One of the sticking points in debates about higher ed reform centers on the way we think about the past. Sketching broadly, in one iteration of the argument, there are the folks who argue that we need change because educational standards are declining, and then there are the folks who dismiss that argument by claiming that the reformers are invoking an uninformed and nostalgic image of a better-schooled past that never happened. They have a good derisive laugh at the people who would like to see constructive change, and they carry on, secure in the knowledge of their superior historicity and complacently comfortable with a status quo that serves them better than the students whose futures are in their hands.

This dead-ending is one of my pet peeves, and I often think that the folks who would like to see reform should just stop talking about the past in order to avoid this kind of reaction from the academics who need to be convinced to take responsibility for educating today's students--and for making the changes that would require. No need to invoke the past, after all. Just talk about the now. Instead of saying we aren't educating as well as we used to, just argue that we aren't educating as well as we need to. That's demonstrably true, and it focusses us on the present and the future it will create in important ways.

Still, it's interesting all the same to encounter the rare college professor who has been around long enough to be able to make some strong qualitative--and eminently quantifiable--claims about how the students of today compare to those of yesteryear.

Here's J. Edward Ketz, a Penn State accounting professor who has been teaching college for 35 years, and has some interesting things to say about what students used to know--and what they no longer do:

Compared with the students in the 1970s, today's students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.

Before proceeding, let me enunciate two premises. First, I do not think there is any significant difference between the two groups in terms of native, raw intelligence. Instead, the distinction between yesterday's and today's students when they first set foot on college campuses rests in their educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process. In short, they differ in terms of their readiness for college. Second, I am focusing on the average student who majors in accounting. Both groups arise from a distribution of students. The lower tail of yesteryear's population had some weak students, and the upper tail of the present-day population has some very strong students; however, when one focuses on the means of these two distributions, he or she finds a huge gap.

To begin, today's average accounting major cannot perform what used to be Algebra I and II in high school. Students cannot solve simultaneous equations. Students have difficulty with present value computations, not to mention formula derivations. Students even have difficulty employing the high-low method to derive a cost function, something that merely requires one to estimate a straight line from two points.

I would like to discuss in class the partial derivative of a present value formula to ascertain the impact of changes in interest rates, but that has become a fruitless enterprise. Even if students had a course in calculus, the exams probably had multiple choice questions so students guessed their way through the course, they don’t remember what they learned, and whatever they learned was mechanical and superficial.

Thirty years ago I required my Intermediate Accounting students to derive the future and present value formulas, including the present value of a perpetuity, which requires a knowledge of limits. I gave up on that endeavor over a decade ago when I observed that the average student had no idea what I was talking about.

Worse, they didn't care.

Today's students cannot read at what used to be a tenth-grade level. I learned this dramatically when I wrote a couple of textbooks in the 1990s. Editors at both publishing houses insisted that I rewrite my materials so today's student could read it. I was forbidden to employ large or "fancy" words and had to simplify the grammar. For example, both editors told me never to compose a sentence with a subordinate clause because it was too complex for students to understand.

Today's students cannot read critically. For example, I can assign an SEC litigation release for class, but students cannot read it for detail, nor can they discern the key points of the document. If I really want them to perceive anything, I have to tell them. Of course, that doesn't work in the long run because I won't be there in the future to help them read SEC essays.

Link via Joanne Jacobs.