Maggie's Farm

Lots of good food for thought here.

The Chaotic Legacy of the Classroom Radicals. He begins:

Halfway through my first year as a history teacher at an inner-city comprehensive in England, I am reeling from the volley of abuse and misbehaviour that makes up my daily grind. I can be sure that at some point in my day I will be aggressively confronted, blithely disobeyed, and probably sworn at. Restless nights are common, and nervousness ongoing. Still, talking to my friends from teacher training, I feel I'm having a comparatively easy ride. I have not yet been physically assaulted, and so far I have avoided the much-feared mid-lesson breakdown.

At schools such as this, the deprived background of the children is routinely presented as a catch-all explanation for bad behaviour. The pupils' chaotic home lives, their lack of prospects, and an absence of aspiration in the local community are all popular excuses for the pandemonium that pervades inner-city schools. These factors undoubtedly have an effect, but such thinking lets schools like this off the hook. The endemic discipline problem within the state sector is in reality self-inflicted. At least half a century of "progressive" thinking on pupil behaviour has had disastrous consequences. In the competitive field of follies wrought by 1960s radicalism, there is a very good case for progressive education being the most socially destructive.

Butler at National Journal: The Coming Higher-Ed Revolution. He begins:

In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations — shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T's "Ma Bell" system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade — often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming.

The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced — keeping many people out of the market — and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms — with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.

If this transformation does come to pass, it could have profound and beneficial implications.

A discussion in the NYT: Should College be for Everyone?

And about high school, from Lulu at Bookworm:

When a struggling student getting D’s or F’s hears over and over that the only future for him is college, but college is an unrealistic expectation because the student isn’t academically oriented, resists school work, and has no educational career plans he can achieve without intense support and personal motivation (which he lacks), the student has only one alternative, and that is to drop-out. The F student who never studies or does a shred of homework often has no plans for the future. The lack of a life goal often leads to dropping out. The student who cannot or will not study sees a professional, college trained career as unattainable because all these professions require academic effort and knowledge, and this is a student who is academically behind appropriate level, sometimes by a significant gap. This leads to a “why try?” attitude. “Why try/” leads to quitting, floating along and letting life happen to you, teen pregnancy, dropping out, and gangs.

By insisting that everyone should attend college, college stops being a training place for the brightest minds. When everyone goes to college, it doesn’t elevate the unmotivated, non-studying student. It lowers the bar for everyone else.

Another consequence of the belief that everyone should go to college is that the high school student who graduates and gets a job is therefore seen under this paradigm as a failure. This is grossly unfair. This country has always valued the person who labors honestly, starts his own business, or provides people with desired goods and services. Historically these backbone working people have not needed a college degree. To this day many successful store or restaurant owners, plumbers, contractors, mechanics, and on and on, thrive despite never having graduated from, or perhaps never attending even a day of college. These people and their contributions should be valued. They obviously have all the education they need to create a business, provide needed services, and to succeed.

From A Funny Book about Worthless Degrees at Minding the Campus:

"Here are some [college] degrees that cost you roughly $30,000 in tuition, their much cheaper replacements, and the savings you'd realize:

Degree Replacement Savings

Foreign Languages: Language Software $29,721
Philosophy: Read Socrates $29,980
Women's Studies: Watch Daytime TV $30,000
Journalism: Start a blog $30,000

...Since none of these degrees help increase your employability, you might as well avoid these majors and do it on your own."

$30,000? Try $200,000. People with curiosity, who love to learn, will always find a way. Books, libraries, Teaching Company, etc. Those without the gift of curiosity will never know more than they have to. Do you want to learn, or do you need a credential? A quote:

As a recipient of a "worthless" college degree myself (I double-majored in English and classics), I wish that Clarey had devoted few more pages to discussing exactly why the liberal arts have become radically devalued in the eyes of prospective employers. Not too long ago a bachelor's degree in history or philosophy signaled that you were smart and could write well, two qualities that employers prized (and still do). Now, a B.A. seems to signal, "I'm a parasite" in search of make-work at a nonprofit, as Clarey bluntly puts it.

