<p>Bay: Maybe this varies by major? I can only remember my kids changing out of a handful of classes. It was unusual but I don’t recall it being difficult. My impression is that usually they had a pretty good idea beforehand what to expect in the classes they were singing up for and usually knew who would be teaching the class. To be honest, I was a bad mom and really not that involved. I do remember one kid complaining to me that a reading list wasn’t what he had anticipated and I suggested he just drop the class. I never even saw the reading list. I didn’t care that much. I did ask who the professor was. He told me it was a TA. I then repeated he should just drop the class. He did. Mainly I just didn’t want him to call me all semester fussing about not enjoying the class. There were more classes he could enjoy and benefit from than he could possibly take advantage of in his four years at the school. As I said, I’m not a great mom and really just didn’t want to hear him complain. </p>
<p>I did send lots of Care Packages, and I went to Parent’s Weekend and always took a crowd out to dinner. :)</p>
<p>Like sewhappy’s daughter my kids all found their colleges truly fantastic in almost every respect. Great advising and almost always great teaching. Intellectual challenges galore. I knew how much fun they were having when they were all together at the holidays, sometimes with friends they had brought home, and busy busy busy very intently discussing all the different new ideas from all the wonderful reading lists they had encountered that term.</p>
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<p>sewhappy: I think that is an interesting observation. Do you feel like writing more about that? If you do, I’d be interested to read it. However, I may not be able to respond in a timely matter since holiday company will be arriving shortly. Hope you and yours have a wonderful Thanksgiving.</p>
<p>I think this varies by student culture prevailing at each individual school and is more complex than the above.</p>
<p>From my observations of colleagues and undergrads on several campuses, engineering/CS majors tend much more to political extremes(right-libertarianism or radical left Green/Marxist)<em>, American history/politics/studies majors tended to veer rightward(mostly pre-MBA/law) with a few leftys(mostly aspiring PhDs), area studies with the exception of European Studies</em>* and possibly East Asian Studies** tended to veer leftward, and the rest of the majors spanned the political spectrum. </p>
<p>Granted, this may be very different at other colleges/regions. </p>
<ul>
<li>Found that from hanging around them from HS onward, taking a few CS classes for majors, and working closely with them after college.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>** A lot of right-leaning pre-MBA/law aspirants seem to gravitate towards those area studies fields at the schools I’ve visited/known of from HS classmates.</p>
<p>I think I know where you are going with this one. My feeling is that students in STEM are too busy to spend much time with navel gazing. Their belief system remains pretty much the same as they were before they enter college.</p>
<p>My feeling is that flexibility in thinking means little if one does not have the quantitative tools to think with. I would rather have the tools; it is easier to learn flexibility than acquire quantitative tools.
You may be right. A Canadian centralist would be a leftist by American standards. Among students, I almost always find engineers to be conservative, and students in STEM less so. Among social science students, economics students tend to be the most conservative and sociology students least. Humanities students I know tend to be mildly conservative to strongly liberal. Among business students, HR and marketing are more liberal than students in accounting or finance.</p>
<p>The professors, I find, are in general more liberal than the students and the public. The only exception to that may once again, be the engineering profs </p>
<p>I think self-selecting must be at work somehow, or maybe it is just me.</p>
<p>We are one of the only systems that keeps EVERYONE in the system, from the disabled, to the “unwanted” and so on. We help everyone. USA is a very giving country. There are countries with socialized medicine that withhold medical care and education to disabled children (and do not tell me this does not happen, I have had a child die and since then, have met families that lost their disabled children because they lived in places like Canada and their children were denied medical care because of the disability). Also, since we educate everyone, we have many in 11th and 12th grade who will never go to college. Many of the education systems across the world are selective about who gets to the end. Many are left out or transferred to a technical program. Only the best of the best reach the end of what we call high school in America. Here, in the US, for the most part, we assume everyone is going to college. No one is excluded from that oppportunity.</p>
