The University as Confection
How short-termism in education is diminishing its value and impeding personal growth
By Nina Powell and Rebekah Wanic
Today’s student-centered education comes with an overarching shift in focus toward short-termism in academia. The current academic context favours immediate impact and evidence of effectiveness over evaluation of progress that is longer-term, meaningful and sustainable. Specifically, researchers and educators are benchmarked largely on the demonstration of frequent output - evidence of impact through publications, grant awards and student satisfaction surveys, solicited with ever increasing frequency. This short-termism has led to problems with research reproducibility, academic fraud, and the destruction of rigour in teaching. While the detrimental impact on research is important to discuss, the aim of this article is to explicate more fully the negative consequences for education.
In the current educational climate, student satisfaction surveys play a powerful role in shaping educators’ practices such that we are increasingly delivering palatable and low-stakes courses in an effort to keep students happy in the immediate. The message from administrators and then absorbed by students is that momentary discomfort is no longer accepted as part and parcel of quality education.
The concern is whether anything of value in an academic context can, or should, deliver immediate satisfaction. Education is not a candy bar but the expectation that a course should deliver immediate satisfaction is to treat the university like a confectionary that delivers immediate pleasure to its consumers.
What we value about a university education is the opportunity to give students a transformative educational experience that extends well beyond their years at university and that produces students who leave as better thinkers, scholars and citizens than they arrived. This opportunity for transformation will not come about if institutions and the wider educational community chase short-term student satisfaction and use this as evidence of impact because this is not the kind of impact that fosters transformation. Short-term satisfaction delivers nothing more than an immediately pleasurable yet fleeting experience - something like the short-lived pleasure that follows the consumption of chocolate.
Undermining Long-Term Growth
University education is valuable because it is a place where students can develop the abilities necessary for their long-term success. The benefits of this experience should continue to pay dividends well beyond any one course or the degree itself. And, these gains should not be limited to occupational success, but also success in all aspects of life, from cultivating meaningful relationships to developing moral autonomy and a sense of civic responsibility. Getting to that point takes time and will involve discomfort. Progress towards these ends is stifled through a short-term focus that identifies, and seeks to avoid or eliminate, any experience of negativity or challenge.
The university and its educators signal to students that short-termism is valuable and navigate them toward this mindset by placing the focus on student performance in continuous, frequent low-stakes curricula. This, coupled with the institution’s constant focus on students’ moment-to-moment experience and attention to well-being, driven by feelings rather than reason and perspective, perpetuates a norm of encouraging students to continuously take their internal emotional temperature; to always reflect on their immediate satisfaction, or lack thereof. A course and an instructor are seen as valuable to the university and its students if, in the moment, the student experience is positive.
The prioritization of immediate satisfaction suggests that we no longer value the negative side (e.g., the stress and challenge) of a meaningful experience or delaying gratification in expecting value and reward to come after we’ve completed the hard work. While this may result in temporary “success” during the limited time at university, such a mindset is not conducive to success post-graduation where developing flourishing relationships and careers requires navigating a long-term path.
Importantly, this focus also ignores the fact that what is experienced in the immediate is often fleeting and uninformative. Students are rewarded for complaining when things are immediately uncomfortable or difficult, for asking for concessions to mitigate momentary hurdles, and for focusing on any temporary perception of hardship or injustice. These are precisely the feelings that are necessary for any endeavour that intends to bring about meaningful improvement and precisely the feelings that gain value when reflected on over time.
Educators and institutions that accommodate these student requests and validate these complaints reinforce a harmful focus on short-termism. This focus undermines students’ ability to adopt a long-term orientation and develop skills to delay gratification and promote resilience. They are thwarted in their ability to push through immediate discomfort or to see beyond the normal fluctuations in mood that accompany any experience. They are not guided to develop an understanding of the value in working through hardship and fail to reflect over a protracted period of time on their experience with rationality and distance, hampering the development of emotional maturity. One need only observe modern discourse to understand how sorely the acquisition of such abilities are needed.
The university’s emphasis on short-termism is deeply disempowering for students. Students fail to take ownership of their outcomes because they become passive when they encounter struggles. Knowledge that their complaints will be attended to by administrators, students come to expect the people in charge to sort out their needs and fail to cultivate agency in their education and their lives more broadly. Agency comes in large part from the realization that experiences which bring a host of both good and bad feelings in the short-term, those that truly challenge us, are necessary for growth in the long-term and from learning how to manage oneself in the short-term to navigate through these feelings and reap the benefits.
Short-term Consequences; Long-term Effects
Many policies that pander to students and the orientation toward feelings and immediate experience developed out of an ever-growing wellbeing-focused movement in education. Contrary to its intended aims, students’ wellbeing is actually being undermined by the lack of attention to, and valuation of, hard work and delayed gratification. This may contribute to why we see an increase in students’ reports of stress and psychological distress. Administrative and student service messaging inundates students with invitations to turn inward to their immediate reactions without ever being asked to adopt a healthier perspective to view things in context and with distance.
Students are encouraged to reflect on their education with heightened awareness of, and attention to, negative feelings, discomfort and distress without reminders that value will come later on, once they pass through their hurdles with new found confidence and ability. If, for instance, a person who climbs Mount Everest focuses on every momentary discomfort from the cold or their feelings of fatigue, they are likely to have a generally miserable experience and more likely to give up before reaching the summit. But a person who focuses on the long game - what comes after the moment-to-moment discomfort which is a life affirming achievement - they are more likely to succeed in achieving their goal. And, whether or not they do reach the summit, they will generally be better off for having made the attempt. In the same way, we are robbing students of such experiences while at university by both turning what could be the Everest of education into a dumbed-down, meaningless stroll up a molehill, and by encouraging students to focus on their moment-to-moment struggles without a vision for what might be waiting for them on the other side.
Because stress, challenge and criticism are in the immediate unpleasant, educators increasingly tell students they’ve produced good work when they have not, remove difficult and challenging assignments, or reduce course requirements. This insults them and their potential. By failing to push them, we end up with students who report feeling satisfied by the ease and friendliness of their courses and instructors all while failing to provide them with the rigour that is likely to have a true, meaningful impact in later years.
In the best case scenario, some students may recognize the meaninglessness of this short-termism while at university, recognize that the lack of discomfort is contributing to their declining well-being, and seek out the increasingly rare, likely less popular, educators who can provide some supplementary rigour and an honest evaluation of their work. In the worst case, and worryingly what seems to be more common, students will leave university having never realized what was missing, and only realizing that their pampered university education failed to prepare them for the challenges they face in the “real world” where the stakes are much higher when it is sadly too late.
The university needs to start inculcating a long-term focus as the metric for impact - one that requires recognition of the fact that long-term success often comes at the expense of immediate satisfaction. If the university and its administrators do not recognize they are failing students by emphasizing neatly packaged immediate deliverables, like student satisfaction during or immediately after a course, then educators will shape their practices around what provides these immediate deliverables. In turn, students will be deprived of the only route to true empowerment - higher standards and a rigorous educational experience full of challenges. Before long, higher education will become entrenched as a business delivering a fleeting consumer good astronomically more expensive than a chocolate bar.
Book recommendation: Readers interested in additional critiques of higher education may want to explore Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz or The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.