Students, “college management” and “professor management”

Closely associated with the problem of low skills and low motivation is students’ tendency to organise academic work in a way that requires the minimum effort needed to obtain the degree. There is a majority of students who have low levels of commitment with their education, choosing not to attend lectures and making a minimum effort (Reay, Crozier & Clayton, 2010, p.112). These students display a strategic attitude to learning (p. 113) based on how to obtain the best results with the least effort. Essentially, studies on student culture from different places – and years – reveal that students have a strategic approach to university demands. Their efforts are seldom the effect of an individual’s own calculations in solitaire, neither are they the result of a teacher’s performance in class or a university’s rules. The way students deal with their day to day tasks and challenges is the result of a mixture of collective beliefs and behaviours, as well as of a group’s accumulated experience.

Here I recall the study on medical students in the United States in 1950s. Extensive participant observation revealed how the students, as a group, go through several stages in their perception of their education. They started with an initial perspective of having to make an effort to “learn it all” in order to be successful in medical school, to a provisional perspective of realising that “you can’t do it all”, then to a perspective based on what consensus the groups create for each occasion, and finally to a perspective based on “what they want us to know” (Becker et al., 1961, pp. 107-157). The results revealed how in a group of students that go through the same experiences together during their Freshman year, there are changes in the way they interpret their education, their obligations, and the level of effort that should be put in and when. Furthermore, these convictions did not stem directly from what the professors told the group to do. They included idealistic perspectives that they had before they started their studies, and collective solutions they arrived to together as they were forced to solve the problem of passing tests and remain at the university. The different perspectives depended on the year they were placed and the major landmark challenges they had to face.

The initial “learn it all” (Becker, 1961, pp. 92-106) phase was based on the beliefs they brought to medical school as individuals. Even though the students found themselves overwhelmed with work and unable to achieve their aim of learning everything, they considered this overload as a normal part of studying medicine, and not as something for which to blame the faculty (p. 102). During this phase they also believed that everything they

were taught was relevant for their future practice (p. 108). The second stage was a collective development. The researchers called it the provisional perspective, which can be described as “you can’t do it all” (pp. 107-134). The acquisition of the new perspective stemmed from the taking of tests, that led them to conclude that the faculty would be “out to get them” (p.109). In this stage they even resorted to studying what they considered was unimportant because they thought it could be included in a test. During this “provisional perspective”, a temporary transitional perspective between the initial one and their final views, students also reflected in a more strategic way on how to focus their efforts. This perspective led students to create their own ‘classification’ of courses depending on the kind of challenge each one presented. They identified two types of courses. On was the “big, tough, important” course, which involved a lot of work and material to learn, and required a lot of independent work for the student. The other type included organised material and manuals. This second type of course was referred to by some students and faculty as “spoon-feeding”, which had both defendants and detractors. “Faculty proponents of spoon-feeding say there is so much for students to learn that this is the only economical way to teach them. Those who favour the detailed style believe that students must be taught to think and that having them organize a mass of material for themselves is the way to do it”. (p.110). Finally, in what the researchers called “interaction and consensus” as final perspective, the students reached a final consensus in which they decide as a group what and how to prioritise in their studies. In brief, the final perspective is described by the researchers as “What they want us to know”. Through their experience, students that belonged to fraternity groups, because of their closeness, reached this conclusion first, while the independents took longer to reach it, resisting for a while and trying to keep learning what they felt was important for their future practice. Once again, this makes clear how group identity, accumulated experience and common beliefs have a decisive role on student behaviour and attitudes towards their academic work.

