I just googled top 10% household income in US is $190K, top 5% is $290K. I know many families are making these amount in Bay Area graduated from UCs and CSUs. You don’t need an Ivy League degree to be successful. There are plenty of opportunities for low income kids to attend “good” colleges and then break into the top income levels, at least in CA.
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I think intellectual disengagement is real, and troubling. And it persists beyond HS.
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Interestingly, he raises the issue that maybe we need a “smarter industrial policy,” and backs this up with this proposal:
Fourth, although sending manufacturing jobs overseas may have pleased the efficiency-loving market, if we want to live in an economy that rewards a diversity of skills, then we should support economic policies, such as the CHIPS and Science Act, that boost the industrial sector. This will help give people who can’t or don’t want to work in professional or other office jobs alternative pathways to achievement.
Again one might wonder if the proposed remedy really fits the identified problem. Like here is from the linked press release on the cited act:
Today, President Biden will sign into law the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which will build on this progress, making historic investments that will poise U.S. workers, communities, and businesses to win the race for the 21st century. It will strengthen American manufacturing, supply chains, and national security, and invest in research and development, science and technology, and the workforce of the future to keep the United States the leader in the industries of tomorrow, including nanotechnology, clean energy, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. The CHIPS and Science Act makes the smart investments so that Americans can compete in and win the future.
Does this really sound like something designed to reduce the growing gap between the Cal Poly SLO class and the sorts of people who are already struggling to find a place in the workforce of today? Not that I am necessarily against these sorts of measures, but even to the extent they encourage some new manufacturing investments in the US, the sorts of manufacturing they encourage are not giant factories full of HS-only graduates.
Unfortunately, I actually don’t know how to solve this problem. Like I agree we are actually at the point we have a variety of “trades” paths that don’t have enough labor supply and do not require college educations, and we are not doing a good enough job supporting vocational training and apprenticeships and such. But even if we do much better in that area, that will only plausibly benefit so many people. Same with encouraging semiconductor factories.
So the vast bulk of once “good jobs” lost to this broader economic transition are not going to be replaced this way. The new “good jobs” are mostly different, and I don’t see Brooks’s proposed remedies really changing the fact that aside from maybe a few more successful trades people who become successful small business owners, otherwise engineers and such trained at Cal Poly SLO are going to continued to be much better positioned to individually “win the future” than people without such training.
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I’m not sure that it matters what happens at the secondary school level if colleges and universities aren’t prepared to figure out what it is they are looking for. Brooks seems to be arguing for a rose-colored past where character was more sought after than cognitive ability. Again, without getting into the politics that seem to undergird so much of our discussions of higher education over the years, let’s just say that for the majority of Americans there has to be an alternate route to the hiring system that doesn’t depend so much on embellishing one’s credentials, but perhaps, for example, supports the ability to recover from mistakes, learn by example - and yeah, maybe even learn by rote memorization (the last of which is supposed to be anathema to higher learning, but an awful lot of professional gatekeeping depends on just that.)
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So many interesting ways to dissect this article.
One thing that jumps out at me is that college-educated Americans seem to identify with their jobs at a much higher intensity that college-educated people in other parts of the world. The securing of a white-collar job in the US signals to society that you’ve checked all the social and educational boxes along the way, or that you were smart enough to leapfrog over any obstacles. Either way you are respected.
Europeans with a university education and white-collar job tend not to make the job their whole personality. Universities are less selective and white collar jobs pay less overall, so the lower intensity makes sense. (And of course even in Europe you have your 1%ers who go to Oxbridge or the equivalent and talk about it incessantly lol).
Europe also encourages more specialization from a younger age. You don’t have to slog through math if you want to study art, or vice versa. I often wonder if a baccalaureate style high school degree would address some of the intellectual disengagement.
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As an aside, this was a big result of the Chetty study, even though it was rarely one of the headlines. The headlines were about how you might have a marginally higher chance of actually getting top 1% outcomes if you chose an Ivy+ over a flagship public. Less heralded was the observation that by far most Ivy+ graduates were not going to get those outcomes, they were mostly going to be in that 1.1-15% range. And once you were talking about those outcomes, controlling for individual and family attributes, there was no statistically significant value added effect to choosing an Ivy+ over a flagship public or such.
This helps explain a potential marketing issue for the Ivy+, that even their desired 1.1-15% sort of families might be balking at paying so much more for those colleges. And that helps explain why their “need aid” has gotten more and more generous higher up into what actually constitutes the upper middle class.
But anyway, as applied to Brooks’s argument, the basic point is for the vast majority of kids, the Ivies and such are in fact just doing what a lot of other privates and publics are doing, namely continuing the preparation of certain kids to become upper middle class adults, a preparation that in many cases started actually well before college (like potentially all the way to prenatal care), and in many cases will continue at least a bit further into postgrad degrees.
And yes, I think he has a point we are not investing enough as a society in supporting other paths. But the bigger picture issue is what paths will even exist to be followed?
