Who Gets to Graduate?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.'
---
'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.'
Basically, straightforward encouragement and promotion of a sense of belonging has a significant effect toward equalizing the health, academic performance and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged kids of the same aptitude as wealthier peers.
So when it comes to "who gets to graduate," I have little doubt that financial and emotional support are more important than academic ability.
When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/inte...
Asians in Alabama graduate at higher rates than whites do.
2. I don't see that chart distinguishing anything by income level.
In a nutshell, a two-parent family can better shuffle duties of picking up kids from school and practice, assisting with homework, and just be around to have conversations.
Vanessa called home, looking for reassurance. Her mother had always been so supportive, but now she sounded doubtful about whether Vanessa was really qualified to succeed at an elite school like the University of Texas. “Maybe you just weren’t meant to be there,” she said. “Maybe we should have sent you to a junior college first.”
After reading the whole article, this is what really stuck with me. I just can't fathom a parent ever saying this to their child regardless of wealth or education. Why does her supportive mother suddenly undermine her at such a critical juncture?
Would the poor kids do better if only their parents consistently expected them to?
And to be clear, it's not like Vanessa is a good student. fta:
a month into the school year, Vanessa stumbled. She failed her first test in
statistics, a prerequisite for admission to the nursing program. She was
surprised at how bad it felt. Failure was not an experience she was used to.
At Mesquite High, she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all
without really trying. (Her senior-year G.P.A. was 3.50, placing her 39th
out of 559 students in her graduating class. She got a 22 on the ACT, the
equivalent of about a 1,030 on the SAT — not stellar, but above average.)
The point of the article is that low-income kids, despite being intelligent and doing well among their peers, have a hard time transitioning to college. Universities could wash their hands of the problem and just reject the poor kids and send them to two-year universities like you suggest, but they’re trying to solve the inequality without further exacerbating our income differences.
Top 7 percent in a group that small isn't "phenomenal" by the normal definition of the word.
It's hard for me to imagine, too; for a long time I thought Beauty School Dropout was one of the funniest songs I'd ever heard for that reason.
However, like my sibling says, the mother is correct. This girl is quite far below a normal student at UT Austin -- it's not good for her to be in classes targeted at them, and it's not good for them to be in classes targeted at her.
I really like UT's 7% rule. You have to believe that ability is equally distributed, just not opportunity. But when you get the abled from the disadvantaged high schools, they need more tools to succeed. Frankly, I think the disadvantaged shouldn't be segregated, they should make the advantaged pair up with them for tutoring so both can learn something valuable. Maybe for those that already know how to learn, they shouldn't be graded on learning more but on learning how to help others. Now that would be an eye-opener.
Remember if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate (that's a chemistry joke).
I had the same reaction as you. Assuming that the mother has the best intentions for Vanessa, and that she know less of the ways of UT than Vanessa (and probably you or I), I'd hazard at the following meanings:
Maybe you just weren’t meant to be there = You have not failed (at something you were supposed to succeed). The failure was in walking down a path that does not lead to the (pre-ordained) future.
Maybe we should have sent you to a junior college first = It was my mistake to lead you down that path.
No matter how you spin it, it's not what Vanessa needed to hear. But putting your self in the shoes of someone who is trying to comfort their child, and who knows little of the university system, it seems like a natural enough reaction.
When I was 15, I sent an application to a prestigious summer program at Phillips Andover Academy. When I didn't hear back after a couple weeks and started to get worried (I had no idea how long applications took to process), my mom said "I didn't think you were going to get in anyway, it's alright." (I received an acceptance letter a couple weeks after that)
Similarly, we were watching Mona Lisa Smile, and I said "Oh, I think I got a brochure from Wellesley." Her immediate response was "No you didn't" I ran up to get the brochure, and she just said "Whoa, that's really weird."
She wasn't being mean, she just had a very clear distinction between "things we do" and "things other people do." It just wasn't possible, in her mind, to cross that boundary. There was just no thought in her mind that someone _she_ gave birth do could go to places or do things she only saw on TV. She wasn't trying to discourage me -- she always wanted the best for me, but there were still some things that she wasn't capable of imagining possible. If she wasn't capable of imagining that these things were possible, the best course of action was to let me down gently.
