If you even casually peruse article headlines about higher education, it should come as no surprise that most of these stories discuss the current aptitude of students. The way a lot of these articles read makes me think that their purpose is to strike fear, or at least concern, in the current state of education.

For example, Horowitch wrote an article in 2024 documenting how several students attending elite schools could not read an entire book for a class because they never had to while in high school. There are now reports documenting how students feel woefully unprepared for the rigors of college. None of this stuff is new. The Harvard Crimson was writing about similar issues over 100 years ago.

When I entered college as a nontraditional student, I had to take a first-year seminar. At the time, I thought the idea of having to take a class to adjust to college was absurd. I had recently left the armed forces, and I couldn’t wait to start college. I sat through military-style education for four years, and I was hoping for something more challenging. For clarity, the Department of Defense requires that all training doctrine be at a third-grade reading level. That makes sense to me because most of us enlisted types were fresh out of high school and ignorant of many things. That is why basic training exists. It prepares you with the fundamentals of military protocols so you can function in that environment.

Now I am told I must take this college-preparation course. Why? The vast majority of my classmates graduated from high school three months prior. For all I knew, they were about to enter the thirteenth grade. Were they not prepared? That is the name of the academic track written on my high school diploma, college prep. I was finally going to use that knowledge four years later, but I finally got around to doing it. I would come to learn that this first-year class was essential because the retention rates of first-semester students were apparently abysmal, and the school thought this would be a good way to alleviate the stress and demands on the incoming students. In hindsight, I can appreciate what they were trying to do with the class. I don’t think it really helped me because if I wanted to know something, I would ask somebody. I hadn’t learned to harness the power of the Internet yet, so asking people for help was how I got around campus.

Fast forward to today. I teach a course that serves as a general education requirement. My classroom is in a building that the students generally don’t use or know about. They walk by it every day, but have no clue that it exists. The building isn’t very big. It is a single floor with one main hallway. The students can only make a left turn down the hallway to reach my classroom. Every other room is an office clearly marked with a professor’s name.

However, on the first day of class, the students continually ask the staff where the classroom is. It got to the point where I had signs made to reduce confusion. The signs are relatively big. They look like the type that you would see in a restaurant telling you to wait to be seated. I had two signs made. The first sign points down the hallway toward the classroom. The second sign is placed right in the middle of the hall, pointing into the classroom. This solution would appear to solve the issue. I should not have another problem with lost students. 

The opposite happened. More students than ever asked the staff where the classroom was. Even though I had placed the signs in high-traffic areas, they went unnoticed. Students practically tripped over the sign just to ask staff members the question it answered. The staff even asked me if we should use tape next time to direct the students to class. 

I am not one to be doom-and-gloom about students because I firmly believe that everybody has a skill set that will benefit them in life. However, I do sometimes wonder about them. I can’t worry if they are reading a book. I need them to read a sign. Okay. I am done yelling at the clouds now.