, and on top of an internship and their studies, the workload may seem infinite. This flawed educational system has become so pervasive it breeds a culture of overworked and sleepless students, swamped with so many responsibilities that they can no longer decide what to prioritize.
College is supposed to be a time of creativity, of mental and emotional development. Earning a degree means mastering a subject you’ve chosen to dedicate four years of your life to, and using that knowledge to propel you into your field of work. Yet students are skimming through college, receiving a surface level and cursory understanding of their courses.
Your studies should come first, because, after all, isn’t that what you’re taking out all those loans for? If we are expected to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to these institutions and graduate with a heaping amount of debt, then it is only fair to be given a proper education. I want the full college experience, not the abridged version.
Ani Mosiyan is a junior majoring in English and minoring in cinematic arts.
College is really a factory imo. You got students who know how to game it, whether it be cheating, being good test takers, colluding with other cheaters, teacher’s pet, etc. Then you got students who are honest, which sadly are a minority, and they do put in sincere effort. I talked to various students when I was a student. And what I quickly learned was that the majors that supposedly land promising careers, such as law, medicine, engineering, business, are mandated by their respective departments, and professional industries, to be hard because, by virtue of supply and demand, you can’t give everyone a shot in those respective areas. You can’t have indifferent people, who just want to get by, be given crucial positions. But unfortunately, that happens a lot more than we think.
For uselessology degrees….I don’t think GPA or an intense expertise of the subject is necessary. Besides, people who hold uselessology degrees usually just pursue administrative jobs…that don’t necessarily require college degrees. These organizations just prefer them because college grads can pick up new information and learn things at a more efficient rate than non-college people. And the organization has a professional polish if it hires college grads.