This article (via Joanne Jacobs) may be heartening to some who believe that if fewer ritzy, private prep-school students are admitted to Harvard and its ilk then perhaps more deserving, low-income students from public high schools will be. That may be true. It would be a shame, though, if America’s best colleges were to accept large numbers of pupils who are less academically able than are many to whom they, the colleges, deny entry. What good comes of enrolling young people who aren’t prepared—or, rather, aren’t the most prepared—for the Ivy League?

I know, I know: Ivy League classes are supposedly easier than classes at many state schools, so students don’t actually need to be more prepared for Harvard than for the University of Virginia or LSU. Maybe not. But as we’ve argued about AP, and as Checker told Jay Mathews in so many words, the quality of a higher-level class is in many ways determined by whether or not that class actually enrolls higher-level students. I tend to think the same holds true, to a large extent, for university classes and campus culture, too. Too much diversity of intellectual ability on campus doesn’t seem to offer any particular benefit. (It is certainly a myth that Ivy League graduates are the only ones who fill competitive jobs, or that a Harvard degree is necessarily the ticket to success.)

And colleges are of course judged largely by their prestige (agree or disagree about whether that’s good, but it’s true), as measured by lots of things, such as quality of faculty and endowment size, all of which are mutually reinforcing. But at base, I think, a school’s prestige is generally built on who matriculates there. It’s complicated stuff, sure. But if Harvard starts shutting out significant numbers of the most qualified applicants and offering spots, instead, to lesser minds, then Harvard’s unique luster will diminish. Some think that’s a good thing, but I don’t find compelling justification for their thoughts.

Photo by Flickr user mjm.

The baby boomers are on the way out of the nation’s colleges and universities. The New York Times reports that liberal professors birthed into academia in the 1960s and 70s are retiring—and being replaced by younger and more politically moderate academics. This shift has had numerous effects, not the least of which is the exit of ideology in the way academics understand and study public education.

Michael Olneck, a professor from the University of Wisconsin and the article’s token old guard professor, introduced the syllabus in a class last year entitled, “Race, Ethnicity and Inequality in American Education” with the following: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.” By contrast, Sara Goldrick-Rab, his new guard replacement, embraces a more empirically based approach. Her class on inequality and opportunity in community colleges will have an “emphasis on the critical evaluation and assessment of current up-to-date research”.

The renaissance of data will undoubtedly have a great impact in the field of education. With colleges full of professors who haven’t lived through the Civil Rights Movement, Brown v. Board, and a host of other educational milestones, we may be able to move into the future rather than stagnating in the past. While these events had incredible political impact and undoubtedly should not be forgotten, the visceral reaction they created in a generation of professors has fundamentally impeded the ways in which we discuss education policy today by substituting emotion for good common sense.

That’s what they’re talking about at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Ross Douthat moderates.

I hope the College Board catches the flack it deserves for its decision to (starting in 2010) show colleges only the SAT scores that the students who earn them choose to reveal—i.e., if Johnny takes the test 10 times, Johnny gets to show State U. only his best score. Currently, university admissions officers see both how many times a student took the SAT and how he scored on each attempt.

The College Board’s purported reason for the rules shift: Taking the pressure off test-takers. The real reason: Making more money. Unfortunately for poor kids, they won’t be able to pay to take the SAT multiple times. Suburban kids—the ones who already shell out thousands for private prep classes, and who go to schools where guidance counselors map out every step of the test-taking plan—will. You better believe that starting in 2010, it’s going to be assumed that middle-class high schoolers take the SAT every single time its offered.  

Furthermore, the College Board is watering down the SAT’s integrity. I know, I know—the organization tells us that an individual’s scores will not significantly increase after multiple retakes. Of course, common sense tells us that claim is baloney and will be proven as such come 2011. But assuming that it is true, doesn’t it render irrelevant the College Board’s ostensible concern about lowering test-taking pressure? (If a kid knows he won’t score better on his tenth attempt than on his first, why would the option of multiple retakes without consequences lessen his anxiety?)  

This change is just so wrong on so many levels. It’s bad for poor kids and should offend those who care about standards and merit in college admissions.

