Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams | Hacker News Reader

Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

latimes.com

150 pointsmbgaxyz263 comments

The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system's priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025.

The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates high."

In a society where there seems to be an increasingly prominent discussion about the (ir)relevance of university degrees, it seems astonishing that they would hold such a position. It's debatable whether there was ever a time when having a university degree actually meant you had a very high likelihood of being "ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school.", but this certainly doesn't help...

When you realize that it's all about equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, it makes much more sense.

> It's debatable whether there was ever a time when having a university degree actually meant you had a very high likelihood of being "ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school."

You're kidding right? That most certainly was the case... many years ago.

As far as I can tell from the article the goal is to reduce the number of classes the students need to graduate. They are not say that that graduates will not meet the graduation requirements for math and english but that they have better ways to get them to learn what they need to learn to graduate. I have no doubt that every extra class that a student needs to take makes it less likely that he/she will graduate. It seems like the change is positive.

The real problem is that high schools aren't preparing some students for college. That's really where things need to change.

I don't know about you but the last time I saw a class take on extra teaching load to help students "catch up" and not sacrifice on other teaching goals was... never. You seem unrealistically hopeful that things are going to work out the way they claim.

But then the change contradicts your statment that the purpose "is to reduce the number of classes the students need to graduate" because if a student readiness for Math and English are low, then it doesn't make sense for them to move ahead.

I agree with your final point. I also believe if the current mandate is to ensure students are prepared for upper course load, then at least the entry to admission perhaps need to be increased? Or at least offer a free one-semester remdial class. If someone is not ready to do a "2x+3=6" then high school education failed to do its job and allowing the student going into a college knowing every college requires some math class to graduate (pre-calc, or as calculus+), only do more harm.

Exactly. And sticking them in a 101 level class when they really should be in remedial can end up having taking the same amount of time if that student now needs to take the class twice (or more) to pass.

Except that they are now allowed to take other classes at the same time, which was previously disallowed.

Well, if those classes don't require the Math/English level they needed, then that makes sense.

The Khan Academy is a great resource for those students. Ideally we would fix the system, but in the meantime we can point them to how they can use software to catch up with (and eventually surpass) their peers.

Fixing high schools for real would require us to get engaged with politics -- that's at least three more years of hard work ahead of us.

No, it's that empirically, the delays imposed by the existing requirement to complete remedial classes before taking any other classes has been counterproductive. They aren't lowering standards to pass substantive classes, the are requiring different mechanisms for closing the gaps that have worked better than the current CSU remediation model in other institutions.

Nowhere in the article was it even suggested that graduation standards would change; given only 19% of students graduate within 4 years, the system is clearly willing to hold the line on graduation standards. Instead, it's discussed at length how to help those students require remedial work to get through in 4 rather than 5 years.

Yes, and more specifically they are hoping to (a) reduce the number of students forced to take remedial classes when they actually were prepared for regular classes and (b) increase the sense of belonging and progress in students who do need remedial work by allowing them to take regular for-credit classes alongside any remedial work. There's no reason a student can't take French 101 just because they aren't up to speed on their math yet, and the current system that prevents them from doing so directly causes increased frustration and dropping out because of the wasted time.

>The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates high."

No. You are completely missing the point here. Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. What this will do is allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need. Remedial courses put an undue financial and time burden on students who would be better served with a bit of motivation and support to get through actual 101 level courses.

Is there a real issue here?

First of all, isn't failing the placement test prima facie evidence that you need remedial courses?

Second, at least my school generally gave you enough rope to hang yourself if you wanted to. You want to take arguably the hardest undergraduate math class in the US? Well go ahead...

> First of all, isn't failing the placement test prima facie evidence that you need remedial courses?

No. An anecdote:

In my tenth grade science class, they had a quiz where you have to memorize the name, atomic number, and atomic size of the first 20 elements of the periodic table. You then fill in the blanks on a table with each of these fields in the columns, and some elements in the rows. I passed this test.

In the first week of my eleventh grade chemistry class, we were presented with the same quiz. I knew I had previously passed this test, so I didn't study for it -- and got an F (~40%, IIRC). My Chemistry teacher -- concerned about my poor performance on this "placement pre-test", asked if I was sure I wanted to take his course. I replied yes, and went on to be the second or third highest mark in the class (an A).

(Of course, then I went into Software Engineering in University, and the lack of labs in our Chemistry courses completely ruined my passion for the subject.)

That's a great point. It's certainly possible to design a bad placement test.

It also seems that the now increasingly common format of multiple choice quizzes would be a "railroad" to designing bad placement tests - ones that verify remembering irrelevant details and how things are named/ordered/classified versus ones that verify skills and understanding of core concepts.

Quizzes (both single and multiple choice) are the worst possible way of testing student's knowledge, because they are sooo... easy.

Trouble here is that human memory is an associative memory - being given one piece of information helps you recall other, related piece. So when the correct answer is written down just few lines below the question you'll probably be able to identify it, even if your overall recall of the material is very bad. This strongly encourages learn-pass-forget style of learning.

To better test student's knowledge you need harder tasks: practical exam, asking to actually apply your knowledge. Or write an essay, which at the very least forces you to put your knowledge in some logical structure. Or the oral exam, where it's evident whether you can have intelligent discussion on the topic or not.

The only advantage of quizzes is that they are quick to do, quick to check, and give the teacher illusion of fairness (because there cannot be any debate whether or not answer is correct and complete).

> Quizzes (both single and multiple choice) are the worst possible way of testing student's knowledge, because they are sooo... easy.

Very much depends.

"Name members of X" is an easy question (unless there is a great amount of material that could be covered).

"Mark the following statements as correct or incorrect. Correct classification adds, wrong classification deducts points." can be a quite difficult type of checkbox-test.

Often there are ways to deduce the likely correct answer due to the way the questions and alternatives are formulated.

It is soooo hard to design a good multiple choice math test. I am trying to do exactly that right now, and resign myself to knowing that it will just be one non-comprehensive piece of evidence.

I did not-so-well on the math subject GRE myself. It was the first time I'd done multiple choice higher(ish) math questions and I just didn't train to triple-integrate fast enough or answer questions about the properties of ring homomorphisms. Write a proof? Sure! I did fine actually getting the PhD. I also placed into 'remedial' math at Caltech according to their placement test; fortunately they let me switch out and up in the first week as it really wasn't appropriate.

The students taking Sally's class all knew what they were in for and many had been preparing for it for all of high school.

No, you are missing the point. For many years now, admissions standards have been so low that rather than teaching the courses they are scheduled to teach, college professors are forced to offer a remedial review of information that should have been mastered in high school. Many, if not most, high school graduates are functionally illiterate, lacking the basic reading and writing skills we took for granted in the recent past.

US students ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math, and 28th in science. Kids in Hungary and the Slovak Republic outranked us.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students...

The sad truth is that the university in the USA are just degree mills looking to make the most money possible. They have no problem steadily lowering their standards to match the steady decline in the US educational system as long as the federally-backed student-loans keep rolling in.

I know the US system has its issues relative to other places, but I have never seen research showing that people are in fact worse going out.

In fact, I feel like I've seen a study showing that the "new math" teaching methodologies that get parents so mad nowadays end up with kids being better at math...

Funny, my kids' math teachers have all stated to me, in public not whispers, they hate the "new math" and it is inhibiting them from teaching math correctly. Since I wasn't educated in the "new math" as a kid I have difficulties helping my children with their homework, which the teachers also admitted to being a problem. Typically I just show them how to solve the problem the way I learned and they pick it up much quicker.

To each their own I suppose.

Does Common Core use what we called "the new math" back in the 1960s? (Tom Lehrer's song is probably as good an intro as any.) Good math teachers seem to be hard to find. That was true in my school days also.

There's some similarities. The old new math was all about learning abstractions early. The new new math is all about approaching math problems from many different angles to build a sense of when you'd use certain techniques and why they work. The common thread is a lack of emphasis on rote application of algorithms without explanation of how they work. Arguably, that's less important in the era of pocket calculators and computers.

I dislike the lack of emphasis on rote memorization. IMO the correct approach should be 1) understand the concepts, then 2) practice until such concept becomes muscle memory, which will serve as the foundation for the next level.

This is the same approach that sports/martial art/artisans use (deliberate practice, etc). The concepts are tools, and being able to use those tools intuitively and instinctively is key to advancing to the next level.

Consider the standard long division algorithm. Would you rather students become fast and accurate in applying it or would you rather students have the skills to understand what's going on and derive it for themselves? Drilling will certainly help with the former, but it crowds out time that could be spent exploring concepts. There's a balance to be struck.

