We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I spoke with a Mom yesterday. She mentioned that her daughter was a high school junior, intending to apply to college. I asked what the kid was interested in. She said "Well, she likes to watch movies. Not much else. She hates school and is not a very good student. She doesn't really study." I replied, "So, why college?" She told me that the kid likes her social life and "wants the college experience. She also wants a diploma."
If they hate fossil fuel, they should first set an example by giving up their cars, computers, cell phones, heat, and air conditioning. Nobody is stopping them from wearing pinwheels on their heads for wind power.
On reading the article, one might be left with the impression that California higher ed is afflicted with a crisis-sized epidemic of destructive racism and sexism. I would doubt that. From what I have seen and read, the U of C is mainly afflicted with a crisis of poorly-educated and ignorant kids whose four years of Fun 'n Indoctrination is largely thanks to the abused California taxpayer.
The growth of school administrators, from public primary schools to private colleges, has been much commented on. I have no idea why it has been such a strong trend.
Germany, historically the model for the American educational system, has a far more practical system than America does today. We often forget that the traditional model for higher ed was designed for scholars, and teachers, some wealthy elites, and Protestant ministers.
We know that a minority, probably a small minority, of American college students are natural scholars or passionately curious. More want, or need, the credential.
It seems to me that much of the discussion of "mission" has to do with confusing "higher ed" with Liberal Arts education. I do not know how much of Higher Ed today is Liberal Arts and how much is vocationally-oriented (eg Nursing, Agricultural, Hospitality, Education, Law Enforcement, Business, Engineering, Communications, Performance Arts, etc etc, but I know that a lot of it is.)
Cornell for example, a strange hybrid of state university and private university, has 7 undergrad colleges. Only one of their undergrad schools is Liberal Arts, and many large universities are similar. It's been many years since "college" has meant Liberal Arts.
I think most of the angst is only about the "mission" and "purpose" of Liberal Arts higher ed. Nobody is confused about the "mission" or "purpose" of degrees in Nursing or Civil Engineering.
If any reader can find those Higher Ed stats, I'm sure we'd all be interested. Specifically, I'm interested in what % of US undergrads are attending vocationally-oriented colleges and programs compared to those doing Liberal Arts programs.
In 2009-2010, "college" in the US yielded 800,000 Associate degrees and 1.7 million Bachelors degrees.
Of the 1.7 million bachelor's degrees awarded in 2009–10, over half were concentrated in five fields: business, management, marketing, and personal and culinary services (22 percent); social sciences and history (10 percent); health professions and related programs (8 percent); education (6 percent); and psychology (6 percent) (see table A-38-1). The fields of visual and performing arts (6 percent), engineering and engineering technologies (5 percent), biological and biomedical sciences (5 percent), and communication and communications technologies (5 percent) represented an additional 21 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded in 2009–10.
"College" doesn't mean what it used to mean. It used to mean Liberal Arts but now it can mean Hotel Management. The change has already happened.
Students learn the new orthodoxy quickly. Fearing classroom humiliation, they keep any reservations to themselves, instead regurgitating on their exams their force-fed lessons. As a result, they learn little. The landmark national study, Academically Adrift, finds 36 percent of students show little to no increase in fundamental academic skills—critical thinking, complex reasoning, and clear writing—after four years in college. Their natural desire to know gives way to repeating whatever is required for a good grade.
And what good grades they get! Under the new student-teacher compact, professors award more A’s than ever in exchange for students’ acquiescence in the transformation of classrooms into ideological training camps. Fifty years ago, 15 percent of all college grades given were A’s. Today, an A is the most common grade (43 percent), despite the fact that, during the same period, average student study-time has fallen from 24 to 14 hours a week.
Come on, we all know that nowadays it's just a credential for most college attendees except for the special ones for whom it is a wonderful opportunity for intellectual adventures. The business needs to please the consumers. "The customer is always right."
Sad to say, an Ivy "A" means nothing today and everybody knows it.That's why so many firms these days avoid hiring Ivy grads. Too arrogant and entitled for today's world, often. I am happy to report that they still like Dartmouth kids, though.
