Maggie's Farm

College admissions, and the new affirmative action for white males.

Are non-Asian white boys too stupid and lazy to compete on a level playing field? 

Walter Russell Mead is rapidly becoming one of my favorite Liberals. This from Paul Krugman Gets It Half Right:

Moving from “time-served” processes of certification (four year BA degrees, three years in law or divinity school) to certification based on achievement can make education dramatically cheaper.  It is sheer madness that most students spend 12 years in school, and another four in college.  Why exactly should all kids the same age be in the same grade? One size does not fit all; why shouldn’t high school kids go free when they can pass the equivalent of a GED? And for that matter, shouldn’t school districts encourage and reward teachers and schools that are able to graduate students faster?  Among other things, this would allow some of the resources not spent on babysitting high-achieving kids to go to kids who really need the help. How “right wing” is that?

The same goes for college.  Oxford and Cambridge graduate their students in three years — yet few people think British college grads are less accomplished than their American peers.  What is sacred about the four year BA?  Wouldn’t a shift to an exam based system (students who make qualifying scores on the appropriate exams would be certified as graduates) allow more people to advance farther at less cost?  And there’s an element of social justice here: the kid from a no-name school who scores high on the exam will have an edge on the Ivy League kid who partied through college and just scraped by.

These are things I have been preaching for years.

(Good comments here. Thank you.)

From Higher Ed, at Lew Rockwell:

Mr. and Ms. Moses must make sure the twins qualify for the Ivy league if that’s where they want to go. Don’t want them ending “up having to go, God forbid, to Rutgers,” she writes. So the twins have had plenty of SAT and ACT tutoring at $125 per session. Of course on top of this are the fees paid for the actual testing and travel to all these places of higher learning. Plus, an additional consultant is on the job to counsel the male twin to not do anything stupid that could jeopardize his chance of admission. Moses considers the consultant a bargain at $701.25 so far.

$701.25? Around here, they want a $3000 retainer.

I think things are changing, though. It's not like the old days. Although the clubby signaling part of the elite schools still is a factor in life, it's much more of a factor in social life than in the world of work and career. From an academic standpoint, the value in an elite degree is that you were able to get in there when you were 17 or 18.

It says nothing about what value you have to offer, today.

When I went to college, they interviewed to see whether you had good deportment and manners, and could discuss Milton, Rembrandt and Ovid intelligently in a conversation. You could flunk out, and everybody had tough requirements for graduation (including Math).

In the so-called elite colleges today, I think they are looking for just a few things:

1) Can this person fill the oboe slot in the orchestra?
2) Can this person help make our girls' Squash Team a contender?
3) Can the Dad write us a check for $400,000?
4) Is there any reason to take this kid instead of the Asian kid with better scores and grades and more developed talents (other than the fact that he or she isn't Asian)?

Is there any rational reason for High School to be four years?

Is there any rational reason for colleges to be four years?

Why not six years? Why not three? Why not make High School just end when you learn what they set out to teach you? Why doesn't every high school make up a list of educational goals which, when met, you're outta there?

When my Dad went to grammar school (and High School, too), they threw you out of there when they felt you knew enough. He went to college at 16, got drafted out at 18. The Army sent him to Basic, then sent him to grad school, and thus his career began.

From Students 'Adrift'? Don't Blame Them, at Minding the Campus:

The recent study conducted by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College shows that only 26 percent of undergraduates at small institutions, and only 18 percent at larger institutions, felt strongly that their professors had high expectations and challenged them academically.

At a state university where I taught, seniors who took my 100-level survey course told me that it was the hardest and most intellectually demanding class they had taken in four years at college. Many were actually grateful for having taken my course and felt cheated by their other professors---although others weren't as grateful and eventually dropped the course or wrote negative comments on Ratemyprofessor.com. In an age when higher education exists for credentialing, and anyone can "get a degree," they wanted an easy professor and a blow-off class.

I refused to accommodate them.

Majority of US Students Lack Science Proficiency.

No surprise there. Those students don't know grammar either. What do they know? I hope they know quadratic equations. I hope they read the Constitution - but you don't need a school to do that.