Both Nathan (2005) and Becker et al. (1961) found that the level of effort and the direction it is given is collectively set by groups. Again, a very important aspect of student behaviour is what Nathan refers to as “college management”. The university dedicated efforts to teach students “time management” skills, with the belief that these could guarantee a better success at combining academic work with social life (2005, pp. 110-111). Time management was introduced as the key to success. Instead, students opted for “controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors, and limiting workload”; they preferred “college management” over “time management” (p. 113). While the system provided and defined a set of choices with the students’ wellbeing in mind, the students chose according to

their own priorities and created, within the system, a different set of choices. Along with registering classes to fulfil requirements, students sought a delicate balance between easy and demanding courses, a schedule that would fit into certain hours of the day and certain days of the week, and a convenient proximity of the classrooms. On-line courses, originally designed for external students, became a very popular option for those living on campus due to their adaptability to any schedule. Hence, when giving students the opportunity to choose, they do so following their own priorities, which are not necessarily educational. Their tendency to practice “college management” can lead them to strategically choose courses based, for example, on the convenience of its assessment method (see, for example, Harrison & Mears, 2002, p. 105).

This instrumental approach to college can also extend to the relationship of students with teachers. Nathan described “professor management” (2005, p. 116) as a strategy consisting of giving professors what they want in exchange of special treatment. Students expressed that they wanted “career advice, information, recommendations, and As”83 _from their professors, while they barely mentioned “learning and discovery” (p. 117). They compared the student-teacher relationship with a “boss-worker relationship” (117) and claimed that getting good results is a question of giving teachers what they want.

Many times the students’ financial situation and the stress brought about by rising tuition costs that result in them being forced to work are mentioned as the root of students’ instrumental attitudes to their university education, and as a reason to dedicating not enough time to their academic work. As Nathan points out, there are in fact political-economic forces that affect the amount of time a student can dedicate to academic work. An increase in tuition fees can indeed increase the amount of hours that a student must work, decreasing in turn the amount of time available for course work. Furthermore, high fees develop into high debt for students who, as a result, make their degree choices preferring those fields that guarantee a well-paid job in the future (Nathan, 2005, p. 151). However, this conclusion can also be misleading and cannot be generalised. First of all, it cannot be assumed that students only work out of necessity, that only those who have financial needs resort to work while they study. Also, the strong focus on tuition costs overlooks other aspects that also reinforce the client or customer identity. The forced conclusion would be that if the student does not need to pay a lot of money, he or she will not feel like a customer or adopt consumerist attitudes to education, and vice versa, when a student has to pay a lot of money this will inevitably generate a consumer attitude and pragmatic approach to higher education. If paying was so

decisive for the development of a pragmatic approach to higher education in students, one would perhaps find a pattern in which students in Sweden and Denmark would have a markedly opposite attitude from American and British students. And there would be very different levels of pragmatism between students in private and public universities in Latin America. An issue that is overlooked in some contexts, for instance, is that the money used to pay university fees does not always come from the student or his/her parents. Many students have scholarships or are financed by a relative who is in a better economic position and will not demand money repayments (in the case of Latin America this is not uncommon). In addition, as seen in the studies discussed above, the same pragmatic attitude that Nathan defined as “college management” and “professor management” was displayed by the medical students from the 1950s, indicating that pragmatic – often identified as consumer – attitudes are not a phenomenon of the current situation.

In sum, student culture is shaped through day-to-day problem solving and long term goals that a collective of students has. It changes through time and varies in strength. Thus, research on student culture casts doubts on ideas about individual teacher performance and individual student motivation and needs as the decisive element that predicts how much effort a student will invest in his or her education, or how successful the learning experience will be. Behaviours and opinions that can be perceived as evidence of a “consumer consciousness”, client-style demands, lack of motivation or an apparent clarity of what students want from their teachers and the university, can in fact belong to a very specific discourse grounded on cultural values shared by a specific groups of students. It is not possible to understand the “truths” students have created about university lives or teachers simply by asking them to fill in a standardised questionnaire. An effort to improve quality focused on individual teacher performance that, in addition, turns its back on understanding student culture and engaging with it, would necessarily conceal instead of reveal important issues on teaching and learning. If this is the case, several other notions from the quality assurance perspective are also erroneous, such as that of pretending to answer individual student needs, as views on quality are collectively generated. Another evident error, especially in internationalised universities, is the effort to standardise teaching practices. Teaching in a group with a very homogenous student culture would necessarily be a very different experience to teaching in a heterogeneous, mixed, or “internationalised” programme, a challenge that university professors increasingly deal with but that quality assurance managers do not acknowledge.