In “The Streamlined Life” Bobo whines that the data on how incoming college freshmen perceive themselves and their futures paint a subtle and sobering picture. Apparently they’re unempathetic and self-centered. But I’m sure that those attitudes have nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that we’ve entered a new Gilded Age… In “Little Genius, Vietnamese Style” Mr. Cohen says the American dream may be battered at home but it’s alive and well in the land of America’s former Communist enemy. Mr. Nocera says “She Had To Tell What She Knew” and that the whistle-blower of the University of North Carolina sees a movement brewing in college sports. Here’s Bobo:
Every year researchers at U.C.L.A. do a survey of incoming college freshmen. These surveys, conducted over four decades now, show how the life cycle has changed over the past couple generations.
This first thing you see from this and similar data sets is that high school has gotten a bit easier. In 1966, only about 19 percent of high school students graduated with an A or A- average. By 2013, 53 percent of students graduated with that average.
The grades are higher even though, for many, the workload is lighter. As late as 1987, nearly half of high school students reported doing at least six hours of homework a week. By 2006, less than a third of all students reported doing that much work. In 1966, 48 percent of students said they sometimes showed up late to class. By 2006, more than 60 percent of students said they sometimes showed up late.
If the high school world is lax, that changes when the college admissions process starts. It’s not only that college admissions are more competitive; students begin to be haunted by fears about their job market prospects.
If you go back and read oral histories conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, you’d be amazed by how benign the labor market seemed back then. People would announce that they were moving to a new city and assume they’d be able to find decent work after they got there.
That image of a benign job market is pretty much gone (as expectations about what constitutes a good job have risen). Even incoming college freshmen seem to fear they will not find lucrative and rewarding work. Harsh economic thinking plays a much bigger role in how students perceive their lives. Their parents feel that anxiety even more acutely.
In the first place, they are very conscious of how much college costs. In 1974, 77 percent of students enrolled in their collegiate top choice. By 2013, only 57 percent were able to. Cost is a very important factor in why students decided to stay away from their favorite school. Second, they saw college much more as job training than students before. In 1976, 50 percent of freshmen said they were going to college in order to make more money. By 2006, 69 percent of freshmen said that. Since 2005, the number of students who say they are going to college to get a better job has spiked upward.
Their overall values change. In 1966, only 42 percent of freshmen said that being well-off financially was an essential or very important life goal. By 2005, 75 percent of students said being well-off financially was essential or very important. Affluence, once a middling value, is now tied as students’ top life goal.
As the drive to compete intensifies, other things get streamlined away. In 1966, 86 percent of college freshmen said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was essential or very important. Today, less than half say a meaningful philosophy of life is that important. University of Michigan studies suggest that today’s students score about 40 percent lower in measures of empathy than students did 30 years ago.
I’m not sure if students really are less empathetic, or less interested in having meaning in their lives, but it has become more socially acceptable to present yourself that way. In the shadow of this more Darwinian job market, it is more acceptable to present yourself as utilitarian, streamlined and success-oriented.
Psychologically, the effect of all this is complicated. In 1985, only 18 percent of freshmen said that they felt overwhelmed by all they had to do. By 2013, 33 percent said they felt overwhelmed. In 1985, 64 percent of students said they ranked in the top 10 percent or at least above average in terms of mental health. But today, students admit to being much more emotionally vulnerable. They also declare low levels of spiritual self-confidence.
At the same time, one gets the sense they are trying to armor up, in preparation for the rigors to come. They assert their talents. They rate themselves much more highly than past generations on leadership skills, writing abilities, social self-confidence and so on. For example, in 2009, roughly 75 percent of freshmen said they had a stronger drive to achieve than their average peers.
Human nature hasn’t changed much. The surveys still reveal generations driven by curiosity, a desire to have a good family, a good community and good values. But people clearly feel besieged. There is the perception that life is harder. Certainly their parents think it is harder. The result is that you get a group hardened for battle, more focused on the hard utilitarian things and less focused on spiritual or philosophic things; feeling emotionally vulnerable, but also filled with résumé assertiveness. The inner world wanes; professional intensity waxes.