Naomi Schaefer Riley takes it to the college-entrance-tests-are-biased crowd—especially those within it who profit from the very tests they decry.

In a New Criterion article, Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history, points out the misperceptions that many college faculty members harbor. If only their presumptions were true!

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective—they do believe that—contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

To avoid accusations that I care not about the Joads or Martin Luther King, Jr., I’ll add this bromide: High school students should learn about the Great Depression and segregation, too.

From this Palm Beach Post article, about college graduates who have a tough time finding jobs:

About 75 percent to 80 percent of UCF students who completed internships found a job in the field they majored in, he said. For students who had no job training outside the classroom, the number is less than 50 percent.

It’s not news that internships are important, or that most interns earn paltry sums that usually don’t cover even their living expenses and that, therefore, lots of poor students are excluded from their ranks. But as more less-qualified pupils enter college, as a college degree’s value is degraded, garnering competitive internships will grow evermore important for 20-year-olds who desire good jobs after they graduate. Look for anti-internship articles like this and testimonials from college grads who, unable to do a sophomore-year summer stint in D.C., now find themselves with a B.A. and without a job—all coming to an op-ed page near you.

John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, writes in National Review a solid, sweeping article about higher education. It’s currently available only to subscribers (they, and hackers, may read it here). Some good parts:

No one disputes that a four-year degree is a ticket to lucrative professions requiring advanced academic training, such as medicine, law, or academia itself. But most undergraduates are not training for these professions, and, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, more and more college graduates go into jobs that do not require diplomas. George Leef, vice president for research of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, notes that a quarter of travel agents and retail-sales supervisors, a third of flight attendants, and nearly half of aerobics instructors have bachelor’s degrees. That’s fine - if they wanted to study Goethe or geology for personal edification, and were willing to spend four years and a lot of money doing so. But it’s pointless if the idea was to boost their careers.

Using 2000 data on test scores and coursework, education researchers Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas and Greg Forster of the Friedman Foundation estimated that the number of high-school students prepared to study college-level material was about 40,000 lower than the number of students enrolling in college. The predictable result of this trend is that only a minority of American colleges and universities are truly selective anymore, with gut courses and grade inflation rampant on many campuses.

In a normal market, prices would take care of this: The high cost of education would discourage those who wouldn’t sufficiently profit from a diploma. But as with health care, third-party payment hides the actual price. About three-quarters of all college students attend public universities, where taxpayers shoulder a large percentage, often the majority, of the cost. Furthermore, government grants and subsidized loans significantly defray the tuition and fees at both public and private schools. Most families pay only a small fraction of the true cost of undergraduate education.

Update: Seems that the article is available to all. Brilliant!

Check out this New York Daily News column about career and technical education (formerly vocational education).

Not only is career and technical education nothing to laugh at, it’s a way to replace the unrealistic “college for all” bias of public schooling with a greater degree of practical preparation for lucrative and rewarding careers in fields like nursing, desktop publishing, computer networking and the building trades.

This is encouraging:

And here’s the kicker: Two-thirds of CTE students go on to college, and when they do, there’s research suggesting they outperform other students. Those that go straight into the world of work are generally getting jobs in fields where the pay is good and demand is strong.

Mushy Mike knows it’s not news that college graduates live longer than high-school graduates. The article to which he refers is a comment on the lousy healthcare that many poor Americans receive, and it really doesn’t have much to do with getting a college education. To assume (as Mike seems to) that if we directed more academically unprepared pupils onto ivied campuses we’d see a marked drop in healthcare disparities is, for sundry reasons too numerous to expound upon here, an incredible oversimplification. College attendance, of course, does not cause disparities in health, wealth, happiness, etc. as much as it reflects the disparities that already exist. And I do not believe universities have the redemptive powers to magically reshape anyone who attends their classes.

