Higher Education Erodes
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As an example, asians whether immigrant or American-born typically have the best credit, highest graduation rates, pursue higher education, and have the highest paying / stable jobs of any culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
Either you are racist and think "asians are better than everyone else", or you have to concede that culture and virtues are the cause -- since they too are in the same education system. They simply emphasize the right priorities, convey those to children, and teach functional life skills (conscientiousness, hard work, etc).
I think that's the winning combination personally.
Most of us have probably had a college class or two with foreign students from Asia who somehow passed the very tough English component of the GMAT or other standardized test, yet barely spoke English. I certainly had a few such folks in mine. My intuition would be that test scores matter quite a bit, but honestly achieving them may not matter as much.
Social mobility is higher here in the U.S. than most Asian cultures, but we put a greater emphasis on honestly achieving it (or did in the past anyway). Combine that with an Asian cultural emphasis around testing/studying and I think you get an interesting dynamic.
Just my perspective.
While I want and connot comment on corruption etc I certainly wittness the (over-) emphasis on individualism in western cultures as oposed to eastern cultures (or is it just China?). Don't know though wheather this is comming from Judaism/Chrustianity. Might also be a thing
... which is, of course, inconceivable.
"Either you are racist and think "asians are better than everyone else", or you have to concede that culture and virtues are the cause"
Or might it be the likelihood that the Asians who are in the US in the first place tend to be a very tiny percentage of relatively fortunate families from their own societies back in Asia, and elites tend to perform better?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-...
NYT Quote: "Why should the success of the children of Asian doctors, nurtured by teachers, be reassuring to a black boy in Baltimore who is raised by a struggling single mom, whom society regards as a potential menace? Disadvantage and marginalization are complex, often deeply rooted in social structures and unconscious biases, sometimes compounded by hopelessness and self-destructive behaviors, and because one group can access the American dream does not mean that all groups can."
They might be poor in the US, but that doesn't mean they didn't come from relatively privileged families back in their home countries.
It might point to the same conclusion, but I'd need to see a result that is controlled for parental education and wealth, and also be shown that being "asian" in the US equates with a culture.
Anecdata: In my locale, the "asian" kids do have a different education system: Most of them live in the neighborhoods, and attend elementary schools, that generally have the highest level of educated and affluent parents. Many of those "asian" kids are adopted.
So its not racist to say that Asian culture values different things than the mainstream American culture, which is perhaps why Asian Americans tend to be more educated and gainfully employed.
This is true, but there aren't regularly gathered statistics on what culture students are a part of. Race, however, is constantly tracked. There is generally a correlation between race and culture in America, and thus race is being used as a proxy for culture in the example.
I think one interesting point the article makes is that parenting really doesn't matter much, except when parents do something extreme to affect the behaviors of their children. I wonder if parents' extreme desire for their children's scholastic success could be categorized as such? Anecdotally, growing up in India, I remember being hit by my parents as a younger kid; the physical violence stopped when I became a teenager, but my parents were quick to show their extreme displeasure and worry when I would get low grades in High School.
Not to suggest that all Asian/South Asian households are violent towards their children, of course. Although, I do trust research over anecdata, so I will agree with you that it might just be a genetic thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the success of Asians (South Asians + East Asians) also stems from the fact that divorce is looked down upon and extraordinary efforts are made to prevent it from happening. Divorcees are often social pariahs in these cultures.
However, he's not wrong on cultural dysfunction.
I should also point out that Hillbilly Elegy has been embraced by the same political class that rejected the same key points made by Charles Murray here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murra...
I should also note that Vance's book could only have succeeded as a critique of working-class white culture. Had a black man written a book like this about cultural dysfunction in his own community, he'd be vilified and marginalized as an "Uncle Tom" blaming the victims.
The other is a child of refugees who fled their homeland.
The refugee descendant has a much more typical level of financial dysfunction in his family, but still far better than the "underclass" elements in the US native-born population.
As someone who grew up in an Appalachian family that has been in the US for over 300 years, cultural dysfunction plays a HUGE role in academic failure.
Let's be honest here:
The advent of birth control has now created a situation where people who don't have their shit together are going to reproduce at a higher rate than those that do. My metric for cultural dysfunction is whether a family raising kids "has their shit together" and teaches productive habits to their kids. Foods, music, language are just the visible cultural traits. Much less obvious are the habits of timeliness, respect for authority, willingness to examine one's OWN role in failure before jumping to blame others, etc.