No, Common Core mandates what kids need to learn when, not how they're taught.

The Common Core math curriculum is actually quite good and based on solid academic research on how to best teach those concepts to the majority of kids. Most of the parents complaining about it just haven't taken the time to read through their children's textbooks and understand the alternative techniques.

We don't have textbooks, we have worksheets. Worksheets with little or no explanation as to the expectations of how to complete the work. That part was covered in class. I was not in class, I was at work. My children don't always understand the alternative techniques and cannot explain them to me. I cannot assist my children in learning alternative techniques I did not learn.

Since we're generalizing, I think that most people that complain about complaining parents haven't taken the time to listen to what the parents are actually complaining about.

I can totally understand the frustration at not being able to help their kid at multiplication, of all things.

It would be interesting if teachers could provide cliff's notes of the lessons so parents can help out. Would help the kids too!

Or even better, teachers could have kids prepare explanations for the techniques. Might take a while but I bet the children will remember the techniques way better afterwards.

The information is readily available for free to anyone who bothers to do a little research. Your time would be better spent learning instead of complaining.

I do the research online to figure out how to explain it. The point is I shouldn't have to do that. I'm only guessing at explaining things with the, hopefully, proper context as to how the teacher expects it to be versus what I found on the internet.

But I'm happy everything works out so easily for you. I could only hope that one day I'll be as smart as you seem to be.

Most of the people who hate Common Core have no idea what it is and hate it because That Muslim is associated with it.

It's pure politics.

Agree that Common Core is good as a set of standards and as a set of teaching methods. However, I know how some ed companies put together their "common core" materials -- just permute existing crap and relabel. There is a lot of bad material out there with the Common Core label.

Hatred of Common Core is political in nature, and therefore not amenable to reasoned discussion.

If you hate something on political grounds, you're not going to be amenable to finding out what it actually is, for example.

Why would that be surprising? Hungary and Slovak Republic are countries with long traditions of strong education.

For a while, isn't that what we prided ourselves in here in America?

The US has generally done well in expanding access to schooling. That has not been the same as strength in education.

It's surprising because the per capita expenditure on education is higher in the US than pretty much everywhere else[1]. Assuming everything else is approximately equal (there are enough teachers, teachers havw proper access to materials, the intelligence of children is the same, etc) it implies that either spending more on education has a negative impact or that the US is using the wrong teaching methods.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/apr/21/jeb...

It's not all about the money, it's obvious....

While educational spending per student is higher in the US, the travesty is where that money is spent. It's not all spent on the students. If it were, the US wouldn't have the (overall) terrible public educational system that it has.

https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/SMART-kapp-IQ-Pro-65-inter...

I recently visited a school with one of these in every classroom. Every student has a laptop. Every classroom has an unused commercial "curriculum" product in the corner.

And given how much administrators make, and presumably embezzle, I'm not even sure these are bad investments, in a relative sense.

I'd also look at purchasing power parity... A dollar goes a long way in education in countries with weaker currencies.

Or... it could imply that in the US the perception is your future depends less on whether you can conquer advanced math, so students aren't as motivated to learn. I would argue that perception is a bit wrongheaded, but perceptions are what people use to make decisions.

I grew up poor. A common sentiment among my peers about math was "I will never use this". No teacher ever corrected this sentiment. Teachers and parents alike seemed to accept that the kids were not able to succeed academically. There was no malicious intent, just acceptance. The kids were actors in a social environment in which trying hard in academics was a source of stigma rather than status.

The overwhelming majority of kids (including me) received poor educations. I learned this in college when I was shocked by the difficulty of the courses. The majority of the kids passed high school because the standards were lowered.

I think lowering the standards in college is failing to target the source of the problem. I believe the further you get from hard skills (e.g., math or cs) the more relevant your soft skills become (e.g., cultural fit)[0]. The fact of the matter is that poor people have a distinct culture and it involves many elements that are not normative. I don't know if it is objectively more difficult to assimilate culturally or learn hard skills. On the other hand, I found it so difficult to assimilate to my PhD program in a social science that I didn't finish. I found programming to be much easier, albeit still a difficult mid-career change, than assimilating culturally. If it is the case that acquiring hard skills offers better opportunities for the poor to rise, then that is exactly what teachers and parents should be telling their kids. That is exactly what those with "sympathy for the poor" should be funding.

[0]Brendan Eich & the Googler who wrote about diversity are counter examples. I can (but I won't) argue the case they have better chances financially due to their hard skills compared to a person in a occupation lacking said skills.

Finland was able to turn itself around in a generation from one of the worst pre college education systems in the West to one of the best, ironically using research from the USA. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/january/finnish-schools-r... Of course, a smaller, more homogeneous society would be easier to change than the USA.

I am worried that the sense of entitlement to a college education will just continue to dilute the value of a degree to where only those attending the very elite of schools will have anything of value.

Reading through this article reminds me of decades ago approaches to making sure graduation rates for high school went up. they simply changed the requirements and load, put the burden on faculty, and labeled anyone who disagreed as a bigot/racist/etc. So we ended up with students who do not know how to learn and their understanding of basic math, science, and literature, suffered.

Just what type of degree program will these young people actually obtain? Without the base Eskills how can they manage the more difficult subjects to come?

Ha thanks. I am from Slovak Republic originally. I don't think our schools are that good to be honest but I think there is a stronger emphasis on math/physics and technical skills in schools in Eastern Europe. Probably historical reasons.

I have always thought (guessed, really) that it is because Eastern Europe (and, more recently, many parts of Asia) recognize something that the West sometimes forgets, even though that is where you will find the strongest evidence for it: technical competence can lead to radically better lives.

Another factor: I know several people who went into math because it could not be politicized. There was not a party line to toe.

They should hear about the Pythagoreans' discovery of irrational numbers (in which the discoverer is said to have been drowned at sea for undermining their belief that only positive ratios could exist): https://brilliant.org/discussions/thread/discovery-of-irrati...

Interesting point, but if I remember correctly it was religious zeal rather than political.

I'm a recent graduate and work at my Alma mater, a large semi-private University.

The bar was extremely low, especially at the business school. I was perplexed after reading people's discussion board posts or edit group work. Many students had serious trouble writing coherently or using proper grammar. Math classes were even more ridiculous.

Around sophomore year I gave up on school work in favor of software development and still managed to graduate with a 3.2 GPA.

I'm looking for a new job in part because I disagree with their decision to seriously ramp up marketing and recruitment. IMO if a university can't stand on their faculty / programs / research they aren't really worth attending.

StanislavPetrov is correct - the incentives are set up for the colleges to graduate you. If they don't have enough students, or too many drop out, they won't have enough income.

> US students ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math, and 28th in science. Kids in Hungary and the Slovak Republic outranked us.

I understand the spirit of your example, but mentioning esp. Hungary is quite out of place. I work in an international context and have many colleagues from all over Europe - and the Hungarians absolutely kick major ass (Apologies to the HN community for the choice of language).

That is exactly the point. When the US has the #11 world GDP/capita and Slovakia has the 39th ranked GDP/capita (at 55% of the per capita GDP compared to the US), shouldn't the US strive to have higher educational standards? It's not down putting the Slovak educational system, it's more of a shot at the US system and the lack of emphasis on educational rigor.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

The US should strive to have better standards -- but it seems that there are interests that aim to have a less-educated population. There are strong forces thwarting the establishment of a well-paid and well-educated teaching profession in the US, strong forces against having standards in education (witness the fight against Common Core), and then strong forces determined to co-opt any minor successes in that direction (witness the crap materials produced by our major ed publishers labeled "common core", and the incredible profusion of badly-written tests that are in the end only designed for profit).

The US citizenry allows this, overall. Partly there is the manipulation of reasonable desires for "freedom" and "local control," and part of it comes from the social attitudes toward math and science that lead to STEM being disproportionately dominated by children of immigrants in the US.

Those studies are based on high school students...

Yes lower-ed degree mills are a huge issue, and need regualating, but that hardly applies to CalState, which is a top tier public school: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/cal-state-la-1140

> Those studies are based on high school students...

Appropriately so, when the issue is their preparedness for further education.

> Yes lower-ed degree mills are a huge issue, and need regualating, but that hardly applies to CalState, which is a top tier public school.

The concern is that it appears to be taking a step in the degree-mill direction. Reading the article in full does not assuage that concern:

“Our timeline for implementation is aggressive,” Minor [Cal State’s senior strategist for academic success and inclusive excellence] said, but “we've got more than enough evidence to suggest that our current treatment of students, with the use of developmental education courses, doesn't serve them very well. ... And we have worked with and talked to our faculty... who are ready to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work that we need to do to serve our students better.” [all elisions were made in the Times article, so I am trusting the journalist has not misrepresented Mr. Minor.]