Well, they certainly know what Howard Zinn thinks - I mean, thought. They aren't necessarily lazy and dumb, they just aren't cut out for the really demanding mental stuff. What they need is solid basic knowledge, learn a job, maybe make a family, and they'll be just fine and as happy as they want to be. How many really smart kids do we need?

Science and math require more disciplined, rigorous, and abstract thinking than most kids want to bother with or, perhaps, are capable of. If a kid says languages - or math, or chem - are "too hard," you know right off that they lack the serious horsepower even if they are "bright and articulate." Most kids like the soft stuff - if they like any of it at all. Trouble is, you don't need a school for the soft stuff: it's all available out there, for free. Everywhere, nowadays.

In our spoiled, decadent culture, most people seem happy to pay others do the heavy mental lifting while they benefit from it all at ridiculously low cost. I know, because I am one of them, although I did plenty of math and hard science in college.

It has always been my contention that nobody should be able to earn a college degree without at least a year of calc, and real college chem, physics, and Bio (also, Econ). Otherwise, however bright you may be, you can't call yourself eddicated because there is too much basic stuff in life you don't understand well enough to have a legitimate opinion about.

Maybe I should have said a High School degree instead of College. If a kid had my kind of High School degree, they would be in a position to learn everything else they were interested in or needed to know on their own, in the library, or from The Teaching Company, or on the job. (Wisdom, on the other hand, comes from getting out there and living and getting into the cage with the Beast of Reality, and taking the knocks and dealing with the BS.)

High Schools should have oral exams on simple basic facts, because kids aren't ready for wisdom. "What's a subordinate clause?" "What's Avogadro's number?" "What's iambic pentameter?" "Why was Alexander Hamilton important?" "Why was Alexander the Great important?" "How does a lever work?" "Why do we care about the Phoenicians?" "How do you find the volume of a cone?" "How does an airfoil work?" Etc. Send in examining teams to do the testing to see whether a High School degree is justified. Paper testing doesn't do it. Nowadays, there are kids graduating from High School who cannot answer those questions.

It's the elite few who design our software, who design and build our computers and X-boxes and cars and refrigerators and airplanes and bridges and office buildings and coffee pots and power plants and missiles and digital cameras and machine tools and oil refineries and robots and hybrid wheat and permanent paintless house siding and our chairs and tables and new medicines and our Blackberries. Those are the unsung heroes of our daily lives.

It's all I can do to repair a horse fence or to replace a cracked windowpane in the barn, yet I am paid better than the people who design and build those useful things I listed above. Understand the workings on my motherboard? Not likely. Not smart enough, yet I am considered "highly educated."

My point is that the kids don't need to know the challenging stuff: Let them learn the elementary basic stuff, and the soft stuff if they want, and get their lightweight diplomas signifying that "they attended," and leave the challenging stuff to the smart, ambitious kids. Let the rest of us lazies flip burgers or teach school or attend meetings or sit in cubicles or express shallow and uninformed opinions about how life works, because we do not know how to make anything useful.

Let those few precious brainiacs work nights to make the tools and toys for us while we fart around with stuff that "interests us." The rest of us don't have to know anything complicated, do we?

We hate it when our brain hurts.

I tend to believe that ordinary public education, with all of its flaws, shortcomings, and loony political agendas, generally does a pretty good job overall from K-12.

They did OK with me. I turned out literate and mathematically-literate (but I have to give my parents lots of credit for that too. My idea of a Dad was a tall guy with either a book, a chainsaw, a shovel, or a hammer in his hand. A cigarette, also.).

Well-motivated, bright, and well-disciplined kids can learn all they need there to get a good start, and if they are truly motivated and curious and in pursuit of mastery, they will take what is offered as far as they want on their own time. That's the whole point - to offer a foundation.

The challenge for school rankings (which is what school boards care a lot about) is the kids who are not in that category. They drag down the ranking, and thus property values. It's quite obvious that many if not most kids do not find academic learning to be of particular interest, even something as basic to life as algebra. Our schools aren't "failing;" our expectations are the problem.

Most kids are neither scholarly nor studious (girls are more inclined to sit than boys), and the latest stats that many or most kids learn little in college confirms that. College is whatever somebody makes of it, like everything in life.

