Maggie's Farm

It's a post at MTC. It begins:

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.

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?

From Rosenberg's piece:

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.

Anyway, here's the notion: New Bill Would Take Income-Based Student Loan Payments Straight From Your Paycheck.

What do you think?

Stanley Fish's essay...

was prompted by a survey of freshman composition courses a few years back. Fish read lesson plans for 104 sections at his university and found that "only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues --- racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising." Writing courses taught by writing instructors should focus on writing, period. People should teach subjects in which they have some expertise (what do English graduate students know about globalization?), and materials brought into the course should not obscure stated aims (how does teaching about racism help students write better sentences?). This is to insist upon boundaries between disciplines---another no-no in current thinking---and to divide people into experts and dilettantes. It is also to endorse the goals of general education and examine how well a college curriculum delivers them. Hence the discussion of a new report by ACTA.

It bears the title What Will They Learn?

Read the whole thing at Minding the Campus.

Mr. President, Tuition Subsidies Are the Affordability Problem, Not the Solution. He quotes:

...a growing body of research controlling for variables outside of aid supports the hypothesis that aid has an appreciable inflationary effect, though study results vary by type of aid and institution.

Like most individuals, institutions can always find new "needs" to spend money on. About three years ago, my alma mater announced a $600 million bequest. Two months later, their fund plea arrived in the mail, hoping I would increase my annual donation.

Did they lower tuition? No. For greedy government and greedy non-profits, it's never enough and never will be.

Last week we posted about how higher ed is simply job preparation. Here's the other point of view: The Liberal Arts, Economic Value, and Leisure. A quote:

Instead of seeing college as a private investment, we must consider it a public good. If we remember the generation that was educated after World War II, generous public support meant that they could afford -- economically -- to spend four years studying the subject that most interested or spoke to them, and then they took their education and did millions of things with it that helped us develop a richer society, not just in terms of wealth but in terms of knowledge, art, and citizenship. That generation could do so because they did not have to take on thousands of dollars in debt and to worry all the time about how to pay for it. They could do so because public support for their education -- meaning low tuition for students thanks to tax support for America’s colleges -- gave them the freedom -- the leisure -- to study.

While I am somewhat sympathetic to the feeling of the article, I also find it foolish in several ways.

First, it is not only the elites who have access to the liberal arts. With 70% of current job seekers holding higher ed degrees, that no longer applies.

Second, any public high school offers an abundant introduction to the liberal arts, enough to prepare anybody to pursue their intellectual interests for the rest of their lives.

Third, "leisure to study"? That's ridiculous. Full-time college offers leisure to drink, to attend football games, and to pursue the opposite sex. Best students I've known had no leisure.

Fourth, the idea of a "public good." Last I heard, that just means that somebody else ought to pay for it, preferably my neighbor via taxation. Why my neighbor should pay for my kid to "pursue at leisure the things that speak to him" is utterly beyond me.

Home schooling has been around forever. Whether it was the wealthy with education via Moms and tutors, or poor immigrants working all day and then educating themselves in the New York Public Library, or pioneer kids like Abe Lincoln, it was all home schooling.

As one example, Teddy Roosevelt - who wrote more books and articles than any President ever - never attended any school until he went to Harvard College. (As I recall, though, he did have to cram his Ancient Greek and Chemistry a bit for the Harvard entrance exams. At home, of course.)

Here's a good update on the topic, explaining why the Education Establishment is hostile to home schooling.

Related to the topic is the latest educational egalitarian wackiness coming out of France. Schneiderman does a good semi-rant on the topic: Dumbing Down Education in France. Many are not aware that there are similar Harrison Bergeron movements afoot in the US.

What is higher ed for? Universities Are Vocational Schools. A quote: 

The admissions officers seem to believe that those planning to attend college view it largely as a signaling device that directs the best and brightest young Americans to the best and highest-paying jobs. It is not primarily about acquiring knowledge ("human capital"), critical learning or leadership skills, or better perceiving the difference between right and wrong, but more about achieving the American Dream of a comfortable, moderately affluent

Judge Posner on edumacation:

The challenge to American education is to provide a useful education to the large number of Americans who are unlikely to benefit from a college education or from high school courses aimed at preparing students for college. The need is for a different curriculum and for a greater investment in these children’s preschool environment. We should recognize that we have different populations with different schooling needs and that curricula and teaching methods should be revised accordingly.

"Investment in the preschool environment"? What does that mean? It's been proven many times that Head Start accomplishes nothing other than to employ expensive babysitters on the taxpayers' dime.

I'm not sure whether I agree with all of the judge's thoughts, but definitely with some of them. It reminds me of those hospital ratings that came out a few years ago. NYC's Memorial Sloan-Kettering came out at the bottom. Too much morbidity and mortality. Of course, it is the world's pre-eminent cancer center for research and care.

Do they "care" at Sloan-Kettering? They sure do. Wonderful people, doing God's work. I know. They have world expert teams for every kind of cancer.

Via SDA, from Cato:

As we've said here ad nauseum, there are three separate subjects here. First, the politically- and financially-powerful Education Industry. Second, the transfer of culture and knowledge. Third, the interest in learning and the capacity of kids to learn (plus, obviously, the value the family places on curiosity and knowledge).

Judging from what I see and hear daily, we have long reached the point of diminishing returns on the public school front.

Readers know that I have long rejected the notion of a college-level Liberal Arts-focused education as an economic investment. However, I have praised it as a potentially life-enhancing guided exploration more deeply into our culture and into current knowledge than secondary school can do (although good private schools can do it). "Cultivation of the mind" and all that.

In other words, do I do not think of it as utilitarian. (Colleges were designed for scholars and clery - for the cognitive and/ or financially elite.) I learned much in high school and in college which have never provided me with a penny of profit but which I believe have enhanced my life in countless ways: Geology, Statistics, Intro Music History, Ancient Greek History, Russian Lit, etc.

