The Good Old Days … of the 1980s?

According to Keith Devlin, today's college students aren't appying themselves as much as they did in the 1980s:

I find it a paradoxical feature of American youth that large numbers of them bring a feverish intensity to sporting endeavors, putting in endless hours of dedicated training to become the best in their school, their district, their country, or even the world, yet only a few will put in the same kind of effort to mastering mathematics.

As recently as twenty-five years ago, the situation was very different. Early in my academic career, when my home base was in the UK, I used to come over to the USA frequently for a semester at a time to collaborate with colleagues at various universities, funding my trips by teaching courses as a visiting faculty member. I used to look forward to those trips not only because of the research activities they afforded, but because of the students I would teach. In contrast to most of the students I dealt with at home, many of my American students were highly motivated, hard working, fiercely competitive, and determined to show they were the best in the world. They would go to heroic lengths to avoid being defeated by a problem. Two decades later, living in the US now, I still encounter such students from time to time. But they no longer seem to be in the majority. For most of the young people I meet, the spark I used to see in their predecessors seems to be absent. What has led to this change? Why do so many of them seem to give up so easily? And is there anything we can do about it?

I suspect that students in the 1980s were harder-working than in the 1970s. In the late 1970s, there was a running joke that “only freshmen study.” By the 1980s, hard-working students were even noticed by the popular culture and (since Everybody Knows hard work and creativity are antonyms) assumed to be mindless regurgitating facts.

In other words, the Seventies are back “And is there anything we can do about it?”