From Herb London:

The trick is to unleash market forces. Let curriculum reform dictate marketability. Let online courses serve as a credible alternative to classroom study. Let some universities fail--some certainly should. And let parents and students make choices based on the trade-off between taxes and tuition.

The President could make a difference if he said it is time for the federal government to get out of the way so that market forces can flourish. There was a time when tuition rates were affordable for even working class people, but that was before federal intervention. It may be time to turn the clock back to that period.

Solyndras In the Classroom: How We Vastly Overrate Education:

...it appears that our massive “investments” in education have produced no measurable economic return. Should we be surprised by this? No. Average scores on standardized tests have not risen, despite the fact that we are “investing” seven times as much in real terms in each student than we did six decades ago. So, even by the measures used by the educational establishment, it is clear that the higher spending has not created any additional human capital.

I do not overrate learning. I think we overrate spending on the education industry which protects a monopoly on credentialing. Learning and education are not the same thing. Learning is for adults (over 16); education is for children.

Kevin Carey in The Wilson Quarterly makes the case for college - or at least some college - for all. Naturally, I think that is insane, and for more reasons than I have time to list.

A rigorous high school degree can still provide all that is needed to continue one's education on one's own, if wanted; all that is needed to be a good citizen, and all that is needed to perform 90% of the work out there.

We all know that a college degree can mean a great deal, or next to nothing - same as a high school degree.

A couple more education links:

Are Colleges Ripping Us Off? Half of all college students make no learning gains in their first two years, and 36 percent show no significant intellectual growth even after four years.

McArdle:  Envisioning a Post-Campus America

I noticed this: Biden Florida Visit: College Degrees for Everyone.

I had to laugh at that, because America is still far from providing a meaningful high school education to the average kid:

The cheerful confidence in face of utter ignorance is the most impressive aspect of this video. You can either blame the schools, the parents, or simply accept that these kids simply are not interesting in knowing much. You can lead a horse to water... 

These kids don't need college. They need remedial grammar school. As Black and Right says: "We fund public schools. I demand my money back"

I have been asked by readers why I can sound so harsh about education and our current educational systems. The answer is that I care about learning so much. For me, learning new things is relaxing, recreational, and a gift (and does not need to be expensive), but I accept that not all feel the same way. I am a teacher at heart, even though I do not teach although I do help train our young associates. If I were as tough on students as I am on our associates, I'd be fired in a New York Minute.

Here's Walter Williams: Schools of education protect ignorance in the classroom. He concludes:

Schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college. American education can benefit from slum removal.

Sounds true, although those pathetic standards certainly do not apply to my town in CT where, unions aside, the public school teachers are well-educated, enthusiastic, demanding, and dedicated. However, our local school system avoids hiring teaching school graduates.

Is Algebra ll too difficult for most high schoolers? It's a big debate in California.

I honestly do not know the answer, but it seems basic to me. If you can't master Algebra and Trig, and use them to hone the brain, it's tough for me to figure out how you graduate from high school.

Somewhat related, The College-Degree Mania in Ohio. As Leef says:

Sorry, governor, but colleges don’t graduate students. Students graduate themselves if their efforts are sufficient, and the sad fact is that many who enroll are so academically weak and unmotivated that they don’t amass enough course credits to get their degrees within six years. That isn’t the fault of the institutions.

Maintaining standards is an endless and possibly a losing battle with today's credentialism. Someday, we'll have to admit that most people are not scholars (even to the level of Algebra ll), and that learning how to do something useful and practical might be more important. That view, however, runs right up against the Big Education lobbies.

There is no market for Sociology Majors, but there is a big market for Master Plumbers and Gunsmiths. They make more money, too. But they need to know some math to do their work.

A good debate: Are Too Many People Going to College? (link fixed)

I tend to agree with George Leef in that debate, but of course I think anybody ought to go if they want to. Some of my points, as readers know, are these:

- college does not equal education
- very few people are natural scholars
- for many people, it is just an extended adolescence, with credential-buying, beer, and sleeping til noon
- many young people would rather work than study

and so on.

Everybody knows what they are doing. They are trying to run a guild in a post-guild society. One aspect of that is keeping prices high - the prices for the schools, and worse, the prices for the poor clients and to hell for those who cannot afford a lawyer but are not poor enough to get a cynical, burned-out Legal Aid person.

