Ease up professor! I'm paying your salary

Extract

[...] Since the student is now so much a free agent in determining his or her education, the department administrators and the faculty members must necessarily be preoccupied with the problem of how to keep enrollments up . Under such circumstances it is inevitable that requirements will be lightened, standards lowered, grades inflated, and instruction narrowed to the supposed requirements of some supposed career opportunity” (82). When this sense of competition between attracting students exists, it takes away from the quality of education. [...]

[...] Although it's evident that this consumerism has led to higher quality of life, you must wonder if it's worth it. Today it is instilled upon children at an early age, making it more difficult than ever before to escape this attitude. Considering this, Mark Edmundson writes, “It's my generation of parents who sheltered these students, kept them from the hard knocks of everyday life, making them cautious and over fragile, who demanded that their teachers, from grade school on, flatter them endlessly so that the kids are shocked if their colleges profs don't reflexively suck up to them” (43). [...]

[...] While this is acceptable to some degree, it shouldn't set them up to fail as they enter the world. Then, rather than trying to help students realize the protective bubble that they have been living in, universities often find it easier to keep the students in a bubble. The admissions departments of colleges play a major role in this, using an approach that's heavily influenced by this same mindset. It was traditionally left completely up to the students to pick a school, without major outside influences. [...]