How Students Are Wrecking Their Futures With Student Evaluations

With this title, most people would anticipate that I am going to talk about the end-of-term professor evaluations that colleges administer to their students.  There has been a large amount of research conducted on this subject, mostly concerned with how it affects retention and tenure decisions that might help or wreck professors' not students' futures. 

 
These evaluations, however, are not the ones that should concern those who are worried about undergraduate education in the first two years--the ground zero of college failures.. Why? Because most of these lower division courses today are taught by adjuncts, and they are far more concerned with enrollments--or how students vote with their feet--than they are with college evaluations and tenure.

 
Twenty years ago, a senior adjunct professor at my college explained to me the logic of this calculation.  Watching me prepare materials for my first college class, he took me aside and explained "the enrollments problem." If the word got around among students that I was likeable, funny, and "easy," the next semester they would flock to my class.  What or how I taught was less important than these social decisions. While tenure-track professors have to deal with retention decisions, adjuncts are quite vulnerable to decisions  that deprive them of section assignments. According to my colleague, my continued employment would hinge ultimately on administrators' views of my enrollment numbers.

 
Though I went my own way, every experience that I have had since then confirmed for me that he was essentially right about colleges in general. American colleges are accomplished at enrolling students, but they are not set up well for ensuring the finish line, or making sure that students are college educated and graduated. 

 
Twenty years ago, students had word-of-mouth to guide their feet in and out of the classroom. Today, as with most things, the internet has turned this tendency into a phenomenon to be reckoned with, which brings me to the RateMyProfessor website. When I was teaching, I never looked at this site and naively thought that most students didn't bother either.  But I was surprised recently when I overheard a very good former student of mine talking about it.  I asked her if she actually went on the site, and she told me yes and that everybody did.  For what, I asked? I think she was taken aback by the amazed tone of my voice. She assured me, "just to know whether or not I had to buy the textbook," which of course did little to assuage my concerns. 

 
I finally did access the site to know what this other world of student evaluations was about. Suffice to say the evaluation categories are superficial at best.  But one thing that you have to hand to the internet evaluation sites. They make no pretense of evaluating the quality of education, as the college-administered student evaluations do.  Instead, they simply summarize and accumulate student comments that give other students one clear piece of information--in this particular course, with this particular professor, and at this particular time, how passive can I be in my own education and still pass the class?

 
There are many more students than you think, who are gaming the system and graduating in this way. Undereducated college graduates have become a national problem. In 2003, an adult literacy assessment found that only 31% of college graduates were proficient at college reading levels.  Michael Gormon, then president of the American Library Association said,  "It's appalling--it's really astounding. Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not saying much for the remainder." (Washington Post, December 25, 2005).

 
This means that, while 50% of college students drop out and join the working poor in low-end jobs, another 35% graduate with an unpersuasive piece of paper and float around the labor market for years. Evidence suggests that employers are increasingly avoiding these undereducated students by leaving them unemployed, underemployed, or working in low-end jobs.

 
You may find the following problem a useful introductory exercise for your next course.
College Graduates and the Labor Market 