I think a more interesting question is why so many of the successful people in business are Obama people. Over half of the very wealthy people I know are ardent Democrats, and are people who understand how the real world works. Of course, I do inhabit New England where blue is the cultural color of choice.
What goes on these days at an elite, expensive, private liberal arts college? It's been studied, and parents might not be too pleased by the looniness there.
Students are encouraged to "think critically" about anything that threatens the college's dogmas on diversity, multiculturalism, gender, and sustainability, etc., but, for the most part, not to think critically about those dogmas themselves. That is the problem: such contradictions go unnoticed. And they go unnoticed because at Bowdoin, and places like it, there are precious few people who can point them out.
It all reminds me of a conversation I had with a nice lady last weekend. She was talking about the oppression of Muslim women. I offered the notion that she was not being very multiculturally-tolerant in wanting to impose her Western views on Muslim culture. I asked her whether we should not respect cultural differences.
Somewhat apropos: Islam’s Latest Fatwa Permitting Rape of Non-Muslim Women. Why does Islam seem so preoccupied with the interests in rape, pedophilia, homosexuality, bestiality, religious imperialism, and killing Jews? Surely there must be other, more productive and positive things in life to focus on.
Perhaps the Bowdoin faculty could enlighten me on these points because the only aspects of it which seem to be approved on college campi are the homosexuality and the killing of Israelis.
"There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.
"No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because 'vocational training' is second class. 'College' is first class.
"Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living--and would do better in vocational training.
Apparently Chagnon's field research did not support Marxist interpretations of stone-age tribal behavior, so he was attacked and smeared. Is there a Marxist interpretation for academia's tribal warfare against Chagnon?
Of course, Edward O. Wilson got some of the same treatment, but not quite as diabolical, for his work on sociobiology. There are lots of Thought Police in academia.
The tenured radicals turned learning into a political enterprise of propaganda for young, malleable minds. It is disgusting, deceitful, and has nothing to do with education.
In the public education world, it's considered a promotion to get out of daily teaching.
When I went to prep (boarding) school, all of the administrators taught at least one course, including the Headmaster and the coaches. My Headmaster taught Calc. - and, being an Episcopalian priest, also conducted the daily chapel service where he taught the word of God. Preaching to adolescents works, but it takes about 20 years to sink in.
A good guy. Eagle Scout, US Army vet. He had pet otters that followed him around campus. He was also the Varsity Hockey coach, had been Captain of the Harvard team in his youth. We had serious hockey. He checked me quite hard one time in a student vs. faculty game. Three outdoor rinks, and one under a roof. Each faculty person also had to coach a sport, but we had tons of intramural sports. A daily sport was required of all. Morning classes, afternoon athletics, then chapel, dinner, and study hall. A Spartan life-style, with no chicks around for distraction other than the deliciously-appealing and refined faculty wives with whom we all fell in love.
Half of those surveyed…said they had trouble finding recent graduates qualified to fill positions at their company or organization. Nearly a third gave colleges just fair to poor marks for producing successful employees. And they dinged bachelor’s-degree holders for lacking basic workplace proficiencies like adaptability, communication skills, and the ability to solve complex problems.
As I have said here many times, a Liberal Arts education is not job training. It's designed to be about life-enrichment and about molding civilized and thoughtful citizens with deeper understanding of the world and of their own civilization than secondary schools can offer.
If people want job credentials, I'd advise majoring in Medieval History, Classics, or Renaissance Literature, and minoring in Accounting, Engineering, hard sciences, or Econ (or the other way around) - combining the life-enhancement with the utilitarian.
The kids should consider this: anything that can be learned just as well at The Great Courses/Teaching Company should not be studied at great expense in college. With all the alternative ways of learning higher ed material nowadays, spending big bucks for it makes no sense. And if you need a class and exams to provide the discipline, then one should work on one's discipline.