K-12 schools are supposed to be places where students, regardless of their backgrounds, can garner the information they need to succeed at college or in the workplace. K-12 schools, not colleges, are supposed to be the equalizers. Obviously, America hasn’t yet structured the k-12 system to work as it should, and we keep graduating 18-year-olds who can’t read. Therfore, ed reformers, having so far failed to markedly improve k-12 classrooms, are shifting their aspirations for k-12 schools onto colleges. It’s a foolish strategy, and it will have bad consequences.

Flypaper does not relish the role of policing The Quick and the Ed, but that blog’s latest item simply demands rebutting.

Kevin Carey comments on a piece, written by an adjunct professor, in the most recent Atlantic that supposes that perhaps pushing all students to college is a bad idea. (We commented on the article here.) Carey writes:

One thing’s for certain: this piece will be catnip for those who like to adopt the contrarian too-many-people-are-going-to-college-these-days position. This is an especially attractive stance for elitists and/or people who spend a lot of time searching for opportunities to loudly begin sentences with some variation of the phrase “I know it’s not politically correct to say this, but...” as if this denotes intellectual bravery of some kind.

Why this impugning of motives, this name-calling? Beyond being trivial, beyond being unspecific, it is also logically suspect. One can (and many do) make the point that to assume everyone needs college, that jobs that don’t require college degrees are plain undesirable, is the elitist stance. Carey bolsters this claim when he writes:

After all, without college, what are Ms. L and her struggling classmates supposed to do? Live out the rest of their lives hardly able to read and write? Find some menial job quietly providing service to the likes of Murray, Bennett, and Wolfe, who enjoy three PhDs and a J.D. between them?

This paragraph, inter alia, overlooks the fact that most Americans do not currently possess college degrees, that a majority of the nation’s population throughout history has never possessed a college degree, and that such degree-less people do not all lead lives of quiet desperation, serving dinner to conservative pundits. Millions can and do lead quite wonderful lives without a B.A.

Those who believe that all students should go to college might retort: “Sure, millions lead fine lives without a B.A., but wouldn’t their lives be better with a B.A.?” Maybe (assuming they want one in the first place), but some people just aren’t qualified to receive a college degree. Elitism? No—realism. Carey himself notes (see above) that Ms. L, a struggling student profiled in the Atlantic piece, can barely read and write. Logic seems to demand the admission that college is not a place for those who are largely illiterate.

Carey doesn’t subscribe to this logic, though. “After all, without college, what are Ms. L and her struggling classmates supposed to do? Live out the rest of their lives hardly able to read and write?,” he asks, as if a university campus is the appropriate venue to teach students how to read and write! Such a claim is truly baffling and defies reason.

A college diploma holds no inherent value, and if we continue to push unqualified students into university classrooms, a diploma’s value will dip and in 10 years, ed reformers will be mounting “All kids to graduate school” campaigns. Carey reveals this degradation of standards in his blog post:

In one of Professors X’s two classes, English 102, “we read short stories, poetry, and Hamlet.” How about not reading poetry and Hamlet? I have nothing against Shakespeare, but Hamlet was written over 400 years ago and isn’t easy to read. How about picking some high-quality prose from the last century, or even this one, which is available for free in abundant supply from publications like The Atlantic, and use that to teach the course?    

“How about not reading poetry and Hamlet” because they aren’t “easy to read“? Is this serious? Carey is supposedly discussing a college class, not 3rd-grade remedial language arts. And if Ms. L and her peers can barely read or write, how far are we willing to degrade college curricula to accommodate them? The blatant rejection of reality inherent in Carey’s sentences is astounding.

I could go on, but this a blog post after all, not a book.

Mike just passed along to me the June Atlantic (not yet available online), in which one finds an article titled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” It is a poignant piece, written by an adjunct professor whose night classes contain all those that society deems ready for college—who must go to college—but are in reality far from it. The author (the anonymous “Professor X”) writes, “They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.”

And so, it becomes the adjunct professor’s responsibility to clean up for society’s destructive romanticism. Does he lower standards or hand out multiple Fs? The professor in question takes the latter route, but he doesn’t sleep well because of it. His students, many of whom cannot construct a coherent sentence, are confused by the poor grades they receive. Haven’t they done everything right, haven’t they fulfilled society’s expectations and returned to school to better themselves? It may not occur to many of them that society’s expectations are unrealistic, its hopes based on fiction, and that they have been set up for failure.