The justification seems to be that this will work because a) other things do not, and b) we want it to work. Anyone who understands how bureaucracies respond to "aggressive" mandates that specify outcomes for unproven methods probably has misgivings.

CSU is literally middle tier in the scheme of public post-secondary education in California, being sandwiched between the junior colleges on the lower end and the University of California on the higher end. While certain campuses like Cal Poly punch above their weight, the system as a whole is not selective.

Just because the dumbest people participating in university courses have gotten a lot dumber doesn't mean that anyone else is affected by this change. Lowering the bar for acceptance is not the same thing as lowering the quality of education.

Hell if anything, universities are making up for the massive shortcoming of public schooling by offering courses to people who would not have otherwise received anything resembling an education.

As for the degree mill statement, who cares? Since when do degrees matter anyway? If destroying the integrity of the accreditation system results in more people getting an education, then so be it. Accreditation is almost never anything more than a racket anyway.

It matters if they have professors that grade on a curve. Take all of those students who wouldn't pass the math entrance exam and put then in the same College Algebra class. They are all terrible students but the curve grading passes 80% of them.

> allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need

If the placement tests are done well, they would indicate that which remedial classes the students may need. If the tests are flawed, fix the tests, don't eliminate them.

While putting them into 101 classes may help them, it slows down the rest of the class -- the students who are up-to-speed on the skills required for the class get less attention spent on them because more focus must be placed on the students who didn't pass placement.

> If the tests are flawed, fix the tests, don't eliminate them.

The tests are fine and we know it. The students are bad and so are their parents, who were also bad students.

Source: I was a bad student who had to change a lot in life. Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades. Teachers can only do so much yet burden almost all of the blame.

> Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades.

Funny how that works.

"Why won't you learn?!" "It doesn't matter to me!" is not a recipe for success.

I appreciate what you said. Made me want to jump out of my chair and clap. But then I would have been escorted to the loony bin, so...

Why do you believe that having a test administered by the school is the only way to identify students needing remedial help? The school is arguing that they can do a better job of identification by using existing grades and test scores. What's your evidence against this argument?

"Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. "

This is where you are wrong. Classes such as remedial English or basic mathematics did not used to count for college credit, they now do. Therefore students can graduate with a lower level of performance than was previously possible.

Incorrect; this is not granting credit for existing remedial courses, it is eliminating the existing set of remedial courses, and the testing and other policies aruoud them, and requiring new models (but not dictating one single model for all campuses.)

There area number of alternative remediation models that have been used in other institutions without the problems experienced by the current CSU remedial ed program that campuses may be guided by. This is all expressly laid out in the article.

You're right that there is some flexibility, but the basic move is to grant credit for remediation [see below]. Whether that means turning the intro courses into multiple semester courses or giving credit for summer prep. The problems with basing placements on high school grades is why they had to create the assessments in the first place. The better solution is the early assessment program, but since California has eliminated the high school graduation exam requirement, it gets harder to see which college bound student needs help in the 11th/12th grade level.

"Freshmen who would usually be directed to developmental English or math will instead enroll in the same general education classes as their peers, but they might receive additional tutoring or take the course at a slower pace, stretched over multiple semesters. A summer program for incoming freshmen who need extra preparation will be redesigned to count for credit." http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...

> but the basic move is to grant credit for remediation [see below].

Your quote does not really support that description; it suggests that they will be directed into either non-remedial for-credit courses with additional tutoring or other support, or courses with the same content (and credit) as non-remedial courses but a stretched timeframe. The former is clearly not credit for remediation (the only “remediation” is outside of the for-credit classwork), the latter arguably could be described that way but the content is not remedial, only the manner of presentation.

> since California has eliminated the high school graduation exam requirement, it gets harder to see which college bound student needs help in the 11th/12th grade level.

It was suspended through 2018, and there is a recommendation to repeal it, but the exit exam wasn't based on current curriculum standards and the other assessments (including several in eleventh grade) that are aligned with those standards aren't being eliminated. So I don't think it has any bearing on how hard it is to identify students falling behind.

I think the point is- courses that cover material that used to be considered below college level will now be given college credit. Or courses that cover college material will now be stretched into two semesters, doubling their credit. The logical result of this is that the material level that is covered in college will go down, as people will be using up credits on lower level courses.

HS graduation exams are useful feature of most successful school systems. That so many people were passing those but still requiring remedial instruction indicates that there was something lacking. However, if graduation rate is the metric you are optimizing for, there is no need to pull those in.

On the one hand, I remember my high school math teacher complaining about how colleges even had to offer remedial education (she considered it proof that high schools were generally failing to do their jobs).

On the other hand, I personally didn't go straight from high school to college, so I was given a particular placement exam, and when I passed it I was put in college algebra (instead of being allowed to take the next harder placement exam). It was clear to me after about a week that I remembered more math than the school thought I had. Of course, I should have tested out of the class and used the free time to take something that would have been more useful to me.

I wish the school had been less rigid about which math class they would allow me to take. But the obvious outcome with this policy change will be that students will have to decide which class to take, and some will get it wrong. Will they be allowed to fail? Will that help double the graduation rate? Will more classes simply include remedial material? If so, is that an improvement?

The problem is students who should be in remedial courses are going to turn the first year of college into High School Part II for everyone.

If a university lowers the bar, it will reduce the value on the job market of a degree from that university - names like Hardvard and Yale and whatnot have a high reputation, whilst they hand out degrees with the same names as other less reputable universities.

This is the only reason Harvard and Yale have any value. You could take the first year student intake at these institutions and distribute them randomly to other universities and the end result would be the same as letting the students study at Yale or Harvard.

No. If you distributed the students admitted to Harvard among other universities their education would be impaired by the fact that the professors would have to dumb down the material taught in their classes to their less bright colleagues. Not to mention that the professors themselves would not be as smart and accomplished as Harvard professors.

I think you are overestimating how much influence professors have (something I lament as a former professor). The high achieving students succeed despite anything their professors might have done or said.

A distinct flavor of hubris arises from self-proclaimed brilliance being so easily impaired by a silver spoon that isn't quite as shiny.

Yet it is certainly true. More than the professors, I think the peer group matters in pushing students to their full potentials.

It probably has more to do with the simple name of the university opening doors.

Investors and employers will give more to a Harvard grad than to an equally accomplished state-school grad.

"the professors would have to dumb down the material taught in their classes to their less bright colleagues."

A fascinating side effect of open courseware and online lecture videos is the elimination of that peculiar historical belief. For example, per video evidence, the kids in Professor Strang's linear algebra classes are definitely not observably smarter than the kids I met in my linear algebra class. There is a small measurable quantitative difference, but in practice there is no observable qualitative difference. The much maligned concept of human biological differences observationally do not extend to mere ivy-attendance.

Counter-anecdote:

I passed University physics by watching MIT OpenCourseWare lectures and those kids learned in a week what took us three...

They will always have the cream of the crop. It's not comparable to a Cal state.

> The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates high."

This is how highschool was for me. I dropped out of a highschool with a 98% graduation rate. In that situation, no one cared if people were learning or even about what's best for the society or economy. For the school it's about building a system that gives them the desired numbers. Second anecdotal: Education has been giving girls better grades. There is a college in California that is famous for their animal science and veterinary programs. Girls don't want to work with big animals. So the school simply does not have enough people interested in big animals. They tried lowering the GPA requirement just so they could let enough boys into the program. This caused their school ranking to fall, and they immediately reversed the decision.

Schools are playing politics. Favoring girls in education has led to problems across the board as people just assume girls will want to do the same jobs at the same rate.

All anecdotal for sure. Definitely nothing conclusive. Just thought I'd add my 2 cents.

PwC, E&Y and others dropped university requirement because they don't tell anything about people.

This is a downward spiral. Universities get less picky, A inflation, more money for universities but devaluing degrees. Companies catch on and drop the requirement for degrees.

"Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found that screening students based on academic performance alone was too blunt an approach to recruitment. It found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken."

http://www.ey.com/uk/en/newsroom/news-releases/15-08-03---ey...

Companies will not drop the requirement for degrees, they will simply want the degrees from the universities/colleges that don't engage in this nonsense.

No, they have dropped the requirement, see the source.

I think this is not fair.

First, many college remedial courses don't achieve their aims. They have high DFW rates (D means you can't progress, as C or better is usually the prerequisite, F is fail, W is withdraw). Their graduates often don't do that well in the next class anyway.

