Maggie's Farm

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.

Sounds like a very good idea to me: Check Out This Alternative to College:

The idea is that employers can decide which certificate level they would like to see in the hands of applicants in order to match them to the job at hand. (They can also check with ACT to verify that a certificate is genuine.) The NCRC test avoids such high-school stumbling-blocks as algebra, geometry, grammar, and advanced vocabulary—the stuff of the SAT and the regular ACT test. Instead the NCRC test, designed to focus on real-world in contrast to academic aptitude, contains just three WorkKeys: "Applied Mathematics," "Reading for Information," and "Locating Information." Still, while the skills assessed in the three WorkKeys are fairly basic, (Applied Mathematics requires no more than eighth-grade math), to perform well enough to earn a Platinum-level certificate would probably challenge many college graduates.

I tried out the most difficult of the sample NCRC questions on ACT's website and found myself delving deep into memory for the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder (Applied Mathematics), attempting to correlate two complex soil-sample graphs (Locating Information), and poring over a legal document (Reading for Information). Critical thinking and the ability to use abstract data to solve concrete problems are clearly among the skills assessed. ACT has also developed a list of additional WorkKey assessments that employers in search of specific talents such as business writing or applying technology, or "soft" interpersonal skills such as listening, conflict resolution, or working in a team, can use to fit applicants to the specific demands of a job.

This thing sounds more useful than a BA.

The great Heather MacDonald on L.A.’s misbegotten teen dating curriculum.

It is difficult for me to believe that taxpayers want to pay for this crap. As she notes, if social work fixed social dysfunction, everybody would be functional by now. One quote:

Schools have been piling on social services for decades, yet the illegitimacy rate continues to rise, most cataclysmically among blacks (73 percent) and Latinos (53 percent). (Teen birth rates have gone down since the early 1990s, though they are still magnitudes higher than in Europe and Asia.) The social dysfunction that results from this spiraling illegitimacy rate provides the pretext for further increasing the school social work bureaucracy.

Via Insty, Did Utah Valley University fire business prof for being too tough?

That's what I have been talking about lately - students evaluating teachers, dumbing down to please students, etc. A quote from the piece:

According to a lawsuit filed Oct. 14 in U.S. District Court, Maranville’s lawyers allege UVU administrators justified the dismissal based on student complaints that his “capstone” course in business strategies was too rigorous and his Socratic style intimidated them.

“A number of students liked him a lot and said so. The brass came in and liked what he was doing. [Maranville] wanted students to get together in small groups and chew over the topics they were studying,” said his attorney, Robert Sykes. “They get him up here and toss him under the bus because some of the students wanted high school.”

Boo hoo. Tough Socratic teaching and interrogation is typical in elite colleges, laws school, medical school, and business school. If they think a prof is too rigorous, they oughta see real life.

Fascinating and serious essay by Hess in National Affairs: Our Achievement-Gap Mania. One quote:

Because of the way "achievement gaps" are measured — using scores on standardized reading and math tests — any effort to "close the achievement gap" must necessarily focus on instruction in reading and math. Hence many schools, particularly those at risk of getting failing grades under NCLB, have fixated on reading and math exclusively; other subjects — art and music, foreign language, history, even science — have been set aside to make more time and resources available for remedial instruction. The New York Times has reported that, in Sacramento, California, poorly performing students are permitted to enroll only in math, reading, and gym, in a mad dash to help close the achievement gap. The Wall Street Journal has reported that, facing budget pressures and a relentless press to drive up reading and math scores among the least proficient students, school districts nationwide are axing foreign-language instruction. Indeed, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, between 1997 and 2008, the share of U.S. elementary schools offering foreign-language classes fell by roughly one-fifth.

There will always be achievement gaps until 1+1=2 is the math test and "See Spot run" is the literature exam. Humans are far too variable in interests, talents, abilities, self-discipline, and motivation for it to ever be otherwise.

As somebody recently commented, "Why not aim for equality in violin, film-making, dress-design, tomato-growing, or basketball?"

It's all about this "consumerism" rage in the past two decades.

Students are consumers of education, patients are consumers of medical care, citizens are consumers of government services, prisoners are consumers of rehabilitative services.

It's a strange point of view.

The notion that students evaluate profs as if school were American Idol seems perverted to me. School is not infotainment. I can be an entertaining speaker and did some litigation in my distant past, but I would never teach where my career, even in part, depended on student evaluations. When teaching, I like to be a demanding SOB, intolerant of anything short of excellence and keeping people on their toes. In the end, people are thankful for my demanding attitude.

Article: Who Wants to Be Evaluated by Students?