It’s a piece well worth reading, because the human cost of the “all kids to college” push is seldom discussed.

Photo by Flickr user partsnpieces.

Another interesting bit in The Gadfly is this piece, which describes how thousands of Massachusetts students who pass the MCAS and graduate high school nonetheless have to take remedial courses at 2- and 4-year colleges—i.e., they’re not ready to do college-level work. Many drop out.

The MCAS is supposed to be one of the nation’s toughest exit exams. So if thousands of students who pass it can’t get along at university, this should alert policymakers to a piece of common sense that has, in the age of No Child Left Behind, become taboo: Not every student can or should attend college.

The “all kids to college” push is something of an unquestioned mantra in ed-reform circles, which has always puzzled me. Of course the only way all students, or even most students, will get to college is if college admission (and by extension, college degrees) means nothing. We already see this happening in states that have attempted to tie high school graduation to high school exit exams; they can either make receipt of high school diplomas an easier task or export more dropouts to the streets.

A university diploma has no intrinsic value. So when we hear that all kids must go to college because the good jobs employ only those who possess at least a Bachelor’s degree, we can be confident that (suspending disbelief) when everyone in America finally does attend college, the good jobs will demand applicants with Master’s degrees. And so it goes.

A better idea: High schools (and ed reformers) should lose their “college or nothing” mindset. Lots of kids won’t, can’t, don’t want to attend a university, and they deserve high school pathways, such as career and technical education, that do not leave them as 18-year-olds with zero prospects.

Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in the Wall Street Journal about obstacles beyond lousy instruction in the classroom that often prevent students in urban public schools from attending college: Letters of recommendation that are poorly written (when they’re written), guidance counselors who can’t be bothered to turn in on time their students’ applications, and reams of confusing paperwork.

The article’s title, “Not by Tuition Breaks Alone,” is apt. Getting more low-income pupils into college obviously requires more than legislation.

In the Weekly Standard, Liam reviews Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, which, he reports, picks up where William Buckley left off in God and Man at Yale—lamenting what has gone wrong in higher education, in Kronman’s case that academic specialization in the humanities has brushed aside “the meaning-of-life questions that are so basic and important.”

Universities today may avoid the existential questions, but never let that be said about Flypaper, where the solemn search for truth (in education policy) is alive and well.

One of Thomas Sowell’s points, that college education is being watered down because too many people are obtaining it, is a fine one. He notes that “education is not a Good Thing categorically in unlimited amounts, for people of all levels of ability, interest, and willingness to work.” This is one reason why k-12’s current “college or nothing” structure is a failure, and why so many 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds who are not willing to work toward college, and who have no other educational routes open to them, drop out of high school. (It’s not popular to say, but common sense helps us realize that if the almost-adult student likes fixing cars and hates poetry, one does him no service through repeated floggings of Marlowe.)    

Sowell writes:

Those who are not serious—which includes a remarkably large number of students, even at good colleges—would have to back off and go face the realities of the adult world in the job market. But not as many jobs would be able to require college degrees if such degrees were no longer so readily available at someone else’s expense.

His last sentence is a wounded antelope for the China-and-India crowd, which will instinctively pounce. They reflexively remind us that Americans compete not only with themselves but with (you know) the college-educated Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Malagasy. Partly true, as always. But that U.S. education credentials are worth less each year is undeniable—and employers know it. As we push unqualified people into college, college degrees lose value. Today, having a B.A. is better than not having a B.A., but it won’t turn anyone’s head. In 20 years, one foresees the education Pooh-Bahs kvetching that too many low-income students lack three Master’s degrees. K-12 education is dismal as ever, yet universities are packed. What does that tell us?

The New York Times, one understands, seeks to reach its audience, and those who casually turn the pages of Thursday Styles are of a sort that enjoys and relates to articles such as this.

How to prepare teens for the world of work? the piece asks. Should parents encourage children to do what they love, or should they push diligence and sacrifice as the road that leads to a successful and rewarding career? Probably more the latter; the author herself writes that her son is “part of a generation whose members are so convinced that work should be personally fulfilling that they see photocopying as beneath them.”