When people talk about reforming schools, they generally are talking about trying to "meet the needs" of those who aren't very interested, talented, pushed, encouraged, or able - for whatever reasons. For them who wants it, basic eddication ain't expensive at all. For them who don't want it in youth, they can go to the internets or the library and learn all they want when they are older and more interested in things. For kids, the internets are a total time-waster and brain-killer, same as TV used to be. Well, if you have the Britannica online, maybe that might be an exception. I was raised to always review the Britannica before venturing into any new topic, for the overview and context.

So who thinks they are smart enough to change schools? Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools.

These people don't have a clue.

From the Pope Center's Studying or Partying? The Five-Year Party identifies a problem with college, but gets a barely passing grade:

The reward for students being good clients and paying ever-increasing amounts of tuition dollars and other fees is a diploma.  However, because they have not received a real education, their diplomas are almost worthless, and they cannot obtain decent jobs with them. Although most schools imply that graduating from them will put the student on the path to a good career, the truth is that many have barely advanced past their high school knowledge and will find employment in jobs like theater usher and coffee barista.

Readers know that I am in favor of raising the bar for HS and college graduation. Over time, these things mean less and less. A HS degree should mean, at minimum, that you can write a personal essay, a researched essay, know what PV=nRT means,  and perform Trigonometry. A college degree should mean, at minimum, that you can write a scholarly paper, do Calc, and speak intelligently about Kierkegaard and the Bible.

At Insty. One quote that he quotes:

...approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more.

The error is in considering a BA as job training. It is not. It is a paper credential for sure, but I am not sure it makes sense to view it as an investment. America needs more gunsmiths and plumbers and software developers and small business creators, not more BAs in Anthropology.

A skilled gunsmith makes more money than any anthropologist - if income is what one wants. My gunsmith charges $170/hr for metal work, a bit less for wood work, and leads a fun, interesting, and adventurous life and gets to meet and befriend all sorts of fascinating people (like me). My local digital equipment repairman charges $175/hr. Scholarly types go to college for spoon-fed intellectual nurturing and development, but I am not convinced that those things "pay off" very much in a financial way - especially nowadays, when anybody can go to college. There are plenty of schools eager to accept a fat check from anybody who can sign their name.

"Twenty years of school and then they put you on the day shift..."

When people are curious and want to learn everything, they will do it with or without a BA, and they will never quit doing it until they die even if they never make a penny from it. Real learners never quit reading and learning and trying new thoughts. It's easy to identify real scholars - after they finish whatever formal schooling they do.

That question is posed by Bryan Caplan on the signaling value of education, here, via our reader Mike's site, here. (Thanks, Mike)

My perspective on the topic is that educational signaling, like dressing well, good manners, or possessing a good pedigree, will only take you so far in life - maybe to your first or even second job, but it alone will not lead to a happy and productive lifetime white-collar career or careers. That requires fortunate combinations of personality traits including social skills, a bit of dignitas, leadership skills, savvy judgement, a quick penetrating brain, good ability to assess others, a cheerful but forceful disposition, integrity, good intuition, etc., of which many folks lack at least one element. (I lack more than one of those, which is why I am a Partner and not an employee. Like many Maggie's Farmers, I am not fit to be an employee but I am a darn good tough but caring boss: if you don't bs me, I'll be on your side when you screw things up - which you will.)

After the first or second job, the only real value of fancy academic signaling is social. The old school tie networking is highly over-rated these days (except amongst the Dartmouth Gang and the prep school kids who help their own tribe no matter what. Yalies? Not much anymore, since Yale went psychotic).

When we interview at my shop, we partners interrogate the candidates first, and glance at their resumes afterwards. We like to size a person up. Get the cut of their jib. We do not like slick, and we do not like negativity. We have a soft spot for vets and/or people with a strong sport because those things matter to us. We see through bs like a laser. We enjoy dry humor as well as raunchy humor, and are bored by conventional thinking and ordinary "nice" personalities. We try to decide whether this is a person we'd enjoy and benefit from having around every day, somebody we can learn from - and have fun with at dinners and parties. We like to be surprised, and we enjoy quirkiness when associated with brilliance and creativity. And we are looking for the beef: "Teach me something I don't know about ____"

(Admittedly, our candidates are screened first by our junior people, and how they do that is not my concern.)