Essay of the above title at Chronicle. One quote:

Her experience, she explains, "led me to one of the most sobering insights I had as a professor-turned-student: how little intellectual life seemed to matter in college. This is not to say that no one cared about her education or that everyone cut all his classes. Rather, what I observed was that engagement in the philosophical and political issues of the day was not a significant part of college student culture."

Katrina provided the opportunity to reconstruct NO education from the beginning.

The Big Easy's School Revolution - John White, superintendent of New Orleans' public schools: 'In other cities, charter schools exist in spite of the system. Here they are the system.'

Why the remarkable proliferation of law schools? Because schools make a lot of money from them. In my youth, in the 1800s, we learned law from books and apprenticeship. Law school was not a requirement for joining the bar until 1906, which is long after I was admitted to the bar. Why they jumped from 0 years to 3 years of formal education, I do not know.

Paul Campos posts: There are a lot of bad reasons to go to law school. Here are some of the most common...

I happen to believe that legal training is good training for all sorts of things that a person might want to accomplish. However, the legal field is looking a little shaky these days unless you want to chase ambulances and have strange hair like John Edwards. The Obama recession is hurting everybody, dentists and lawyers, plumbers and electricians, doctors and churches, handymen and builders.

The SAT was designed to produce a more egalitarian, less elitist American college student, yet few are ever really happy with it. I tend to view it roughly as an IQ test, but one which conflates the upper end to eliminate the upper outliers (it's not fair to the others to be too good).

From Steve Sailer's Asians, aptitude, and achievement: a positive sum reform proposal (h/t AVI):

...once the Ivy Leagues started trying to find the most promising non-upper class kids from the rest of the country, they needed something more objective about individuals than just grades. Another issue is that high school grades have certain inherent shortcomings. The future Nobelist in physics might not care about his social studies class and thus wind up with a lower overall GPA than the well-adjusted grind. Plus, grades have a ceiling. Even an A+ in physics doesn't really tell you that much. Moreover, lots of future successes are alienated in high school. Some people who get all As in high school might not have the upside to continue to do so in college. Incentives toward grade inflation at the high school are built in. And so forth ...

What will they learn in college? Not much

College: The disruption is here:

As of yet, there's no market mechanism to reward high levels of student success for the least possible cost. This is irrational. Thiel’s critique is based on an unstated assumption: market forces are starting to unleash on institutions that have not had to learn to thrive in a post-Internet, mobile device-oriented, and competitive marketplace. Indeed, few are currently asking themselves the important questions and embarking upon the dramatic transformations that will allow them to thrive.

Perhaps the SAT does roughly correspond to IQ, but the reason to use IQ is to take into account unrealized potential in those who have had the misfortune of not being exposed to adequate education or of stimulating environments.

Admittedly, most people with intellectual ambition and special ability find a way to pursue it in youth, but there are surely plenty of diamonds in the rough out there with undiscovered glitter. If I were a college admissions officer, I'd want a kid with a 160 IQ and mediocre SATs over an over-achiever with decent SATs and a mediocre IQ.

Mind you, this is all about academic potential, not life potential. That's an entirely different topic. Only God can measure a life.

Is there a meaningful difference between an 800 and a 770 on the Math section of the SAT?

My proposal for the SAT exams (which, for our overseas readers, is used to measure something called "college readiness" - although in the US today college readiness can mean ability to pay or to obtain loans and grants to pay. American colleges are full of kids who cannot even do basic trigonometry) is to make three sections, each with a fairly steep slope of demands from basic to subtle and advanced:

- Scientific and quantitative

- Literary, reading comprehension, and writing

- General academic information (ie history, the arts, religion, geography, etc)

Then to score each section with the usual academic letter grades, A+ to F (with A+ reserved for a perfect score because that means you know it all and can execute it without sloppiness).

If I had my druthers, I would add a regular IQ test also, but in the current atmosphere I don't think that would be accepted despite the fact that plenty of grad schools do require it. (I had to take an IQ twice, once for the army and once for grad school. I think maybe we had to take one in grade school too in order to assess our academic potential.)

From Wemyss' Broken Britain in the NER:

...the sentimental idea that the intellectual differences between children are not real - or that they are real, but too upsetting to acknowledge - has taken hold of the popular imagination, whereas once such nonsense could only have been believed by a sociologist.

My son went to one of the comprehensives that replaced academically selective grammar schools. He is now studying law at university. Since he was likely to be correct about which of his peers would have passed and failed the eleven-plus had it still existed, I asked him if any of the likely failures had gone on to do surprisingly well under the comprehensive system.

Not one. I then asked if any of those whom he would have expected to pass the eleven-plus had gone on to do less well than he would have expected.

