Maggie's Farm

Few kids would turn down an Ivy scholarship, but, after your first job out, you are on your own and nobody cares about it anymore except for you and your narcissistic needs. Done right, wonderfully life-enriching, speaking as an older Dartmouth fellow from the era when your Ivy BA meant something; many things, really. Lots of social signalling and networking, because everybody likes a Dartmouth lad (or lassie). Those were the good old days when elitism gave you a leg up in the sport of life. Clubs, jobs, friends, grad school, social acceptance, deals, etc. Of course, being a Col. or above in the US military offered similar perks. Respect.

It reminds me of the oldie, "Don't send my boy to Harvard, the dying mother said, Don't send my boy to Harvard, I'd rather see him dead, but send him to Columbia, or better yet Cornell, but as for Pennsylvan-i-ay I'll see him first in hell."

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League

He begins, In the spring of 2008, I did a daylong stint on the Yale admissions committee...

Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of “service,” and not in the spirit of “making an effort,” either—swooping down on a member of the college support staff and offering to “buy them a coffee,” as a former Yalie once suggested, in order to “ask them about themselves.”

Sheesh.

Peter Wood reports on the new AP American History program.

A Conservative case: The case for allowing these debts to be erased via bankruptcy.

Makes some sense, as long as that doesn't get dumped on the taxpayer. Of course, having a bankruptcy on your credit report will not do much for your future prospects.

Was he teaching "community organizing"? I was a drunk, angry teacher - I just wanted to open my students' eyes to social justice and reality. I didn't want them to end up bitter like me.

It's not so much the drinking that bothers me - it's that he was not doing his job and it sounds like he still is not. For him, it's all about him. I would not want this jerk "teaching" my kids anything. Since I am sure he is in a government teaching union, he can't be fired.

Related, Narcissistic Personality

He begins:

 The grades I just issued in my post-calculus, differential equations course – a sophomore math offering taken mostly by engineering students—followed the usual bell-shaped curve, roughly 10% A’s, 20% B’s, 40% C’s, 20% D’s and 10% F’s. The complaints came more from the D students than from the Fs.

It's bogus to compare nations, really. It's apples and oranges. In America, K-12 has tons of immigrants who are not yet acculturated and do not have excellent English. And when it comes to college, America aspires to send everybody there, not just the scholarly. Why? Don't ask me. A credential I guess. Thus it makes no sense to compare with places like Finland or Singapore, or places like the UK with high bars for university entry and without mass-market schools.

As Schneiderman asks, How good are American universities? How can you tell?

The main NYT article is Americans Think We Have the World’s Best Colleges. We Don’t.

I recently had a conversation with a multi-multi-millionaire who recently sold his second business start-up at age 43.

He is a humble guy, good golfer. He told me that he was advised that he was not "college material" - and "I am not", he says. "I am not a scholar, not intellectual, not very smart but I am energetic, and strong on practical and common sense. I learned my math at work because I had to." He became an apprentice (I can't say in what area) and in ten years owned a rapidly-growing company with 130 employees and two warehouses.

He told me his future plans too, but I want to keep it short and confidential.

Anyway, it raised the question for me: What is "college material"? Or is that term obsolete?

Things are changing fast: Fast Times in Higher Ed. I believe that the old late-medieval model, designed for dedicated scholars, will survive but in small, elite places. It was never meant to be mass market.

Just one point from Peggy Noonan's The Trouble With Common Core:

The irony is that Core proponents’ overall objective—to get schools teaching more necessary and important things, and to encourage intellectual coherence in what is taught—is not bad, but good. Why they thought the answer was federal, I mean national, and not local is beyond me. Since patronizing people you disagree with is all the rage, I’ll have a go. The Common Core establishment appears to be largely led by people who are well-educated, well-meaning, accomplished and affluent, and who earnestly desire to help those in less fortunate circumstances, but who simply don’t know enough about normal people—how they live, how they think—to have made a success of it.

Also they don’t seem to know that intelligent Americans, exactly the kind who quickly become aware of and respond to new federal schemes—sorry, I meant national ones—have become very, very wary of Washington, and the dreams of its eggheads. How they could have missed that is also beyond me.

It's not as if the country had been begging Washington to tell them what to teach in school. Nobody asked for that. If the federal gummint thinks that we the people are retarded, then they should consider their own election.

Carter:  Dear Class of 2014: Thanks for Not Disinviting Me

A commencement speaker with a difference: Robert Frost, 1956

He would get the brownshirt treatment today

Dear graduates: Don’t follow your dreams (A commencement speech for the mediocre) - The brutal truth is that most people can't pay the bills by "living their passion." So what can we do instead?

We are all mediocre, but in different ways.

Harvard joins list of schools giving its commencement speaker the “brownshirt” treatment

Admiral McRaven says - First thing to do: make your bed! Good, useful lessons from the boss of the USN Seals. "You will fail often." That is true:

Choice Schools Work Better Than Public Schools

 Notably, choice schools can hire their teachers based on their own criteria — such as advanced study and experience — not the criteria used by public schools, which look at the number of education courses completed. Moreover, Walberg writes, choice schools pay teachers based on their performance, and teachers who do not perform are likely to be fired.

