Why is there such a large focus on writing long essays in US education?
When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of the Swedish subject, but actually writing them was always done in school, as an exam, i.e. sit down for three hours and write. And the grading of our essays were never on length, it was always on grammar, spelling, style, form and coherency.
University was largely the same. Granted, being a CS major you're expected to write a lot more code than essays. I took a few courses that had essays as part of the requirements such as technical writing and history of technology, but those were outliers, and not the norm. I mean, my Master's thesis was "only" 45 pages, and again, the professor was a lot more interested in it being coherent, correct, and actually saying something, rather than being long.
So what's the point of long essays in every subject? To me, it seems like that will just make students write a lot of voluminous bullshit without ensuring that they actually learn what they write about?
I was a double major in Communications and American Studies in my first go-around at an undergrad degree. It's not so much the fact that essays are necessarily the problem, but the expectation of length as the ultimate point of the exercise--from professors and students--that causes confusion.
As a writer, I hate filling prose with word soup just to fill space, but early in college I often ended up writing in 15 words what could be said in 5. By my junior year, I stopped caring about meeting the length requirements and focused on solid research and arguments in my papers.
Most profs didn't seem to dock me for it when I showed competence in the subject matter. Those that did were reasonable after speaking with them about it.
But, that's the difference between me and the people that hire ghostwriters. I made it clear to my teachers I was there to learn and grow, regardless of many of the arbitrary milestones and requirements. I was there for the journey. People who enter university simply to pass through a series of checkpoints on their way to an end goal focus entirely on the end goal of getting a degree (and presumably shortly thereafter, a job) rather than getting an education.
In one of the first writing classes I took in college, the professor said on the first day "You have just spent your high school years finding ways to add words and fill more pages. In this class, you will learn to take them out."
The length of every assignment was exactly 1 page.
In my experience, the number of words you write can be a reasonable proxy for the depth and intricacy of the argument. Granted, I also attend one of the best (if not the best) undergrad universities in the US, so this may only be true for a small subset of the college population.
Probably the most crucial factor in having a strong correlation between a high word count requirement and the depth of research needed to write that many words is having discerning grader who will penalize bullshit.
There are still some tricks you can play to make your paper look (slightly) longer--like not using contractions.
Most college classes don't require much writing, which is one reason most people write so poorly. If you want to become a good, or even reasonably competent, writer you need to practice. That is one thing that all of the books on self-education emphasize - get practice writing, especially write lots of short papers.
When I went to "high school" in Sweden, I can't ever remembering having to write an essay as homework in any subject. Some tests in some subjects could have essay answers, but that would basically amount to writing half a page or so about something specific. Of course we did have essay writing as part of the Swedish subject, but actually writing them was always done in school, as an exam, i.e. sit down for three hours and write. And the grading of our essays were never on length, it was always on grammar, spelling, style, form and coherency.
University was largely the same. Granted, being a CS major you're expected to write a lot more code than essays. I took a few courses that had essays as part of the requirements such as technical writing and history of technology, but those were outliers, and not the norm. I mean, my Master's thesis was "only" 45 pages, and again, the professor was a lot more interested in it being coherent, correct, and actually saying something, rather than being long.
So what's the point of long essays in every subject? To me, it seems like that will just make students write a lot of voluminous bullshit without ensuring that they actually learn what they write about?