Second, there is a lot of evidence that providing good teaching and targeted intervention in the 101 class (rather than the remedial class) increases achievement and advancement. One really interesting example is the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars program. It is not remedial, but it does take students who are no more prepared for calculus than any other students and ask them to spend more time on the harder material in class, and these students do better. Many WES students are from demographics with lower math achievement in regular classes.

While remedial classes have face value, they don't actually have a track record of success! Why persist with something that does not achieve what it aims for?

This is part of a long and slow change in the role of higher education. Previously, college was seen as being for people who academically deserved it. College was not for teaching high-school level concepts, it was for teaching advanced concepts to students who had already demonstrated some bona fides. Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and productive citizens, even if that means re-teaching the basics.

[1998] http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/28/local/me-54085

>The Times reported in March on data from the California State University system showing that roughly half of the freshmen at the Fullerton campus failed basic-skills placement exams and had to enroll in remedial math and English courses. New statistics released Wednesday show that those students had a mean high school grade-point average of 3.1, or a B.

> "How can it be that students can be getting Bs in English and not pass a fairly basic test and end up having to take a remedial class?" Klammer asked... "We cannot afford, as a state, to be reteaching high school classwork at the university," he said.

> Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and productive citizens, even if that means re-teaching the basics.

This seems to be the case with grad programs now too: doing the teaching that undergrad should have already done. Turtles all the way down.

In which departments have you seen that? [Not denying, genuinely curious]

i've seen some pretty shitty grad students but i don't really blame the grad school. a lot of non-cs undergrads go into cs grad programs with barely any programming experience. in my experience, the grad programs don't teach them the fundamentals (assuming they know them) but instead teach very specific niche areas. They end up never learning basic programming fundamentals.

If someone is studying computability or formal languages or algorithms or ML in a CS department, they don't really need to be programmers.

My sister is a graduate student in Neuropsychology. As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.

Simmilarly, most research in CS will involve using programming as a tool, even if it is not the final product. The problem is that in CS, no one thinks to require the graduate students to take basic programming classes.

> As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.

But for students focusing in complexity, they may not need to program at all, so naturally it makes sense there would not be much emphasis on programming.

in my opinion they don't need to BE programmers but they need to be ABLE to program.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=398

relevant song by scott aaronson

Obligatory coding horror reference:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

I'm in physics/chemistry/materials fields. I've been around several 'world-class' institutions in the UK and USA, and had mixed experiences -- far more mixed than you'd think looking at simple rankings. I wouldn't like to draw any hard conclusions though, because I only have anecdotes, but perhaps others can comment.

There is strong financial incentive among power brokers to promote as much tuition cost and student debt as humanly possible, especially when the government underwrites it, making it zero-cost to both the lender and the school. The only losers are the taxpayers, who are abstract enough to be a non-entity, and the student, who is made to believe that he must obtain and service such debt to have a successful adult life.

Perhaps the US wouldn't have this issue if we had a strong vocational program culture.

Yes, I suspect that the real reason the students "don't need" remedial programs to complete their degrees is that the specific degrees are actually vocational rather than academic.

An incoming student that can't write a cogent essay or do basic math problems simply isn't ready for any traditional degree program. The best they can do, if they're not going to grind through remedial courses, is to start training for a job.

>Yes, I suspect that the real reason the students "don't need" remedial programs to complete their degrees is that the specific degrees are actually vocational rather than academic.

x2. The more academic requirements of a 4yr degree are not strict necessities of those fields. If college is going to stand in for vocational school then it's a waste of time/effort/money to make those students take what amounts to academic fluff.

The problem is that until colleges acknowledge their vocational role every department will be pushing for every other department to require students to take a few of their classes on the basis that it is a requirement of a well rounded education (which is not the kind of education students in the more vocational programs are seeking).

It's not clear that even needs to be handled at the university level in that case, though. Community colleges already offer a range of vocational programs, with faster completion and much lower costs. This seems like purely some kind of prestige treadmill, where people really want a CC degree but employers demand a 4-year university degree, so we need to start offering 4-year university degrees that are CC degrees in disguise to bridge the gap. An alternate approach might be to convince people and employeers that a vocational CC degree is perfectly valid and respectable. But that's probably harder to do, so I don't really blame people for going this route, just seems not really ideal.

I think there's always been an interplay between different roles.

If you go back enough, the historical role of college has been that of a "finishing school" for the higher/educated classes. More so, the further you go back.

In places with a more conscious class heritage (eg UK), talented students saw these colleges as a merit-based ticket into the higher classes. Over time, academic merit gained prominence.

Social class largely overlaps with academic merit, so the identities didn't clash too hard. But, you can see both heritages in modern Universities.

For example...Colleges (esp US) are very interested in college as "tranformative years of my life" experience. Generally speaking, this is a luxury only the rich could afford. For the median family, this is still a massive expense.

TLDR: roles change.

This problem is exacerbated by the suspension of the high school graduation exam. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/hs/

College was not for teaching high-school level concepts, it was for teaching advanced concepts to students who had already demonstrated some bona fides ... the onus is on the college ... even if that means re-teaching the basics.

If I put on my tinfoil hat, I start to think that the UC change is intended (at least in part) to avoid exposing the failures of California's primary and secondary schools. If they stop doing these tests, it becomes more difficult to demonstrate that the education up through high school was a failure.

EDIT: formatting

I TAed at a Cal State and worked in the math tutoring center. If the tests were like other standardized tests I encountered there, they probably were not a very good measurement of anything. And the remedial courses, best I could tell, did not help.

Some people seem to be interpreting this as lowering the bar. That position supposed that these tests are more accurate measurements than grades and SAT scores. I believe you are putting way too much faith in these tests. Also, the plan of "stretch" courses seems like a better one - motivation is a large factor in performance, and students will be more motivated in classes that count towards their degree, and don't tell them they preemptively failed.

K-12 education needs lots of improvement. But the Cal State system can't affect that. This is a change they can make, and it seems like it will help bring the kids who need it up to speed faster.

Your second paragraph is spot on. These tests are not very accurate, and students who see a bunch of remediation rather than progress in front of them often quit or switch majors, rather than gearing up and doing the math that is required!

Let's just drop meritocracy all together. Everything is subjective, right?

Seriously though, I'm worried about our future as a spieces. The knowledge and technologies we have developed, which require nurturing. We nurture modern civilization by making sure the smartest get into positions where they can express their intellect. Part of that process needs to be keeping rigours standards in place when it comes to education.

Nowhere does the article say they are lowering standards. They are just changing how they handle students who need extra preparation in English or math.

Before: give them standard English and math tests, and if they do not pass make them take a year of non-credit remedial classes before letting them take any credit glasses.

After: everyone can take credit classes. For those that need extra work in math or English there will be programs that work concurrently with or as part of credit classes to catch them up on math or English.

> Nowhere does the article say they are lowering standards. They are just changing how they handle students who need extra preparation in English or math.

Just re-read the sentence dispassionately.

You do realize that these are people who would flunk TOEFL if the TOEFL was a requirement the way it is for foreign student? Why are we accepting people who fail basic English into a university that has English as a primary teaching language? What are going to be the classes that these students would be taking concurrently with "Expressing yourself in paragraphs 49"? All of the soft sciences require papers that are graded. So they are out. Hard sciences? Nope, they are require algebra and our students cannot do basic algebra ( let us not pretend that universities have math proficiency requirements for admissions - it is just basic algebra and some geometry plus ability to reason ) or do basic problem solving. So I guess those classes would be yoga and basket weaving.

And in just 6-7 years ( these people won't graduate in 4 ) we would be wondering why is that we are having so few people getting jobs in STEM fields.

> Let's just drop meritocracy all together. Everything is subjective, right?

You mean it sarcastically, but you are literally correct. What has "merit" in so-called meritocracies is entirely subjective.

Unfortunately not. The reason meritocracy has “won” over the last 200 years is those societies that didn’t embrace it lost the wars that were fought.

This is so completely wrong. Wars are won and lost for many, many reasons. Food, resources, location, coincidence, weather, politics, sheer luck.

This is the sort of crap people complain about whenever the meritocracy comes up. Sorry, but merit is not whatever you want it to be after the fact when you point to something that succeeded. That's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Yes wars have been won and lost for many reasons over history, but since the development of meritocracy (last 200 years) those societies that have embraced it have won all the important wars.

Do you really think the nobility just rolled over and gave the middle classes all the power because they asked nicely?

Edit. Actually that is exactly what merit is. Meritocracy is not rule by the just, but rule by those most likely to be winners. It just happens that given the opportunity the “winners" are most likely to be found within then middle class.