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I would say that works both ways. What does it matter what happens at the college level if the secondary school level is not doing a good job preparing kids for both college and non-college paths? And for that matter, if you were following the science and wanted to pick one single period in which it seems the most good/harm can be done with different developmental models and resources, it is from birth through pre-K.
But personally, I try to resist the idea that there is any one step in this whole process that matters more than any others. If you want a system of career development that actually works for as many people as possible regardless of what resources their parents can contribute, you do in fact have to start from birth (or even before), and take it all the way through not only terminal training programs and degrees, but actually retraining/reeducation as well. Colleges are sitting somewhere in the late or late-middle part of this process for some people, and not even in the process for other people. But regardless of the process you use, ALL the steps then matter.
That said, if you want to point out that it is not necessarily a great thing that we have this important system of private colleges, and OOS programs which are more or less competing in the same markets, where things like the impact of admissions decisions on both present revenues and future gifting are important practical considerations–OK! That’s pretty icky.
But then what is the solution? Ban that model? Prohibit them from receiving any sort of public research grants? Because short of that, if you allow these institutions to exist and compete for faculty and students and research grants and donations and so on, they are going to compete in ways they see as necessary and effective.
And they see competing to constantly increase their financial resources, including relative to other similar institutions and programs, as part of what it takes to be successful as an institution. And so that is going to keep happening unless we force them to stop.
Or is it just the general trend through history that economic inequality in society generally tends to increase, and that normal political processes are unlikely to reverse that trend (although they can accelerate it)?
Walter Scheidel makes that argument in The Great Leveler (preview and table of contents here).
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Yes, American culture notoriously has a strong Calvinist streak where working hard in your chosen vocation is integral to your social and moral value. Originally this was a religious notion but even among non-religious Americans there can be a lot of observable internalization of this idea.
It isn’t limited to college-educated Americans, however. Plenty of Americans without college educations have basically the same attitude toward their jobs. And it is one of the many reasons why it is not so easy to get Americans to, say, accept that their longstanding job path has been eliminated by market-capitalist competition, and now they have to retrain to do something very different. This sort of potential need for radical work shift isn’t just a financial issue, it is a fundamental self-identity and moral issue.
I think there are pros and cons to earlier specialization. Indeed, I don’t think it is possible to separate out all the International demand for enrollment slots in US colleges from the fact their most desired colleges are often the ones most committed to a flexible and exploratory “general education” continuing well into college. That system does work to produce graduates that many selective next-step gatekeepers are very interested in considering, including because it allows more time for people to learn about their actual interests and abilities before committing to a specialization.
But of course that is not the best path for everyone. I think ideally, every kid specializes when it makes sense for them to individually specialize. But because of how this notion interacts in practice with the rest of US society, this immediately raises the issue of whether every kid who would benefit from a delayed specialization path will have practical access to one, or will they get “tracked” into earlier specialization paths even when those do not really make sense for them as an individual?
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The trades that lead to good jobs and careers are the skilled trades where more education, training, and practice beyond high school is necessary. The jobs themselves have become more complex over time, with increasing skill levels needed. That likely makes those jobs less accessible than they were a generation or few ago.
Indeed, combining some general trends:
- Jobs are becoming more complex over time, requiring more education, training, and practice to enter and continue in them than before.
- In many type of jobs, the required education costs the job aspirant more in time and/or money before entering the job, compared to before.
- The types of jobs in the economy can change quickly, making some jobs obsolete even as other jobs are created that have too few people with the skills to do them.
means that those in the labor class face increasing costs (to enter the desired type of job) and risks (that their chosen profession will be obsoleted, and that they face costly or unaffordable retraining for some other kind of job) but declining rewards (as an increasing share of economic growth goes to capital).
But these trends are not really specific to the Ivy League or Harvard or other highly selective colleges.
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Yes, very much true. And being a hard working loyal employee is, at face value, something to be respected.
I would love to see a system here that combines both a generalized track and a more specialized/baccalaureate path. But I guess that makes the case in some ways for state educational systems to lead the way and invest in their polytechnics and trade schools and even more importantly in the job pathways that those institutions can establish with employers in their regions.
The other issue with early specialization (in high school or middle school) is that the earlier a kid specializes their educational and professional path, the more likely that such specialization reflects the parents’ desires and/or assumptions, which may or may not match the kid’s actual desires which may only be known (including to the kid) later.
Indeed, the trend of parents flooring the math accelerator to push their good-but-not-great-at-math kids to the +2 or +3 math track starting in middle or elementary school can be seen as a hint of what early specialization in the US might lead to.
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I’m not saying that (although one could argue that Brook’s is implying that.) I think he’s actually catching up to the front of the parade, if for example, you want to consider how many influential members of that system still feel justified in making standardized testing optional.
What I am saying is, that once the dust settles, we’re still likely to have at the very least a fifty-state approach to what happens K-12 and “The System”, if it is to continue to function, is going to have to pick its way through the noise.
