What College Really Is

Sara Mebrahtu

Professor Bohn

English 1020, Section 042

February 10, 2015

What College Really Is

We have been told over and over college is a place where you really find what you are interested in. I find college to be a place we are told we must go to or as said by Jane Jacobs who wrote “Credentialing vs. Educating”, “A degree can also be a passport out of an underclass, or a safety strap to prevent its holder from sinking into an underclass. Without it, as North American high school students are forever being warned, they will be doomed to a work life of ‘flipping hamburgers.’”  And, during my entire high school career I was being told I must go to college. Jacobs states that going to college does not mean graduates will get a job. “The credential is not a passport to a job, as naive graduates sometimes suppose.”

Coming into college I thought I would know my professors personally, which is not the case at all. Several other students had the same idea about college, as Jacobs wrote, “Students had expected more personal rapport with teachers, who had become only remote figures in large, impersonal lecture halls.” Professors in large classes probably do not even know they are my professor, I had to approach a teacher to ask a question about homework, they had to ask me who I was and what section class I was in! It seems to some professors I am just another “T” number, and this was especially apparent in my college algebra class. My class had about eighty people in it and the class met once a week. Our homework assignments and tests were all online. Fellow friends of mine always wondered how we learned the materials in class; we did not, because we taught ourselves. In fact, there was not one-on-one time with the professor, which was ridiculous, and even when I was in class and I raised my hand to answer a question, the teacher either would not or took a long time to acknowledge me. My algebra professors claimed he’d always available during his office hours, which as a naïve freshman, I believed. So I visited my math professor’s office for extra help and to my surprise he was not there like he said he would be. Although I had a bad experience in math, not all classes are the same for example, my English professor says, “If I spent 13 years in my profession I think myself, and other professors would be willing to help students” I think that if my math class had been smaller my experience would have been different.

Although paying attention in any class is hard, paying attention in a large class is near impossible. For example, this semester at Tennessee Tech I am taking an anatomy and physiology class; this class is very large. Having three hundred students; consequently one can already imagine the amount of distraction there is. Specifically, I have to arrive very early to sit in the front of the room or else there is no point in coming to class because I will be stuck in the back row seats. Where the students are almost always taking part in distracting activities. Of course, it is much easier to get distracted in the back because the professor cannot see them and therefore will not call the students out. One biology class day I arrived late, and sat in the back, students were on their phone and talking, I was completely distracted. However, distractions can be easily eliminated with reduced class sizes, because the professor is in front of you.

College is not high school, the professor will get paid whether the majority of the class passes by cheating or by actually learning. The larger the class the easier it is for the majority of the class to fail. For example, in my general psychology class with a student body of about three hundred students the majority of students failed, I know this because grades were posted online. Although I passed by studying, students that I knew who passed did so by unorthodox means, such as paying someone to get all the test versions. Professors with a large class do not have the time to talk to everyone who is not doing well, so a student will fail unless he or she takes circumstances into their own hands, for example cheating or studying. Even though cheating is not right, many students look at it as necessary because they do not want to fail a class that cost hundreds of dollars. Helpful materials, such as study guides, would have immensely helped students, but to me it seemed as if my professor did not care enough to generate one.