However, when I went to college the ways of learning these things outside college were not as accessible as they are today. The self-informed scholars of the past had to spend hours in libraries, after work, just to try to figure out where to start. Today, you can get the best Music History course in the world from the Teaching Company for $200. and enjoy it at leisure - with no exams.

So we return to my recurrent question: Is Liberal Arts college about job-preparation, for networking, is it a meaningless credential, is it a way to delay adulthood, or is it a guided exploration into our culture and knowledge for the deeply curious and scholarly with high IQ? 

In Obama's economy, the reality hits. Plumbers making $70-150/hr make much more money than most recent college grads and lead more independent and entrepreneurial careers. In fact, more than many recently-graduated professionals.

Insty found this post, How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America, which asserts that colleges should do more to teach the kids how to make money. I beg to differ.

We are all weary of the drearily repetitive claims of oppression and the academic insistence on PC orthodoxy. Everybody is oppressed - especially in America. And white-colored males are oppressed by the "victims." 

From the review:

What is true at Bowdoin is more or less true everywhere. The power of the victims' studies departments lies not in what they say but in their ability to prevent inquiry that runs against their preferred narratives. They need not go to a lot of trouble to make this happen. They are more often like rocks in the stream. The regular flow of academic life simply goes around them. Few faculty members or administrators want the hassle of getting in their way.

Bawer's book is as vivid an account of the history, the shifting rationalizations, and the rhetoric of victims' studies as we are ever likely to have. This owes something to his insider status. An openly gay man whose 1993 book, A Place at the Table, advanced the cause for integration of gays into mainstream society, Bawer is deeply sympathetic to academic work that emphasizes the history of groups who have struggled against prejudice. Moreover, he has been a participant in some of the key debates that shaped these fields. His chapter on how "gay studies" ("a serious academic discipline") was displaced by "queer studies" (a celebration of "oppositional relation to the norm") is the centerpiece of the book. He recounts his own disputes with queer theorists such as David Halperin, who attack him for criticizing the late Michel Foucault, whose view that sex is "socially constructed" is the founding principle of queer theory.

If sex is a social construct, somebody needs to inform the birds and the bees because they did not get the memo.

What is higher ed these days? Any of the above, or maybe sometimes all of the above along with a delayed adulthood.

From Stephanie Blanchard:

By the time I was college-aged and supposed to be "finding myself," I didn't want to pursue a degree; I wanted to work. Instead of searching through course catalogs, I found a better-paying position with a large insurance company. At that time, the early 1990s, no one demanded that I have a degree or even wondered how young I was. (I'm guessing because it was illegal to ask.) Someone in Human Resources put me in a temp spot, and before long, I had a permanent job followed by a promotion. It took me a while, and working for a few small businesses, before I finally found my true calling, newspapers, but by the time I became a weekly reporter, I already had ten years' office experience, at just 24 years old.

This would be impossible today.

Jane Shaw: I’m dumbfounded. Two professors from UNC-Chapel Hill actually said it: Not everyone should go to college.

Charles Murray guesstimates that something between 1 in 10 and 1 in 30 can make the best use of Liberal Arts higher ed (ie, not as a credential but for the intellectual growth which is more difficult, but entirely possible - to do on one's own). For the rest, it's credential-buying, a rite of passage, an extension of high school, checking a social-advancement box, and/or delayed adulthood.

Mike Rowe in his letter to Mitt Romney touts the needed skills that yuppies don't want their kids to learn.

Investing in Higher Education Will Not Bring Democratic Equality:

Most public officials are mesmerized by the egalitarian fantasy. They insist that investing more in higher education will even out inequalities by helping those at the bottom get an Associate's Degree to compete with Ivy League graduates. No Virginia, Santa Claus cannot help those baffled by Algebra I to earn millions doing mind-boggling Wall Street swaps and derivatives. And take heed, Occupy Wall Streeters: next year's 1% will be even smarter and richer than today's 1% as the pool of applicants to top colleges expands as a resul tof growing worldwide wealth. In fact, thanks to this relentless upward pressure from an ever larger pool of applicants, today's 1% may eventually be displaced by those with even higher IQ's.

Those who wave the bloody flag of "fairness" in the income distribution are doomed. Exceptional talent, as any sports fan can tell you, does not come cheap. Bill Gates was once asked to identify his greatest competitor. He said Goldman Sachs. A puzzled interviewer asked why, and Gates responded that both Goldman and Microsoft competed for the same prime intellectual talent at the very edge of the bell curve's right side. Finding and rewarding top intellectual ability in today's global economy is incompatible with economic leveling though, ironically, this "unfair" meritocracy that looks nothing like those below will bring greater prosperity to everyone.

 

Can entrepreneurs combat the narrow-minded ideologies on our campuses?

...the truth needed to make the world a better place is a "public good" that private markets cannot easily supply. Foundations have spent many millions of dollars financing private, market-oriented think tanks in an effort to compensate for the damage being done by academia. But while these think tanks have had an influence at the margins, the vast majority of college-educated Americans continue to rely on the information provided by elite universities and mainstream media rather than the think tanks that espouse classical liberal thought.

Can market forces provide the creative destruction needed to solve this problem? 

News you can use: What's the Harvard number?

I have heard that the Duke number is $250,000. Maybe colleges should be ranked by their "numbers"

UNC admissions standards remain well-below "college ready"

Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals

It has always seemed strange to me that public schoolteachers tend to major in "Education" rather than in getting educated.

Elite private schools rarely, if ever, hire graduates with education degrees or even any education courses. Government schools require heavy doses of education courses. Hillsdale changes the way it teaches teachers and starts a cascade of positive reactions.