This is a well-documented “millennial” attitude. (Sometimes, though, it’s well-founded. Some of the most talented recent college graduates make loads of money because that’s what they’re worth to the companies that employ them. Why on earth would they deign to make photocopies when they could trot across town and get another job at which they don’t make photocopies?)

Conspicuously absent from the Times piece is the role colleges play in youngsters’ work preparedness. I’m still amazed at how ill-equipped for office life I felt after receiving my undergrad degree, and I imagine the adjustment is even more difficult for some grads, especially those who go in for stuff like this. (A particularly noxious “art” project by a Yale student.)

It’s easy to dismiss it as culture war fodder. But it makes a point—this selfish, relativistic stuff is eschewed in the real world, and yet it happens all the time (albeit not to such a repulsive degree), and is often applauded, on college campuses. K-12 schools have their problems—lots of them—but at least they enshrine certain codes of conduct into the school day. In this way, when it comes to preparing students for the work world, college can actually be a regression from high school. No matter how much self-esteem parents spoon-feed their kids, it’s nothing compared to the all-about-me culture that’s the norm at many universities.

Update: Turns out the Yale art project was a hoax. As Yuval Levin wrote, it’s an “abhorrent and disgusting one.”

Apparently, one can earn a degree in anything.

Seriously, it’s not really better than it sounds.

Trot on over to Eduwonk, where guest blogger J.B. Schramm, Founder and CEO of College Summit, is turning in some substantive posts. He ends each day by pasting excerpts of student admission essays: 

While the importance of research, policy and debate within the education community cannot be overstated, it is also valuable to be reminded of “what it’s all about.” During our week here, we’d like to conclude each day with an excerpt from a student’s college admission essay that he or she developed at one of College Summit’s annual summer workshops.

One is immediately struck, upon reading these essays (or at least the two so far posted), that the writing is all about suffering—about feeling lost, about feeling burdened, about feeling like an outcast, etc. Quite frankly, the pieces resemble the weepy and gaggingly emotive memoirs (some true, others not) that clog bookstore shelves.

It can be supposed that College Summit’s essay workshops encourage such outpourings—”Write about what stirs you. Admissions committees want to know how you feel.”—and pushes students to include as many mentions as possible of themselves as underprivileged and of a different race or culture. But if the goal is to integrate these young adults into a university setting, does this approach make sense? Might it not simply reinforce the separations College Summit endeavors to degrade?

Update: I should note that universities of course ask for this type of essay and certainly look favorably upon those submissions that fit the mold, so College Summit doesn’t deserve all the blame. Nonetheless, it’s truly awful writing that, no matter how you slice it, doesn’t impart much about why the author should be admitted to any given college.

The New York Times reports today on the admissions crunch at Ivy League schools. Due to record numbers of applicants, Harvard’s acceptance rate this year is down to a new low of 7.1 percent, and other schools are setting their own records as well. Why? The Times speculates, but focuses on demographics:

Many factors contributed to the tightening of the competition at the most selective colleges, admissions deans and high school counselors said, among them demographics. The number of high school graduates in the nation has grown each year over the last decade and a half, though demographers project that the figure will peak this year or next, which might reduce the competition a little.

Other factors were the ease of online applications, expanded financial aid packages, aggressive recruiting of a broader range of young people, and ambitious students’ applying to ever more colleges.

I’d bet on that last point—students applying to more and more colleges. Anecdotally speaking, when I applied to colleges 16 years ago, submitting a handful of applications was the norm. Now that seems lazy.

As the International Herald Tribune reported in January, “‘There was a time when kids applied to three or four schools, then to six or seven schools, and now, 10 or more is not uncommon,’ said John Maguire, a higher education consultant.” We’re in a vicious cycle, where students need to apply to more schools simply because everyone else is applying to more schools. This effect—if indeed there is a doubling or tripling of applications per student—would surely dwarf the relatively gradual increase in graduates each year. I’m just not sure where it ends.