Several.

And then of course there is the question of the content of the education, even for those who “do well”. My son would be quick to acknowledge that he is an academic success but that he knows virtually nothing of British or European literature prior to the twentieth century. Indeed, he knows little of British or European history, even including the twentieth century. He knows nothing of the Bible, or the Christian tradition. Luckily, he is genuinely intelligent, and has a magpie-like gift for intellectual theft, seeing much of an idea from even the tiniest stolen morsel.

Read the whole thing. It's about "enforced compassion" and egalitarian ideology.

Academia seems torn between utter decadence and Spanish Inquisition-like puritanism. Peter Wood discusses Higher Sex Ed:

Educate about “sexual harassment and sexual violence” on one hand, and promote sexual license and vulgarity on the other hand? This may not be a complete contradiction, but it is pretty close to one. License and restraint are awkward partners. Campus culture currently decrees that we should want both: It decrees that we should strive to liberate students from conventional morality in favor of free-wheeling sexual expression, while at same time we should instill an ethic of male restraint hedged by severe penalties.

Containing one's sexual and romantic impulses is one of the more difficult things that adult humans are called upon to do in civilized life. Academia reflects that human challenge in warning guys never to touch a girl on their way to their exciting Porn and Perversion Studies class.

From the venerable Mead:

...as their financial prospects darken, students’ educational costs are exploding. Like the health care system, the educational system is being overwhelmed by rising costs and rising demand. And as misguided government policies contributed to the real estate bubble by artificially inflating demand, government programs are burdening students with unpayable loans and contributing to relentless and unsustainable inflation in school costs.

And so, dear students, welcome back! Your generation is going to have dig its own way out of the hole my generation has dug for you (thanks for the Medicare, kids, and sorry about the deficit!), but here are a few tips that may help you get the best out of your college years.

Good tips for the students, there. For example:

I’m sorry to bring you bad news, but your generation faces the toughest competition any American generation has ever known.

Your competition isn’t sitting in the next library carrel. Your competition is in China and India – and your competition isn’t hanging out at frat parties or sitting around watching sitcoms with dorm-mates. It isn’t getting stoned and it isn’t putting its energy into chasing the opposite (or apposite) sex. Your competition isn’t taking lots of courses on gender studies; it isn’t majoring in ethnic studies, or (unless it is planning to go into movie making) the history of film.

Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning. There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees Americans a higher standard of living than other people. Those of you who spend your college years goofing off in the traditional American way are going to pay a much higher price for this than you think.

A RAND report shows New York City’s bonus program for teachers did not leave to improved student achievement. Why?

Here’s a conclusion that follows straight from common sense: Don’t make your incentive scheme the subject of a complex negotiation with a bunch of stakeholders. Keep it simple. Hold people accountable for things they actually have control over, and give them a chance to correct their course along the way. If you discover your rules are lousy—that you made things too easy, or too hard—it’s OK to change them. But never do it in the middle of a game.

Everybody knows that incentives work in real life, but teaching is not exactly real life. How many talented teachers does it take to teach a kid Algebra? One, but the kid has to want to learn.

I hope I am not boring my readers with all of my posts about the college bubble and the meaninglessness of the current American college degree. From The Case Against the College Degree:

College degrees are poor proof of learning, and perhaps a barrier to it

Students want jobs and respect. Degrees bring both. Employers, meanwhile, want smart, capable workers. A degree is a decent enough proxy for intelligence, but we want it to be more than that. We want degrees to mean that students have learned the foundations of human knowledge literature, chemistry, physics, composition, metaphysics, psychology, economics and so on. If we didn t, we d replace degrees with inexpensive vocational exams.

Charles Murray, a fellow at American Enterprise Institute, calls for just that in a recent book, Real Education. He argues that too many kids who lack the ability to complete a liberal arts education are being pushed into four-year liberal arts schools, because there s a steep societal penalty for not getting a degree. Schools, in turn, have made their degree programs easier. Murray provides a sample of courses that students used to fulfill core degree requirements at major universities in 2004, including History of Comic Book Art (Indiana University), History and Philosophy of Dress (Texas Tech University) and Campus Culture and Drinking (Duke). He documents not only falling standards but rampant grade inflation.

Read the whole thing. He has an interesting suggestion too, but colleges won't go for it. For their own survival, they are committed to their marketing of their expensive credential, whether it means anything or not. In my experience over recent years, it means little-to-nothing.

You used to know what assumptions you could make about somebody with a BA. Not any more. Now, they don't even need to know basic calculus. That's crazy.

Why is a college degree diminishing in its economic and social value?

