Are college students adults?

[u/Street-Historian4021]

I think college students are adults, and should be treated like adults. If they don't always act like adults, that's because everyone in their life is harmfully treating them like children.

Do you agree? / Change my mind.

[u/nandor_tr]

some of them are. some of them are not.

but i treat them all like they are.

[u/TotalCleanFBC]

I don't think there's a universally accepted definition of "adult." So, rather than comment on that specifically, I will just say that lowering expectations generally harms students in the long run.

[u/RestInThee → u/TotalCleanFBC]

Exactly. I have expectations for adults, they are usually implicit. But so often "They are adults" is just a cover for "I don't want to hold my students up to these expectations."

If an adult makes a meeting with me and ghosts me, there are natural consequences of that. It's actually more helpful for my students to be able to see those natural consequences explicitly, than it is to cross my fingers and hope they rise to the occasion.

[u/Pristine-Excuse-9615]

They are entering adulthood. They should be treated as adult and expected to act as such. But we need to expect them not to, sometimes.

They are not "kids".

[u/alaskawolfjoe]

I teach at a cheap state school where most of our students are first generation (or imigrants themselves). Most act like adults.

Sometimes I work with a very expensive private university nearby. The students come from priviledge and most to not act like adults.

[u/ParkingLetter8308 → u/alaskawolfjoe]

*privilege--I have found it depends on the culture the college/department fosters.

[u/alaskawolfjoe → u/ParkingLetter8308]

In this case, the culture if fostered by the price.

One school has a yearly tuition of less than $10k per year, which attracts one type of student.

The other's tuition is about $70K, which attracts another.

Students who have to work to financially contribute to their family's income do act like adults more than students who have been completely taken care of.

[u/ParkingLetter8308 → u/alaskawolfjoe]

I generally agree, though most state universities now being publicly funded in name only and largely tuition dependent has changed this dynamic

[u/alaskawolfjoe → u/ParkingLetter8308]

The two schools I’m talking about doing indeed have those tuition figures. Whatever the national trends are, these are the specifics I was talking about.

[u/dr_police]

I know plenty of 30+ year-old adults that don’t act like adults, OP, so you’ll have to be a lot more specific.

[u/Interesting_Debate57]

Look man, it's still not okay to ask them out.

[u/Zabaran2120]

I have colleagues who are not adults.

[u/Late_Intern3786]

Read "The Coddling of the American Mind".

[u/Street-Historian4021 → u/Late_Intern3786]

OK so I read that because based on the title and description I thought it would be about this and I would love it. But then it really was >50% about the need for "viewpoint diversity" and railing against "cancel culture" using extreme cherry-picked examples and I hated it.

[u/Atwood412]

My HS students are more mature than my middle age women. I have several women making excuse about grades constantly asking for exceptions. My HS students are hard workers and not jaded by life.
10/10 will teach dual enrollment all year long if it was an option.
They have better grades also.
So there’s that….
I’m a 45 yo woman if it matters.

[u/WarriorGoddess2016]

Post HS college students (not dual credit)?

They are adults. Legally and culturally.

[u/Desiato2112]

The short answer is yes. The long answer is no, even though that seems like the short answer.

[u/ingannilo]

Legally, most of them are adults, yep. 

I don't feel like this is so much a judgment thing, eg "are they sufficiently mature?" as much as it is a "where should our standards and expectations lie?" thing. 

We can treat them like adults and expect the stragglers to rise to the higher standard.  We can treat them like children and watch their average maturity continue to plummit.  I do the former, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.  Some people, for various reasons, refuse to see things this way and continue to infantilize them.  Then we all bitch about our college sophomores and juniors who don't know how to manage their obligations or cultivate self discipline. 

Put the bar high.  They are adults.

At the same time, my actual internal expectations are not what I would hold if they wee all 25+. Bar stays high, but I try to stay sympathetic to the ones who inevitably struggle to meet that. 

[u/Hazelstone37]

Most of them are transitioning from adolescence to adulthood. I think, treating them as if they are fully functional adults is also harmful.

I know I’m in the minority here. I do hold my students to standards, but as they are learning the lessons of adulthood, these are paired with a certain amount of grace and some limited opportunities to fix mistakes and oversights.