Next up we have Mr. Cohen, writing from Ho Chi Minh City:
The American dream may be battered at home but it is alive and well in this city that fell to the Communist North Vietnamese Army almost four decades ago, evident in the upscale Phu My Hung neighborhood where a house, a yard, a state-of-the-art barbecue, a jeep and a Domino’s Pizza at the corner fulfill the aspirations of a burgeoning upper middle class. Perhaps this is what is meant by losing the war and winning the peace.
Or perhaps not, seeing that Vietnam is a one-party Communist state along Chinese lines where the very notion of checks and balances dear to the framers of the United States Constitution is alien, and things function the way they do in the absence of such competing institutions, that is to say with little transparency and plenty of greasing the wheels. But then again, perhaps any attempt to categorize systems makes little sense in a post-ideological world dominated by invisible networks.
Stroll around Phu My Hung in District 7 and what is most striking — aside from the proliferation of coffee shops serving iced lattes — is the number of schools with names like “Little Genius” or “Homework Center” or “Cornerstone Institute” promising to give the offspring of the upwardly mobile the foundations of success, including excellent English, perfect SAT scores and habits of hard work that will take them to the summit.
American students scratching their heads about why college entrance has become so arduous, with ever smaller percentages of applicants admitted to the best schools, could do worse than take a look at this little corner of Vietnam.
A 13-year-old Vietnamese boy managing the reception at the Homework Center told me in perfect English (he started learning it at age two) that children attend after school between the hours of 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., bringing their daily studies to around 12 hours. He spoke with earnest precision and eerie assurance. And where, I asked, would he like to go to college? “M.I.T.” he shot back without hesitation.
At Little Genius — motto “Kids want to fly!” — the push for academic excellence begins at an early age with a computer room designed for three-year-olds and filled with state-of-the-art equipment. Mastering English and technology is a sine qua non for such global wunderkinds growing up in a Communist state with a fiercely capitalist system, and imbued with the Asian values that put the success of the young generation first.
The brochure of Little Genius, an international kindergarten, lists among its objectives: “To creatively integrate technology through the curriculum, thereby earning access to the learning tools of the 21st century. With a growing world of technology it is important to give children early access to tools and equipment they will learn in their future.”
For wealthy Vietnamese, the goal at the end of this educational push is access for their children to American colleges or, failing that, schools in Australia or Canada or Britain or, failing that, perhaps state-funded scholarships to the best universities in Moscow (one vestige of what Communism once was is the close ties between Vietnam and Russia; Vietnamese entrepreneurs have made fortunes selling instant noodles for the Russian poor.)
This then is the way the world works: Autocratic hypercapitalism without American checks and balances produces new Asian elites, often party-connected, whose dream is an American lifestyle and education for their children; and whose other goal, knowing how their own capricious system really functions, is to buy into the rule of law and property guarantees by acquiring real estate in North America or perhaps Britain, so driving up prices in prime urban markets to the point where the middle classes of those countries, whose incomes are often stagnant or falling, are pushed aside. This symbiotic system at the level of individuals is mirrored at the national level, where the invisible bargain is that American debt is bought by Asian governments, notably the Chinese, and Asians make money through access to credit-fueled U.S. markets and consumers.
None of this is particularly pretty, nor is it particularly just, but it beats the war that ended almost 40 years ago, on April 30, 1975, a military defeat for the United States now being celebrated with the red flags of Vietnam’s Independence Day.
After so much war it is natural that this generation of Vietnamese should nurse its own version of the American dream. Only a few have access to it; the streets of Phu My Hung are full of women on bicycles sifting through the garbage of the rich for some saleable item, their bicycles freighted with their finds. But any assessment of the likelihood of American decline would be wrong if it failed to factor in the evidence of American magnetism in the land of its erstwhile Communist enemy. Soft power may not interest Vladimir Putin but it is persuasive.