Justice is exorbitantly - and unjustly - expensive and, as I have often said here, I think a better case could be made for socialized legal coverage than for socialized medicine, because equal justice is an American ideal, but illness is just human fate. In my view, the American legal system is a broken and often piratical mess run for the benefit of the lawyers (most politicians are lawyers). Just consider how many people settle unjust and annoying claims simply to avoid legal fees.

Via Bader in Minding the Campus:

... there is simply no reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam. As law professor Paul Campos notes, legal education is a rip-off, since the typical law professor "knows nothing about being a lawyer. Hence, he must bullshit -- he does not lie to his students about how to be a lawyer (doing so would require him to know how to be a lawyer, while attempting to deceive his students regarding the substance of that knowledge); rather, he 'talks without knowing what he is talking about,'" when it comes to discussing the legal system or how to be a lawyer.

Law schools' lack of interest in preparing students to be lawyers is illustrated by Tulane's recent decision to give a murderer a scholarship to attend its law school, even though he most likely will never be admitted to the Bar given his criminal record. Law schools lie about whether graduates find jobs: two law schools are being sued for fraudulentplacement data. Law schools have increased tuition by nearly 1,000 percent since 1960 in real terms.

Meanwhile, student loan debt is rising at an exponential, ever-increasing rate, harming students' ability to buy homes (and thus, the housing market), and increasing federal spending on student loans is driving up college tuition and also harming the economy in other ways.

Of course, if you want a Big Job in a Big Law Firm, you will want a Big Degree. It's just one more example of greedy Big Education's monopoly on credentials. Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Government, Big Education, Big Farming, Big Tort Law. Same old story. Just follow the money.

I recently posted about the desirability of attrition in colleges due to substandard performance, expressing the view that low graduation rates are a good, not bad thing, and that they lend some credibility to an expensive piece of paper.

Competitive and highly-selective graduate schools, however, probably should have lower attrition rates as their standards for entry are so relatively high.

Here is some info on Medical School Graduation and Attrition Rates

Here's Law School Rankings by 1L Attrition Rates

A groundbreaking study of New York schools by a MacArthur "genius" challenges the typical understanding of what makes a good school.

It's a major short essay. Weissman begins:

Think of the ingredients that make for a good school. Small classes. Well-educated teachers. Plenty of funding. Combine, mix well, then bake.

Turns out, your recipe would be horribly wrong, at least according to a new working paper out of Harvard. Its take away: Schools shouldn't focus on resources. They should focus on culture.

Read the whole thing. Schools aren't about money. Excellent education is inexpensive, except for technical levels of science. All it takes is a heated room, a blackboard, a demanding and interested teacher, and some curious kids.

Readers know that I am opposed to mortgage interest deductions. As I view it, these are mainly an indirect subsidization for the construction industry, with incidental apparent benefit to the homeowner - paid for by renters.

I say "apparent" because it is no real benefit to mortgage-holders. After all, without that tax deduction home prices would necessarily be lower to be affordable by your price range.

Same thing applies to all products: subsidies, subsidized loans, grants, favoring policies, etc. distort markets and make things more inefficient and, in the end, more costly more everybody. It's the Law of Unintended - Intended - Consequences.

Here's an example in the news: Real-World Evidence Showing that Unemployment Insurance Benefits Increase Unemployment. Big surprise there, right? I am not opposed to unemployment insurance, but my point is that markets, including labor markets, still work like markets no matter how much they are distorted by policies. Just boulders in the river until they become dams. If people want to take a lengthy sabbatical on unemployment, they will take it until it runs out. That's quite rational and legal, if undignified and exploitative.

Higher ed is a great example. Student loans, grants, and favoring policies simply make it feasible for schools to charge more and to spend more. But where is that money going?

You know where it is going. It's payola to schools. It is going to burgeoning highly-paid admin staff, slick new dorms, mindless PC programs, marketing, and other baloney which has nothing to do with the education which is supposedly being bought by feckless and sacrificing parents, and state-taxpayers.

Hot tubs and basketball teams? Give me a break. College is not supposed to be either High School or babysitting.