And, btw, I don’t think " present revenues and future gifting are important practical considerations".
Yes, understanding I basically agree with ucbalumnus there are much bigger picture issues here that educational reform alone cannot solve, at a minimum we can at least make comparable public investments in all the paths that are in fact economically viable.
And again, to avoid the impression I entirely disagree with everything Brooks wrote–I do think there are issues in American culture with how we talk about work and careers and what smart and ambitious people should be looking to do and so on that end up being way too rigid as applied to many kids.
Like this is not often a focus in these discussions, but I think there are many kids who because their parents went to college (or maybe just because their parents strongly value college), they are pressured in all sorts of ways to go to college immediately after secondary school. And sometimes that is fine, but I think in some cases that is a big mistake. Instead, some of these kids would benefit from taking a break from more schooling, and starting some form of work. And they could later return to school if and when that made sense for them. But sometimes that may never be necessary, and in other cases they may return to school with a very different focus and goals than they would have had straight out of secondary school.
To the extent we are de facto giving kids the impression such a path is inherently less worthy, that is bad. It is bad for the kids who follow that path, but it is also bad for the kids who then choose to go immediately to college when that is a mistake for them.
So while I do not think Brooks was necessarily thinking in quite these terms, I would completely agree American culture would benefit from seeing all these paths as equally worthy of consideration for every kid.
Of course easier said than done. But at least everyone who sees things this way can try to communicate that to everyone who will listen, including our own kids.
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Yes that’s unfortunately true especially with math, CS, and STEM subjects.
Brief tangent - I write occasionally about the wine industry and have interviewed many 2nd generation winemakers who studied at UCD and increasingly at Calpoly SLO. I’ve also interviewed some people who studied parks & rec & ag studies there who work (also sometimes 2nd generation) in county and state fair organizations. There’s a pipeline that can be cultivated in these and other similarly specialized regional industries. But now I fear that the students who make great candidates for CalPoly’s Ag studies can’t get in without 12 APs and a micromanaged maximization strategy to take as many high scoring classes as possible. In reality, the students who benefit most from that program are the ones that work and do 4H, but high stats kids from all over the country are onto SLO now.
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Yeah, that was intended as more a generic “you” as opposed to an individual you, but I realize now it was not clear how I put it.
I don’t think this conversation would benefit from a prolonged descriptive debate, but just to make clear the things I had in mind . . .
I would suggest any college that is need aware for any part of admissions is taking present revenues into practical consideration. And there is an active lawsuit suggesting that even nominally need blind colleges are still using predictive yield models and such to achieve their revenue goals for the enrolled class as a whole, without Admissions ever knowing the actual need determination that Financial Aid made as to the individual applicants.
And then there are things like Dean’s List hooks, which can be tied to donations. And at least some of the defenses that have been mounted in favor of legacy admissions have referred to establishing ongoing relationships with families who may well be significant donors. And some of the defenses of continuing to give recruited athletes a hook have made reference to what alums want, and not to be cynical, but that to me is always in part a financial issue.
And so those are the sorts of things I have in mind. Obviously one can disagree about what is happening factually, what the motives are, and so on. But I just wanted to make clear I was not talking about anything esoteric, just known practices like need awareness policies, the use of yield models for tracking budget goals, hooks for things like Dean’s Listers, legacies, and recruited athletes, and so on.
You’re right that we’re getting into the weeds when it comes to any discussion of college financing, particularly financing at the level of a Harvard or MIT where they could conceivably populate the entire school with kids from blue collar families, and not feel it, if they chose to do so.
CPSLO does admit by major, although it is not that transparent about thresholds by major. It does show that the Agriculture, Food & Environmental Sciences division is the least selective at First-Year Student Profile | Cal Poly , but it is still significantly more selective than most CSUs. Presumably, most out-of-state students go there for majors like engineering majors.
But it does mean that students looking into agricultural type majors there still need to play the admission points game (which CPSLO is not that transparent about, but has been found or reverse engineered in the past). The biggest bonus point value would be taking precalculus and calculus (yes, this means getting on the +1 math track in middle school) in order to list 5 years of math courses (including any high school level courses taken in middle school) on the CSU application. Other added courses beyond the CSU minimum also give bonus points.
But CPSLO’s use of weighted-capped GPA means that more than 8 semesters of AP or UC/CSU-designated honors courses do not help the points for its admission formula.
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8 APs is still a lot for a student who may be actively working and tending animals etc… but yes, at least the Ag school has better acceptance rates than CS or Bio. But as you say, even those students will still need to meet a very high bar for admission, which just means that the more pathways like this we have, the better. CSU seems to be making strides here with their polytechnic programs in viticulture, wildfire management, cannabis studies etc.
So just to bring it back to the original topic, one thing I can nominally agree with is that looking away from the Ivy League is a good idea.
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8 semesters of AP and UC/CSU-designated honors is basically 4 year-long courses of that designation.
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