Declarations of Dependence

This story is part of a series about Teaching Gen Z. Read other stories here and here.

When Anya Galli Robertson taught her research-methods course for the first time since the pandemic last year, the associate professor of sociology at the University of Dayton realized that the major project she typically assigns wasn’t going to fly.

Galli Robertson had taught the content-heavy first half of the course as usual: same lectures, same book, same test. But her students were floundering. Nothing suggested they’d be ready for the second half of the course, where they would write a research proposal. If she wanted to see them apply the material from the first half of the course, she was going to have to offer more support than usual.

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Galli Robertson is not alone in clocking a change. Much has been made of students’ spotty classroom attendance and disengagement from their work. But a less-discussed dilemma may end up mattering even more: Students are struggling to complete significant work on their own. Some professors — who see a big paper or project as integral to assessing what students know and can do — have cut down on other parts of their courses so that students can pull it off.

But what, exactly, stands in the way? Observers offer a variety of explanations, from students’ overly busy schedules to the pandemic’s effect on their academic preparation and social adjustment. But most agree the problem evades a simple diagnosis or an easy fix. It has professors reducing workloads, adjusting assignments, and asking themselves a question that might once have been unthinkable: Can students still get work done on their own?

Galli Robertson thinks that a lot of the shift she’s seen in her students has to do with their experience of the pandemic. The students who take research methods are mainly sophomores and juniors, meaning most of those in her course last year experienced the brunt of the disruption in high school. Here’s what she thinks happened: Educators, forced into an unfamiliar format, focused on getting through as well as they could. Any sense of meaning fell by the wayside. Students responded by doing the bare minimum. By the time they got to her course years later, they seemed unable to do anything more.

Their bad habits, she thinks, collided with the longstanding pressures of work and family responsibilities, pessimism about the future, and a realization that a lot of what they were asked to do in college could be completed by generative AI. Put it all together, and students had become very selective about where they would invest their effort.

Galli Robertson couldn’t change any of that. So she decided to try to create a project they would care about and offer more support to help them complete it.

Instead of proposing a study, students would actually conduct one, making the experience more hands-on. Instead of working individually, they would work in groups. She broke down the project into smaller pieces. And she coached them along the way, commenting in the Google Docs the groups used to collaborate and in class when several groups were struggling.

“It was more collaborative,” Galli Robertson says. “They were less isolated. The stress of having to do all the work at once was taken off because they did it over the course of the semester.”

Sure, she offered more help and gave up some class time to make it happen. But students, she says, “still got the achievement of a final learning outcome.”

Galli Robertson plans to keep the changes she made to the final project this year. She’s resigned to the fact that students struggle to work solo — and that that’s not likely to change.

It’s not that students don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. But they seem to expect someone else — the professor — to spark their motivation and hold them accountable for doing it. That’s what Kimberly N. Russell says she and her colleagues in Rutgers University’s department of ecology, evolution, and natural resources have observed.

Russell, an associate professor of teaching, sees the change as multifaceted. Historically, she says, a slew of students would come and see her after the first exam because they wanted to discuss how to improve their performance. That isn’t happening anymore. Russell, who also directs the undergraduate program in her department, has noticed other shifts in how students approach their courses in general. Students have told her that attendance should be mandatory because otherwise there isn’t enough reason for them to show up. They have even suggested that if professors don’t want them to cheat they need make them take exams in person and proctor them.

Since the pandemic, more professors have shifted to offering more small assignments rather than making the final grade hinge on just a few exams. That is probably a better approach, Russell says, but students seem to have a hard time keeping track of all of the work they’re meant to be doing.

And they need more help on larger assignments, too. In the past, Russell gave students a handout on how to write a lab report. Now her TA spends half of a lab period walking around helping students get started in writing one, even though most students in the class are sophomores and juniors. “I’m finding it’s difficult to get to everything because I’m having to spend more time in class getting students started on stuff, getting them to the point where they’re comfortable working on their own,” she says.