Can you give examples of societies that have embraced meritocracy? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Singapore was explicitly created as a meritocracy, when it was granted independence from Malaysia by England. This was a deliberate contrast to Malaysia, where the government did and still does explicitly promote policies that benefit the Malay minority at the expense of the more economically successful Chinese minority. Singapore is now one of the most prosperous countries in the world.

Fun fact: the first president of Singapore was senior wrangler at Cambridge, which according to Wikipedia has been described as the "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain"[1].

Singapore also has one of the world's most liberal immigration policies, allowing practically anyone in who can get a reasonably paying job, instead of privileging the employment of its own citizens like most countries do.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler_(University_of...

All the ones that speak the language you just wrote in.

More seriously any society not ruled by a hereditary nobility is a meritocracy. The nobility did not embrace this change - they just lost the war with the middle class.

I should say that no society is a perfect meritocracy and that the past winners are always conspiring to keep out the new, but overall most current societies in the modern world are a vast improvement over the old, inbred-nobility ruled alternative.

I would take a look at Fukuyama's "Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay". The first hints of meritocracy were in China during the Qin and Han dynasties, where exams where used to provide positions in bureaucracy to those not of noble birth.

Prussia was really the first example of this in the west, where in 1770 all civil servants were required to pass a written exam.

I think the East India company were the first western group to copy the Qin exam based merit system [1].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

Nonsense. The Chinese have had a meritocratic civil service for ~1500 years. They spent the early 19th century being thrashed by the British who only established an exam based civil service in 1850s.

The Napoleonic French were a lot more meritocratic in their military and civilian career structure than the British who beat them on the seas.

The Chinese were not thrashed by the British in the early 19th C. - they were thrashed by the East India Company who had embraced meritocracy long before then (they actually copied the Chinese system).

Napoleon is a classic example of the success of meritocracy - it took the combined effort of the whole European nobility to defeat France and even then it was a close run thing.

I don't think a meritocracy requires the formal education system we have. I'm sure the top trades people in ancient times were high in society.

Also I don't think we have the meritocracy people claim we have. Being born into a well connected wealthy family is such a huge head start. And some of the people at the top seem to have little merit, for example the kardashians seem to be famous because they're famous. Not to pick on them but they are a public example of how money gets money.

college and other education should be about adding learning to the recipients and not about measurement.

People should learn things as they want, and not be required to meet arbitrary standards and degrees to obtain societal benefits.

A hundred years ago ~1% of the people went to college. Now it's more than 50%. The societal function of college has changed.

Measurement is a huge value add. It's proof to employers that you know the basics. It's something that you can use to get a job. Learning for the sake of learning is great and all but you also have to put food on the table.

how many employers give job offers based on GPA?

GPA or any other grades is bad proxy for actual ability and employability.

Humans are good at studying for evaluations and measurements. But colleges that teach for that are a waste of time.

"People should learn things as they want, and not be required to meet arbitrary standards and degrees to obtain societal benefits."

Then don't ask me to pay for you to do so. Check some books out of the library.

People are paying a lot of money to universities in exchange get a better life for themselves. If it doesn't improve their skills in any measurable way, we should try something else.

thats ok. we are in a transitional phase. Most of what you learn in college goes to waste anyway.

College proves that you can start something and finish it. Like you can do engineering, but even graduates of MIT need years in industry to learn the actual skills needed for their jobs.

If the goal of college is just to prove you can prove that you can do start something and finish it, we can find a lot cheaper ways of doing that. You can even get a job that doesn't require college to prove that.

In the industrial manufacturing based economy people could get good jobs without basic undergraduate 'skills'. Now in the knowledge economy, they can't.

yes, and that's why they should go to college and learn those skills.

It used to be that community college was the place to go if you lacked the credentials to go straight into a 'real' college now that I think about it. Is this not the case any more?

lack the credentials or money to pay.

'real' colleges offer better networking, but often great teachers can be found in community colleges, where profs are not selected primarily for research.

A minority of students learn better in competitive environments. Self motivated students learn better in constructive non competitive environments which are more like apprenticeships than competition for grades.

Actually meritocracy is bullshit really. How can you measure merit ? By the outcomes ? Are you seriously believing outcomes measure merit ? If so I have bad news for you.

As for the argument that society will collapse because of the democratization of education and degrees and whatnot,it's at least a hundred years old argument. In France the right-wing has been whining about it for 50 years (especially regarding math) and we still have mathematicians that are among the best in the world.

Outcomes on realistic tests of performance, yes.

I think you are thinking of "merit" as some intrinsic property of a person as opposed to measured performance. Some things are hard to measure, but many things are not. Putting people into positions based on the best estimates of how well they would perform is meritocracy.

What is your system for selecting people for positions if not by how well they would perform at the positions? What this typically devolves into patrimonialism or clientelism...where positions are given to related persons, friends, or in exchange for political power.

Your last paragraph is filled with a lot of ideologically loaded terms. "Democratize", "Right-wing"...

Okay here's a good example:

A company hires and pays a person to do job a, said person has skills and knowledge of topics x and y and gets the job done using skills x and y.

The same company hires person b, who doesn't have skills x and y, but still has the accreditation. Person b, doesn't get the job done, still gets paid and the company did not have the problem solved, or service/product to sell.

Further, if we don't set rigorous standards for admission and graduation the smarter people have their accreditations devalued. Additionally, employers and other agencies will not know who they are getting.

The idea lowering standards so 'anyone' can get into anything is dangerous, and creates chaos. It's anti-progressive.

Subjective is not an allowed thought with respect to politics, see recent events at google. My suspicion is loosening STEM requirements is a reaction to tightening political belief requirements.

My point is its not so much a weakening, as its a redirection back to the traditional place of a college for indoctrination of theology.

In a community of extreme political intolerance, algebra matters very little compared to political purity.

Heinlein, Friday

When it was noted that Californians with college degrees earned more than those with high school diplomas alone, the California voters passed a law granting all citizens a bachelor’s degree upon graduation from high school.

That sounds awfully close to Idiocracy. Next up, law degrees from Costco.

I recently interviewed a master's CS student at a decent state school looking for a part-time job. She had barely programmed before the master's CS (undergrad was in MIS). Did not know what a hash table / dictionary / etc. was. So troubling for someone soon to graduate with a master's in CS.

That school may have once been decent, but is no longer. Employers are gonna have to start looking at degree award dates very closely. They don't have time for that, though, so maybe that's a good idea for a website.

Which state school?

As mentioned elsewhere, sadly many CS masters programs are designed with the assumption that students already have solid foundations from undergrad CS, but now are often admitting people without those skills.

Also cheating is unbelievably rampant at many state schools (I say this from witnessing it first hand).

Lastly, all the MIS programs I'm familiar with are a sad joke. Often the result of a turf war between a business school and the engineering school, the MIS department is often incredibly weak on the technical side.

CS is a broad discipline. It doesn't necessarily include much programming or data structures, depending on the student's focus. If you want programmers then you should be recruiting based on other qualifications than a MSCS degree, or expect to provide a lot of training.

The level of elitism in this thread is staggering. Should kids that are not at the top of their class be left to work in the salt mines? Do we just abandon the idea of educating people and make all universities a private "smart people only" club? The CSU system's mandate is to provide accessible education to all Californians. Ragging on them for working towards that goal makes no sense. The UC system is still the most prestigious, selective public university system in the world, and this will not affect that.

> Should kids that are not at the top of their class be left to work in the salt mines?

This is the canonical definition of a strawman argument.

How about looking the issue differently: what can education do to make students better at Math and English? Focus on these two disciplines.

> The UC system is still the most prestigious, selective public university system in the world, and this will not affect that.

Is the UC system more prestigious than Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Imperial, or top prepas/grandes ecoles? Even the most jingoistic American wouldn't argue that the UC system is more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge for undergraduate studies.

I mean I don't know if Oxford and Cambridge should be considered "public" the way the UCs are, but UC Berkeley and UCLA are in that tier, and like, does changing that line from "in the world" to "in the US" really change the point?

You're confusing a public school system with individual schools. Of course UC Merced is not on the same level as Oxford or LSE. But Berkeley and UCLA certainly are[1].

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

But the article isn't talking about UC, it's talking about CalState ... this link is old, but emphasizes differences between the two school systems: https://www.imperial.edu/ivc/files/WHAT_IS_THE_DIFFERENCE_BE... ... the original article points out this change is in effect at the 23 California State University campuses, and doesn't refer at all to the 9 or 10 (?) University of California campuses.