An academic mercenary tells his story. A quote:

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

Cognitive Dissonance and Historically Black Colleges

Well, I hesitate to term these "professional" conferences, because by my definition unionized people cannot really be considered professionals. But, putting that aside, here's Academic Conferences: the Oppressed Versus the Oppressors. One quote:

A preliminary program for the National Council of Teachers of English conference (Nov. 18-21, Orlando) lists a session, "Leading Out Our Profession Through Advocacy," that blames Ronald Reagan (whatever happened to blaming Bush?) for scripted lessons and mandates handed down to classroom teachers in the cause of school reform: "During the Reagan years, systems and structures were set in place so that corporate giants and government would have more control over education," resulting in policies such as No Child Left Behind and now even the Obama Race to the Top. The NCTE workshop's answer to all that? "Critical reflection, dialogue, and action toward an educational reform and advocacy that enables teachers and learners to collaborate, explore, engage, and renew ourselves through positive, empowering, professional advocacy."

If I can peer clearly through the edubabble, I think this is a union training session. Not certain, though. By the way, what's a "learner"?

Mr. Surber supplied the toon. The video here.

Philip Brand and his brother visited schools in every state in America. What Johnny Learned. A quote:

 The contrast between New Heights (a charter school funded publicly but operated independently from the local school district) and New York City public school C.S. 211, two schools which Brand visited back-to-back, is stunning. At New Heights kids rhapsodize about the safety of their hallways; at C.S. 211 Brand witnesses a student screaming to her teacher that she had just been groped. At New Heights an enthusiastic young teacher is instructing her students in the basics of respectful adult interaction, how to shake hands while looking someone in the eye, how to listen with �eyes and ears�; at C.S. 211 a disengaged teacher assigns busy work to a bored class for an entire period. 

Destroying Schools to Achieve Racial Justice. Weissberg begins:

I've long suspected that the federal government is consciously subverting American education. Deep inside the Department of Education, there must exist a top-secret Bureau of Educational Disasters (BED) whose mission is to concoct alluring but guaranteed-to-fail, academic achievement-killing policies whose sole benefits are more jobs and mindless paperwork. These would be the folks who recently bribed states to retain academically troublesome students whose behavior hindered decent students so as to make America "better educated," i.e., a nation of high school "graduates" barely able to read their diplomas.   

The College Board keeps selling college:

�For reasons that are not entirely clear, more people are questioning whether it�s necessary to go to college.�

If she had been paying any attention, she would know that the reasons are very clear. Many of the young people drawn into college are academically weak and disengaged; they learn little or nothing in their college years; they accumulate loads of debt; they end up working in jobs that almost any high-school student could easily learn to do. Furthermore, as we increase the percentage of people in the labor force who have college credentials, that ratchets up credential inflation, making it harder for those who don�t have college credentials to find good employment.

Via Insty:

People who choose to work with their hands are looked down upon by the chattering classes. It used to be that getting into college was hard. Now it�s just expensive. Getting into a post-college profession was even harder. People were impressed if someone went to college. And even more so if they went on to become a lawyer or doctor.

Walter Russell Mead's 6 Tips About What Really Matters in College

Many British University Grads Working in Call Centers

For-profit education under assault by the government. New rules that do not apply to the old-fashioned schools.

From Re-thinking Education at Rebel:

Everything testifies to the great benefit of charter schools, private schools and home schooling, so why do we continue to provide education in such an antiquated method? Again, it doesn�t serve the teacher�s union to break the kids out into smaller and smaller schools and classes where information can not be controlled and might even become contradictory to earlier �government� teachings. What government employee would benefit from a revolution in education delivery? None.

NYT: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits.

That might be good advice. I am not sure. What always worked best for me in college and in law school was a ration of 2hrs/studying in the library to 1/hr discussing and mutual quizzing with somebody in the course.

From the latter, I learned to interrogate my own understanding after I read anything. It's become a habit for me. If I can't explain back what I've read after I have read it, I've gotten nothing from it.