The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

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Raced-based university admissions

There are interesting comments at this InsideHigherEd.com article.

The Test Score Advantage

Among the potential bombshells in the book are data on the advantages or disadvantages of SAT or ACT scores by race, ethnicity and economic class. Many studies -- including those released annually by the College Board and the ACT -- show gaps in the average tests scores by members of different racial or ethnic groups. This research takes that further, however, by controlling for numerous factors, including gender, status as an athlete or alumni child, high school grades and test scores, type of high school attended and so forth.

The "advantage" referred to, to take an example from the book, is what it would take to have equivalent odds of admission, after controlling for other factors. So the table's figure of a 3.8 black ACT "advantage" means that a black student with an ACT score of 27 would have the same chances of admission at the institutions in the study as a white student with a score of 30.8.

As the following table shows, there are large black advantages in the way colleges consider SAT and ACT scores, and notable disadvantages for Asian applicants. On issues of wealth, the SAT shows an expected affirmative action tilt, with the most disadvantaged students gaining and the wealthiest losing. But there is also a gain for upper middle class students. On the ACT, analysis found the advantages go to wealthier students.

The table uses ACT scores for public institutions and SAT scores for privates. The "norm" score was considered white for the race section, and middle class for the class section.

Advantages by Race and Class on the SAT and ACT at Selective Colleges, Fall 1997

Group	Public Institutions (on ACT scale of 36)	Private Institutions (on SAT scale of 1,600)
Race
--White	--	--
--Black	+3.8	+310
--Hispanic	+0.3	+130
--Asian	-3.4	-140
Class
--Lower	-0.1	+130
--Working	+0.0	+70
--Middle	--	--
--Upper-Middle	+0.3	+50
--Upper	+0.4	-30

The MBA is taking America down

Bloggers are weighing in on the worthlessness of the MBA. Here's one. I think it's one of the components of the trinity of disaster that academia has imposed on America. The other two are diversity and Colleges of Education.

Student Loan Debt -- Good or Bad?

Two recent articles in the WSJ and at a CNN blog illustrate the role of debt in modern life. In the WSJ article "With this Debt I Wed Thee" the author makes a good distinction:

Good debt: a mortgage on an affordable house; a loan on an affordable car; student loans to pay for a college degree. In effect, good debt improves your life permanently.

Bad debt: auto leases, since they generally finance cars you otherwise can't afford; home-equity loans or lines of credit, which too often fund discretionary purchases; any consumer expenses for which you allow the balance to roll over from month to month. In effect, bad debt only improves your lifestyle temporarily.

The CNN blogger is a recent grad saddled with student loan debt, over $100,000 studying an unspecified major that supposedly allowed her to obtain her position. She does mention that she knew her career prospects would yield low pay. It's clear that she and commentators on her blog are asking for a bailout. To what extent should society accommodate this behavior? The adage that student loan debt is a good one is in fact a fallacy. It's simple to weigh the costs -- does the degree allow for the income to pay off such debt? If not, then it's a no go. This stuff about a college degree creating well-rounded citizens is overrated. If you were take two groups of people send one off to college, the other to work or the military, you'd find the latter more mature and able to assume the responsibility of citizenry. College loan debt can be bad debt, as many use these loans for precisely for temporary improvement of lifestyle, i.e. postponement of adult responsibilities and hedonism with the pretensions of scholarly pursuits.

‘Teaching Unprepared Students’

Over at Insidehighered.com:

Many experts say that the United States can only truly see gains in the
percentages of adults who have a college degree if colleges and universities get
better at teaching students who arrived on campus unprepared for college-level
work. But many professors find themselves frustrated by teaching such students — and many of the students drop out....

The comments:

I never had a problem reaching and teaching underprepared students who
wanted to learn. However, the students who are both underprepared and who lack
any semblance of a work ethic are another matter. When these students have been
taught for twelve years that they will advance to the next grade regardless of
how little they have learned or how little effort they have invested, they are
incapable of performing at a college level. That is because many of them have
never even achieved a junior high school level of self-discipline. Such students
are doomed to fail not only in school, but in life. They are tomorrow’s blue-
and white-collar criminals.

The subject of the interview states “However, the reality is that right now
we have freshmen and transfer students who are not prepared, but who are
enrolled in our classes and want to learn.”
I challenge that logic. Too many
students are enrolled because they have been sold a bill of goods. They are not
their to learn. Rather, they are there to get a job. They have been told this by
high school teachers, family members, public policy makers, admission officers,
etc. All of them have said the key to getting a good job, making lots of money,
and having a great life is, all together now, a college degree.
These
students fail to take to ownership of their education. They will blame the
instructor for having grading standards, for demanding their work meet certain
criteria, and for inconveniencing their lives. These people do not care about
knowledge.

