Students

Soldiers are returning from war to college. For several years I did not even notice them. That seems to be the way they like it. The 336 veterans who are now students on the Bridgewater State University campus in Massachusetts are almost invisible. By my calculation, the number of veterans at BSU has increased by 65 percent since 2009–10.

Over the past two decades we have placed the outcomes of higher education under scrutiny. Accrediting agencies make the assessment of learning a key to appraising institutions. We scholars make our voices heard on the matter, and politicians have grown curious about undergraduates. In the first decade of the new millennium, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education spent three years collecting data on the best way to measure the effect of a college education.

Politicians, administrators, philanthropists, and teachers have all weighed in on what to do about American education. What do college students think? One of my students recently wrote:

I think teachers know what to teach and how to teach it. Administrators come in and try to tell teachers what and how to teach and how to measure what children learn, and they don’t know what they are doing.

Let us imagine, with puckish conjecture, ten items from the Mindset List for the class of 2037, students born in 2015. Will irreverent prognostication breed constructive gadflies?

1. College survey courses have always come through podcasts from five or six major universities.

2. There have always been departments of transhuman studies.

3. The replacement of human beings by computers and robots has made job prospects, even for college graduates, increasingly difficult.