The College Writing Problem: Stop the Presses for Journalism and English Majors

Philip White

In the course of the Atlantic’s recent series, The Writing Revolution, contributors have explored how to inspire struggling students, discussed the need to go beyond curriculum requirements, and delved into the disparity between how American society treats its high school athletes and their star student classmates.

Each of these pieces has merit, and yet as I read them, I was inspired to move beyond what works and what doesn’t for K-12 writing instruction and jump ahead to the problems of writing in higher education. 

In his fine essay, Arthur Applebee writes that in 2011, 40 to 41 percent of public school students at grades 8 and 12 were assigned less than a page of writing homework per week, and that 80 percent of these assignments didn’t involve composition.

You may think and hope that this dearth of practical writing is overcome once students pack their bags for college and that our higher education institutions have challenging syllabi that prepare able students to write the next great American novel, become the new David McCullough, or, heck, just eke out a living as a poet or freelance journalist.  But, in many cases, such an assumption is ill founded.  

The composition courses required at liberal arts colleges (typically Comp 1 and Comp 2) are usually a joke, covering the basics of grammar and style that previous generations mastered in high school or before. If you don’t know a verb from an adverb by the time you’re 18, what hope is there for you? Indeed, enterprising students can and should do all they can to avoid such rudimentary instruction—and the cost of six useless credit hours—by taking a CLEP testthat exempts them from Comp course requirements.

The picture is little brighter when it comes to those brave and creative souls who choose an English or journalism degree. The typical limitation of the former is a lack of practical exercises that allow students to critically evaluate a text in a way that sharpens analytical skills applicable outside academia. The length and scope of such essays have been steadily reduced, to the point where a two-page, double-spaced exercise in brevity is the norm. There’s nothing wrong with being succinct, but such an assignment is a cakewalk for most able undergraduates. Many won’t excel unless they’re pushed, and a few hundred words now and again just isn’t going to cut it.

There are many challenges for journalism degree programs, but these can be distilled into two main points. First, the newspaper game has changed so much with the closing of many dailies and weekly publications, the staff cuts at others and the rise of online-only pubs like The Huffington Post, which rely ever more on unpaid contributors from its vast blogging network.

The same is true of magazines: while there are an increasing number of specialty publications and overall reading stats are up (if you believe the claims in the 2010—2011 Power of Print campaign run by the Big Five of Time Inc., Hearst, Advance Publications' Condé Nast, Wenner Media, and Meredith), many more have folded and many of the surviving titles are run by skeleton crews. Still more titles have become online-only ventures that require Web 3.0-ready writing—complete with tags, optimized search terms and such—elements all too often ignored by behind-the-times journalism programs.

Second, there are too many schools at which the journalism professors have never actually worked as journalists. Sure, having a Master’s and Ph.D. in journalism is beneficial, but a lack of practical experience makes it nearly impossible for an instructor to prepare his or her students for the working world. I was fortunate enough to have a journalism adjunct professor whose day job was running several local newspapers. I was shocked by the red ink hemorrhage on my first few assignments, but soon realized that this detail-oriented editing from a real editor was making me a better writer. If it wasn’t good enough to be printed, it wasn’t good enough for him. His diligence and the equally severe, yet constructive, reviews from three others professors conditioned me for writing outside of academia. And when I’d finally reached his high bar, Mr. Kevin Wright put one of my feature stories on the front page of his flagship paper. So began my writing career.

For journalism professors who don’t have Wright’s practical experience, bringing in guest speakers to provide guidance on essential topics—such as how to prepare for and conduct an interview and how to establish connections with editors—can help. But this is no substitute for an instructor who can pass on lived lessons to would-be journalists. Or for one who not only has writing chops to bolster academic credentials, but also encourages students to get ahead by (heaven forbid) building a useful portfolio while still in college. There are, of course, fine journalism programs—including those at Columbia University and the University of Missouri—but too many others are letting students graduate with an all but worthless BA based on theory-heavy courses from a bygone era.  What student wants to pay 100 grand for that education?

What's the Point of College?

Randall Stephens

If you haven't already checked it out, have a look at Louis Menand's New Yorker essay, "Live and Learn: Why We Have College," June 6, 2011. The Pulitzer Prize-winning intellectual historian and Harvard professor considers the changing nature of college in recent years and the various ideals that have shaped higher ed. He also discusses several books that take stock of the situation. Are we in the midst of a major change in higher education? Says Menand:

Before 1945, élite private colleges like Harvard and Yale were largely in the business of reproducing a privileged social class. Between 1906 and 1932, four hundred and five boys from Groton applied to Harvard. Four hundred and two were accepted. In 1932, Yale received thirteen hundred and thirty applications, and it admitted nine hundred and fifty-nine—an acceptance rate of seventy-two per cent. Almost a third of those who enrolled were sons of Yale graduates. . . .

The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus. This is what Arum and Roksa believe, anyway. Students at very selective colleges are still super-motivated—their motivation is one of the reasons they are selected—and most professors, since we are the sort of people who want a little gold star for everything we do, still want to make a difference to their students. But when motivation is missing, when people come into the system without believing that what goes on in it really matters, it’s hard to transform minds.

If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification.>>>

Notes from Grad School: The Coming College Crisis

Dan Allosso

The two wide spots in the 2010 US “Population Pyramid” reflect college-age Americans and their parents. For years—since I was an undergrad, really—I’ve suspected that when a graph of the annual cost of college crossed the annual income of average Americans, there would be a problem. It recently occurred to me—now that I’m a parent of two high-schoolers—that the real issue is slightly more complicated.

I’m not a statistician, but I suspect that if you were to look at the numbers, you’d see some interesting things. First, the average US family size (2000 census) was 3.14, with an average of .90 children per family. But wait! 52% of US households had no children at all. The average number of children, in families that have children, is 1.86—for convenience let’s call that 2. This means there are really two groups of people in America: half of us have kids and the other half don't. We probably have different perspectives on education as a social good.

So, in a family with children, the average is two children. They tend to be close in age, which means they tend to get to college age at roughly the same time. So, going back to that population pyramid, on average those college-age Americans in that first wide spot have a college-age sibling. About 60% of American kids go to college, and they’re more likely to go if a sibling also goes. So, in those college-oriented families, the parents in that wide spot that centers on age 45-49, on average have two kids in college.

Add to this the conclusions of studies like the one done by the St. Louis Fed, and the picture becomes even clearer. Their “wealth curve” shows that married couples with children have only half the net worth of married couples without children. And the overwhelming majority of the wealth in America is held by people aged 55 to 75. So what we’re looking at is a big batch of Americans coming to college from families of modest means.

Annual average tuition, fees, room and board (TFRB) at four-year private institutions has grown from $18,312 in 1986, to $30,367. Average TFRB at four-year public institutions has risen from $7,528 to $12,796 over the same period. So if you’re the average family described above, you're looking at over $240,000 to send your two kids to private schools, or $100,000 for public. And the bills come over a six or seven year period.

When I was an undergrad, there was no FAFSA. Parents were not automatically expected to pony up the funds. I saved, took out a small student loan, and worked. That’s not even an option for my kids. But beyond the personal implications, what do these changes mean for the American economy? What are the long-term implications of scooping all the savings, home equity, and retirement nest-eggs of middle class Americans, into this one bucket? Or of this group of Americans taking on huge additional debt? And what will happen to an American higher education industry that has become accustomed to these revenues, when people can no longer afford them, when credit dries up, or when the population pyramid shifts again in ten years, and the narrower bands of parents and children reach college-age?