The proper level of education doesn't really mean college education - having 100% people go from high school to college isn't a goal, shouldn't be a goal and is not a desirable thing in any way whatsoever. For many "life paths" that any society needs going to college is a good thing, and for many of them it's a bad thing, wasting many years. This education should be available for the people who choose it, and people shouldn't be excluded for economic reasons; but for many people foregoing this choice wouldn't be a "wasted opportunity" but a good thing.

If anything, the USA education system has a problem with "overeducation" and not undereducation, mainly because weakness of vocational studies causes people to spend many extra years for gaining skills that could have been gained in a much shorter and efficient vocational study program.

It's not a problem for wealthy kids who can afford to spend a few years on the parts of the "college experience" that (in some cases) is less like investment in skills but more like a fancy self-improvement hobby, but we harm the poorer people if we make the education path unnecessarily long and thus expensive; it may make gaining the proper skills unaffordable even if education itself would be free, simply because they can't afford to waste this time without income before starting full time work.

>The proper level of education doesn't really mean college education - having 100% people go from high school to college isn't a goal, shouldn't be a goal and is not a desirable thing in any way whatsoever.

I guess that this is where we will have to disagree. I feel like this is the same sort of attitude that leads to "tracking" in schools, which can be devestating to ones educational future. We certainly do not need to enforce 100% equitable outcomes in higher education. But there is still a massive gap in equity of opportunity afforded to those who missed out on key skills in high school for one reason or another. These people should not be relegated to some vocational training program simply because they could not pass a multiple choice algebra quiz on entrance to a university.

Saying college students should be able to pass remedial math and english tests isn't elitism.

If you can't pass a basic remedial test in basic math and basic english how are you going to take college level courses?

Where are you getting elitism from? Having some basic minimum standards isn't elitism. It's having standards.

It's elitism when you realize being born into the wrong school district and/or with the wrong parents may increase your chances of not being able to acquire those basic skills.

What we should really do is drop all grading systems and test scores entirely. They are flat out bad for people's self esteem. So long as people show up to class sometimes they should get a special badge they can put on that says "I went to college!"

I honestly cannot tell if this comment is sarcastic. There are legitimate arguments for this approach as kids identify early with "bad at math" for example, and that sticks with them.

My comment above had two points for a while, then for some reason was voted down and now has zero points. So here's an appeal to authority: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rich-kids-stay-rich-poo...

Maybe they should work in salt mines? What is so bad about that? We need to get rid of this stigma that if you're not an intellectual then you're automatically some poor serf at the bottom rungs of society. Your attitude is a perfect example of elitist culture, that anyone who doesn't have an "advanced" ""education"" isn't worthy of any dignified position in society. Forcing all people to go through a watered down higher education is wasteful and stupid. Higher education is a thing only needed for certain roles and should only be attempted by a fraction of the population.

What's wrong with working a mine? What's wrong with being a plumber? What's wrong with being an electrician? What's wrong with manual labor? What's wrong with the countless good paying jobs that don't require a college education?

I believe you may be the one with the elitist problem.

"smart people only"

Isn't that the whole point of university? I don't get it.

You might be asking how one fails the state testing (then gets put in remedial class) but gets accepted to college (particularly a CA state one).

Let me tell you a funny yet embarrassing story. I went to GaTech and I failed the English Regents test not once but twice!

Now at first I thought it was my fault. I didn't really take the test seriously. However I was seriously embarrassed. After all this was Georgia not California.

Long story short after having to go through a remedial english class that was a complete waste of my time and somewhat embarrassing I learned the reason I was failing.... the exam testers could not read my hand writing!

To this day I'm still sort of jaded about the whole thing.

I feel that this story needs a date to make any sense. 2015? Wow that's completely ridiculous and infuriating. 1984? Yeah that makes sense, handwriting was a critical skill for effective communication in the college setting.

I believe it was circa 2001. My whole life I have had terrible penmanship but most teachers still had the ability to read my writing.

There were a couple of other problems that exacerbated the situation. I believe you had to use their pencils and their blue notebook. This was a problem for me because by that time I had gotten quite accustomed to typing and when I did write I used a high end mechanical drafting pencil.

I didn't find out about the illegible part till I had my college's dean check out why I had failed it yet again.

He should have been told regardless. I can totally understand, sympathize, and even potentially agree with an evaluator not wanting to deal with sloppy handwriting, but a context-free failing grade is just totally unacceptable.

My brother and parents were quite upset one year when he failed his 6th grade standardized test. 20% -- so low! They were talking about his study habits etc etc and I asked to see the results. Perfect 20% in each topic. How many choices for answers? 5. Hm. Can I see your form? You filled in the B bubble for "test form" and it was an A form.

This seems like they're focusing on the wrong metric. They look and say, "Graduates earn more money" and say "ok, for the best NPV, let's reduce the cost and increase the graduates".

The problem is they mistake causality with correlation. If you focus strictly on graduation, without improving the students, then you will find that graduates will earn less. This same problem happens in high school - lowering the standards of students does improve graduate rates, but not necessarily life outcomes.

An extreme example of this is to observe, "On days when there is a lot of ice cream sold, violent crime is higher, therefore let's make it harder to sell ice cream." The reality is hot days cause the rise in both ice cream sales and violent crime. If you only address the visible metric of ice cream sales, you miss the underlying cause.

This abuse of statistics is rampant in education.

College graduation and home ownership were markers of success that were misinterpreted as the source of success.

Very good point. I saw some research that suggested that once you control for income and SAT scores, where you applied to school (Signaling ambition) was as much a predictor of success as where you actually attended.

In my opinion it is part of a wider trend, of both public- and private-sector schools, moving away from the "education business" and more toward the "diploma business."

Yes. So the question is, "Are schools giving up their academic rigor, or just facing up to the reality that students aren't learning anything anyway?"

My soft anecdotal observation is...

- At my large public undergrad, very little classroom learning happened for 80+% of the students outside the hard subjects. (Physics, Computer Science, etc) 80+% of the students in the hard subjects learned a lot in the class. Many students learned a lot outside of the classroom.

- At my private research focused professional grad school, there was a lot more learning, but even then more of the learning was outside the classroom. It was also possible to treat the experience as a multi-year job interview, and do fine skating by with low grades.

College is really the new high school...

And this hurts the people they're trying to help. If you devalue highschool to the point you need another 4 years to prove you have the basics, anyone who's doesn't the privileged to wait that extra 4 years is that much more screwed.

Perhaps devaluation explains the trend towards requiring ever-higher degrees (Masters and PhD) in jobs that once were satisfied with a Bachelors.

Next steps: Lets make it free!

There's no point to making college compulsory if the banks can't get rich off student loans.

Another four years of baby sitting please!

It's easy to get trapped in those courses. I took the placement test and tested way lowered in math because I basically wasn't very good. The class was extremely difficult for me. I remember being required to solve square roots by hand without a calculator ("show your work!"). Probably fun for some people but I was going to be there forever, and programming was a breeze.

Instead I simply studied the placement exam, retook it and passed into college level math and dropped my other classes. Higher level math classes are much easier in my opinion because there isn't the same emphasis on process but instead on competency. This is also the biggest difference between high school and college classes in my opinion.

Later on life i do enjoy solving square roots by hand for fun.

They want to lower the bar so that they can pass more low-mediocre people though the system, give them the false idea that they are intelligent and eventually give them government jobs. They need a class of useful idiots in power to achieve their goal of a complete technocratic surveillance state. These type people are already taking power positions all over and totally changing the working culture. Look at that guy who wrote the google diversity criticism memo, it wasn't even a controversial thing, yet he was brought down by this mob of new brainwashed low-intellect people pushing an insane agenda. The kind of person who can't pass a remedial English exam or do any kind of advanced mathematics is perfect for this role. Having advanced reasoning skills, language and mathematics skills actually puts them at a disadvantage here, what they need is a new class of bullies and manipulators that will go along with whatever they are told.

"At Cal State, about 40% of freshmen each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees."

This is crazy to me. I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?

Cal State LA Accept rate: 68%

UCLA Accept Rate: 18%

uhh.. this is a really messed up comparison considering UCLA is the most applied to college in the world.

> UCLA is the most applied to college in the world.

That's just your opinion really.

It is a good school. Most applied in the world doesn't mean anything. A trade school could be more applied than UCLA.

But UCLA does have Alan Kay, creator of smalltalk, and Terrance Tao one of the most famous mathematician. Also their med school is nice.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-college-made-histor...

Cal Poly Accept rate: 29.5%

UC Irvine Accept rate: 40.7%

Not sure where we're going with this though.

Even better, UC Merced Acceptance rate: 73.7%

It's the newest UC and also middle of nowhere.