Sol Stern in City Journal:

NCLB’s accountability system led to another distortion, this one harming top students. Because the law emphasized mere “proficiency,” rewarding schools for getting their students to achieve that fairly low standard, teachers and administrators had an incentive to boost the test scores of their lowest-performing students but no incentive to improve instruction for their brightest. Robert Pondiscio, communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation and a former New York City Teaching Fellow, describes how the process worked at his South Bronx elementary school. “Eighty percent of the kids in my fifth-grade class were scoring at the two lowest levels on the state reading and math tests,” he recalls. (Each student in New York State receives a test score from 1 to 4, with 1 signifying performance far below grade level, 2 below grade level, 3 grade level, and 4 advanced.) “Early in my teaching career, an assistant principal told me that the kids in my class already scoring a 3 or 4 ‘are not your problem.’ In other words, my goal should be to move the kids scoring at the lower levels up a few points on the scale. I was not specifically ordered to do this, but the message was very clear. My job was to get more kids over the lowest two hurdles, because that’s how the school was rewarded for good performance in the city’s accountability system.”

As a result, Pondiscio says, the few gifted minority students in his class didn’t receive any extra attention—attention that could have given them a better chance to pass the rigorous test for admission to one of the city’s elite specialized science and math high schools. That’s especially sad when you learn that the percentage of black students passing the admissions test for top-ranked Stuyvesant High School has dropped steadily over the past decade. Last year, it fell below 1 percent.

 

While America's first colleges were built mainly to produce ministers, by the late 17th- early 18th Century they had evolved towards something akin to a Brit "Gentleman's education," with curricula including math, some sciences including anatomy, Rhetoric, Ethics, Georgraphy, Christianity, Latin and Greek. Thomas Jefferson, an aristocrat more-or-less, attended the College of William and Mary for only two years, but was mainly tutor-educated and self-educated as were most ambitiously-curious folks in the time, and up past Abe Lincoln's time. He, after all, never saw a college.

Gentlemen, would-be clergy, and the rare would-be teacher attended colleges (but did not necessarily bother to graduate). And the prosperous, up through Teddy Roosevelt's time, were tutored at home while the practically-oriented primary schooling was for the working classes. (I don't believe TR ever attended school until he entered Harvard College. He had to pass their Greek and French test, along with other exams, for admission.)

The rise of public libraries, beginning in the early 18th C, had a huge impact on self-education up through the early 20th Century. For those who could not afford to buy books, these were like the internet for learners.

The research room in the NY Public Library. America's libraries are where many accomplished people without means received all of their "higher" education since 1730:

The evolution of American higher ed is fascinating as these institutions attempted to keep themselves relevant and in demand and to ultimately create a monopolistic if meaningless credential. American higher ed borrowed from the European, but has always been quite different. My reading suggests these phases in its evolution:

As you go through your list of end-of-year charitable contributions, please consider adding FIRE to your annual giving list.

They do good work on a shoestring with, as I understand it, quite a lot of volunteered legal time. As I see it, FIRE is continuing the work of the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 60s. In fact, I am considering offering myself to them for occasional free counsel.

In my view, few things in life match the pleasure of giving money for the things one cares about. The freedom to do so is a gift itself, and a privilege. Like many or most of the conservative persuasion, we like to give until it hurts, but without going into debt to do it. The widow's mite: my charitable check sizes range from $50 to $1000, depending on how I feel and where I see the needs, but I have to whittle my list down to 12-15 of my favorite charities.

From J.M. Anderson's Three Cheers for Useless Education:

Let’s face it, most students want jobs or to get into good professional and graduate schools and therefore care little about useless general education courses and the formative process of education; Corporate America wants skilled workers, not philosophical or reflective employees (who might then question some of its practices); therefore, the marketplace reinforces the economic value of higher education and dictates the nature of the curriculum and the priority of the courses that are taught. To keep up with current trends, many colleges and universities market their product as “a major investment,” as the president of a selective four-year liberal arts college, stated, and then added: “And with returns that will last a lifetime, it’s one of the best investments anyone could make.” But students aren’t buying this highfalutin talk. They are buying degrees so that they can make money because Mass Culture U.—television, music, movies, advertising, celebrities—tells them that that means success. Like religion, the life of the mind can wait until, as one student told me, after she gets a job, gets married, has children, and settles down. Then she’ll have time to think about “art and books and all that stuff.”