You can obtain a top-notch Liberal Arts education with them, with as much breadth or depth as you desire. I eagerly await the day that the company will offer their courses for college credit.
Well, because it's just what most people do unless they are either Catholic or prosperous, or want to take on home-schooling. It's just normal. My own kids mostly avoided public schools because I could (barely, and not really) afford to.
In the end, though, isn't most primary education ultimately home-schooling anyway? I think it is.
Beginning as early as kindergarten, the authors explained, girls have better average social and behavioral skills than boys, and that relates to girls’ higher average grades at each stage of school and why girls are more likely to earn a degree.
“The grade gap isn’t about ability,” said Claudia Buchmann, co-author and sociology professor at Ohio State University, “it’s really more about effort and engagement in school…”
From Leef: The Spirit of Adam Smith Returns - At one time, professors were independent contractors paid by students; that relationship may return:
It is a bad habit Americans have gotten into that we often look askance
at learning opportunities unless they’re “for credit.” The return of the
free market in higher education will help break that habit, as people
again learn for the sake of learning (as Adam Smith’s students did) and
stop taking courses just because they need some credits.
Perhaps the new competition will end up determining who wants to learn things, and who just wants the credential.
From Michelle Rhee: My Break With the Democrats - As a lifelong Democrat, controversial education reformer Michelle Rhee never thought she’d support school vouchers. Until she did. InRadical, she details her transformation:
Here’s the question we Democrats need to ask ourselves: Are we beholden to the public school system at any cost, or are we beholden to the public school child at any cost? My loyalty and my duty will always be to the children.
Not everyone bought it. In fact, most of my Democrat friends remained adamantly opposed to vouchers. It was interesting, though: they were always opposed to the broad policy, but they could never reconcile their logic when thinking at the individual-kid level.
In 1997, at the age of 27, I washed up at my parents’ house, done with school, and out of money. All I had to my name was and three humanities degrees, (B.A. Rhetoric, M.A. Literature, M.F.A Creative Writing) and a dog.
It was a dark time, both figuratively and literally because my parents had downsized since I’d first gone away for college and the only room for me in the new house was the basement. When I snapped the lights off at night, the blackness was total, roughly reflective of both my spirit and my prospects. In bed, I would wave my hand in front of my face, unable to make out even the faintest image. If you want to take that as a metaphor for my employment prospects, so be it.
"One important implication of our analysis is that for many institutions, demand-side market pressure may not compel investment in academic quality, but rather in consumption amenities," write the authors, three University of Michigan scholars.
While getting a college degree dramatically improves a person's potential earnings over time, the sheepskin alone is not the sine qua non.
Certainly not, especially in a time when college degrees are so commonplace and when graduate degrees have lost their economic, social, and academic value through dilution.
Listed in the article are not things you learn in college, but things you can learn wherever you are: high school, college, armed forces, crappy job, or on the street. Basic life lessons which I began learning at 12. I have had paid jobs since then. That's where I learned about life even though my book-larnin' has been a blessing to me.
They could or should have said "should learn before leaving high school" because that is when adulthood is supposed to begin. Well before my time, college students wore suits to class. It was a serious adult endeavor. We don't know what it is now, except that they will give you As (or rarely Bs which used to be Ds and Fs) for paying the bill because the customer is always right except in math, physics or chem. Which is why employers like to see the tough courses and the demanding majors in college grads. They grade on curves, so the right stuff shows to potential employers.
Now that I am in a position to interview new hires at our place, it has been a very interesting experience. We are finally doing quite well after post-start-up challenges. I'll write up a post about our hiring process and our hiring filters when I have a chance.
We get 1000 applicants for each job posting at our little shop, but we do not delete the "overqualified" here if they are willing to take a chance with low wages to start.
He has also recently written a short legal essay on a topic dear to my heart entitled HAM SANDWICH NATION: DUE PROCESS WHEN EVERYTHING IS A CRIME. Nobody knows what the criminal laws are anymore, especially the regulatory ones. It's like Alice's Restaurant. The Feds truly can indict anybody for anything if they want to.
