Alexander Astin

American higher education devalues teaching the very students it could help most, argues UCLA professor Alexander W. Astin, and shouldn’t get off the hook by dropping remedial programs for poorly prepared students. Much quoted for the surveys of entering college freshmen that he initiated more than 30 years ago, Astin contends that “many faculty are brainwashed in their graduate training that remediation is a low-level activity, it’s demeaning, so we hire part-time people to do it. But it’s our most important work.” Money and status are concentrated at elite institutions like his own, and not at community colleges, which have the bulk of the students and the most need.

Astin, director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, is a jazz pianist by avocation. His thoughts on the skewed values of higher education are a verbal riff based in part on listening to the students he surveys. His views are unpredictable. For example, survey data show that entering freshmen benefit when colleges expose them to diversity by preaching it, including it in courses and encouraging students to interact across racial lines. These students stay in school, are more satisfied with their programs and “care enough about the racial problems to want to do something about them,” Astin says. Yet, he parts company with some avid supporters of affirmative action “because all of the energy was put into arguing whether we ought to use race in admissions.”

That deflected attention from the real question of “why do we need affirmative action in the first place?” Astin says. “What are the social and economic conditions that create these discrepancies in preparation across different racial groups?” Astin would like supporters of affirmative action to agree to limit the practice over time in return for meaningful support from opponents for programs designed to end those discrepancies.

Astin’s benchmark American Freshman surveys, begun in 1966, have polled more than 9 million students. His institute tracks many of them beyond college. The researchers now make headlines annually because they chart the mood swings of college generations; in January, the survey revealed that women felt more stress in their freshman year than men. Astin, whose background is in developmental psychology, says he is seeking what works best to produce successful students and citizens.

Confessing he was an indifferent student as an entering freshman, Astin said he hadn’t had to work hard in high school and focused on music. He played the trumpet at 7, and his brother, the actor John Astin, played the violin. Sandy, as the 66-year-old Allan M. Cartter professor of higher education is known, majored in music at Gettysburg College, then switched to psychology for his doctorate at the University of Maryland. His wife, Helen, also a professor of higher education, is UCLA’s former associate provost and helped establish the university’s women’s studies program. The couple has two sons and two granddaughters.

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Question: One particularly damning trend in your freshman survey is students reporting increased boredom in their high-school classes. At the same time, we read that the California State University system is trying to reduce its need for remedial classes. Are those things linked?

Answer: I think they are. The remedial issue is particularly interesting because the Cal State people don’t seem to understand that that’s their most important work. They want to dump it on the secondary schools or the community colleges or whatever. Higher education trains those teachers, school administrators and principals. We set the standards for the curriculum in those schools, so for us to stand back and disavow any responsibility for the fact that these people need remediation is not only self-serving but it’s just inaccurate.

It worries me that higher education is sort of off the hook on this one. The poor folks in K-12 [kindergarten through high school] are taking the beating for problems that are very often out of their control--either issues of funding or class size or poor neighborhoods.

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Q: You’re saying higher education in general has to do a better job?

A: Exactly. If you can imagine efforts at working with the lower schools [as Cal State is doing] being successful over a period of time, and one would hope they would be, what are we going to do in the meantime? Just kicking these students out of the CSU is crazy. It’s shortsighted in terms of the state interest. Why do we want a bunch of people with marginal literacy flooding into cities and towns of our state? We have a self-interest in educating these people well and valuing that part of our work. Many faculty are brainwashed in their graduate training that remediation is a low-level activity, it’s demeaning, so we hire part-time people to do it. But it’s our most important work.

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Q: What can colleges do to prevent boredom in their own classes?

A: The problem is really larger than that because the society is so different from the way it was 30 years ago. Kids grow up with a different set of stimulation. Their ability to concentrate, their ability to read, to listen well, is different. It’s different, I think, not exclusively but primarily because of television and just generally the electronic media. [It’s] a different kind of influence from the radio days. Listening to the radio is a different cognitive process, wildly different, from watching television. You exercise your powers of imagery when you listen to the radio. That’s a very different kind of attention than being slack-jawed in front of the tube.

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Q: Professors can’t just stand up and lecture anymore?

A: That’s the point. There’s some evidence now that the development of the brain during this critical age from, say, 3 to 6, is affected by excessive TV watching, so not only are their habits different and their proclivities but maybe their brains, too. We haven’t adjusted to that. We haven’t really taken into account that we have a different clientele now. Also, their values are different. They tend to look at education more instrumentally. There’s less interest in learning for its own sake, more a sense of, “We learn in order to get a credential or get a job or earn more money.” We have to contend with that. It’s not a matter of blaming. They’re just part of our culture.

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Q: Your surveys show plummeting student interest in politics. Obviously, politicians are somewhat to blame, but is there anything universities can or should do?