A quick Google search tells me the closest Cal State to me, Sacramento, has a 67.3% acceptance rate. Slightly higher than the national average of 64.7%, although I'm not sure how trustworthy those numbers are.

I went to CSUS. I'm very surprised it's that low. Shortly after the one year I went there, they implemented a "fast track" acceptance which basically meant they accepted you as long as you had a high school diploma.

It's amazing that there's such a thing as remedial classes in a university, but hey, how else are we going to get an adequately diverse student body?

Are you insinuating white people don't need remedial classes?

Are you insinuating that white people can't be diverse?

They can't be racially diverse if they are white. If you mean educationally diverse, you're just trolling.

So White people are all one race, now?

Germans and Slavs and Scandinavians and Italians are all the same?

When did that happen?

Yes, it's Caucasian. There is a difference between race and country of origin. I mean wow.

Huh. Hasn't always been. Look up the history of race sometime.

Race is politics and not biology. I mean wow.

Are you saying Germans and Slavs and Italians aren't the same race, i.e. Caucasian? That's what you were stating. I understand the origins of race, but you implied they weren't the same race.

Maybe they're the same race now, but historically it hasn't been that simple.

Hell, Italians and Irish haven't always been considered White.

> So White people are all one race, now?

Always have been, pretty much since the classic idea of defined “races” was formed, in early race models—whether in two-race (Caucadoid/Mongoloid), three race (adding Negroid), or five-race (white, yellow, brown, black, and red) models—whites were, alone or with some others, one race.

There's an entire department of the federal government whose first, or perhaps even only, priority is to deal with the fact that OP indelicately mentioned.

which department? i seem to be missing the implication

Most directly, Ed. But now that you mention it, Justice is a close second.

jeff sessions justice department?

I'm commenting on trends that have persisted over administrations, and certainly accelerated under the last one. I don't pretend to know what's going on with this one, except to note that the career staff of many agencies are in semi-open revolt.

Of course all kinds of people can land in these remedial classes if they are not prepared.

Now, I ask you, which schools do a better job of preparing students for college level work, the schools white kids get to go to or the schools black kids have to go to? If you are wondering, look at the AP classes offered at say Palo Alto high school vs Crenshaw high school:

http://schools.latimes.com/school/los-angeles/crenshaw-senio...

http://schools.latimes.com/school/palo-alto/palo-alto-high/

Highlights:

Proficient in Math: PA: 76% Crenshaw: 2.5% (not a typo)

Proficient in English: PA: 84% Crenshaw: 18%

Now, are you saying we shouldn't let bright kids from bad schools get into college?

>Now, are you saying we shouldn't let bright kids from bad schools get into college?

Show me where I implied that.

I was just using your technique of putting words in someone else's mouth, with a question mark at the end. See GP post.

Palo Alto Avg. Income: $126,771

Inglewood Avg. Income: $43,394

Wouldn't it make sense to compare like-to-like, and choose two schools in areas with similar incomes?

Just btw. but in Germany ~43,000$ would be considered a not too bad income, certainly not an income where one would expect people to have ~2.5% math proficiency.

Sure, but a drink in Germany isn't going to run me $7 to $12, it would be less than half that usually. In a major city in the US, your living standards on $43k a year will be much lower than in Germany.

An average 1 bedroom in Inglewood ranges from $1350 to $1600 a month. An average 2 bedroom ranges from $1650 to $2000 a month.

Someone making $43k a year would end up with $2,667.51 a month as take home pay. This would not include health insurance, which could run anywhere from $100 to $400 a month (and potentially much, much higher).

From a different article about this same subject[1]:

> The policy announcement “aims to address inequities in college readiness head-on in order to close gaps in degree attainment and afford all students the opportunity to succeed,”

When a policy like this is couched in that sort of language, it's pretty obvious that the changes aren't being made because white kids are having trouble graduating.

[1]: https://edsource.org/2017/cal-state-adopts-new-policies-to-h...

Eh, numbers seem to match up with national numbers, and there's not a huge difference between ethnicities https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_270.asp

The scary one to me is "field of study: education" : 41.1.

41% of future teachers need remedial education? Wonder how that stacks up to other countries.

Education, psych, business, english, journalism, etc are buckets that catch a lot of people who don't know what they want to major in but go to college because "that's what you do"

Go to community college like I did. I took a bunch of remedial classes that helped me prepare for university. I wasn't prepared for a real university education out of high school. But after 3 years of community college (2 major switches) I transferred to UCSD for CS and got by BS and am currently doing my masters.

I don't think lowering the standards is a good idea. I think we should fill the gap's in education left by high schools failing at their jobs.

Not all cal states are created equal. Many are effectively glorified community colleges(not necessarily a bad thing) , while others (like calpoly slo) are excellent universities. Source:was recently a California high school student

Cal Poly SLO shouldn't be used as an example of the CSU system; it is technically considered a CSU but is exempt from the admissions process that every other CSU campus is required to use. Cal Poly SLO can indeed be described as more or less an excellent university; no other CSU can.

I went to a Cal State university - it was a joke.

Would be happy to hear more about your experience. In what respect?

* Slept through my year there. Managed a 4.0.

* After I was there, they literally accepted anyone with a high school diploma. They called this "fast track acceptance."

* In the orientation, I, as an anthro major was somehow grouped with about 40 engineers. The guy was discussing the math and English assessment tests. If you had x on your math SATs, you can skip the math test. If you had y in your English SATs, you can skip the English test. He asked how many people can skip the English test. Me and like 5 people raised our hands, which wasn't surprising in a room full of engineers. He asked how many can skip the math test. Maybe 10 more people raised their hands.

Somehow, I, the anthro major had a higher math SAT score than a bunch of people who wanted to build the bridges I drive over.

Went to CSUS. Indeed it was.

> I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?

No, it depends on the Cal state. There are two cal state that have high acceptance rate and have low grad rate. IIRC CalState Domigez have the highest acceptance rate.

But there are other very selective calstate such as cal poly.

Cal State (CSU) is an umbrella term for many california state universities across California excluding UC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California).

Examples are CSULB, CSUF, CSU-whatever...

edit:

I had to take remedial English classes at a UC in my program ESL. So it's not amazing...

Examples for UC is UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSD....

My family members who teach at Berkeley indicate it is not much better there and they've been complaining about it more and more for a decade now.

I can't comment on Cal State, but SUNY schools in New York will pretty much take anybody. That doesn't necessarily make them bad institutions, it's just widely varied. I was fortunate enough (or unfortunate depending on how you look at it) to attend a SUNY CC and two private schools. My education at the SUNY CC was far superior to one of the private colleges, while the college I actually graduated from blew them both out of the water. It still surprises me how drastic the differences can be.

> I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?

No, Cal State is the 2nd of three public college tiers defined by California law. (Top is the UC system, bottom is the community college system, which will indeed let in anyone who applies.)

CSUs, except for Cal Poly SLO, admit on a quota-by-major system, scoring all applicants objectively and taking the top $quota who applied in each major with a score above the minimum admittance threshold. Some majors at particular campuses, and some entire campuses, are considered "impacted", which means they get enough applicants that you're unlikely to be admitted with a score near the minimum threshold. The converse of this is that if you're above the minimum threshold, and you apply to a non-impacted campus, you'll be admitted. If your school gave you As, you'll beat the threshold without any inquiry into the quality of your school, or whether it was possible to receive grades lower than A.

Here's CSU San Jose's policy (they're impacted):

> To be considered for admission, graduates of California high schools or residents of California, as defined for tuition purposes, must have a minimum eligibility index of 2950 using the redesigned SAT or 694 using the ACT. The minimum eligibility index for nonresidents of California is 3570 using the redesigned SAT or 842 using the ACT. The CSU eligibility index is calculated by using either the SAT or ACT as follows:

> SAT (sum of scores in mathematics and critical reading) + (800 x high school grade point average)

> -or-

> (10 x ACT composite score without the writing score) + (200 x high school grade point average)

( http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/static/admission/freshma... )

Obviously, this scoring system is massively biased in favor of GPA over test scores (if you were running a college, would you rather admit someone with a 4.0 GPA and an 800 total SAT score, or someone with a 3.0 and a 1600?), which does a lot to explain why the caliber of students in CSUs is so low. I found it interesting, when I was looking into this a few years ago, that CSU San Francisco was impacted in their "social work" "major", but not in computer science.

While interesting, being of college age and living in the area, SFSU impaction makes sense. CS majors are generally more serious about their education and major choice and also know that SFSU is a poor choice for a CS degree. Meanwhile, I know many people that, getting into their 20s, go "I wanna live the city life!", and quickly pick a major with SFSU being an easy admission.

Compare SJSU being impacted in all majors, including CS.