I work in a Catholic, college prep high school that sends over 95% of our
students to college. We are facing the same issues of unprepared and unmotivated
students as discussed in the article & comments. Every year it seems, we
(and all of our peer institutions in NH) admit very intelligent (high test
score) students, some who have a pathetic work-ethic; who want education to be
entertainment; and who lack basic academic skills. We have implemented a
“front-loaded” program for freshmen that involves a core of battle hardened
teachers along with various support services. Most kids catch on and eventually
become successful. But every year, there are more and more kids who arrive
without an adequate foundation. It’s scary to think about the students coming
up, what they’re going to need, and how many resources they will require. I wish
I could be optimistic but I see all of us caught in the cultural demise of what
learning and education is all about.

I would tend to agree with those regarding lack of work ethic. I see it
everyday. Some students have a sense of entitlement regarding their academic
performance, while others realize that their performance is a reflection of
their hard work and effort. For many students, there is a disconnect between
effort and performance. After many years of schooling this disconnect means
these students are at the bottom of a very large hill. They will need an
extraordinary amount of assistance to make any progress up the hill (forget
about getting to the top). My question is: Is this the job of the university
faculty?

“Everything must be learner-centered.” I have seen first-hand, at the
secondary and post-secondary level, the debilitating effects this mantra has had
on the learning environment. Life beyond the Ivory Tower is not, and the sooner
we teach our self-absorbed students this fact, the better learners (and people)
they will become. The kumbaya feel-good vibe is something I save for students
who give a damn; I’ve been burned far too many times by diverting positive
emotional capital towards students who end up dropping or failing anyway.

Could independent colleges be the next bubble?

Discovered on PhiBetaCons from MSNBC:

By Maurna R. Desmond
updated 3:54
p.m. PT, Fri., Oct. 24, 2008

In June, 157-year-old Antioch College
decided to "suspend operations" at its flagship campus despite a push from
alumni to rescue the flailing institution. At that point, only 60 students were
enrolled, and their $40,000 per year tuition was being heavily subsidized by
Antioch's five newer campuses...

...The crunch will be particularly bitter for the institutions that drained
coffers to build "country club colleges" complete with luxury dormitories, spas and top of the line sports
complexes to lure choice students, hoping that a sharper crowd would lead to
more accretive diplomas, entering a profitable cycle of more successful alumni
and increased donations...

America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

...Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."...

...Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout....

Tuition for State Universities

The Solutions Through Higher Education site as data on tuition of state universities. Click on the following image.

The UK increases scrutiny of university degrees. From the BBC. Another one.

College Football's Highest-Paid Losers

From Forbes Magazine.

College Daze

by Charles Murray
Published in Forbes Magazine 9/1/2008

College is not all it's cracked up to be. Dumbed-down courses, flaky majors and grade inflation have conspired to make the letters B.A. close to meaningless. But another problem with today's colleges is more insidious: They are no longer a good place for young people to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today's colleges are structured to prolong adolescence, not to midwife maturity....[more]

College is not a Must

From the CSM

College is not a Must

........The total damage inflicted on students by the college-is-for-everyone mentality is incalculable. Students who cannot measure up to the demands for a college curriculum are made to feel like failures...........

For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

Wall Street Journal
CHARLES MURRAY

August 13, 2008; Page A17

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses....[more]

America's best colleges

Forbes' list of America's best colleges.

How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science

An opinion piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Excerpts:

• "the shortage of Americans holding or pursuing advanced degrees in fields like computer science defies conventional market explanations. The average annual salary in the field is more than $100,000. Meanwhile, we have a robust supply of high-IQ baristas and college graduates with jobs that a generation ago would not even have required a high-school diploma."
• "Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces. In the United States, students are insulated from the commercial market's demand for their knowledge and skills."
• "Success in the sciences unquestionably takes a lot of hard work, sustained over many years. Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study."
• "on the emotional level, contemporary American education sides with the obstacles. It begins by treating children as psychologically fragile beings who will fail to learn — and worse, fail to develop as "whole persons" — if not constantly praised. The self-esteem movement may have its merits, but preparing students for arduous intellectual ascents aren't among them. What the movement most commonly yields is a surfeit of college freshmen who "feel good" about themselves for no discernible reason and who grossly overrate their meager attainments."
• "The intellectual lassitude we breed in students, their unearned and inflated self-confidence, undercuts both the self-discipline and the intellectual modesty that is needed for the apprentice years in the sciences."

