Maggie's Farm

That's the 2008 book by Charles Murray.

I pretty much agree with everything in it. From the blurb:

Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its best to ignore it.

Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math. Real Education reviews what we know about the limits of what schools can do and the results of four decades of policies that require schools to divert huge resources to unattainable goals.

Too many people are going to college. Almost everyone should get training beyond high school, but the number of students who want, need, or can profit from four years of residential education at the college level is a fraction of the number of young people who are struggling to get a degree. We have set up a standard known as the BA, stripped it of its traditional content, and made it an artificial job qualification. Then we stigmatize everyone who doesn’t get one. For most of America’s young people, today’s college system is a punishing anachronism.

No, it's not from The Onion. Gender Quotas on Philosophy Panels? A quote:

The Lance-Schliesser boycott proposal was endorsed by many of the philosophers who commented on the pair's blog entry. Indeed, "some proposed that the boycott be expanded to include conferences with all-white line-ups or with lack of diversity in sexual orientation or nationality," Inside Higher Ed reported. The notion of merit, aptitude or interest as relevant to scholarly endeavors from majoring in chemistry to speaking at a philosophy conference seems to be falling by the wayside.

Good grief.

It's too hard for the kids, he says.

What a great idea! Get rid of languages, too. They're too hard. That way, the division between the smart kids and the less-talented and lower-IQ kids will be even more obvious to colleges and employers.

J M Anderson is a thoughtful fellow, but he's dreaming: Common Core Standards Can Save Us.

Nothing wrong with core expectations of elementary and secondary school if people can agree on them (but I'd go to the local taxpayers for that advice, not the national educational establishment). However, no standards can cause those who don't want to, or are not interested in or capable of, learning things in school.

He opens with this: "It's no secret that most high school graduates are unprepared for college." Well, duh. But so what? There's no crisis in that area.

I don't blame teachers or curricula or standards for the fact that many kids do not learn much. It appears to be the case in colleges, too. Pretending that most kids are natural scholars defies all known reality.

Education is not a "product" that can be purchased, any more than "health" is. Such things are not passive purchases. No gym membership can give you six-pack abs, alas.

Charter school envy in NYC:

It’s painful, charge our critics, for the families that these schools serve to see the contrast between their dreary classrooms and ours, which we spruce up with cheery paint jobs, new carpets and extensive technology.

Actually, it’s far worse than that: 88 percent of our students read proficiently; fewer than a third do at these district schools. Our students also get two hours more instruction per day, science daily and teachers who receive far more professional development.

And they do it for less money, with no admissions process other than a lottery. No union bosses, no political pay-offs.

What is college for, and why is it so expensive? From John Leo:

Where does all that money go? Much of it to lavish spa-like facilities and grand new construction, including $100 million or so for multicultural centers and sports stadiums. The debt taken on by colleges has risen 88 percent since 2001, to $307 billion. Jeff Selingo of the Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a “lost decade” of wild campus spending: “The almost insatiable demand for a college credential meant that schools could raise their prices and families would go to almost any end, including taking on huge amounts of debt, to pay the bill. In 2003, only two colleges charged more than $40,000 a year for tuition, fees, and room and board; by 2009, 224 were above that mark.” And now many are inching toward (or past) $50,000 a year...

I am old-fashioned. I think college should be spartan but spartan doesn't sell. It's about branding and sales.

Related from Leef: The wealth gap in America may be widening, but higher education has very little to do with it:

To the slight extent that our higher education has increased social stratification, it is due to the mania for college credentials the system has helped unleash. Some people who can’t obtain the credentials that are increasingly required of job applicants—even for work that calls for nothing more than basic trainability—are shut off from good career paths. That is something of an obstacle to social mobility and if the higher education industry wanted to make amends, it could work toward alternative credentials that would be less costly and better indicators of employability. (There is already movement in that direction, but mostly from outside “edupreneurs.”)

I think the edupreneurs will own the future, especially for those who seek education mainly as an investment in their careers. Traditional colleges don't know whether they are centers for life-enrichment or job-training centers. They are confused about their mission because they do not want to see themselves as credential-salesmen. I have no problem with janitors with college degrees. Why not? I do have a problem with college for people who do not treasure the life of the mind.

Somewhat similar to Charter Schools, the academies get a flat rate per student, and run themselves. Britain modeled these after the Swedish system which offers an abundance of choices free from the governmental and union system.