Because so many people are going, nowadays. It's not special anymore, and unselected people are getting degrees today who could not have gotten near higher ed one generation ago. It's a consumer-oriented biz now, desperate for gullible consumers. From our IBD link this morning:

A recent example of this exaggerated view of the value of higher education is "The Undereducated American," a paper by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.

The authors argue that the United States needs to produce far more college graduates than it currently does.

Their evidence is that there is a significant wage "premium" for those who graduate from college — across all fields of work. They argue, in effect, that the high return on investment applies regardless of whether the graduate becomes a financier or a dishwasher.

But they fail to look at generational differences.

Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that gains for recent college graduates have been declining for more than 10 years.

Roger Simon on Is Rick Perry a Dope?

I can also attest to the fact that an Ivy League education isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Whatever small accomplishments I have in life are not easily traceable to my academic achievements (even though I was considerably closer to Clinton than Gore in class ranking). Arguably, the most successful president of the post-war period, Ronald Reagan, attended the ultra-obscure Eureka College. I don’t know what his grades were and I don’t much care. All I know is he got Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.” (Not exactly, but you know what I mean.)

Turning to Perry, he was a mediocre student at Texas A & M, a school that emphasizes a more practical form of education than Yale. What does this mean? Don’t know, but these days going to an Ivy no longer appears to be the royal road to career success it once was. This study of Top 10 Job Placement Colleges only shows one Ivy, Cornell, in the tenth position. Number one, not surprisingly, is The University of Texas at Austin.

Perhaps more importantly… and amusingly… this study from the Wall Street Journal shows Perry’s Texas A & M the number two choice of corporate job recruiters with nary an Ivy in sight until Cornell (again) at fourteen. Harvard, Princeton and Yale did not make the top twenty-five.

Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers - When Everyone Makes the Grade (h/t reader via Insty via Inside Higher Ed).

One quote from the conclusion:

Low grading standards in university education departments are part of a larger culture of low standards for educators, and they precede the low evaluation standards by which teachers are judged in K-12 schools. The culture of low standards for educators is problematic because it creates a disconnect between teachers' perceptions of acceptable performance and the perceptions of everyone else.

It's difficult for me to form a strong opinion on the grading topic because I have no idea what Education Majors learn or study. Maybe it's so easy and simple that anybody can master it readily, and all deserve As. Maybe they have full-semester courses in making Lesson Plans, and full-semester courses in Social Justice. Beats me.

However, it does not escape me that no profs in higher ed have ever taken a teaching course (outside of those profs in the Education Dept.). Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, not one of my kids was ever taught by anybody with an education degree.

(A reader asked the question. Yes, very expensive private schools. Private education is the only way to not be taught by people with ed degrees, if such things matter to you. Most of my kids' teachers had done a lot in life before they decided to follow their hearts and teach. Their Latin teacher was a professional actor on the side, their math teacher a retired Wall Streeter, their English teacher a retired Sports Illustrated writer, etc.)

I think it would be constructive to abolish the entire notion of the Education Major. Let people who feel called to K-12 teaching study something like everybody else does and, if they want to take some courses on the side on primary school education or Special Ed or whatever, OK. It seems to me that most teachers ultimately learn their trade by being assistant teachers - by apprenticeship and supervision, not in education departments.

Teaching is not hard work, if you know your topic. I've done it. It's fun (but some kids can't learn and some don't want to. Many are not interested in anything academic.). In fact, every parent becomes an amateur teacher. Much more primary education is ultimately home schooling than schools might want to admit. (In my state of CT, the "quality" of the schools across towns correlates exactly with the levels of average education and income of the adults in the town - regardless of teacher pay etc - suggesting to me that it is, in part, education-minded parents who make their schools look good.)

Maybe most of the world is on vacation now, or taking breaks from their information-gathering and opinion-surfing. Still, I expected more interest in my racism post yesterday. Perhaps it is all old hat to our readers. I thought I did an OK job of pointing out that multiculturalism, when extended to acceptance and "tolerance" of self-destructive cultures or subcultures, is not a particularly noble or constructive mission (despite its obvious political motives).

Star Parker has a piece on the topic today:

 ...for the highly politicized parts of black America, the point has always been to keep race in American politics.

For black political culture that dominated after the Civil Rights Movement, the point was not just equal treatment under the law, but special treatment under the law.

Plus the assumption that more black political power -- defined by more blacks holding office -- would mean that blacks would be better off.

In other words, post-Civil Rights Movement black political culture embraced an agenda exactly the opposite of what the civil rights movement was about.

Its agenda was to get laws and policies that were not neutral but racially slanted and to put individuals in power based on their race and not on their character and capability.

