<p>Did anyone else hear the (to me, misguided) piece on this morning’s NPR “Marketplace”? The commentator, David Frum, from the American Enterprise Institute, suggested that more money for scholarships and tutition tax breaks for the middle-class would do nothing but drive up the cost of education. Leaving that aside, the ammunition for this onslaught was even stranger:</p>
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<p>Here’s a link to the study that he was representing:</p>
<p>I’ll start: who knows what the methodology of the study was, but heaven help us if factoid-based knowledge becomes the yardstick for real learning and understanding in fields like history or IR.</p>
<p>Here is the introductory paragraph from the study:
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<p>How would you possibly categorize this as using “factoid-based knowledge” as a yardstick? Never mind that college students of today are our future leaders. I’m just alarmed about their historical illiteracy which doesn’t bode well for their ability to be engaged & informed citizens.</p>
<p>There have been at least two threads on this study, the first of which discussed the methodology at length. My memory is that the methodology was sort of OK, but there were legitimate questions about the randomness of their selection of students to take the test at each school, and about the comparability of the freshmen and seniors taking the test. The basic problem was the premise – that you would expect college students, who might be majoring in BME or physics or math or French, to improve their factual knowledge about American history, foreign relations, and economics over the course of three years.</p>
<p>The other thing about the study was that, with the odd exceptions of Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, the students at prestige universities both started and finished higher than students at less-prestigious places. Liberty and, especially, Rhodes seemed to get their seniors reasonably close to where the Ivy League students were. The average scores at the Ivy League schools were essentially unchanged between freshmen and seniors. For some reason, it looked like kids at Berkeley and Hopkins “forgot” a lot over three years. In Berkeley’s case, that may reflect the fact that its senior class has a different composition from the freshman class due to CC transfers, and who knows what the story was with Hopkins except for maybe it has a bigger percentage of pre-meds.</p>
<p>The test itself wasn’t outrageous, and was fairly carefully developed. There were a couple history questions that I thought were over-fussy – things that not knowing hardly meant you were uneducated – but it didn’t feel like a fundamentally silly test of knowledge in those areas, and I would have expected ALL of the kids to have done a little better than they did.</p>