Susan, a UCLA student is in the middle of complaining about the fact that she cannot get the classes she needs to graduate on time, and she is afraid her financial aid will be cut off. She also feels that it is unfair that she cannot understand the majority of her teachers because of their thick foreign accents. When I ask her why she doesn’t write a letter to someone or go to a student protest, she shrugs her shoulders, and says, “What’s the use, after all, what can you expect from a cheap public institution.”

In response to Susan, her classmate Javier, adds, “After all, we are still getting a degree, and what really counts is what you learn in grad school. UCLA is just a stepping stone.”

In fact, a recent survey of UCLA freshmen reveals that close to 80 percent of first-year students intend to go to some type of graduate school, and therefore it is not strange for students to see their undergraduate education now as just something to get over, so they can be qualified to take the next educational step. Moreover, students believe that they have to get A’s in all of their classes in order for them to get into medical or law school.

As a faculty member at UCLA, I have found that pressure to get A’s pushes many students to care only about the grade and not the content of their classes, and this focus on degrees and grades means that they are often willing to settle for a low-quality educational experience.

This complacency among some students is very unfortunate from a union perspective because one of our major goals is to improve the quality of undergraduate education by fighting for smaller classes and more secure faculty. However, if students do not care about the quality of their education, we lose an important voice in the struggle to counter the negative effects of the current corporatization of the university.

For example, many studies have shown that large lecture classes often lead to ineffective learning environments because they rule out most forms of teacher-student interaction and concentrate on using easily graded multiple-choice exams to test memorized knowledge.

Instead of students protesting the constant expansion of class size and the standardization of higher education, they often accept the situation as being inevitable, and some even justify these ineffective educational practices. For instance, recently one of my students told me the following, “I don’t mind that my class is boring, impersonal, and I cannot understand my professor. It has taught me the importance of learning on your own and not relying on others.”

When I asked this student if he minded going to a class that he thought was a waste of time, he responded, “I stopped going to class, and I only study for the exams. Luckily, the class notes are now online.”

In response to this student, a classmate added, “We know that the professors here are hired for their research, and so we cannot expect them to be good teachers. What really counts is to have UCLA on your diploma so others will be impressed.” While some may find this student to be cynical, it may be that she is just recognizing how the system works.

However, when I do tell my students that when they graduate and go to work or grad school, they are going to be required to think, write, and speak in an effective manner, they often respond that besides the few small classes they have taken, the university has not prepared them for the future.

In response to this acknowledgement of the importance of small classes, I tell them that untenured lecturers, who are not hired for their research and are judged mostly by their student evaluations, teach most of these classes. Students almost always reply to this fact by indicating that they had no idea that anyone teaching their courses was not a tenured professor.

One reason students do not know this is that the university continues to hide the status of the people (lecturers and grad students) teaching a majority of undergraduate courses. For instance, I recently went on a campus tour at UCLA for prospective students, and when I asked the tour leader who teaches most of the undergraduate courses, the guide quickly affirmed that tenured professors teach all undergraduate courses.

I then asked what the average class size was, and the guide said it was 50 students for the first two years and 20 students for the next two years. These statistics are blatantly false, but this is what the student guides are told to say.

UC-AFT union members must begin a process of educating students about the importance of a quality education by holding informal conversations with them and participating in student-led events. Only by educating parents and students can we fight back against an indifferent system.