Education and Student Success

One of the things that keeps coming up in education groups and on LinkedIn and other places here on Facebook is that students need professors to make them better students. What I'm talking about is all the articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education and some of the things that come down as apotheosis from my administrators at the college where I teach is that somehow students are not responsible for doing the work that they are supposed to do. There's an implication that professors have some sort of unlimited omnipotent power in which to program the students to get them to do the work and to be more successful. It's really driving me crazy that it administrators and a lot of educators don't see that at least 50% of the equation is how hard the students work. In many cases 50% of the equation is how not hard the students work. Student success is more about whether or not the student is successful not whether or not the professor is successful in teaching them. Maybe the emphasis needs to be switched back on to the student to become responsible for doing the work that they're supposed to. Stop blaming the teachers when students don't learn and if you really want to trace it back blame the parents for not teaching  the students that they have to do the work themselves to learn.