A lot of students seem to balk at the premise that they’re supposed to come to class, prepare in advance, and study afterward. In the past, Elizabeth Flandreau had students watch videos before coming to class, even before that model gained popularity during the pandemic. And it worked well, says Flandreau, an associate professor of psychology at Grand Valley State University. But a couple of years ago, she found herself unable to get a good class discussion going. After looking at the platform where she posted the lecture videos, Flandreau figured out what the problem was: No one was watching them.

One student angrily told her: “Well, if we actually watch the videos and do the reading, then class is fine. But otherwise, I get nothing out of it.”

Flandreau was taken aback. But on reflection, she realized that because so many professors had posted videos during the pandemic, students’ expectations had shifted. These days, she thinks, students either want to do all of their work online, at their own pace, or they want everything to happen face to face. They don’t want to have to do both.

So Flandreau took a new tack. Early on in her course, she gave students a quiz about their schedules and motivations. Then she gave them an option. They could move through the course in the preferred, collaborative format she had designed. Or they could take an alternate route in which most of the work could be completed online, at their own pace. One result is that the students who came to class wanted to be there. It also allowed Flandreau to be flexible with students while still maintaining boundaries.

Flandreau has learned that she can’t be completely responsible for how students move through her course. “I cannot be everywhere and everything for everyone,” Flandreau says. Some people “are going to look at the class as a hurdle to graduation and a checkbox thing to get done. And I can’t make them love neuroscience.”

It hasn’t been an easy lesson. Flandreau loves neuroscience and she wants students to love it too. But she’s realized, “I might want something different for a student than what they want or need for themselves.”

It’s easy for professors to lament students’ lack of focus on the academic heart of the college experience; it’s also easy for that lament to slide into blame. Some students are surely squandering their time. But many have real responsibilities beyond the classroom. And colleges, by enrolling students from a wide array of backgrounds and circumstances and charging more than many of them can afford, drive some undergraduates to attempt to be both full-time workers and full-time students.

Students who work — and about a quarter of them work 20 or more hours a week — have a time deficit, says Janese Free, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Emmanuel College. Free and her colleague Katrin Kriz, a professor of sociology, are working on a book about how colleges can better support students who work, based on interviews with students in the Northeastern United States.

Students told the researchers they knew they could do better academically, Free says, if they had more time. Scheduling was a common challenge, and working students didn’t rate as highly in group projects where professors asked them to evaluate the contributions of their peers. It was hard for them to take advantage of experiential learning opportunities.

Not being able to do their best work and not feeling supported led many students to experience a loss of passion for what they were learning, Free added. These challenges, she says, have a compounding effect.

But professors don’t always see what holds students back from doing their best work. A good first step, the authors think, would be for colleges to share with faculty members data on their own working students.

The way Vanessa Woods sees it, a lot of the changes professors have made to support this cohort of students are things they probably should have done anyway. In the past, it wasn’t as apparent when assignments were weakly designed or poorly communicated because more students were well prepared or had robust support from family and friends, says Woods, an associate teaching professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This new group of students has simply revealed some existing weaknesses in how college students are expected to learn.

Even before the pandemic, students weren’t reading or writing at length in high school, Woods says. Zoom school reduced their focus and provided less supervision, resulting in weaker skills in studying and note taking. Some of her students, Woods says, spend hours studying but do so ineffectively: They’ll read the textbook, but they won’t write anything down. That’s not to mention all of the time they spend getting distracted online.

Addison Johns knows that distraction well. Sometimes Johns, a rising senior at Montana State University at Billings, will scroll TikTok, telling herself she’ll take a five-minute break. “And then five minutes turns into an hour.”

Notifications that she’s gotten a text or Snapchat are similarly distracting, adds Johns, who’s double majoring in sociology and criminology.

This distraction is a real challenge, especially because Johns has limited time to do her schoolwork: She’s taking a full course load and working two jobs, at the local police department and at McDonald’s. She sometimes works up to 40 hours a week, with shifts that include opening the restaurant after staying up to do her homework. Her parents, who borrowed for their own educations, discouraged her from taking out student loans, she says.

Johns’s schedule pushes a good bit of her studying into the night or early mornings, which can make it hard to stay motivated. Having more time to study in class is better, she says. And she has appreciated assignments that fit her interests and feel connected to the real world.

The pandemic didn’t just hinder students’ academic preparation. They also took a hit socially.