Yale is offering a course on bartending. I'm surprised, because I thought Yale College now specialized in the fun of sex toys and at the same time, in some sort of straddle, in combatting the evil and politically-incorrect male sexual interest in females. Not in alcohol. Maybe Yale is trying to compete with Dartmouth in the drinks category. Yale will lose that competition hands-down.
Is the reality of this economy sinking in yet? Admittedly, making a Perfect Manhattan is not child's play.
The fact that millions of college graduates are unemployed or wait tables is not a temporary aberration; it is an inexorable result of rational incentives.
and
Consider the essential qualifications of a good employee (and I offer this account as someone who once owned and ran a business). He or she must be punctual, honest, be able to complete tasks on time, first time around and as specified. Employees must politely pay attention when spoken to and are not excessively argumentative; they must dress appropriately for the job, have good hygiene (look “clean cut”), speak distinctly and, with few exceptions, possess adequate writing skills as well as being able to perform tasks without explicit detailed instructions.
Such workers get along with co-workers or customers. They show up even under adverse circumstances and if unable to work that day, take necessary steps to minimize their absence. They give a full hour’s work for an hour’s pay and willingly volunteer for extra work if necessary. They also know that work is also not the place to socialize on the firm’s nickel.
The article is here. Of course a shorter summer "vacation" would help kids with continuity.
However, I think it's time that the entire structure of public K-12 education ought to be reinvented.
We started out with home-schooling, with tutors for the wealthy, then neighborhood one-room schoolhouses supported and controlled by the parents of the kids, then we went to the tax-supported, age-cohorted Prussian (yes, our public schools were based on the then-modern Prussian schools) factory model for the poor which we still use today in the US, while the prosperous (and the Catholics) used private schools. One size does not fit any, much less all.
Nobody cares what I think, but I do have plenty of ideas.
One of the first things I would do would be to eliminate the age-cohort system and, with that, those talented and gifted programs. Proceed at your own pace after demonstrating mastery of modules of study. The highly-motivated and bright move faster, the rest more slowly - or never. So what? Most kids cannot handle integral calculus but some kids are eager to tackle it.
Another would be to eliminate the huge summer vacation. It's obsolete. Give them August off, if need be. Why should kids have life easier than the grown-ups who take so little time away from their work and pay the bills for the supposed professional education?
Third, I would reintroduce technical training. The fancy private schools my kids attended have more technical training than the public schools have. Schools can take their pick: wood shop, metal shop, music shop, forestry shop, computer shop, kitchen shop, farm shop, garden shop, car and engine shop, construction and architecture shop, art and graphics shop, electrical shop, stone shop, ceramics shop, gun shop, etc. Few parents can teach all of these things, and the opportunities to integrate book learning - math, history, etc into real life tasks can be inspiring. If we had stone shop today, we might find another Michelangelo. Our kids' Kitchen Shop ultimately produced a Cordon Bleu four-star chef whose first task in Kitchen Shop was to understand sanitary dish-washing and the workings of a commercial dishwashing machine. Because private schools are non-union, the Kitchen Shop kids work in the school kitchen and take orders from the chef.
Fourth, I would get rid of the costly educational edifice complex. The building doesn't contribute anything. Any old empty mill building or vacant factory would be fine.
Fifth, I would bring back Civics. Every American needs to be taught how to be a citizen of a free republic. It's not easy to be one; it's all about man and God and law. Not all parents explain this plainly, or even by example.
Sixth: Sports. Every kid ought to do some team or individual sports as part of school or outside of school. Not just the athletically-gifted. America is a sports country. Builds character even if you are a spaz. Mens sana in corpore sano.
Seventh: Get rid of the unions. Teaching is a calling, not a factory job and definitely should not be a government job.
Eighth: Abolish the Federal dept. of Education. It's not their yob, and they are mostly idiots who could not change the oil in their car or hammer a nail straight into a 2X4, much less diagram a sentence.
A national "common core" for lower ed? I do not like that idea at all. I do not approve of any national authorities involved in education, much less curricula. Why do we have local school boards?
