SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images
I began teaching in 1986, in an era when term papers were written by typewriter, attendance was taken by hand and missing an exam was a rare event. Over nearly four decades in the classroom, I have taught students across generations, political eras, technological revolutions and social upheavals. I have weathered moral panics, budget cuts, culture wars and the transition from chalkboards to learning management systems.
What I witnessed last fall, however, is qualitatively different.
This academic year has brought a marked increase in students missing exams, turning in work late—or not at all—and disengaging from the basic norms of professionalism that once governed higher education. This is not a story about “lazy students,” nor is it reducible to individual failure. As a social scientist, I see structural forces at work that have reshaped students’ lives, their relationship to education and the legitimacy of learning itself.
A Classroom Changed Permanently
The pandemic did more than interrupt education; it rewired expectations. Emergency flexibility, understandable and necessary in 2020, has calcified into a new baseline. Deadlines became negotiable. Attendance became optional. Exams became adaptable or avoidable. Institutions, acting with compassion, signaled that structure could bend indefinitely.
But structure is not cruelty. For many students, especially those without stable external supports, structure is scaffolding. When everything becomes flexible, nothing feels binding. I now encounter students who assume that deadlines are suggestions, exams are reschedulable by default and engagement is conditional on personal convenience.
This shift is not about entitlement so much as habituation. Students who came of age academically during the pandemic learned—implicitly—that academic life adapts to crisis. What they are struggling with now is recognizing when the crisis ended.
Economic Strain and the Vanishing ‘Traditional’ Student
The “traditional” full-time student with minimal outside obligations is now the exception, not the rule. Many of my students work 20 to 30 or more hours a week. Others are caregivers. Some are housing insecure. These realities directly affect attendance, preparation and performance.
When students miss exams or submit work late, it is often not because they don’t care, but because they are triaging competing forms of survival. Higher education still operates on a mid-20th-century model of time, attention and availability that no longer matches many students’ lived conditions.
As a criminologist, I am acutely aware of how structural strain produces rule-breaking behavior. When expectations exceed capacity, norm violations increase. This applies as much to classrooms as it does to neighborhoods.
Mental Health, Motivation and Executive Function
Students today are not necessarily more anxious or depressed than previous cohorts, but they do seem to be more exhausted, lonelier and cognitively overloaded. Chronic stress erodes executive functioning, the ability to plan, prioritize and follow through on tasks. Missed deadlines and exams often reflect not defiance, but paralysis.
The problem is compounded by social media and digital environments that fragment attention and reward avoidance. When every discomfort can be escaped with a swipe, sustained engagement becomes harder to practice.
Political Delegitimization of Education
What is new, and deeply troubling, is the broader political context in which this disengagement is occurring.
Recently, higher education has been the target of sustained political attacks. Universities are portrayed as indoctrination factories, professors as elites detached from “real life” and expertise itself as suspect. Learning is framed not as a public good, but as a partisan threat.
Students absorb these messages. When education is publicly delegitimized, academic norms lose moral authority. Why respect deadlines, exams or intellectual rigor if the institution demanding them is portrayed as corrupt or meaningless?
I now hear language from students that I have never encountered before: skepticism about the value of learning itself, hostility toward expertise and a transactional view of education as credential extraction, rather than personal and intellectual development. Engagement suffers when belief in the scholarly enterprise erodes.
Professionalism in Decline—or Redefined?
I have also seen a decline in what we once called professionalism: timely communication, responsibility for one’s commitments and respect for shared norms. Emails arrive weeks late, or not at all. Missed exams are explained after the fact, sometimes with the expectation that accommodation is automatic.
This is not merely a generational failing. Professional norms are learned through institutions, and educational institutions have been sending mixed messages. When universities emphasize customer satisfaction over academic standards, students learn to negotiate rather than comply.
In criminology, we understand that norms weaken when enforcement is inconsistent. Education is no different.
Moving Forward
We cannot fix this with nostalgia or punishment. Nor can we simply “return to normal,” because normal has changed.
We need to rebuild legitimacy: of education, of expertise and of shared academic expectations. That means acknowledging students’ real constraints while restoring clarity about what higher education requires and why it matters.
Flexibility must be purposeful, not infinite. Compassion must coexist with appropriate accountability. And institutions must defend learning, not apologize for it.
After nearly 40 years in the classroom, I still believe in students. But belief alone is not enough. Students need structures that support them, cultures that value learning and a society that treats education not as an enemy but as a foundation of democratic life.
What I am seeing now is not just a classroom problem. It is a social one.