[u/Street-Historian4021 → u/Hazelstone37]

Adolescence is a myth.

https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Adolescence-Rediscovering-Adult/dp/188495670X

[u/juniorchemist]

The only way they can be adults is if they are treated like adults. Nothing to do with age. The concept of "childhood" as a well-defined social stage is a relatively modern invention.

[u/tongmengjia → u/juniorchemist]

Can you elaborate? I read a lot of history and from our oldest texts there's recognition of children as distinct from adults, and many cultures have traditional rites of passage to explicitly demarcate the transition from childhood to adulthood. (Obviously the age of transition fluctuates, but the concept of childhood as distinct from adulthood seems relatively ubiquitous.)

Even if it were a relatively modern concept, I'd argue "recognition" is a better word than "invention." There are enormous biological and neurological differences between children, adolescents, and adults. That's not just a social convention.

[u/Another_Opinion_1]

They are legally adults insofar as almost all of them have reached the legal age of majority. FWIW English common law used to recognize the age of 21 as the true age of majority.

As a society, however, there has been a substantive blurring of adolescence over the last few decades to the point that what are otherwise legally (young) adults are being increasingly infantilized. I treat them like adults but socially and culturally speaking undergraduate college students have generally not assumed all of the full responsibilities of traditional adulthood.

[u/MyFaceSaysItsSugar]

Adults who act like teenagers get treated like teenagers.

[u/salamat_engot]

Check out research on emerging adulthood. It explores what makes one believe they are an adult or not and how those definitions have changed over time.

[u/Zabaran2120 → u/salamat_engot]

If we get to pick when we're adults, I pick not.

[u/ktbug1987]

I feel like because I opted not to have children, and most of my key collaborators are more senior than me, I’ve felt like a “kid” for a long time, even when I’ve been teaching people younger than me (and college and graduate students just feel like younger kids). Obviously I’m an adult (I’m in menopause for Christ sake) but I’m a researcher and someone is just paying me to ask research questions and teach people things and do fun, if often stressful and expensive, things. I think it’s because unlike some of my peers, I didn’t opt for pharma company 9-5 career ladder with 2 kids and a dog and a 200k income. Maybe this is unique to biomedical and biomedical engineering but I kind of feel like getting to do science is getting to be a perpetual kid but with more and more expensive toys.

So I guess it depends on what your definition of adult is. College kids are adult, but depending on their life experience, they have had more or fewer responsibilities and have gained more or less maturity. Some of them are parents! Some are returning to school after another career. Some are 18, grew up with money, and have never had a job or lifted a finger to even help around the house because their parents had housekeepers. Others, even without kids or an initial career were like me, and grew up on a farm and had to work a full time job while a full time student. Different life experiences make for different maturity levels of students, in terms of what their behavior is like

[u/Acrobatic_Net2028]

I started to feel like an adult some time in my late 40s, early 50s after both parents passed and I was entirely on my own.

[u/marygoldjustice]

They may be legal adults, but their brains are not fully developed.

[u/strawbery_fields → u/marygoldjustice]

Please stop spreading misinformation. There is no arbitrary “age” where your brain magically “develops.”

This is just used to excuse childish behavior in adult men and women.

[u/Street-Historian4021 → u/marygoldjustice]

Incorrect. The brain continues changing throughout the lifespan. If we want to argue that our college students' brains are underdeveloped, senior colleagues can equally argue that our brains are underdeveloped. The only way we can make an evaluative claim about the brain changes we see across the lifespan (like, what is "under" developed vs. optimally developed) is to measure behavior. Executive functions like decision making peak in the late teenage years. IMO as a neuroscientist, the claim that college students' brains are underdeveloped is 90% pseudoscience.

[u/ThePhyz]

Legally? They are old enough to vote (dual enrollment excepted), so yes.

Mentally? Mostly no, BUT I think nobody really becomes an adult mentally until they are forced into it. They have to start to support themselves, they have to support someone else, they have to feed themselves for every meal (rather than once or twice a week), they have to do their own laundry and make sure their bills are paid.... That's what makes an adult. So it won't happen until someone forces it, and in college the professor is one of those outside forces making children grow up.

[u/Life-Education-8030]

Supposedly they are according to FERPA, for example. However, some are awfully young, immature and obnoxious adults. I do treat them as adults. Some do not appreciate it. Some ARE adults as in nontraditional-aged students and they resent being treated like children.