Having talked to peers with similar backgrounds, I think this is an extremely common phenomenon, and one that holds a lot of potentially-successful people back, before they ever realize they're being held back.
That being said, neither mother probably can evaluate Vanessas chances correctly, one failed course is not a catastrophe. Her high school apparently suxed: "she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all without really trying." - that could not be good school. Learning how to study for math at 18 is hard if you never had to do it before. She really might need more structured support at this point.
Her high school was definitely awful, but that's not evidence. I never studied for math tests either. The difference here is that she aced all her math tests without knowing math.
Yeah, which can mean she was the best in her class, even though they are all very bad at maths.
[0] http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20...
The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers.
If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.
Not true, it's taken by a self-selecting minority of college-aspiring high schoolers. The SAT-taking population is far, far more representative than the ACT-taking population. In isolation, that actually makes an ACT percentile better than it would appear, but there are other effects around.
In 2005 22 was the 62nd percentile among ACT takers nationwide (21 was the 55th). Assuming ACT takers are mostly representative of the population, this girl is smarter than 55-62% of US high school students, roughly as smart as 0-7% of them, and dumber than the remaining 38%. For a college student, this is not an inspiring figure.
> If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.
No, the top 7% figure is for GPA. And you don't need to overcome anything to be at the top of a group that isn't competing for the position. For any group, there will always be a top 10%.
http://bealonghorn.utexas.edu/whyut/profile/scores
Average ACT is 28. 25th percentile is 25. She got a 22.
How would you classify me on the smart/not-smart continuum?
I also got a 680 on the math sat 2, a 670 in the english sat 2, and a 4 on both the ap us and ap european history exams, and have a masters degree.
Now how would you classify me?
I don't know. I've generally been one of the top engineers on every dev team I've been on, was the first engineering hire of one startup and am the director of engineering for the current one.
Is classify myself as an above average engineer. Not a superstar, but solid and I get things done and done well.
I basically see no correlation between my SAT score and my ability and success. It's hard for me to look at only the SAT scores of others and say much of anything about them.
I will concede that scores on the ACT or SAT are correlated with intelligence. But like most tests, you can improve your score with practice and study. If I can get a better score after preparing for the test, it doesn't measure intelligence, at least not directly.
That still does not change my central assertion that the ACT or the SAT are not good tests of intelligence. Or that IQ tests are not good tests of intelligence. I don't deny that high scoring test takers of such tests are usually intelligent but as the famous line goes, correlation does not imply causation.
Intelligence is a very tricky thing to define. People typically try to quantify intelligence as one's ability to solve tricky problems, solve problems quickly, retain hordes of knowledge, etc; but these things leave out rather important aspects of intelligence such as creativity, so-called "emotional intelligence", and the value of personal experiences. This is not an exhaustive list of things that are missed by these tests. Suggested reading here is Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book Outliers.
I'm moving the goal posts a bit on this conversation, but an even broader point to make about intelligence is that if you have a certain amount (what ever that means, again I'm not claiming that you can measure this), magically gaining more intelligence would have relatively little impact on your ability to have a successful life. It is my opinion that hard work, social connections, and even luck are more important than intelligence. Again, anecdotally, I have seen brilliant friends struggle to gain any sort of measure of success in life while the friends I judged as less intelligent are blowing them out of the water. Successful people are intelligent people, but they are rarely geniuses.
And this is where my argument begins to loop back around to the point the original article makes: Outcomes improve for people from poor and underprivileged backgrounds when they are integrated into a social groups with people who make them feel like they belong in higher education and encourage them to learn from bad test scores or rough semesters. So what does it matter if this girl has only slightly above average intelligence (as measured by tests that are flawed indicators of intelligence anyway)? If participating in these programs helps her become a productive member of society and become successful against her personal goals, isn't that a huge win?
And you also seem to be saying these disadvantaged kids shouldn't be helped to reach their potential.
Many kids in college have those moments. What the data tells us is that the ones with the social and economic infrastructure in place to see it for what it is - a minor setback - tend to graduate more. That indicates to me that it is inaccurate to elevate this phenomenon higher than the social and economic support structures.
Might as well just call it spoilt brat syndrome. They were never given any challenges and they never sought them out (intellectually anyway, it seems). Then a few obstacles comes along and they collapse, never having had to deal with such things before. Then woe is them for having been lulled into a false sense of security all their life, including their parents.