A: Our whole approach to civic education needs to be changed to recognize that politics is a very different ballgame today than it used to be. The power of money is increased because of the control over information. We have to recognize this in our curriculum. If we really believe in democracy, and we want young people to become active players and to have their needs represented in the political sphere, then we have to help them understand how the thing works. The idea that we can just teach civics courses, learning about the three branches of government and the Bill of Rights--give me a break. That doesn’t begin to reflect what’s really going on. If higher education and the school systems don’t do that, who will?

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Q: Are any colleges doing a good job involving students in community affairs or volunteerism?

A: That’s one of the most promising developments in higher education. A number of colleges have taken on civic responsibility and community engagement as a major part of what they’re doing. There is an organization called the Campus Compact, created by the presidents of Stanford, Brown and Georgetown. They decided that higher education had dropped the ball on civic responsibility and needed to emphasize service much more in its curriculum. The emphasis is on what is called service learning: academic work which has a component of engagement with the community.

It’s like the laboratory in science. If you study chemistry and all you do is look at equations on the board, you’re not necessarily really going to understand. But if you demonstrate in the laboratory the things you’re learning from the books and lectures, you understand it at a different level. With community service, if it’s just community service not connected with course work, it’s probably not as powerful. We’ve done a number of studies recently which indicate that so many good things happen to students when they combine service with course work: [The course work] has much more meaning. It’s retained better. The students become better critics of the course theory. When they serve people in the field, they realize the limitations of the theory, so it isn’t that they’re just parroting something back out of a textbook.

We have a wonderful thing happening at UCLA now. [Chancellor Albert Carnesale] has appointed a task force to look at the implications of the service-learning movement for UCLA and to make recommendations for what we can do. I’d like to see that happening all over the country, and I think it may.

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Q: You studied the effects of increasing diversity on the students themselves. Could you summarize what you found?

A: To me, the test of anything in academia is how the students are affected, and I don’t think we ought to be making policy in education in any other way. That ought to be the true test, the bottom line, the students’ benefit. Is their development enhanced by this?

The evidence is clear. If you emphasize diversity--and you can do that in a lot of different ways, you can do it in subtle ways by talking about it, by preaching, by incorporating it into courses, by having workshops, by bringing speakers onto campus and by encouraging students to interact across racial lines, to break out of that balkanization--students generally benefit. Very few student outcomes that are not positive come out of this emphasis.

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Q: What kind of outcomes?

A: Retention, satisfaction, finishing your program, how satisfied you are with your program, whether you are interested in going on to graduate school. Your commitment to a value like promoting racial understanding is strengthened, and God knows we need more of that in our society. The argument that this is destructive to academia to put an emphasis on women’s studies or ethnic studies or multiculturalism or cross-racial interaction is just not supported by the facts.

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Q: Your research shows that even when black and Latino students do get into college, they don’t finish their degrees in the same percentage whites do. Why?

A: It’s almost entirely attributable to their poor preparation. When you discount differences in preparation, the different racial groups finish college in almost identical numbers. The preparation goes way back, even [to] preschool, probably. What we haven’t challenged is the whole notion of selective admissions in the first place. That’s where the debate should be focused now.

I hope one of the byproducts of the demise of affirmative action, or at least race-based admissions, will be to refocus attention on the game itself--and what’s that all about? What’s the societal interest that’s served by having a game we play that distributes the educational resources inequitably across racial groups and obviously is just going to perpetuate differences that already cause us a lot of trouble? In other words, we don’t invest equally in community colleges as we do in the university. And they have the people.

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Q: What are the major changes you have seen in 30 years in freshmen’s attitudes?

A: The biggest change was the women’s movement. Society is so different today. Young women today haven’t the foggiest idea how things have changed. They take for granted things that were highly questionable 30 years ago. The men assume the same thing: “Why should men and women have different opportunities; why should they be treated differently?” they ask.

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Q: That shows up in your surveys?

A: It’s dramatic. It’s manifest women think differently now, they have different aspirations. What’s really amazing is that two of our most important professions, medicine and law, are going to become predominantly female professions in the next few decades. What that will do for our society, I don’t know, but my intuition tells me it’s going to be beneficial. We already see it in the legal field, where the men and the women are very different: Women are more interested in public issues, in public-service law, and the men are into corporate law and so forth.

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Q: What’s the most disturbing trend?

A: Disengagement. It’s probably tied with materialism. If you read de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” 150 years-plus ago he was awed by how materialistic Americans are. It’s gotten way more materialistic, at least in the 30 years that we’ve been studying young people. The society is that way, too. That’s the Madison Avenue dream, that everybody defines their values in terms of the things they have.

That really troubles me, the disengagement. We see it not only in disengagement from civic life and the political process but also in disengagement from academic work. It’s as if the only things that matter are tangible. We’re neglecting our spiritual side, our values, the things we care about. These are what make us tick. As soon as you do that, you begin to see the importance of community, because what is community? In part, it’s conversation, a way I can tell you about my insides and you can tell me about yours. It’s sharing our experience of what it’s like to be alive that makes for community.