<p>Yes, we do assume everyone is going to college. And that is why we believe in a one-size-fits-all system, with the only caveat that that perfect size is highly dependent of the wealth of the school district and ability to segregate on a SES, if not racial, basis. </p>
<p>Yes, we do assume that our schools are there for EVERYONE. That assumption is, however, hopelessly flawed, despite being repeated by many who find an objective appraisal of any of the US systems to be offensive, as the American overall self-esteem still forbids to see how the country that was once the world leader in almost everything (mostly due to its vast resources and spendthrift ways) has lost its leadership.</p>
<p>Education is one of the area where the slippage has been most evident. From a leader in the industrialized world, we now compare to countries such as Turkey, while we do spend like the biggest spenders such as Luxemburg. </p>
<p>The spending would not be such a disaster if we did --as some assume-- in fact do a decent job at educating everyone and … helping graduating from either secondary or tertiary education. The reality is that our basic undergraduate degree have lost much of their value (think how many now consider a Master’s necessary for a career) and, worse, that many do not even graduate from high school. </p>
<p>If you do not believe me, make an effort to google for simple things such as “high school dropouts” in places such as Detroit. How does “everyone” correlates with graduation rates at around THIRTY percent with boys in the TWENTIES? And after a substantial improvement. </p>
<p>It is time to consider the trade-offs we make when we provide <whatever> service to every last person, regardless of cost.</whatever></p>
<p>I know of a school where one student (with very litigious parents) costs about 25 times the average of all other students to support. Is it really optimal and fair (speaking in favor of one side) to the other students, or to tax-payers, to be deprived of educational and other opportunities because of just one student?</p>
<p>Same with healthcare – something like 90% of health cost is incurred to maintain the last 6 months of life (I don’t have the exact figures; they vary depending on definitions but go something like that). The health needs of a very small number of people are bankrupting the system. There are serious questions of equity here (on both sides), but whichever side you take, it is important to acknowledge that the trade-off is not without cost.</p>
<p>Even something as simple as the postal service, that “last mile” service to every single address in every single corner of every single state is extremely expensive. The USPS has other problems, some of which are structural, but it would not be broke so often if it didn’t have to provide postal service of the same quality universally, regardless of marginal revenues and marginal costs!</p>
<p>This actually has only been practiced within the last 4 decades as the US did not only practice strict academic tracking before that, but also legally excluded racial/religious minorities and those from low-SES families in various parts of the US. </p>
<p>Back in the seemingly American “Golden Age” of the 50’s and early 60’s, many elite private colleges…especially the Ivies weren’t really open to anyone who wasn’t a wealthy establishment WASP. </p>
<p>Many public colleges like Ole’ Miss and UT-Austin used to exclude racial minorities well into the '60’s. </p>
<p>It’s a factor in why schools like Boston College or Brandeis were founded in the times they were founded…private colleges on the East Coast…especially the Ivies discriminated against Irish Catholics and Jewish people in admissions during the late 19th and early-mid 20th century. </p>
<p>Another factor according to dozens of classmates’ parents/grandparents who attended schools from the 20’s to the mid-'60s…teachers didn’t teach to the LCD in average/college prep programs. Students were expected to keep up to the teacher’s/school’s standards set for the top portion(50% or less) of the class and if they can’t, it was unthinkable to immediately blame the teacher/school first rather than the student/parent(s) involved. </p>
<p>Students were held much more accountable for mediocre/failing performance and/or their behavior than what they see with K-12 students in my or later generations. </p>
<p>The levels of chaos/violence at many neighborhood NYC public schools of the '80s would have been unheard of back in the time of those older adults because violently disruptive students who openly attacked students, teachers, or local passersby would have been separated from the rest of the school population rather than being excused as “misunderstood” by their parents and some IMHO idiotic teachers encountered in public middle school.</p>