Grade inflation and overoptimistic parents are probably partly to blame for this. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for these spoilt brats. Oh, so you actually have to work in order to get an A, or even work for a measly B? Life truly is unjust for demanding anything from you.
This is the point - basic education and high schools aren't challenging students enough to prepare them to higher ed. If in addition to that you also don't have adults with higher education in your life to use as a reference, it makes it pretty hard to realize that you're not actually that good. Who wants to criticize themselves when all they hear is praise?
As long as you know the grade is not representative of you, you're all good. WTF that level of external validation seeking will destroy you.
I find this very interesting in light of studies I've seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental income was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental education. Poor kids of well-educated parents were far more likely to graduate than rich kids of uneducated parents.
Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility.
All past US studies I've seen have shown the same thing, or at least that parental educational attainment is a better predictor of a persons educational attainment than any other factor, including parental income.
> Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility.
Or: a lot of the education necessary to success in formal education happens outside of its bounds in less-formal interactions, including, especially, those in the home.
Parents having actual directly relevant experience seems intuitively to be quite likely to have value there.
Doctoral degree-holders are unique in that they're the only group that earns less than a lesser-educated group (professional degrees).
No, while medical doctors and lawyers (civil doctors), were recognized uses of the term "doctor" for quite some time, traditionally the professional degrees in both fields have been baccalaureate degrees (the MBBS in medicine/surgery and the LL.B. in law), outside of certain Scottish universities, and the change to make the degrees generally doctorates were fairly recent (19th Century) US innovations.
That is - quite apart from genetic differences - your own education level, motivation, attitudes and various other influences are set by the time you become a parent. It's difficult and unlikely that you will change, and your child will begin to be influenced by their environment the moment they arrive. Probably your biggest choice of determinant is your partner, but even that is influenced by all the things already in place.
The only usable piece of information from these types of studies is that, if you didn't graduate, you're going to have to work very hard to assist your own children to graduate.
More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.
It is astonishing that 2/5 of American students can be saddled with huge debts without having generated the means to repay that debt (increased wages through a college degree).
"According to USA Today, the University of Phoenix's Detroit campus has a graduation rate of only 10%, but a student loan default rate of 26.4%.[38] A 2010 report found that the University of Phoenix's online graduation rate was only 5 percent."
Things seemed easy in high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing, until I realized that University is serious business academically.
With friends failing out right and left, I forced myself to attend paid tutoring sessions (worth it) and meet others who had study groups.
In the end, it worked out after years of making up for that one mistaken semester, but I had to buckle down on my own because of the fear of telling my parents how bad I performed...
Perhaps instead of an SAT or an ACT, there should be a test where different colleges contribute questions that are representative of intro level classes at the school. Questions would progress from relatively easy (large state school questions) to more complex, esoteric questions that would show up for the more selective, private school caliber students.
This would overcome an important informational friction: high school students don't see college-level test questions until they're enrolled and sitting in class, with the test in front of them. If you are going to make a $200k investment, you should have as much information as possible about your chances of success before signing on the dotted line.
I went to a private college. I am not better than my friends who went to state schools.
Sounds more like a reflection of the difference in studied topics.
I am not saying that students who go to a private college are "better" or more likely to succeed. My point is that more selective (and generally private) schools are accustomed to receiving students that have been groomed for academic success throughout high school, and thus the bar for academic rigor starts out at a higher level. The crux of my original comment was to propose a solution for identifying just how high the bar is set on that first batch of exams, to see if you are ready. Knowing what is coming would prevent the overwhelming feeling of depression and "not belonging" that comes with failing a test in a new, scary environment. My point was somewhat obscured and vague, so thank you for challenging me to clarify.
As a rising senior in college, this is just a personal observation derived from my choices and conversations I have had with friends.
Prior changes to make the test more fair for speakers of dialects other than Standard American English were also good, even if they were "political".
It gets funnier than that. The SAT IIs, with near-identical characteristics to the SAT, are also supposed to be "achievement" tests.
"But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the Dashboard."
Surely one potential solution would be to remove the social stigma of attending a community college? I am proud that I went to a CC with professors that cared about their students, class sizes in the 20s, and office hours that extended throughout the day.
