Maggie's Farm

A Superficial Solution to the Student Debt Problem

Higher ed is expensive, but today it is far more expensive than it needs to be.  It's a mess, and government has only made it worse.

The Chronicle Supports the Case Against College for All

The higher ed marketing machine has done a good job for its booming industry over the past 50 years,  but it has gotten ridiculous. A college degree means nothing. Anybody who wants to can now cheat, drink, and bs their way to the piece of paper as long as they can find a way to come up with the cash.

Let's face it. If you can't or won't handle Calc. and Aristotle, you can't use it. Get a job and learn something real. And read books.

Oberlin Is An Insane Asylum

It certainly does seem to exist in a cocoon of unreality, but so does much of higher ed to varying degrees.  The comment on this piece about how the adults have let the kids down is to the point.

NYC's City College is a great public school, (ten Nobel laureates, countless distinguished citizens, academics, and professionals) but it had a lot to recover from. So did the rest of the huge CUNY system which aspires to make higher ed accessible to aspiring New Yorkers.

I think it would be a wonderful, fulfilling career to teach at City College. The pay and benefits are good too, thanks to the taxpayers. The CUNY Revival - Higher standards and civic and political support have rejuvenated a great New York institution.

From Michael Bloomberg and Jamie Dimon: The Skills Schools Aren’t Teaching But Must

I entirely agree with their idea of job training for high school grads, and I also agree that the overemphasis of college is foolish. I am not sure the idea is neglected, though. There are vocational schools all over (public and private), and community colleges generally have vocationally-oriented programs.

Much neglected in the discussion in the US are apprenticeships, which cost nothing and which are usually paid helper jobs which can lead to well-paid jobs afterwards.  My electronics repair guy gets $175/hr. My computer expert gets $200/hr, has no college. My gunsmith, $150/hr.  Carpenters, electricians, plumbers, tree men, chefs, and so forth all can have solid incomes via apprenticeships.

In fact, legal training is mainly through apprenticeship. Sure, you have to go to law school in most states now, but the real learning is by doing under supervision.

A Champion of Free Speech Takes on the Muzzled Campus

Ironically, where liberals are most dominant.

OK, but why are we still measuring things by race and ethnicity? Does it really matter? People are individuals. Why not measure people by height instead, or shoe size? Or, with the current meme, hand size?

Forget "gender," skin tone, ethnic background, etc. and just evaluate people on their individual strengths and character. How hard would that be? I am sick and tired of this ethnic-racial-gender-class neo-Marxist analysis which tries to put everybody in some labeled box based on the most trivial and superficial characteristics.

We all know that Jews and Asians statistically out-perform academically, and that African-Americans outperform in many athletics. So what? Many blacks are klutzes and intellectually-talented, and many Asians and Jews are not too bright. Cultural and societal averages might be academically interesting, but we are just talking about basic education here. With an undamaged brain and a decent teacher anybody can learn enough Trig and Calc to study Civil Eng in high school or after and never be unemployed.

From a review of Charles Murray's 2008 Real Education:

(Americans) want to believe that every young person is equally educable and that we can solve social inequalities by ensuring that nearly all children complete high school and go on to earn college degrees. Reality says otherwise, however. Kids vary enormously in ability, which means that the right kind and extent of education varies tremendously. And instead of trying to put more students through college, we should recognize that we already have far too many there.

...

Throughout our whole educational system, we are “asking too much from those at the bottom, asking the wrong things from those in the middle, and asking too little from those at the top,” he maintains. From kindergarten to college and from the smartest students to the dullest, our education system underperforms.

Does It Matter?

I have never understood how higher ed got into the business of remedial education because it is about high school- level work. I suppose we all know why colleges accept kids who cannot do some high school-level tasks.

If you can not produce a grammatical, coherent, and well-structured essay, or do trig and pre-calc, you are likely not ready for a higher ed curriculum. Sensibly, a North Carolina pilot project is moving remediation to the high schools. At that point, it's not remediation, just more high school. 