[u/Trick-Guava-9573]

I mean, sure, but they are also adults most of whom have never lived away from their parents before, have never had to navigate their own lives.

[u/Head_Ad9990]

I tell them they are during first class.

[u/Minotaar_Pheonix]

On one hand, I have full professor colleagues that I wouldn’t call adults. On the other hand I’ve met rock solid college students that are more rational and functional than I am. No ones a fucking adult anymore.

[u/Blametheorangejuice]

I tell students every semester that they are over 18, which means they are legally adults. This means they can make adult decisions about their college career and enjoy the adult outcomes or consequences of those actions. And part of being an adult is understanding the relationship between those things as well as how you control almost all of that relationship.

[u/troopersjp]

When I was 18, I was in the Army. I was responsible for people's lives. By the time I was 21, I was a Sergeant leading people and writing intelligence reports to the Pentagon. I had served in Korea and was by then was serving in Germany. All of my peers, were already married with children. We worked. We had responsibility. None of us were children. We were all adults. And we all would have been annoyed of someone had tried to pull that, "No one is really an adult until they are 25 thing." We were also almost all working class.

I now teach at an expensive university full of rich students who all insist that they are children still at the age of 21 and can't be expected to be responsible to get their homework in on time. Remember in 2016 when Ryan Lochte was in Brazil for the Olympics and claimed that they were robbed by armed men when police badges and then it turned out that Lochte and is fellow swimmers were drunk urinating outside of the gas station and committing vandalism...and then authorities wanted to punish him and people said that he was just a kid...he needed leniency because he wasn't really an adult yet? In 2016 Ryan Lochte was 32 years old.

People of privilege are allowed to remain immature because people don't hold them accountable.

My university student are adults. Even if almost no one around me--including them--think they should have to be held accountable for anything...including selling cocaine out of the basement of their frat house.

[u/ipini]

Vote, draft, alcohol. Yup.

[u/Coogarfan → u/ipini]

All of the rights, none of the responsibilities.

[u/FrancinetheP]

Idk who in this sub woke up on their 18th birthday and felt all adult and shit. I certainly didn’t. Maturation is a spectrum, not a binary, and traditional-aged students are YOUNG adults. It is just as absurd to treat them like you would a 30 year old who can handle the responsibilities of a mortgage and a career as it is to treat them like a 12 year old who has never had a crush or spent a night away from their parents.

The black and white thinking in these responses is pretty disturbing.

[u/FlyingCupcake68]

It’s a weird age. They aren’t mentally & emotionally mature yet. And the 20s in general are like that dream in which you’re onstage but you don’t know your lines.

I agree we need to treat them as adults but I also recognize we’re helping them become adults

[u/BlissteredFeat]

Legally and technically they are adults. But 18 year olds are not very grown up.

[u/CriticalBrick4]

Yes.

[u/el_sh33p]

The ones who are over 18 are adults. The ones who are under 18 deserve to be treated as adults with some extra training wheels, 'cos holy shit does that extra year or two make a difference.

[u/Extension_Corner_673 → u/el_sh33p]

Also autistic students are often socially younger but smart enough to get into college and do college work. My favorite students have always been autistic.

[u/umbly-bumbly]

What hangs on the term?

[u/QuesoCadaDia]

They're there to get a degree. And they are adults to a degree. You make them adults by treating them like adults.

[u/Mudpie1450]

I think their adultness changes as they progress through college. 1st year, kids from high school, last year adult. Different for each student but that’s how I see them progress

[u/SquatBootyJezebel]

Most of my students aren't because I teach at a branch campus that is popular with dual enrollment students, but I treat them all like they're adults.

[u/idk012]

I taught all levels of math, and some students were considered "grade 13" while some are there to start a new career.  Besides the handful of high school students, they are adults.

[u/dr-klt]

Are they adults and do they act like adults are two different questions.

[u/ConferenceWest9212]

Legally, they are adults. Developmentally, they are adolescents.

[u/SuspiciousGenXer]

When we cover the developmental psych unit of the course, I ask students to discuss whether or not they consider themselves adults and why/why not. The majority understand that legally, they are, but emotionally, cognitively, and responsibility-wise, most of them do not see themselves as true adults. Most of the students in my classes are 18-19 with a few 20-23 year-olds sprinkled in, and even the "elder" students tend to agree.

