One of the significant changes I noticed during my 12 years as a college teacher was how the college made it easier and easier for students to drop classes. There used to be a $20 fee to drop a class, but it was reduced to $5. The college also gradually moved back the deadline for dropping a class from just after midterm to the week before classes ended. It used to require the teacher’s signature to drop a class, but by the time I left anyone in the department could sign the form. Often, the teacher didn’t even know a student had dropped. The student simply disappeared.
Why would the college make it easier for students to bail out? It was incomprehensible to me why the college would actually encourage students to quit rather than redouble their efforts to study and improve their grades. Students had to be complete morons to fail a class when they could bail out the week before exams and not have a failing grade on their records.
But then I realized who benefited from these irrational policies: the college. When a student dropped a class it disappeared from his or her record. It was like the student never registered for the class at ll. Except for one thing. There was no refund. The college got to keep the money. The real losers, of course, were the students who were required to pay for something that simply disappeared from their records. This was a prime reason why most students took six years to graduate from a “four-year college.” Many of them would drop one to three classes every semester.
Students who dropped classes often had poor attendance, sometimes disappearing for weeks at a time. Or they got so far behind they could never catch up. A decade ago these slacker students would have received Fs and flunked out of college. Nowadays, students can simply drop classes rather than fail them and end up right back where they started the semester. Then they can take the same classes or different classes. It’s a terrible waste of tuition money and, I believe, actually encourages students to act irresponsibly.
Students actually told me that dropping a class was a wonderful alternative to classes that required them to do some hard work. If you’re looking for a free ride through college, class drop forms allow you to bail out even if you take a challenging course by mistake. Once again, education and responsibility take a back seat to colleges’ mantra of “retention, retention, retention at any cost.”
I think all of this would stop very quickly if parents had to sign the drop form. After all, in most cases, it’s their money that’s being wasted. “Oh no, you’re not going to drop that class, young man,” I can hear them saying, “you’re going to hit the books and pass it or else!” But the attitude that you can easily quit, go back and start over is often a perfect match for irresponsible students and it’s an attitude that will not serve them well after graduation. After all, there are no “drop forms” in real life. The business world is ruled by contracts and commitments that must be lived up to. Once you are assigned a project you don’t get to drop it. Once you’ve signed a contract you must live up to it.
I suspect that many millennial college students are going to be looking for the drop forms in real life and are going to be disappointed to learn that there aren’t any.