Free choice is always a good idea. Here's another good idea: Schools That Work, Literally. Jobs in the real world.

When I was in boarding school, all students were assigned to work crews all year long. That was good, but the above is even better.

What work crews were we assigned to at school? Leaf raking and landscape clean-up, kitchen duty (dishwashing mostly), prep and maintenance of the outdoor hockey rinks, preparing and serving faculty teas and faculty meetings, working in the printing shop and the mail room, cleaning the chapel after Sunday service (we had daily chapel) and waxing the chapel floor, working in the gym's laundry room (gross), shelving books in the library, snow-shoveling, early morning newspaper delivery to faculty, preparing the skeet and rifle ranges, raising and feeding the pheasants for the shooting club, and so forth. Work crew averaged out to around 7 hrs/week. Most of the work was under the supervision of rough-edged townies who didn't mind calling us spoiled brats and sissies who didn't want to get our hands dirty. They did not give a damn about how you felt, and rightly so. That attitude was motivational and, I believe, endorsed by the administration.

Looking back, the work crews did us all a lot of good. Bear in mind, we had plenty of rich kids from NYC who had never seen the inside of a kitchen or touched a rake, much less a snow shovel. Education takes many non-formal forms.

U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there

The world only has so much room for geek geniuses. The rest of us need regular jobs, regardless of all of our above-average IQs and our As in Calculus.

Applying Title IX to science enrollment – what possibly could go wrong?

As if academia were a misogynistic, Muslim-style environment. These policy-makers are morons, panderers, idiots.

On some days, I feel that the world has gone mad and that we should put Thorazine into the drinking water along with fluoride. One such days, I think the government should require that the NY Rangers be 45% female, 5% mixed vegetable sexual orientation, and 11% black. Same for the Knicks. That would make for a circus, for sure.

Good fun, at Driscoll: An Interview with Glenn Reynolds on The Higher Education Bubble.

One fascinating factoid from Glenn: "People who are accepted at Ivy colleges, and don't go, are as successful in life as those who do attend."

What is success?

Glenn contends that the Ivies now exist as places for the elite to meet elite spouses.

At Mediocracy:

In the case of universities, the anti-elitism strategy has been to insist that the degree experience become a near-universal benefit. At the same time, the belief has to be maintained that the whole thing is still in some way a major achievement, a reason for enhanced self-esteem. (This, of course, generates the familiar prizes-for-all inconsistency.)

The nagging doubt remains: as long as it is not literally for everyone, and as long as there are some institutions which are more exclusive than others, there is something about universities which is at odds with the prevailing ethos of perfect, Facebookish horizontality.

It is this ambiguity which seems to keep the what-are-universities-for programme busy, and makes boggling about the question so appealing. Nothing is said which contravenes the basic pseudo-egalitarian ideology, but a certain frisson is generated by juxtaposing mutually inconsistent requirements...

What is a "college education" in America, these days? Seems to me that there is no such unitary thing, and that it can mean almost anything. As I have mentioned here in the past, I have interviewed college grads who could not do calculus or even explain basic statistics, read a foreign language, or write a grammatical, well-structured formal essay. These basic skills can be achieved in high school, by those who want to learn stuff.

Or easily achieved in the library or on the internet. Not everybody is driven to learn things.

There's a debate going on these days about the notion of "college for all," and Robert Samuelson has been scoring points.

College for All, of course, entails extensive remediation for kids who are not prepared for, or capable of, "higher ed" as we older folks think of it. It also entails lowering expectations and standards. I don't blame the schools - I mostly blame the students. There is no such thing as "getting an education," because all learning is ultimately self-education. Without drive, curiosity, discipline, determination, and IQ nothing valuable will happen.

The education industry, naturally, markets itself and wants to fill all of their seats with warm, paying bodies even if they are not capable of serious high-school level achievement. Here's a summary of the current debate on college-level remediation.

That's a model. The Next Model for Higher Ed.

What do people want? Useful knowledge, or a piece of paper?

Growing Pell-Mell - The government’s program to help low-income students is out of control:

There are two major problems with the program: Not only has it expanded to cover more than half of all students, but almost anyone—regardless of academic background—can qualify. Recipients must meet only a minimal academic standard: obtaining a high school diploma or the equivalent. There are no minimum SAT scores or GPAs.