It would seem to me that, if you can not write a complete sentence, you are not college material.

How to Ruin Thin Mints

The article by Heather MacDonald

Related,  Groupthink in Academia: Moving Further to the Left

Related, from Williamson: The war on free speech on campus and beyond

A conversation with Tyler Cowen. (Podcast and transcript). Prof. Haidt is a thoughtful fellow. 

 The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable. The heritability coefficients vary between 0.3 and 0.6, or 30 to 60 percent of the variance, under some assumptions, can be explained by the genes. It’s the largest piece of variance we can explain.

I had to get halfway through the piece tor realize that she is talking about kids in college. Forget about "not prepared for college."  These kids are not "college material." Sure they can be graded, as "unacceptable." 

We too-easily forget that 50% of people have below-average IQs.

How Can I Possibly Grade These Students?

Meet the college president who said  "This is a university! It is not a day-care!"

Some higher ed is work training, some is general education, and some is a mix. It is the "general education" part, aka Liberal Arts, that most people mean by "an educated person." Can you discuss Plato? And Aristotle, sorry to tell you New Age profs, is the foundation of everything. De Poetica? Yeah! Have to read it.

What that has devolved into today is anybody's guess.

He got  a B.A., M.A., Ph.D., But Little Education

From From Plato to Palo Alto - The case against Western Civ:

A strong case can be made for a core curriculum for college undergraduates to serve as a corrective to the excesses of cafeteria-style elective systems and politicized identity politics. But the genre of triumphalist Western history, beginning with Homer and Athens and culminating in liberal democracy and free enterprise, of the kind represented a generation or two ago by popularizers like Will and Ariel Durant and Daniel Boorstin, was always crude presentist propaganda. We do not need a Western Civ 2.0 in which the ancient Greeks and Romans and Hebrews and medieval Christendom are part of a grand historical narrative that concludes with the triumphant technolibertarianism of Silicon Valley. 

I understand Michael Lind's critique, but I feel it is a trivial one. If people do not know the foundational origins and concepts from the Bible and Aristotle through John Locke and Adam Smith, it seems to me that there is very little that you can read with understanding. It is no "triumphalist narrative," but just the story of how we got where we are. At's a map.

I don't get why anybody would want to pay for higher ed without this. I was the fortunate beneficiary of 2 years of it.

Related, Call for western civilization courses at Stanford gets backlash

So what do they want to learn about? If it's Physical Chemistry 2.0, there's time for that too.

From the article:

Public and private universities in the United States are regulated to the nth degree.

Federal, state, and local higher education laws seem to multiply by the hour. Bureaucrats now dictate campus policies regarding academics, sexual assault, athletics, dining, technology, employment, campus construction, and student health, among other areas. Meanwhile, schools devote millions of dollars and valuable resources to comply with those rules—many of which confuse and do little to improve student outcomes.

College presidents on average earn $377,261 annually, or more than twice the average pay for CEOs

Academic Drivel Report - Confessing my sins and exposing my academic hoax. 

We estimate that differential exposure to children linked to domestic violence explains 5 to 6 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in our data, and that removing one disruptive peer from a classroom for one year would raise the present discounted value of classmates' future
earnings by $100,000.

I am skeptical.

What I Learned by Going Back to College

Delightful. Many retired people do this.

Trapped in the Community College Remedial Maze - Today, these institutions welcome scores of underprepared students who often have no idea how they ended up behind.

It used to be termed "not college material," but now is more kindly termed "not college-ready." If money is attached, however, somebody will find you a spot.

There are many options for free or inexpensive higher ed: College is already free, Bernie

Also,  Some Going to Europe for Free College

Euro-Style ‘Free’ College is Completely Different Than American Higher Education

Good points all, but especially what Americans would consider limited access - high bars for entry to university.