A student recently introduced themself in one of my online courses with, “Hi. My name is _____, I’m originally from Michigan, but moved here about a couple of years ago. I’m in this class to complete the course requirements, so I’m not really hoping to learn anything…”

My first reaction was probably a predictable one for many. A feeling of deflation followed quickly by offense. Here I was, carefully constructing a course, thinking about engagement strategies and student outcomes, and this student had just declared intellectual disengagement before we’d even started. But as that initial offense faded, something more unsettling became clear: this student had simply articulated what many others might feel or think but know better to say out loud.

The student’s blunt honesty raised concerns many of us have been reluctant to fully examine. Maybe the student was expressing their experience of taking courses in the past that have shown them they can pass, get their credits, and learn nothing. I don’t think this student’s comment was specifically about my class; rather, it’s about the transactionalization of higher education in the U.S. We have taught some students to be only motivated by external rewards (credits, badges, certificates, degrees) – not internally rewarding them by learning something new and interesting.

The comment revealed something about the general shift towards higher education as more transactional than transformational that has been documented in recent educational research. Undergraduate students have increasingly adopted a transactional approach to college characterized by overemphasis on labor market preparation and financial returns to a degree. Considering this framework, my student wasn’t being cynical, just honest about experiencing education as an exchange: completion of assignments for credentials, rather than an exchange of activities that help students gain knowledge and new skills that relate to their world.

Nobel laureate Herb Simon captured the fundamental challenge: “Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn” (quoted in Ambrose, S. A., et al., 2010, p. 1). If learning truly emerges only from what students actually do and think, and not from what they’re assigned or what boxes they check, then my student’s declaration was a stark reminder that I had failed to influence their thinking even before the course began. How many of our course requirements genuinely facilitate the kind of doing that leads to the type of learning described by Simon? Are our course requirements engaging and clearly aligned to meaningful learning outcomes or simply exist because that’s how our courses have been traditionally structured?

Are our course structures inadvertently encouraging students to ask transactional rather than transformational questions? When students optimize for grades rather than learning, are they gaming the system or simply responding to the game I’ve designed? This isn’t to absolve students of responsibility for their own learning. But it does raise questions about higher education culture. When we require attendance without examining whether our classes warrant attending, when we grade participation without considering whether our pedagogies genuinely invite meaningful contribution, when we demand demonstrations of engagement without reflecting on whether our content truly engages, we create conditions where honest disengagement might be more rational than performed enthusiasm.

Perhaps the question isn’t how to get students to hide their disengagement better, but whether their candor might be the catalyst we need to examine what we’re really doing in our classrooms and why. The student’s introduction was uncomfortable because it was true. And sometimes the truths we least want to hear are the ones we most need to consider. If we’re serious about creating life-long learners rather than transactional credentialing, we might start by returning to Simon’s insight: our job isn’t to create requirements, distribute grades, or demand performances of engagement. Our job is to influence what students actually do and how they think, and if we’re not doing that, perhaps we need to ask ourselves how we can get there.

Sparks, D. (2022). Student perceptions of college—how to move beyond transactional approaches to Higher Education. Higher Education, 85(2), 477–481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00919-4

Ambrose, S. A., et al. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. Jossey-Bass.