<p>The USPS is indeed a good example, although the proposal of delivering mail in remote areas is not the real issue. As the German postal service has shown this can be accomplished in innovative ways and strategic partnerships with the private sector. The real problem is when this service has to provided through a captive workforce. In so many words, what is paramount is the protection of the employees. Ancillary issues such as the need to deliver mail six times a week merely complicate the biggest problems. </p>
<p>Our education system suffers from similar issues, and that is the price we pay for having abdicated the system to the representatives of the service providers. More than anything else, our education system suffers from personnel issues. The solutions start with making wholesale changes in the training, recruiting, and retaining of teachers and administrative forces. And, obviously, in finding the right balance of rewarding the competent and efficient in an equitable manner.</p>
<p>I agree with you, Xiggi, but elsewhere you described charter schools as a poison that is getting in the way of a solution. Since no one is able to get majority agreement about what a proper solution might be, we have to consider if the solution is rather a multiple of solutions, each intended to be optimized to different audiences. Charter schools are a way of crowd-sourcing the problem and, hopefully, a range of solutions will eventually coalesce to replace our one-size-doesn’t-fit-all-very-well system.</p>
<p>LI, I think I used the expression “poisoned gift” and if I did not, it could be from my poor habit to forget words when typing slower than thinking. </p>
<p>I happen to agree with your concept of multiple solutions to end up with more than a few workable ones.</p>
<p>Are we willing to pay for improvements to public schools? After our own are past those years or if ours are in private schools? Do we have a reasonable idea yet re: what would truly make a better and more effective teacher? If the pay were right, can we see ourselves taking on that role? Outside of what cobrat quotes, it’s still a constrained work stuation.</p>
<p>I seriously doubt we need to throw more money at public education; we just need to reallocate the dollars. There are way too many overpaid and unresponsive back-office administrators who justify their existence by creating endless rules and paperwork for teachers to complete which actually get in the way of teaching the kids. </p>
<p>Computers have lead to the thinning of management layers in Corporate America over the last few decades. Educational bureaucracies have yet to get the memo; they chug along at a steadily-expanding growth rate, just the 19th-century British Colonial Office did in Parkinson’s study in his hilarious book Parkinson’s Law.</p>
<p>“My feeling is that students in STEM are too busy to spend much time with navel gazing. Their belief system remains pretty much the same as they were before they enter college.”</p>
<p>I never found STEM students any busier than anyone else. Theater students are quite busy with learning the craft of acting, play rehearsals and the like. Music students spend untold hours in practice. Etc. I realize it feeds into the delusion that STEM majors are the most important majors by pretending that such students are “too busy” but I don’t buy it.</p>
<p>^I think you missed my subtle poke at non-STEM students for navel gazing, AND STEM students for a lack of (social and political) development. IOW, I value both; true wisdom is not possible without all the tools in the shed.</p>
<p>Taking my message literally, you are absolutely right. It was poorly thought out and poorly worded. My mind was still on the CLA study, showing how different majors impact students critical thinking development differently:</p>
<p>*The gains came in clusters. At the top was sociology, with an average gain of just over 0.6 standard deviations. Then came multi- and interdisciplinary studies, foreign languages, physical education, math, and business with gains of 0.50 SDs or more.
The large middle cluster included (in descending order) education, health-related fields, computer and information sciences, history, psychology, law enforcement, English, political science, biological sciences, and liberal and general studies.
Behind them, with gains between 0.30 and 0.49 SDs, came communications (speech, journalism, television, radio etc.), physical sciences, nursing, engineering, and economics. The smallest gain (less than 0.01 standard deviations) was in architecture
*
I always felt we are conservative by nature, and learn to be liberal as we develop so those students in majors that show the least critical thinking development are more conservative… </p>
<p>Hardly an endorsement for STEM and STEM only, don’t you think?</p>
My feeling is that students in STEM are too busy to spend much time with navel gazing. Their belief system remains pretty much the same as they were before they enter college.</p>