The key issue in the US is we don't have a conversation about cultural differences, and instead have a conversation about racial differences, which completely obscures the real issue.
60%+ of black American children are born out of wedlock. This isn't caused by some magic gene. This is a sub-culture within the black American population that has cultural dysfunction that matches that of some of the bad elements at play within my Appalachian relatives.
We know that poverty isn't the root cause. Equally poor Latino and white communities have much higher percentages of fathers present in the household. Incarceration rates don't explain the gap either. Culture is almost certainly the answer.
I say this as a person who spends a lot of time helping the neighborhood kids who are playing with my son every afternoon. Almost all of them have parents who, contrary to the narrative pushed out, are not working 60 hours a week at 2 jobs. No, they are working 40 hours or less at a crappy job, and then invest their time/resources into blowing off steam at the end of the day. Car hobbies, drinking, NFL games, but helping their kids do their homework? No way. A lot of them don't even bother TELLING their kids to do their homework.
Other notable aspects of culture (well, in this case language) is that perfect pitch occurs more often in speakers of tonal languages (think chinese), and speakers of languages with shorter words for numbers can remember lists of numbers easier [3]
Now does this mean we don't try to fix other things? No. "Culture" is not a panacea for everything I would think. What do you do with those born into a unfavorable circumstances? But I do agree that more often than not we're trying to fix the wrong thing when fixating on outcomes, instead of tools and opportunities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm... [3]
That being said, it's definitely true that the college system has evolved to perpetuate itself, as the author writes:
Cal State is setting an example for the re-definition of “college readiness” towards “willingness to sit tight and pay the cash.”
I also like to tell students that college is a multiplier of their own motivation and actions. If students don't read (and many apparently don't: https://jakeseliger.com/2017/08/28/igen-jean-m-twenge-the-ki...) then they aren't going to get that much out of college. A lot of their experience is up to them.
Between cliques, crazy parties, and general irresponsibility, I ended up treating getting my bachelor's degree as I treated my HS diploma: that place I have to go to for four years while avoiding just about every so-called 'social engagement' that takes place after 5pm.
Of course students will need the requirements nerfed down to nothing - when only three or four other people besides me got enough sleep at night to be awake at the 8AM class, who can blame the schools for trying to adjust their expectations of these students?
I can't tell you how many people were dumbfounded that their 1.25 GPA meant they had to go to community college to bring up their GPA before they could continue the "College Life." Or they just bum around the college for 2 years + working a mind numbing job.
I have had a few success stories in my years in college life. I kind of hate seeing young adults throwing away and just wouldn't let their lack of life skills destroy their potential. It usually meant a meeting in my office where I have backing powder and hydrogenation peroxide and me knocking on their dorm door at 8 AM for a month.
(Did you learn chemistry in a German environment, btw?)
What's that for?
ALSO it helps with the smell of unwashed clothes, and poor hygiene (Especially smelly hair I LEARNED TO HATE THAT SMELL). I would also boil white vinegar in my tea pot when the smell got really bad.
I truly believe the next generation's elite will primarily be those whose parent's were smart enough and well-to-do enough to take them out of one size fits all public education and put them in Socratic, Montessori, or some other alternate school.
Is this what you're saying?
To talk about my views a little, I disagree with the whole, "No Child Left Behind" thing and increased standardized testing. I think we need to worry more about kids getting into what they're learning and learning all the critical skills they need like reading comprehension, algebra/math, critical thinking, etc, rather than focusing on test results (which don't seem to support that goal).
Yeah, change the status quo, but the change she's supporting don't seem to help the issue we're discussing here - unless you have some contrary sources? Down to hear about them.
The current situation is that the public school system (K-12) has one goal: College bound. There is no method while in this system to adapt a student to a trade. Germany does a good job of telling students that they are not college material and then having a non shamed option to pursue (trade or apprenticeships). In America, someone saying they are without a college degree is shamed or looked down upon; unless they are an entrepreneur who makes it big.