I had brilliant professors across multiple subjects, the common thread running throughout my entire community college experience was that each and every professor who worked there was there because they loved to teach and spread their joy of their field to students.
The other obvious issue is poor study skills taught in HS. I tell students in HS that if they get one thing out of HS, which is otherwise a large waste of time, it should be to learn how to study.
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/REVIEW-OF-EDUC...
Positive feelings of belonging and capability seem to be a surprisingly powerful form of race and class based privilege.
I hope they controlled for the admission criteria here. Otherwise, the obvious reason to see a correlation like this is that more selective colleges select students who are better at studying for tests (and therefore more likely to graduate).
> It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating.
Selective colleges have the resources to give focused attention to people who can (demonstrably) do the work, but lack the necessary habits and structural support.
The distribution of grades ... didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you
might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.”The completion rate for online courses is very low anyway, so it is likely this difference might be immaterial in the noise of that overall low rate.
b) still smells like Lysenko-ism
Nope. Did you notice the part of the article where they declared victory and extended the program to all students?
> A rise of four percentage points might not seem like much of a revolution. And Yeager and Walton are certainly not declaring victory yet. But if the effect of the intervention persists over the next three years (as it did in the elite-college study), it could mean hundreds of first-generation students graduating from U.T. in 2016 who otherwise wouldn’t have graduated on time, if ever. It would go a long way toward helping David Laude meet his goals. And all from a one-time intervention that took 45 minutes to complete. The U.T. administration was encouraged; beginning this month, the “U.T. Mindset” intervention will be part of the pre-orientation for all 7,200 members of the incoming class of 2018.
How nice of them. Besides helping out the student body, this also spares them the risk of having to falsify a cherished idea.
At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?
And again, as they say, it was only 45 minutes, and it didn't "do" a lot. It did however, change how the students interpreted bad events in the future, and reduced the chance of the student feeling that, say, because they failed a test, they don't belong in college at all.
house them together, encourage them to form study groups, provide them with mentors and tutors, meet with them regularly to stress the importance of academic achievement, monitor their progress closely, involve them in research, take away their scholarships if they fail to make a "B" average, they will perform better than students deprived of these benefits.
And before anyone gets hung up on the "scholarship" part: I know plenty of students who had parents pay for at least some of their college, but knew they had to perform or their parents would stop paying. That expectation of performance is the same.
Well, yes.
So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance.
Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable? More or less so than this?
Once you know how to study and want to learn, there's a whole internet full of knowledge. Before, things like access to a fancy library, or labs would definitely boost productivity for a successful student. At least for the more theoretical subjects, we have far more resources available to learn from than 100 years ago.
What definition of valuable were you thinking of?
I'll also make the assumption that your lifetime earnings are a multiple of your entry-level salary, just to have an anchor for the numbers. Equivalently, assume that whenever you get a raise, it's defined as a percentage of your current salary.
With that assumption and the GDP definition of value-to-society, we can immediately see that it's 50% better to, by intervention, raise someone's starting salary from $50K to $80K than to raise a different person's starting salary from $10K to $30K. But it might be cheaper and easier to produce a 60% improvement in the $50K guy than a 200% improvement in the $10K guy.
> If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
According to http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1572-University-o... , the 25th percentile student at UT Austin (entering in 2011, I think) scored 540 verbal and 580 math on the SAT (annoyingly, this doesn't mean that the 25th percentile student scored 1120 overall, but it's the closest thing I could find). The girl in the article scored the ACT equivalent of 90 points lower. But she's not dramatically underqualified?
update: for reference:
UT Austin 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 590 - 710
Cal Tech 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 770 - 800
How significant do you think it is that a quarter of Cal Tech students are below the 25th percentile? How far below do you think they range?
>How significant do you think it is that a quarter of Cal Tech students are below the 25th percentile? How far below do you think they range?
I don't know.
It would help if your figures didn't cut out at the bottom-quarter mark, i.e. if you gave some figures on the lowest SAT math score (and what about verbal?) admitted to these institutions, or some other indication rather than asking what we 'like to think' about the range or having me guess :)
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the way you expressed it, "despite being below the 25th percentile for students at that school" and "It specifically calls them out as being in the bottom quartile" in your original comment is probably not a great way to show your case. Your range comment is much better, but stops short of indicating what the full range is or where this student falls.
