[zamfi]

Wait, but the point of the piece is that although college has always been transactional, behavior has changed.

If so, why would transactional-ism be the cause?

Read on:

> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.

And then, crucially:

> Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.

[jt-hill]

"Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids.

When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.

Don't hate the player — hate the game.

[jackcosgrove]

I don't think the author of the piece is saying there has been a cultural change among students, emanating from within. Rather the thesis is that smartphones are the culprit. "Things changed" can encompass the proliferation of smartphones.

[Olreich]

Sure, but the argument is still that the smartphones aren’t the root cause. It’s the transactional nature of the thing. Can’t fail students because money would go down, so keep passing them as they get better equipped to ignore you and have reduced requirements to get a passing grade.

The thing that’s changed is how much the transactional nature favors the lazy students, not the smartphones specifically.

The reason the argument is so bad that “it’s the smartphones” is because that implies an easy solution that is external to the academic system, when the root cause is internal to the system.

[zamfi]

Why would the transactional nature favor students now though? What’s the mechanism for that, that’s internal to the system?

In other words it sounds like you’re arguing that the root cause is “the transactional nature” but that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed. So why is it worse now?

What is it that makes students “better equipped to ignore you”?

[mike_hearn]

Because the universities themselves have been constantly lowering standards. It was always a transaction but there was a price. That price is locked in a race to the bottom because administrations and professors don't care about standards.