Gee, I almost forgot. We have them to apply for federal grants, which are, in turn, used to control state and local education from Washington.
Given the increasing centralization of everything, at least one fellow has something on the ball: David Coleman, Education Hero.
We noted in our piece on Visiting Colleges that responsible parents can decide what their kids need to learn in college, even if they go somewhere with minimal core requirements.
This should not be left to the kids to decide, because 1. It's too important 2. We know better than they do what they need to know to be educated adults with an openness to the richness of life, 3. We should have our own ideas about what we want our own kids to know (eg, any kid who doesn't know basic geology is a bore), 4. Colleges, in their pandering to students, tend to not want to tell them what they need to know, and 5. Who pays the piper calls the tune.
Here's an example of Mom and Pop's Minimum Required College Courses for a Liberal Arts education, regardless of major or interests (they can be met with High School APs or equivalent too):
Math and Science: Math through at least first year calc (BC calc), Statistics, Bio with lab, Physics with lab, Chem with lab, Geology intro
General: History of Western Thought (or Western Civ, or whatever it might be called), Art History Survey, Music History Survey, a political science course, Micro and Macro Economics, a Bible-based Christian Theology course, Intro to Accounting (if you can find something like that in a fancy college. If not, take over the summer at a local college. It will be a huge help to anything a person does in life, including volunteer jobs.)
History: American History, European History
Literature: Shakespeare plus 2 other lit courses
This is a minimal foundation for "lifetime learning" and reading. A young person with this foundation ought to be able to discuss almost any subject that comes up - if maybe only superficially - and to know how to learn more about it efficiently when they want or need to do so. Corny but true.
nb: Before you debate me on this, note that these are minimal requirements. You ain't eddicated if you don't know this stuff.
I often hear complaints that many colleges appear to have limits to how many Asians they want to accept. I have heard it said that "Asians are the new Jews", recalling when elite colleges elected to keep their Jewish component low.
It's understood that no competitive college wants to fill a class with nothing but kids with perfect SAT scores (just joking about the stereotype) who play concert violin, but at what point does discrimination against eyelid contour begin to exist?
I'd like to see color-blind and ethnicity-blind admissions. We all know what colleges are looking for - bright, curious, and hard-working kids who are likely to be a credit to the school and who can fill some sort of slot in the construction of a class, eg they will want a few lacrosse players, a sailor or two, a cellist, some literary types, some genius science geeks, some kids who have shown unique initiative in life, etc.
This past week was finals week for my son. Thankfully, his slow start at college led to a fine rally and his efforts were rewarded with good grades. I give him a tremendous amount of credit for pulling himself together in his new environment. He started out carelessly, as many young people do when suddenly placed in an environment which is seemingly responsibility-free. The reality hits home quickly, of course, and his hit in the first two weeks, details of which are not important.
What was important was how he responded. He buckled down, and realized that while he could have some fun, he was there to do work. I pointed out to him his payment for the work he does is the sense of accomplishment good grades provide.
However, for all the fine work he did, there was one event which bothered me. He handled it well, I can't say that I would've.
His professor, for their final paper, asked them all to write a letter to President Obama asking for increased legislation and leadership to move our nation to a 'green' or sustainable energy policy. All the papers would be graded, but the highest grade would be sent directly to President Obama through a personal friend.
My first reaction was "what right does this professor have to force a particular view on his students?" My son replied, "Look, I don't agree with this and I don't support it. But I can get an A and I've got a good idea of how to write this. If I fight him, he'll probably give me an F on the paper."
As much as this approach bothered me, I was impressed with his maturity and focus on the goal. His paper was, for what it was, pretty darn good. I don't know if it will get forwarded, but it was worthy of a very high grade. He and I laughed and I said "at least if it does get chosen, we can use it as a platform to show the inadequacies of some portions of higher education."