Wall Street Journal's Rankings of Colleges and Universities

As you can guess it's by income. By university, by major.

A few western/northwestern universities

School Name	Region	Starting Median Salary	Mid-Career Median Salary	Mid-Career 10th Percentile Salary	Mid-Career 25th Percentile Salary	Mid-Career 75th Percentile Salary	Mid-Career 90th Percentile Salary
Boise State University (BSU)	Western	$40,800.00	$69,500.00	$37,400.00	$48,700.00	$87,500.00	$110,000.00
Idaho State University	Western	$44,900.00	$73,400.00	$35,400.00	$49,600.00	$101,000.00	$143,000.00
University of Idaho	Western	$44,900.00	$82,000.00	$43,000.00	$56,700.00	$104,000.00	$142,000.00
Washington State University (WSU)	Western	$45,300.00	$84,700.00	$43,600.00	$59,000.00	$113,000.00	$162,000.00
Utah State University	Western	$43,800.00	$78,700.00	$41,600.00	$55,400.00	$101,000.00	$132,000.00
Gonzaga University	Western	$44,900.00	$76,000.00	$47,000.00	$57,400.00	$103,000.00	$138,000.00
Montana State University - Bozeman	Western	$46,600.00	$77,500.00	$40,200.00	$58,100.00	$111,000.00	$151,000.00
New Mexico State University	Western	$44,300.00	$79,500.00	$37,400.00	$53,800.00	$102,000.00	$131,000.00
University of Arizona	Western	$47,500.00	$86,100.00	$44,800.00	$61,700.00	$117,000.00	$160,000.00
University of Montana	Western	$37,300.00	$71,900.00	$37,000.00	$51,500.00	$96,400.00	$138,000.00
University of Washington (UW)	Western	$48,800.00	$85,300.00	$47,000.00	$59,800.00	$115,000.00	$149,000.00
University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV)	Western	$45,200.00	$71,600.00	$39,000.00	$52,400.00	$100,000.00	$128,000.00
University of Nevada, Reno (UNR)	Western	$46,500.00	$82,900.00	$41,900.00	$54,600.00	$113,000.00	$143,000.00
University of New Mexico (UNM)	Western	$41,600.00	$81,600.00	$41,800.00	$59,100.00	$105,000.00	$141,000.00
University of Oregon	Western	$42,200.00	$78,400.00	$38,100.00	$56,200.00	$117,000.00	$186,000.00
Oregon State University (OSU)	Western	$45,100.00	$83,300.00	$46,900.00	$64,000.00	$113,000.00	$146,000.00

Math Is Harder for Girls . . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times.

Heather MacDonald blogs on that Science study touting average scores for girls and boys on the whole being equal.

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting...................[more]

A NY Times blogger also differed with Lewin.

10,000 Diploma Mill Degrees

Spokane diploma mill recipients, from the Spokesman-Review.

Evidence of Sex Discrimination in the Sciences?

From a NY Times blog:

July 23, 2008, 3:38 pm

Sex, Bias and Data

By John Tierney

Debra Rolison, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory, gave a talk eight years ago at the National Academies of Science. It was called, “A Title IX Challenge to Academic Chemistry: Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” Now that her proposal to actively apply Title IX to physical sciences and engineering has been adopted at federal agencies (as I wrote in my Findings column), I’ve been looking at the evidence for bias against women in science. After considering physics last week, let’s examine chemistry and some other fields........

.......You’ll find sweeping assertions of discrimination in academia against female scientists if you read the executive summary of the National Academy of Sciences’ 2006 report, which was issued by a committee led by Donna Shalala. But if you look in the report for evidence of bias, you find studies showing that female graduate students in general (and those without children in particular) are as likely as men to finish their studies, and that they’re as likely to have mentors and assistantship support. According to the report, there were some differences in productivity — male graduate students published more than female students, and tenured male professors published about 8 percent more than female tenured professors — but when men and women were up for tenure, they received it at similar rates.........

........I was also interested to see Dr. Nelson’s comparable figures for white males, because it certainly looks as if their “millennium of affirmative action” has ended. Dr. Nelson found that white male Ph.D.’s are overrepresented among assistant professors in just three disciplines: chemistry, biological sciences and psychology. They roughly break even in two other fields, political science and sociology. And they’re underrepresented in everything else — 10 of the 15 disciplines surveyed by Dr. Nelson.

The Dumbest Generation

A book review.