Related, re Newark and Zuckerberg:  The Problem with Top-Down Education Reforms

There is no single form of higher ed. It's a topic about which I have posted a number of times: Seven Competing Views of Higher Education

It's a good, brief summary. I wouldn't use the word "competing," though. "Coexisting" captures it better.

It's been a hot topic in recent years. You might imagine that all young males are beasts and barbarians, but they are not. Are they horny? Of course they are, terribly and sometimes painfully so, but in Christian countries rape is still one of the most serious crimes and everybody knows it.

I agree with this: Victims of Campus Rape Should Dial 911.

Being a student is no immunization from law.

Is College for Everyone? An Introduction and Timeline of College in America

I think formal education ought to proceed at the individual student's pace, not lockstep by age and class grade as in the German model.

Achieve proficiency with something, then move onward like merit badges.  That would certainly appeal to most kids, I think.

At Mead, Stuff Learned Trumps Time Served

More Decline in the U. of Chicago Core.

I have come to think that it's not so much about ideology and abandoning the canon of mankind's works over the past 10,000 years, but it's more about marketing to the kids. It's disgusting, and it saddens me.

If the U of C were in Big Ten football, they could and probably would keep their core and their soul. They are selling their soul for a bowl of lentils. It's greed.

The competition for full-tuition foreign students.

Higher Ed follows the money. Greedy non-profits, are they not?

We recently linked this: Should the U.S. Adopt the German Model of Apprenticeships?

The otherwise-useful article concludes with the notion that "government could do more." 

I have no idea what government has to do with it. After the basics, most lines of work are learned by apprenticeships and "practice" of various sorts. Just consider auto mechanics, cooking, gunsmithing, machine-tooling, law, medicine, bond sales, garden design, preaching, playing music, carpentry,  jewelry design, flower arranging, cattle-raising, horse-grooming, dog training, leather-working, road-paving, politics and sales in general, fashion, etc., etc., etc. The list is endless.

I am very much in favor of the term and concept "apprentice," but I don't know what the heck government has to do with it. Why do so many people have this reflex that "government ought to do something"? As if it could.

People can figure these things out on their own.

Just one quote from an excellent piece from Walter Russell Mead: The Coming Reformation of Higher Ed:

One important shift we need to make, in K12 as well as in higher ed, is from the time-served model of education to a stuff-learned model. The time-served model asks how many credits, how many years? As a method of qualification it is characteristic of guilds where you have to serve so many years as an apprentice, so many years as a journeyman--you have to walk through all the steps.  And it also is a revenue enhancer for colleges because the bright kid is going to have to take just as many courses as the dumb kid. Here's another aspect of the stuff-learned model.

Suppose we actually had an exam, a national baccalaureate exam of some kind, and if you passed that exam then you would be deemed to have graduated from college with an equivalent of a BA. Not only would this make it possible for a lot of people to get that degree with less time in class and less money spent, it would also allow the kid that went to the University of Illinois and learned a lot to be able to compete with the kid who went to Harvard and stayed drunk. It gives the kid from the no-name or lesser-name school an honest-to-God credential. To me, this is a matter of elementary social justice. It would help to reduce the immense prestige premium that a handful of schools have--a form of privilege that those of us who care about a more open and democratic society should oppose.  And I think it would be healthy to put less pressure on middle-class kids to get into name schools and put more pressure on them to learn stuff that would be interesting and useful. And offering certificates equivalent to a BA to students passing an exam would address a lot of the needs that are now fulfilled through very cumbersome and expensive programs often leading to a lot of student debt.

And if a family's kids are able to graduate from high school two or three years early, the taxpayers save money.  Why shouldn't some of those savings go to the family that managed the savings, so they could use the money for the next stage in their childrens' education?   

But who would design that exam, Prof. Mead? I'd be willing to do it, but then higher ed would "teach to the test."

My BA test would include things like (for examples) Calculus, Physics and Physical Chemistry, Plato, Econ, the Ming Dynasty, John Locke, molecular Bio, Michelangelo, one or two languages, basic Law and Civics, basics of Engineering, Geography and Geology, Roman history, Sophocles, Bach's music, the Bible, and Augustine. Plus an essay on a random topic during the exam.

The degree would mean something, if done my way, and separate the slackers from the scholars. Could kids pass it? Well, how about just a score on it, then? But who would care? It doesn't take a fancy degree to sell software or bonds, to write code, or to make Chai Latte.

It will come as no surprise to observers of graduate education that the
report documents the fact that foreign students make up the majority of
enrollments in U.S. graduate programs in many STEM fields...:

 At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the proportion of international students in graduate electrical engineering programs is 52.5 percent and, in computer science, 35.3 percent. At Stanford, 56 percent of graduate electrical engineering students and 43.7 percent of graduate computer science students are international.

I'll always listen to what Scruton has to say.