Basically, I am directly saying that being in the bottom quartile is not itself an indication of sub-standard performance - at any school. Because nearly a quarter of students will be below the bottom quartile - at every school.
And I provide exact numbers for the girl under discussion. Someone else was nice enough to point out that the ACT average for students at UT Austin is 28 (91st percentile nationwide), and the 25th percentile is 25 (80th). This girl got 22 (62nd). Compared to the average student at her school, that's abysmally low.
From memory, the range for verbal scores at caltech was 720-800, and the range at UT Austin was 120 points. The "true top end" at caltech probably isn't that far above 800, since the writing range was 720-790, so UT Austin is displaying much much more variation (120 points compared to 80). In contrast, there's going to be a lot more variation in math ability at caltech than the 30-point math range implies, due to the very low ceiling on the SAT-math. That makes it impossible to say how much variation there really is by looking at SAT scores.
On the other other hand, caltech being a technical school, you might suspect that they're targeting math ability, and the range should be narrower than it is for verbal. ;p
> Because nearly a quarter of students will be below the bottom quartile - at every school.
You could change this to exactly a quarter and you wouldn't be wrong (except in cases like, as we've seen, caltech and other high-end schools, where well over a quarter of the students are in the top 25th percentile by math SAT score). But the sentence preceding it is obviously false. Yes, a quarter of the group will always be in the bottom 25%. Does that mean they're not performing as well as the rest of the group? Of course it does. That's how we measured them.
If your top students and your worst students are very close in ability because of restriction in range, you can sensibly put them in the same classes. If, as at UT Austin, they're very far apart, you can't. I went to a large public university myself, and the course catalog was full of classes covering the same material but differentiated by "difficulty". What's wrong with describing the students who can't succeed outside of the bottom tier as "substandard"?
"What's wrong with describing the students who can't succeed outside of the bottom tier as "substandard"?"
The article tells you what's wrong with that: it keeps people who COULD succeed from doing so by undermining their confidence and their motivation. Why are you really intent on knocking down the disadvantaged at every turn? Why don't you want to help them learn how to succeed?
Because trying to lift these people up is one of the least cost-effective things we could be doing. It has knock-on negative effects all over, directly wastes tons of money, and produces very little to show for it.
You appear to be saying that while these students are in fact substandard, we shouldn't say so because it will hurt their feelings. How is admitting two (or more) tiers of students, banding them into classes by ability, and then telling them they're all in the top tier better than letting different schools admit students from narrower ability bands, so that when you tell them they're more or less as good as the other students it has the virtue of being true?
There was a scandal recently (I believe at UNC chapel hill) where the classes for football scholarship students were found to be fictional, just a bureaucratic vehicle for giving them grades so they'd qualify to keep playing for the school. Would you be willing to call those students substandard? What if it undermined their self-confidence?
I never said these students were substandard. I do believe their performance is substandard and they are at greater risk of dropping out because of all the disadvantages they had and continue to have in life. I believe good schools should admit them because their potential is equal to the non-disadvantaged students, and the results in the article prove this. The article even points out that disadvantaged students with potential do better when admitted to the better school.
Your view does not separate performance from potential, and you keep insisting on using low performance to limit admissions to good schools, and thus in a way, limit how much potential these students can develop. You are essentially arguing that the poor and uneducated (who are likely to be minorities) should stay poor and uneducated.
I believe that it is a net gain for society when all students are given a chance to meet their highest potential. This article shows that he cost of doing so is minimal, and thus the gain for society is even greater.
Some headlines from the homepage:
> Crime and the Hispanic Effect
> Diversity and Excellence: Are They Compatible?
> The Color of Death Row
> Affirmative Action: The Robin Hood Effect.
Edit, also: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classi...
"I had never before heard of La Griffe du Lion. His article was so full of egregiously bad methodology and other mistakes that I at first assumed it was a satire of racist pseudoscience, the sort of thing that might be written for the Annals of Improbable Research or (if you're Alan Sokal) Social Text."
I don't trust that site's analysis, and I don't trust them to accurately report the underlying data without cherry-picking or selecting dubious studies.
Given your comment history, you seem like somebody with an ideological axe to grind on the subject of racial and gender diversity, and I don't believe you selected this article from such an obscure source solely for its topicality.