If today’s college students are marching toward the abyss, as so many pundits and prognosticators have said, the poor fools will never see the yawning pit until it’s too late. After all, they have pasted their eyeballs to the shimmering screens they hold, and even if one of them were to spot the danger ahead, he would not dare speak up without an adult telling him it was OK to do so. Such are kids today.
OK, OK, that’s a mean, generational joke, told by a 37-year-old reporter who has absorbed various stereotypical renderings of the young Americans who are now are walking, talking, and breathing on a campus near you. Generational thinking has become so common—and generational labeling so sticky—that nuanced discussions of teenagers and twenty-somethings are often hard to come by. Where generalizations rule, students are either great or terrible, brilliant or ignorant.
Arthur Levine, the education scholar, wanted to embrace the contradictions he saw in his research on traditional-age undergraduate students, however. “I’m very unhappy with snapshots of generations that try to cram them into very small packages,” Mr. Levine told The Chronicle on Monday. “That tends to leave you with a very skewed picture of who’s coming to school.”
Mr. Levine is the co-author of a forthcoming book called Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today’s College Student (Jossey-Bass). The findings are based on surveys of undergraduate students from the present going back to the late 1960s, surveys of student-affairs officers going back to the late 1970s, and interviews conducted on 31 campuses. Mr. Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and president emeritus of Columbia University’s Teachers College, has written extensively about the characteristics of various generations. His co-author, Diane R. Dean, is a professor of higher-education policy and administration at Illinois State University.
Some popular descriptions of young people today, the so-called Millennials, hinge on the idea that each generation turns a sharp corner, assuming its own distinct set of attitudes and behaviors. Mr. Levine’s and Ms. Dean’s findings complicate this clean-break theory of generational change.
“It’s not like in 2000 that young people changed dramatically and looked entirely different from the ones who came before,” Mr. Levine says. “This generation looks like the last generation in a lot of ways. They aren’t involved in their colleges, they engage in dangerous sexual behaviors, they drink too much, and they are politically disenchanted.”
Nonetheless, the book explores the many significant differences between today’s students and their predecessors. Not surprisingly, the biggest change the authors describe is technology—how it has rewired students’ lives and reshaped their expectations (and experience) of college.
‘Alone Together’
When Mr. Levine set out to write the book, he figured that most students would describe the September 11 terrorists attacks as the defining event of their time. He was wrong. “9/11 finished third,” he said. By far, students cited the creation of the World Wide Web—and the digital technologies it spawned—as the most crucial event of their lifetime (the economic downturn was the second most-frequent response).
In this context, the tightrope-walker is an apt image for the modern student. As rendered by the authors, today’s students are wired to an array of technological devices, texting and tweeting at all hours, and forming friendships through their own means (on average, students surveyed had 241 social-media “friends”). Yet they often find face-to-face interactions difficult, and they struggle to understand the boundary between public and private, the book says.
Several passages capture the ironic meaning of connectedness on college campuses. “Student after student told us of whipping out their cell phone as soon as they left class, and walking across campus chatting, sometimes in groups with each person on their own phone,” the authors write. “They are alone together once again.”
Although this 21st century tribalism has benefits, there are also drawbacks. Thirty-four percent of the students the authors surveyed said they “pretty much keep to themselves socially.” More than a third said they would be more likely to join a Facebook group than a similar on-campus group. “These communication tools should be enlarging students’ worlds and worldviews,” says one student affairs vice-president in Chapter 3, “but they seem to be doing the opposite by teasing out the circle of friends.”
Just when a reader might conclude that the young are doomed to loneliness, however, the authors drop in complicating details. Younger folks, for one thing, tend define community differently than older folks do. In 2009, the authors found, 78 percent of students said they felt a “sense of community at this institution;” in 1993, long before Facebook, just 62 percent of students said the same. Is that just a coincidence?
Generation on a Tightrope examines how other contradictions play out in other aspects of students lives. Many students have been hit hard by the recession, and only 35 percent of those surveyed recently said they were optimistic about the future of the nation. Yet 89 percent were optimistic about their own futures, and 73 percent expected to be at least as well off as their parents.
Today’s students, the book suggests, tend to tune out of campus issues while tuning into global issues. Here, too, Mr. Levine finds a contradiction. “They think globally, but they don’t know a lot about the globe,” he says. “They understand that pollution’s a problem in China just like it’s a problem here, but they don’t know who the president of China is.”
Fans of rosy renderings of the Millennials may want to read over the part where Mr. Levine and Ms. Dean describe students as “a timid generation of rule followers in an era that demands bold, new rule makers” (the authors go on to describe today’s young people as “self-centered,” “immature,” and “needy” sorts who “confused effort with excellence”). Nonetheless, the authors’ purpose, it seems, is not to point fingers at students; rather, it’s to explain them to all the constituents who worry (or don’t worry enough) about their futures.
The authors save the stern lecture for academe, offering several recommendations for colleges. They also urge colleges to embrace the “enriched academic major,” with a broader, interdisciplinary approach to various subjects, and a “practical minor” that would give students practical skills that they could use in the work force.
Institutions, they insist, also must do more to embrace teaching methods that best serve this ultra-wired generation.
“A majority of students we have want colleges to be more digital, they prefer blended courses,” Mr. Levine says. “This is difficult for colleges, but the world is moving in this direction. If colleges want to remain relevant, they have to change.”
And if anyone wants to endow a center for generational studies on a campus somewhere, filling the shelves with relevant books would be a piece of cake.