So, according to the script of this political culture, election of a black man as president meant more than an end to racism. The conclusion had to be that if the man holding the highest political office in the nation was black, it must follow that blacks would be better off.

Anyway, I am back to my education beat today.

One of my repeated claims here has been that those who deserve advanced education are those who pursue it on their own. After high school, nobody should want or need to be force-fed most (I'll make an exception for Physical Chemistry and Calculus) of what they need or desire to know, so the only test of their desire is whether they pursue it on their own (rather than the simple credential-buying).

All learning is self-education, and "going to college" does not make anybody "educated." Furthermore, true students study throughout their entire lives. There is no finish line, and you do not have to be in academia to do that.

Dinocrat reminded me of iTunes U.

Of course, at Maggie's we are Teaching Company addicts. What's on TV? Joy of Mathematics

Scores show students aren’t ready for college - 75% may need remedial classes.

So why do colleges admit these kids? Because they need the money and the warm bodies. It's an industry now. Low-tier colleges around here will take anybody who applies, and they will never flunk you out because they want the income.

I agree with Mead here. And I do not blame the high schools at all. I do not blame the kids either, who are neither academically ambitious, don't want to spend the money, or who just don't have what it takes but are happy to take 4 years of partying and extended avoidance of adulthood.

Furthermore, I believe that many "college-ready" kids should not bother. 12 years of education ought to be a good enough start for anybody who was paying attention. American high schools offer everything anybody might want or need, but they can't make anybody take what they offer.

I think lots of kids, especially boys, just want to learn how to do something practical as soon as they can. Most people are not natural scholars, and many natural scholars never went to college either.

I suspect something around 5% of kids can make good use of higher ed. If people really want education, you can tell, because they make great efforts to educate themselves in their spare time. If they don't do that, I'd have doubts about whether they are really suited for higher ed of the liberal arts type.

40% of American college admits require some remedial education. I am not surprised. It's not  to blame the secondary schools. It's just that we have people going to college who aren't college material - at least not yet. 

The fact is that higher education is a booming industry in America, subsidized and supported by countless state and federal programs. Many of these schools are desperate for warm, paying bodies to fill their seats. Anybody can get into some college today, and they will do their darndest to keep him there because lower-tier schools need the income to survive (and need to report decent graduation rates).

We have become a nation of degree mills producing meaningless pieces of very expensive paper. I have interviewed many such people from lower tier schools and can report that they should not have bothered. They had the illusion that we might pay them more to do a clerical job if they had that degree from Eastern CT State College. Surprise, surprise - they can't do algebra, compose a literate and grammatical business letter, or get their minds around an abstract concept.

Who is the bigger sucker: Me, whose taxes subsidize the school? Or them, for wasting years when they could have been doing or learning something useful?

Here are the Five Myths of Remedial Ed.

"Everybody has won and all must have prizes." That's the Dodo Bird Verdict.

Colleges, expecially private colleges, now hand "A"s out like jellybeans, and everybody is an honor student. Here's A History of College Grade Inflation.

When I went to college, an A meant "extraordinary distinction" in my Liberal Arts studies, and they were delivered like precious jewels. Probably 0-3% achieved that. Of course, in math and science it meant simply that you mastered all of the material in depth, and made no foolish exam errors. The wisest graders would overlook careless computational errors if the rest was correct.

Graph below from the article:

You will. It's coming to a university near you.

Believe me, it's not about informing your dog that he should not have peed on the antique rug, nor is about your dog's annoyance with you, as the critical animal he is, for being late with the suppertime kibbles.

From George Leef: A Book President Obama Should Read - “Professor X” underscores the folly of luring hordes of weak students into college.

A quote:

A theme that recurs throughout the book is that most of X’s students aren’t in college by choice. They aren’t in his class because they want to learn about literature or even because they realize that they are weak in reading and writing. Instead, they’re in college because they have to get the credential!

Drawing an analogy to the housing bubble (as we at the Pope Center have on several occasions), Professor X writes, “In much the same way the country spent the first decade of the 2000s redefining what it meant to be a homeowner (to disastrous effect), so too have we reclassified which jobs require a college degree of some sort. Industry, including the civil service, wants its workers to be as credentialed as possible.” Therefore we find college degree “requirements” for jobs like managing a video store.

One result is that poor kids (and sometimes middle-aged adults) who want to escape from the drudgery of their current jobs and have a chance at even such mundane work as managing a video store have to get college degrees. Their coursework will enhance their ability to do that job scarcely one smidgen, but it’s the credential that matters. They have to spend or borrow money to take X’s evening course (and many others) just to get out of the “no college” trap.