Betsy deVos can upset the status quo because in the last twenty years have you seen a change in the education system that would address the individuals who are not college material? Is there a program in place that can upend the crazy bureaucracy that currently exists maintaining the aforementioned binary outcome from K-12.
As an aside, the federal government's education programs create compliance structures that increase rent seeking systems that increase the bureaucratic overhead. An example of this is to look at the increase in administrative personnel at a university for the past twenty years. Most colleges have a tooth to tail ratio increase, high schools have seen administrative bloat significantly increase to take advantage of the grants available.
Still, she's upsetting it in favor of her relatives getting paid loads of money to produce illiteracy.
They unionized while engaging in a model that worked for their respective time periods, and the unions interests don't allow for massive structural changes. Public schools worked very well when intelligent, educated women had almost zero career options other than teaching. They established pay structures that reward length of tenure over any other measures.
An immediate red flag for any institution is a persecution of innovators. This is a common occurrence in public school systems.
I grew up in a poor, rural public school system. Co-workers of mine who are 10 years older learned to program in the public schools they attended in wealthy suburbs. My schools were too busy focusing on teaching the 90% of students who they knew weren't going to college how to work on cars to worry about paying for a computer lab.
Had we had vouchers available to us, we would have done what we had begged the school board to do: create a small computer lab for the handful of students who were decent at math, and then pay the fee for the satellite TV learning program used by other rural schools. But no, they were driven by political demands to instead fund bullshit like trips for the chorus class to competitions.
I finally lost patience with the public schools my son attended last year, and put him in private school. The public school system here had decided that teaching cursive writing was not important, and completely removed it from the curriculum. As a result, my son had to learn cursive in 6th grade at his private school. He learned it in a few weeks of practice at home and while doing his normal course work. Ask yourself what kind of institution decides that cursive is no longer necessary and ensures that the kids won't be able to write a signature when they graduate? I think they did it because choosing to no longer teach something is a quick win.
Additionally, my son's coursework is much, much harder than it was previously. He's actually challenged by his classes now. I was lucky enough to have money to choose his school. His classmates weren't.
Trying to change the status quo is only a good thing if you are trying to change it in a positive direction.
[1] http://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2016/11/21/state-m...
To me this looks like a loss of idealism and a move towards a market idea of what sorts of things make up valuable knowledge. It also seems like a real loss of something important.
How many colleges can you name off-the-cuff that you'd never hire from? Do you actively follow every college to figure out if/when they water down their requirements?
There is no information exchange other than the press and word of mouth for what you're wanting the market to fix. The other metrics, graduation rates and job placement rates, supposedly wouldn't be reliable statistics in your view.
A similar effect is happening in the US political arena where people are being called "-ist" for a wider range of transgressions than previously. Rather than increasing the political penalty for these offenses, the expansion of the terminology has actually weakened the associated opprobrium, because people think of being "-ist" as a less bad offense since so many more people seem to be doing it these days.
This applies to all rules that govern what we consider normal behavior.
When (basically) everyone is ignoring the insanely low posted speed limit the result is (basically) everyone driving the speed they feel appropriate for the conditions.
When everyone knows a few gay people nobody sees the point to criminalizing being gay.
A lot of people were STFUing because they were afraid of not being PC. Now that people are seeing people say even more extreme things than they wanted to say without being seriously punished they're saying those things too. Something good will probably come of all this but change is never easy or fun. It's unlikely that we'll return to a culture that accepts outright racism. Hopefully we won't continue to perpetuate a culture in which any attempt at having a frank discussion involving a touchy subject is not chilled by a fear of being name called as a BoogymanOfTheDay (e.g. racist, communist, etc).
In some ways I think it already has. I wouldn't look at a degree as a sign of fundamental competence and I don't think most other people would either. Maybe that's overly optimistic.
What they are doing is simply changing the way they provide remedial help to those who need it.
The current way: those students spend a year taking only remedial classes, which are below college level and provide no college credit.
The new way: remedial help will be integrated with the regular college level courses.
How exactly that is done is up to the individual campuses. Some might offer slower sections, taking say two semesters to cover a subject instead of one. Some might offer extra tutoring.
Um, yes they do. It's called training. It used to be a thing back when HS diplomas were like 2yr degrees were like 4yr degrees
That so few schools recognize this doesn't mean "higher education is eroding"; higher education has always been a niche of a niche.