And now here’s Mr. Nocera:
Mary Willingham remembers the exact moment when she realized she had to go public. It was at the memorial service in the fall of 2012 for Bill Friday, the former president of the University of North Carolina. During his long career, Friday had championed the amateur ideal — the notion that college athletes needed also to be students, and that academics mattered as much as wins.
Willingham went to the university in Chapel Hill in 2003 as an academic adviser to the school’s athletes, primarily its football and basketball players. She was a reading specialist, a refugee from corporate America who had become a teacher in midlife. “Mary is one of those people who believed in the mythology, that you can do both athletics and academics,” says Richard Southall, who runs the College Sport Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.
But right from the start, she realized that there was a problem: Many of the athletes were coming into college unequipped to do college-level work. Around 2008, she recalls, after the N.C.A.A. changed its eligibility requirements — depending on their G.P.A.’s, athletes could now get in with lower S.A.T. scores — the situation became dramatically worse.
One way the academic counseling staff kept these athletes eligible was by sending them to so-called paper classes — that is, no-show classes that required one paper (maybe), which would be generously graded. They all took place in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, under the auspices of the department chairman, Julius Nyang’oro.
“The paper classes were incredibly popular,” Willingham told me recently. “But I knew the game would be over at some point, and it was very wrong from an ethical standpoint.”
By 2010, she had moved out of the athletic department — though she remained at the school — and had begun talking on background to a local reporter, Dan Kane of The News & Observer in Raleigh. Building on the information he got from Willingham, Kane broke a series of articles about Nyang’oro’s department. The reports immersed the university in scandal, causing, among other things, Nyang’oro’s hasty retirement. (He has since been indicted.) Mary Willingham, meanwhile, had become a behind-the-scenes whistle-blower.
By the time of Friday’s death in October 2012, the scandal in the African and Afro-American Studies Department had ended. But, in Willingham’s view, the core problem remained: Too many athletes couldn’t do college work. So she decided to go public, giving a series of interviews to Kane in which she alleged that the athletic department resorted to “cheating” to keep athletes eligible.
Once she became an on-the-record whistle-blower, things began to accelerate: In April 2013, she received an integrity award from the Drake Group, which advocates for reform in college athletics. Two months later, she received her first negative performance review and was relocated to a basement office where she was given primarily clerical duties. “They wanted me gone,” she said. (A university spokesman denies that the school created a hostile work environment.)
Then, in January, Willingham was the subject of a CNN report in which she alleged that, of 183 North Carolina football and basketball players she had researched since 2005, 60 percent read between the fourth- and eighth-grade levels, and between 8 percent and 10 percent read below the third-grade level. That report set off a firestorm inside the university. At a faculty meeting shortly after the report aired, the school’s provost, James W. Dean Jr., described her data as “a travesty.” (Willingham responds that the provost only looked at one of her data points, and that her assessment derived from, among other things, counseling the students in question.)
“That meeting was like a public trial,” said Jay Smith, a history professor who has been a leading critic of the athletic department. “The purpose was to discredit her.” By this time, it was clear to Willingham that she needed to leave. Her last day at the university is Tuesday.
Willingham is not going quietly, however. The most valuable thing most college athletes can get is an education, she told me, and that’s what they are being deprived of. “I believe athletes should have rights,” she told me, “but an education is the only way out of poverty.”
She also has a reform idea: “If universities are going to continue to admit students who aren’t ready to do the work,” she said, “the N.C.A.A. should pay for 15 months remediation, after which the athlete would have to pass a test.” In addition, she said, they should have five-year scholarships to help improve the odds of graduating.
“I’ve become a reformer,” she said. “I want to see the N.C.A.A. machinery dismantled. I want faculties to take back their universities from the athletic departments. I look at what is going on out there: the O’Bannon lawsuit, the union drive at Northwestern.” She paused. “I think we have a movement here,” said the whistle-blower.
