Photo courtesy of Kaleidoscope archives
Students Are Not Lacking 'Grit'
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Kaleidescope guest author, Patik Yedla argues that students today are lazy and uncaring when it comes to their higher education, when the truth couldn’t be farther from it.
Most students are not lazy by choice but rather because they are overworked and have too little time.
If you take a moment in class to look around, you will likely be greeted by a sea of sleeping students, or better yet, a host of empty chairs.
It has been argued that these empty desks and apathetic, uncaring students are this way because they lack a “simple four-letter concept.” According to Yedla, this special concept is “grit”.
Yedla argues that students today make the conscious decision to “unsubscribe” from their classes and, against all better knowledge and the mountains of crushing debt, decide not to care about their studies.
While it is true that most students will graduate with “thousands and thousands of dollars” in debt, the true issue here is not how little students seem to care, but how little the system that supports them, cares for them.
According to UAB’s breakdown of tuition and costs, the average cost for an in-state undergraduate student will be “$91,280” for the entire four years. This average includes housing, meal plans, tuition, transportation and books, with each year costing roughly “$28,375”.
Some students are lucky enough to receive some money in the form of federal aid and scholarships.
However those students only receive enough money to cover about “58%” of the total cost of tuition according to one Washington Post article. This figure only covers tuition and leaves the cost of housing, meal plans and books up to the students to pay for out of pocket.
Based on this figure and UAB’s four-year cost estimation, most students are having to come up with an average of $38,378.80 over the four years to help cover this great divide.
Since the average college student is not a millionaire and does not have thousands of dollars in discretionary money that they can use to cover this vast difference, many students have to pick up jobs to help cover costs.
With such a large number of college students working it is hardly a surprise that they come to class tired and stressed.
If tuition was not so expensive and federal aid and scholarships were not so sparse, you likely would not see as many ‘uncaring, apathetic’ students asleep in class.
Rather than simply ignoring all of the many factors that a college student has to worry about and writing them off as consciously lazy, we need to look at the root of this issue. We need to ask what can be done to ensure that students are able attend college without having to worry about coming up with thousands of dollars on the spot.
It is not “grit” that so many students are lacking, but it is the society that they are a part of that is lacking “grit”. If this concept is defined as a student’s ability to fully commit themselves to their academics then our society is lacking the “grit” to commit itself to the academic success of its students.
Many countries have already adopted programs that help lighten the load of tuition for students. According to a Global News article, “The Ontario government provides a ‘30 per cent off’ tuition rebate for students with family incomes below $160,000.” This article also states that, “in the 2012-2013 school year Ontario universities provided more than $800 million to students in the form of non-repayable scholarships and bursaries.”