A co-worker has his CS degree from CSU Long Beach. I mentioned this to him the other day when I saw it elsewhere. He said, "it was basically high school when I was there and that was a decade ago."

Translation: Diluting the prestige of the cal stage degree

Dang mobile typos. s/stage/state

There hasn't been any prestige for a while. I went to CSUS about 20 years ago. I only went there for my freshman year because I spent more time asleep in class than awake, and still managed a 4.0. It was then I realized it was a joke.

Dropped out, scraped together money, went to a real school on the other side of the country.

More students = more $. Do you really think they care about whether you pass or not?

I think this is part of the answer. Education is a business like anything else.

Yup. Schools make money by being bottom heavy. Classes with hundreds of students make money. Classes with tens of students lose money. Allowing people to enroll in programs they're not prepared for results in more people who drop out or change majors after taking a semester or two of classes with a high profit margin.

I know someone who teaches (or taught, I guess) remedial math at CSULB. From what I've heard, her students do seem to need the classes. A large number of the students don't show up to class, and many of those that do attend have trouble with the class and may not pass. There has been a lot of pressure from administrators to increase the pass rate.

I wasn't aware they didn't allow taking courses for credit before passing the remedial classes though. It seems to me that you could take some general Ed or major courses, but science and engineering without math requirements is hard, and humanities courses without paper writing skills is also hard.

It doesn't make any sense to me to pay CSU level tuition if you're not going to get credit if you pass the course. It would be better to redirect these students to a community college, where the costs to the students are lower, and offer a guaranteed spot for them to transfer in when they can earn credit. Some amount of connection to the CSU may help with student motivation.

If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school.

> If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school.

You know University of Phoenix is a private school right? It's just run for profit. (edit: also Trump University is a private school)

The difference between private school and public is if it's state run.

So you're basically saying Cal, UCLA, UCSF, and other good public school aren't able to read Hacker News...

yeah i'm sure berkeley students can't read hacker news

More like its a quick way to get your kids sick with some nasty ass diseases, West Coast private schools are a petri dish with a ton of unvaccinated kids.

Considering the Catholic Church runs most of these schools, the local diocese need to crack down and not endanger their student body with these nasty ass, bug chasing parents & their unvaccinated children!

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-l...

You talk about "nasty ass diseases" and them go on to talk about the religious affiliation of those schools.

The obvious XKCD notwithstanding, I hope the humor and stereotype reference there is not lost on readers.

Its so odd, seeing that when I was in Catholic School they'd have kicked me out had I not been vaccinated, but now private schools in Washington State are basically the only place you can easily skip vaccination.

Vaccinations generally work, so as long as your kids are vaccinated, I fail to see how sending them to a private school will endanger them in any way...

Reading HN is no problem, understanding it is! /s

I don't take too much of an issue with this. It's clear that the current system isn't working well enough, evidenced by the low graduation rates and high student loan burdens, so I don't see what's wrong in trying out a new approach and measuring the results. If this doesn't work, then I think we should try something else.

Ultimately we need to change the way we fund education, but that a whole lot more complicated.

For those who disagree, I'd definitely like to read why over just a vote in either direction.

It seems like they just want EVERYONE to go to college, even if they go $100k into debt to study German Polka History. They should give fewer student loans, or make them bankruptable, and make sure students actually will be financially benefited within 10 years. There is a surplus of students, which technically means they can give inferior education. If there were a shortage of students, universities would need to up their game.

what is a far larger problem is the fact that employers basically demand college and university degrees for jobs which require neither.

I am not american, but i wonder why the US seems to lack a tiered tertiary education system? In the netherlands for example, we have different levels of tertiary education going all the way from trade school to polytechnical education to research universities. This systems seems to create a far more fitting model for the labour market, instead of requiring everyone to have a college education which all vary widly in terms of levels of competence.

I once applied for a job at a university to develop backend systems. They rejected me immediately because I didn't have higher education, then they called me 2 months later, when someone actually read my resume and saw my skills.

I will tell everyone that skills, recent projects, and cool hobbies will prove you are qualified way more than a degree!

There's a lot of talk about the motives behind this, but moving beyond that: is this even going to work? They say that:

> Under the new system, all Cal State students will be allowed to take courses that count toward their degrees beginning on Day 1. Students who need additional support in math or English, for example, could be placed in “stretch” courses that simultaneously provide remedial help and allow them to complete the general math and English credits required for graduation.

Which sounds great, but thinking about it I think it will end up putting an unreasonable workload on students. They talk like students are wasting time in these remedial classes, but the entire purpose of the remedial classes is to get students to a point where they can succeed in the next class. If they go into a college algebra class not being able to multiply fractions, or not being comfortable with addition and subtraction (which is way more common for people entering college than you might think), they're going to have a very hard time. Sure, these "stretch courses" might be there to help them, but I fear that essentially taking 2 math courses concurrently will be overwhelming for an already disadvantaged population of students.

Not to say that one needs a full k-12 math education to succeed in college math classes; you definitively do not. Like many things we teach our kids, the vast majority of what is covered in those math classes is basically useless. But they do (hopefully) result in students being comfortable with manipulating numbers and doing the basic arithmetic needed for further study. The remedial classes shouldn't be trying to cover a k-12 math education, just enough that the students can follow what is happening in subsequent classes without being confused by the arithmetic.

One of the main drivers for these initiatives is to reduce the time of graduation for students, which I believe was 46% graduation rate within six years. When you add in the mix of minority students who aren't properly prepared for college level courses, you get the really low grad rates in the CSU system. The longer you have students taking classes, the more money is costs the CSU, so they have an interest in lowering that number. Of course, the way they are going about it is bad in my opinion. Professors are pressured to not fail students in key classes that tend to slow down the graduation rates. One way to do that is to have non-tenured faculty teach these courses, who can be let go for not enforcing these practices. Lecturer's are hired on a contract basis, and may not be rehired. I've seen some lecturers on one year contracts. Some of this is not completely a bad thing in my opinion. I remember losing half of an Organic Chem class by the middle of the semester, due to the sink or swim mentality in many of the sciences/engineering faculty.

My University had a policy of letting you retake things and take the new grade. In the modern world, I think you should be able to retake the tests and rely on MOOCs. I'm not at all a fan of allowing failure to pass or even average for a first attempt in a hard subject to pass. I had a few courses that I should have failed and I never revisited them because I got a B or even an A.. Today I am falsely educated in most of those subjects.

Gotta keep that student loan cash flowing.

From the executive order:

Students whose skills assessments indicate academic support will be needed for successful completion of general education written communication or mathematics/ quantitative reasoning courses shall enroll in appropriate college-level, baccalaureate credit-bearing courses that strengthen skills development to facilitate achieving the appropriate general education student learning outcomes. Supportive course models may include, among others, co-requisite approaches, supplemental instruction, or "stretch" formats that extend a course beyond one academic term. In these approaches, instructional content considered pre-baccalaureate may carry a maximum of one unit and shall be offered concurrently with a college-level, baccalaureate credit-bearing course.

Taken at face value, this says that the academic burden will be increased for the weakest students. Excuse me for being skeptical (that this will work or that this is how it will actually be done; take your pick.)

Unless the point is to have more people in regardless of whether they have any possibility to graduate I don't understand this. How many highly talented kids have already been lost just because they didn't know what they wanted in life at 15 and thus have much lower high school grades and sat scores and whatnot than what they are actually capable of?

This isn't an admissions criteria. This is just a commitment to helping kids that come in with weaker backgrounds get up to speed faster, without having to spend credits on remedial classes.

California has a three-tier system

* University of California - real college

* California State University - college lite

* Community colleges - advanced high school

Community colleges are simply lower division; they have guaranteed transfer programs to both University systems, and arguably stronger lower-division programs because they have better lower-division faculty-to-student ratios, and a pure teaching focus.

cal poly slo is a pretty decent school

I always thought degrees were useless, was just ahead of the curve (they still taught useful skills until now)

How can this end well?

This is a change for the better. Ultimately, pedigree does not matter and a meritocratic society should not care about the institution that awarded the degree. Assess the individual and check your privilege.

There's just no reason to get a degree from any but a few schools anymore. Employers have already caught on, and this is a move in the wrong direction. If they'll give you a degree for free, fine, but no one should be taking out loans or paying a dime for a school without making sure diplomas from that schools are still worth anything to employers. There are schools where a CS degree from them makes you look worse than having no degree at all.

That's not anywhere close to true.

This isn't about degrees for free, it's about replacing a broken model of remediation with newer models that have been shown to work better at getting people ready to pass the same substantive classes better and with less delay.

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