Consequently, many grant recipients go to college but flunk out or lose interest, often going deep into debt at the same time.

Government Created Potentially Catastrophic Education Bubble:

Like housing, government tried to orient higher education through a social engineering lens and “established Sallie Mae in 1972 to encourage banks to loan more money for college. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 allowed the government to loan money directly to students. The following year the Taxpayer Relief Act extended tax breaks to student loan borrowers. Predictably, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates at historically low levels, making college loans cheaper.”

In the meantime, “the price of a college education soared…[and] by law, lenders cannot even deny Stafford and Perkins loans (types of federal student loans) based on the borrower’s credit or employment status. What other reason is there to deny a loan?

From You’re Not Special (h/t Vanderleun):

...you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school... and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building...

But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.

There is nothing easy about leading an "ordinary" life - whatever that is - and you will always be precious to your parents.

One of my kids attended a very demanding high school, a boarding school, actually. During senior or possibly junior year, this youth showed me his AP European History thesis. The master had written on top, in the usual red ink, "Best AP European History thesis I have read in ten years. Almost publishable. B+"

I believe he understood the compliment. The master believed that, however fine and well-researched the work was, he could have taken it even further.

From The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn - The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students' lack of skills, but of teachable character.

“An A,” she said jubilantly, but with a strong undertone of derision. “And I didn’t even read the book!” As the paper thudded into the trash basket, her friends joined in the disdainful laughter.

That quote is about college, not the local high school. Another quote from the essay:

The person who is never challenged is also never refined, never learns to cope with the setbacks that come on the way to high endeavor. And it is not only in the academic realm, of course, that they may be hampered: a full life outside of university also requires the ability to confront one’s weaknesses and recover from defeat. Despite the admittedly important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of them.

Colleges have become high schools. As far as I have heard, only the elite boarding schools still maintain the highest expectations and standards, far higher than even the most elite colleges.

That's a question I have discussed often here, along with the history of higher ed. Yes, we all understand that college has become a job credential, a social credential, and a professional prerequisite. Why that is has never been clear.

Martin Hutchinson at the bear's lair (h/t Insty) takes another good swing at the ball: The Higher Education Money Pit. A quote:

The common assumption among policymakers is that, in order to maintain its higher living standards against emerging markets competition, the United States must invest more in higher education. To achieve this, the government has instituted a massive student loan guarantee program, with over $1 trillion outstanding and an average of $25,000 in debt for every graduating student with debt. Yet millions of students continue to graduate with degrees that have no obvious real-world benefits. There’s a disconnect here, and it is beginning to appear that the current U.S. obsession with higher education is misguided.

The traditional idea of higher education was to train the literate for the Church, whether Catholic, Episcopalian or other Protestant. However a hundred years ago, for the elite on both sides of the Atlantic, a very different approach had been devised. This was best illustrated in Evelyn Waugh’s immortal “Brideshead Revisited” in which the protagonist Lord Sebastian Flyte wanders round Oxford with a teddy bear, drinking champagne, eating quail’s eggs and occasionally throwing up onto other students’ carpets. Americans will scoff at this depiction, but really the Harvard of Theodore Roosevelt was not very different, except in that it involved the occasional life-threatening game of football.

Flyte’s Oxford was not intended to train him for real life, it was intended as a highly enjoyable 3- or 4- year holiday before real life intruded. For the middle classes whose fathers were not Marquesses – a majority at Oxford even in Flyte’s time; there are only 34 Marquesses – the system applied a gloss of social polish and connections that was useful in later life, but did not impart more than a modicum of knowledge. Certainly the education provided was not expected to involve a huge amount of work, or to be useful in a subsequent career.

This changed after 1945 in the United States...

It's not long. Read it all.

Here.

It's quite remarkable to me that Polical Correctness, widely mocked ten years ago, has taken over in the academy. More satire is needed, but now there is fear of free expression. It is creepy.

Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

A free college education, at MITx:

Revolutionary, indeed. As I have written earlier in this space, the ground has moved beneath the feet of higher education, much of which will look very different in but a few short years.

It will be fascinating to see what good competition will do to the higher-ed government-industrial complex. In time, I think it will blow it wide open for better or worse. Not just in STEM, but in everything.