Maggie's Farm

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.

What Happens Today at a Liberal Arts College? One quote:

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.

A Murray quote via a commenter on Australian Work Force 'Over Educated':

   "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.

How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist.

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.

When academia becomes politicized, everything gets insane: The Long PC Battle in Anthropology.

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.

But I am getting a bit off topic. Here's the link: Administrative bloat in US public schools

Peter Drucker on the Dangers of College-for-All

Mead's post quotes this:

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.

Related, What College Graduates Lack - Americans have lost their competitive edge. Can college restore it?

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.

Why Are Your Children Still In Public School?

The study says:

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.

Related: MOOCs, MOCCs, and HarvardX

At College Fix

Related, from Mead: When MOOCs Go Bad

Things are changing quickly in the Higher Ed world. It will be interesting to see what works.

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. In Radical, 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.

He begins:

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.

From The Customer Is Always Right?:

"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.

Profs begin to worry about online education.

It's all about the money.

When I wrote my post last week about reinventing government education, I had not been aware that the prolific Prof. Reynolds had written a booklet on the topic: The K-12 Implosion. I will read it.

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.

Weissberg: Higher graduation rates won’t help the economy because college reinforces bad work habits:

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.

I could go on and on, but that's a start.

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.

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?

The subject is discussed and debated in The NYT.

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.

From Zywicki's From Wall Street to College Street:

...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.

Instead of increasing financial aid, two states are decreasing college tuition. A quote:

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.