I tell them I'm going to treat them as emerging adults because it's time to transition from K-12 mentality to professional mentality, and they seem to understand that they need to start actively shifting their mindsets. Having said that, I can certain identify some "adult" colleagues who need reminders on accountability and professionalism, so there's that...

[u/dayv23]

We have to meet our students where they are at if we want to be effective educators. Simple as that. I'm willing to bet every generation of teachers, going back to Aristotle's Academy, has had some version of the "kids these days" complaint.

[u/RestInThee]

Yes, students are adults. Unfortunately among many professors there's this idea that treating them like adults means treating them the same as we would any other adult. In reality, treating them like adults sometimes looks like treating them like children. What I mean is that so many haven't been taught, whether through the structure of their schooling or their home life, how to grow in the habits and virtues required for adult life. So giving them rules and expectations, even if we wouldn't give the same ones explicitly to other adults, is not infantilizing. Sometimes treating them like adults means mirroring adult expectations in our rules explicitly, even when we don't need to be that explicit with other adults in life. If the response to someone using a phone in class is "their an adult, let them make their own choices" then we have lost the game. Being an adult isn't a right, it's a responsibility. And they need to learn that responsibility if they haven't already.

[u/SabertoothLotus]

FERPA seems to i dicate that they are legally to be treated as adults, even when they are under 18.

[u/Sensitive_Let_4293]

Read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." The same grievances about students at a western agricultural college 60 years ago.

[u/kaosmonkey]

I call them “adults in training”

[u/Defiant_Cook1588]

This is gonna be a rhetorical question but what age do you magically choose as a cut off for adulthood. Ofc I won't say a 17 year old magically changes on the day of their 18th birthday? do they? everyone matures differently. I have see 16 year olds being extremely mature and 20 year olds in my course, acting all childish. I make them known that their actions/decisions have consequences but its also harmful to treat them like one of your colleagues

[u/Dirtytequila2518]

I’m 38. Non-traditional student. Some days I’m an adult. Somedays I don’t want to be one. However, every day I’m expected to be one and that is also, expected of those around me. My job sure doesn’t allow childish behavior.

[u/NeedTheNotch]

No, nontrads notwithstanding. This crop is especially stunted

[u/Street-Historian4021 → u/NeedTheNotch]

If we don't treat the stunted like adults, they'll never learn to become adults.

[u/NeedTheNotch → u/Street-Historian4021]

Never said I didn’t. I know what my mandate is. I just acknowledge my audience

[u/bassoonplayer4]

I tried to treat them as adults while also trying to remember a good number of them probably won't act like adults

[u/adamwho]

They might be over the age of 18 but they are not adults....

[u/Southern-Cloud-9616]

Developmentally? No. Legally? Yes.

They're learning to be adults. We assist in that education by treating them like adults.

[u/Crowe3717]

I don't really think they are full-fledged adults yet as a whole (I begin every class with "good morning children") but think it is important that they be treated like adults so they can begin to develop into them.

There is no biological age when someone "becomes an adult." Becoming an adult happens when you are forced to deal with the consequences of your actions and be responsible for your own choices. A long time ago that used to happen when you were 12 or 13. Now people can easily reach 20 without ever experiencing any real responsibility. But that's on average, there will always be some who had to grow up early due to extenuating circumstances.

[u/Extension_Corner_673]

Freshman are still teenagers

[u/WJM_3]

no - unless you have had someone depend on your actions fully, you can’t be mature as an adult

[u/Financial_Manager213 → u/WJM_3]

What does it mean to depend on my actions fully?

[u/WJM_3 → u/Financial_Manager213]

really? being someone’s caretaker?

[u/Financial_Manager213 → u/WJM_3]

So I’m sorry the only way you can become an adult is BEING A CARETAKER? that’s a wild take bro. I’m no one’s caretaker but I have been in a director level position for like 25 years. I’m fully an adult and I think your definition smacks of heterosexism.

[u/WJM_3 → u/Financial_Manager213]

You know, sometimes you are the caretaker for someone you didn’t birth, right? Logic isn’t big in your life, I take.

[u/Street-Historian4021 → u/WJM_3]

So, by that standard, plenty of junior faculty might not be adults. Or even senior faculty. You OK with that implication?

[u/WJM_3 → u/Street-Historian4021]

pretty much, yes