I agree about the value of a "useless education." I also agree with his distinction between "liberal arts" and "job training."  I think Prof. Anderson is likely an inspiring prof.

However, I think liberal arts education has become insanely and unnecessarily expensive, so that people feel forced to regard it as a financial investment. Ask me whether I think higher ed is a credentialling racket, or expensive babysitting for superannuated adolescents.

Also, I do not think "the life of the mind" is for everybody. Seems to me that we have many people feeling obligated to "attend college," whatever that means, when they would feel more motivated and engaged in "training" to do something practical instead.

From Murray: Three Reasons Colleges Are Oversubscribed. One quote:

...colleges are in many ways outdated. At one stage in history a college education required a physical plant where scholars could interact among themselves and with their students and where students could find the necessary resources for their studies such as libraries and labs. Now, however, libraries are largely obsolete and classes, even graduate seminars, can be conducted online. In many disciplines scholarship can be conducted in complete independence of the physical resources of a university.

From Vedder at Minding the Campus.

Math and science are difficult, and they aren't all about "what I think" and "what I feel." Failure is a good thing in a meritocratic field because it separates those with potential from those without. Whether it's banks or students, America needs more room for healthy failure.

Failure is more important than success, because more can be learned from it. In the end, success in achieving goals is better, though. Much more enjoyable.

I got a spanking in the comments on my college post yesterday from Dos Amigos, and perhaps did deserve it. (Well, everybody deserves a spanking anyway, just on general sinfulness principles.) 

So let me inquire of our readers:

If a person comes to you with a college degree in hand, what, if anything, do you feel you ought to be able to expect them to know (besides how to bait a beaver trap)?

I have made it clear what I expect, and I am on our interview committee. Beware of me, new grads, because I am a demanding SOB who will ask questions you might not anticipate including math tricks to check your wit and quotes to check your knowledge, and will expect no less of you than I have expected of myself!

Iffy as an investment, especially in the liberal arts, but a good thing for a kid who is desperate to deepen his thinking and expand his mental life but who cannot do it on his own. After all, even Thomas Jefferson and Bill Gates took one or two years in college before they quit.

Occupy Academia:

The Occupy Wall Street protestors are right to be angry about the failed promise of higher education. Colleges and universities have fallen down on the job of developing the human capital we need to improve our economy and civic life.

The villain is not the lenders who played an incidental role in providing capital to creative writing majors, however. It’s the tenured bozos who gave them Derrida and finger painting in their formative undergraduate years instead of Plato and Aristotle (or a good course in computer-aided drafting). The Zuccotti Park crew should drop their beef with the banks and demand change from academia instead.

WSJ: Is an Ivy League Diploma Worth It? - Fearing Massive Debt, More Students Are Choosing to Enroll at Public Colleges Over Elite Universities

Most people I know would rather hire a University of Indiana Physics major than a Harvard English Lit major.

Mead: Ditching the Ivy League.

A national Baccalaureate exam? Fine with me, as long as I get to design it - and as long as anybody can take it whether or not they attended college because it would be an exam on what is often regarded as post-high school academic knowledge, however acquired. I would not trust anyone to design this thing except me. Among other things, it would contain Trig and Calculus, Physics, Astronomy, Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare, the Bible, Econ, mechanical engineering, Ancient Greece, Biochemistry, Music history and theory, Civics and American history, Anatomy, Geology, Roman law, Statistics, Architectural history, accounting, a sample essay...and many more things of substance and rigor which one typically thinks of a college grad as knowing, plus special sections on subjects of claimed expertise. There are smart and ambitious high school grads who could possibly pass the exam. This would be an elite degree representing broad and deep achievement, which people could make of it what they will, and not replace the shoddy, ordinary college degree which only means you paid your bills for four years. I doubt my Baccalaureate exam would mean much to the job market, but it would be a meaningful life credential to parade around and would be challenging enough to supercede a college BA and maybe even a Rhodes Scholarship. I'd aim for a Pass rate of around 2-10% of those brave enough to take it.

Well, I'll get to work on a sample exam right now - if there's any money in it for me. Or perhaps just a separate blog post.