Vivian Irving found it hard to adjust to her first year of college. Like most students who graduated high school in 2021, she had attended part of it online. Unlike a lot of them, Irving really liked the format, finding she could focus better when her academic and social lives were separate. At Oregon State University, she had to reacclimate to learning in person — and do so in lecture halls that, in some cases, held more students than had been in her high-school graduating class. Her classes felt impersonal, and she was having a hard time finding her way socially on campus.

An economics class made her particularly miserable. Students were supposed to watch the lectures before class, but in a class of 500 the subsequent discussion felt superficial. The material was theoretical and felt, to Irving, detached from real life. Even after contacting the professor and attending office hours, Irving felt unsupported and disconnected from him. She withdrew from the class.

Things turned around for Irving the following year. When she raised her hand in a large psychology class, the professor surprised her by knowing her name. He sent her an email later thanking her for contributing in class. She is now majoring in psychology and has formed a group of friends who are, too.

Cate Denial believes it’s taking students “longer to find their people.” Denial is a professor of history at Knox College, a small liberal-arts institution. In recent years, students have had a harder time building the social-support networks that sustain them, Denial has observed. Before the pandemic, this process usually played out in the first year of college. But now it drags on.

Some of the mental energy that students might otherwise put toward, say, a research paper is diverted into efforts to find friends, even years into college. At the same time, students don’t have the support that a good group of friends can provide, like encouragement to persevere after a setback.

That ties in with another trend Denial has observed: Her students are very worried about climate change. When students have strong social connections, their concerns for the future can fuel activism. When they don’t, students are more likely to despair and shut down.

To help, Denial has changed the format of an upper-level seminar she teaches, giving students class time as a workshop for their research papers instead of sending them off to work on them on their own time.

One student, Ellen Miller Garrett, a gender-studies major who plans to graduate at the end of fall term, said being able to work on a research paper in Denial’s course was great. It made the paper feel like a feature of the course, not just an add-on. But Miller Garrett also spent more time on the paper because the research and writing could be done in class time, which they had earmarked for school. Otherwise, completing it would have competed with all the other things Miller Garrett cares about.

Betsy Barre has been thinking about students’ academic workload since starting her career in faculty development about a decade ago. When she was starting out at the teaching center at Rice University, one of the most frequent questions she got from professors, especially new ones, was how much work to assign, recalls Barre, now the assistant provost and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In college, it’s long been understood that the bulk of students’ learning is supposed to happen outside of class. That makes it a lot harder for professors to gauge how long it’s taking students to get that work done.

When Barre couldn’t find a good resource to point professors toward, she created one herself: A workload estimator that has now been used across academe.

Back then, Barre figured everyone agreed that students ought to be spending two hours a week on coursework for each hour of class. It was a matter of figuring out how long the readings and assignments would take them to complete. Survey data have long suggested that students do more like one hour of work outside of class per classroom hour, Barre says. Still, pushing them to spend more time than that has been considered a best practice for good teaching.

But these days, Barre says, it’s become clear that professors don’t even agree on how much time students should be spending on coursework outside of class.

Students seem to think that, if anything, they’re being asked to do too much. But learning takes time. That means professors have to demonstrate to students — perhaps more than in the past — that the work they’re asking them to put in is valuable. The good news? There are lots of ways to do that, and students will do work that matters to them. The bad news? “Their choices about what they do are not happening in a vacuum,” she says. “It’s really about comparative value.” This class isn’t the only one students are taking; and class isn’t their only, or perhaps top, priority.

If students can’t or won’t make studying on their own a priority, maybe there should be more or longer classes.

“That assumption that we can expect them to independently do that work? Maybe that was never a realistic idea,” Barre says. Maybe what students really need is more time to learn together, and with their instructor.

It might sound implausible — who’s paying professors to spend more time teaching? — but there are already some corners where it happens a bit. Look at the time STEM students put into a one-credit lab course, Barre says. Another model is the way some instructors use office hours to provide students with collaborative, supervised practice time.

If colleges can’t change the pre-college lives of their students, or the many directions they’re being pulled in once they arrive, perhaps what needs to change is when, where, and how they’re expected to learn.