I'm aware that many colleges have become bastions of liberal indoctrination. I'm not sure when the decision was made to eliminate critical thought in the classroom - but I hope it is not fait accompli. Luckily for my son, he and I have active discussions about topics like his paper regularly, so he's aware there is more than one view on the topic. I'm not sure how many of his classmates are.
...the animating principle of the modern university is a focus on the image and “brand” of the university, rather than the underlying substance of the education experience received. Governance of the modern university is almost completely absorbed by how to market the school’s brand rather than how to improve its underlying quality. The focus of every discussion is what impact a particular action (or inaction) will have on the school’s brand.
Of course, current colleges (at current rates!) are not necessarily delivering much bang for the buck either: According to Richard Arum and Josipha Roksa, authors of the 2011 book Academically Adrift, 36 percent of college students fail to “show any significant improvement over four years” as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment.
In my view, expressed frequently here, the higher ed bubble is a result of the democratization of the higher ed industry. Colleges, designed for scholars, compete for "customers," standards drop, and prices rise to whatever level the market, subsidies, and student loans can bear. A degree is a mass market product, which means that the customer must be kept happy. That represents a complete reversal of historical approaches.
I spoke with a recent state college grad who told me that he never read a book in four years. He told me he mainly got by on what he had learned in high school. I think many people are not aware of how low expectations have dropped outside of the elite schools and non-elite STEM programs.
There must be thousands of profs out there who are teaching well-below their levels of competence due to the requirement to dumb down their efforts.
Underlying all of these issues is a simple fact: learning is not something that can be "delivered," something you "get" or can buy. The life of the mind cannot be bought. It can be ignited, but not bought. A degree can be bought today, but its economic value today as a mass-market product, and its price, are out of sync.
When Isaac Newton went to the University of Cambridge several centuries ago, he studied seven days a week, at least ten hours a day, and actively avoided the revelry that some Cambridge undergraduates engaged in even then. No one expects American undergraduates to work as hard as Isaac Newton or as medieval monks. However, what seems to be happening on many American college campuses is the development of such a powerful "fun" culture that a quarter of the students or more arrive thinking that having fun is the main reason they are at college and that the pursuit of knowledge should be resorted to only when they have nothing better to do.
There was a time when the upper classes approached college casually, more as a rite of passage than anything else because they were confident about their futures, while the aspiring classes put their noses to the grindstone the way Newton did. That was in a time, however, when probably 1% or less of the population even considered higher education. It has been democratized, which might be another way of saying that many colleges are now glorified high schools.
Rugg proposed “new materials of instruction” that “shall illustrate fearlessly and dramatically the inevitable consequence of the lack of planning and of central control over the production and distribution of physical things. . . . We shall disseminate a new conception of government—one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people; and one that will successfully adjust the psychological problems among men.”
Since when does the federal government control school lunches? When I was a kid, my Mom made my lunch and I carried it in a lunchbox. Mom controlled it. Apple, banana, or plum, a sandwich on white bread, a couple of cookies. Usually baloney sandwich, Fluffernutter, or PB&J as I recall but sometimes ham and swiss as a luxury. With four of us kids, it was the early morning lunch-box assembly line. School provided only those little cold cartons of milk, chocolate or plain, with a straw. I turned out just fine.
And since when does the federal government control school curricula? Catcher is a dumb book and not worth the read, but who decides these things?
Since when do the feds have anything at all to do with local education anyway?
The picture of this disadvantage is dramatic. Based on 2007 - 2010 data from the 76 institutional members of the six largest athletic conferences, black men were 2.8% of full-time undergraduate students but 57.1% of football teams and 64.3% of basketball teams. 50.2% of black male athletes graduated within six years, compared to 66.9% of student-athletes overall, 72.8% of undergraduate students, and 55.5% of black undergraduate men overall.
We should just do an open thread on the topic of the big-time college sports industry.
I think the Feds should get entirely out of the Big Education industry. They screw up everything they try to do because government is a self-serving idiot and has become, in fact, a (non-profit) but highly-profitable mega-industry unto itself. Just consider how many Americans make a living off of government.
Mead's post 
The article is 
We noted in our piece on