<p>USD UCLA,</p>
<p>There is a ton of information on the 1% cap; this was just a quick one I pulled up (read under “Provisions”):</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.publiceducation.org/nclb_policychange_disabilities.htm[/url]”>http://www.publiceducation.org/nclb_policychange_disabilities.htm</a></p>
<p>Thanks for posting the George Leef paper, katonahmom! If public colleges could raise their standards and bring down costs at the same time, while also providing opportunities for low-cost vocational training for those who are more inclined in that direction, I think our tax money would be much better spent.</p>
<p>Thanks Allmusic. I’ve read some of it and will read more later.</p>
<p>I do believe that the exit exam and NCLB is benificial overall (I know many will disagree but I assume it’s debated in another thread so I won’t hijack too much here). It quantifies underperforming districts, schools, groups, and individuals. It also attempts to bring back some meaning to the HS diploma which in some areas has lost any credibility. It will allow for schools to guage how they’re doing against others and hold them accountable which can bring needed focus to those areas with problems. It empowers parents to see quantifiable differences in various public schools and make the best decision accordingly for their child. It’s not a perfect system but I think it’s much better than what was in place before which was inadequate.</p>
<p>If divergent & critical thinking were well taught in K-12, along with competency, mastery, & transferable skills to the marketplace (vs. PC curriculum), there would be much less real & perceived need for 4 yrs beyond Grade 12. I think that’s a poor, & expensive, use of higher education, but it is unfortunately too much a reality. And employers have not been properly educated as to what a college degree does & does not provide, what benefits it may or may not have relative to the job being sought.</p>
<p>Speaking of proper, England looks upon higher education quite differently. Of course, they have somewhat of a luxury to do that, since generally the quality of their pre-college education is so much better. It is not assumed, even among educated families, that everyone is suited to college. Those who are talented, artistic, learning a skill or trade are not pressured or packaged for college. Nor are the latter pursuits considered of themselves inferior to academic pursuits. It is considered not lower or higher, but realistic to pursue a specialty.</p>
<p>That said (& returning to the U.S.), we really do look upon those 4 yrs. as a social & personal adventure, a liberation that is important to self-development. Perhaps because Europeans routinely travel more, have long been flexible about the equivalent of gap years, college may not have the same personal equivalency as it does for us. But the discernment of where & why to go to college might be made much more efficient in our country by wider, more routine acceptance of gap periods between high school & one’s next step(s).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually this is a big difference I observe too, being at college in England. If someone posts on this board they are thinking of taking a gap year then many people reply to say it’s a really bad idea and a huge waste of money. It’s seen as something which costs the parents a lot to keep their unfocused kid from being a drop out. Yet if you posted the same thing on a UK board you would get 5 pages of people telling you how wonderful their gap year had been and how it changed their life. A really high percentage of undergrads here have taken a gap year or do so after they graduate from university. It is considered a very positive thing. Most people don’t take part in really expensive organised programmes (though some do) but get a job/work experience which universities and future employers look favourably on. It is common for people to make “deferred” applications for university, and even some jobs, so they are accepted but can delay admission/employment for a year to have a gap.</p>
<p>I definitely don’t think that Europeans think of universities as being the place to teach students essential life skills. People would think that’s what high school is for! Not to mention your parents/family. But most people in Europe go to college close to home so it’s not such a huge life-style change that it can be in the US, such as a Californian student choosing to go to college in Boston for example (obviously not everyone has such an extreme experience but you see what I mean). College is seen as a rite of passage in the US, but as a means of getting a job everywhere else.</p>
<p>edited to add I left the US just before High School so I can’t really comment on that.</p>
<p>as I have posted elsewhere- my oldest planned to take a gap year- and the result was that she applied ( and graduated from) a much more rigorous school, than her previous first choice.
My younger daughter also plans on a gap year.
Actually from Ds private prep school, a good number took gap years or otherwise didn’t go right into college.
I think it is becoming more popular and more accepted</p>
<p>ek, I certainly agree with you that a gap year, or even years, can be a wonderful opportunity to explore options, gain maturity and a clearer sense of future goals - as well as instill a finer appreciation of the benefits of higher ed. So I am glad to hear that they are becoming more popular and more accepted. </p>
<p>The thoughtful posts on this thread really give good food for thought. I do agree with other posters that a liberal arts education ought to be regarded as a public good and a laudable social virtue and that pre-college education ought to be stronger. That said, Leef’s paper poses some provacative questions, since this position was a lot easier to defend when higher education was deemed to be the purview of the elite and relatively small numbers of young adults went to college as a prelude to entering the work force. His argument sends a message that the debate over whether higher education should be seen as a public good and social virtue or an investment shouldn’t be a debate at all since higher ed. should be both a public social good and a sound investment. This position is all the more significant with the soaring costs of attendance for both private and public higher education - much of it aimed to provide students with a “fun”, rather than “rewarding”, college experience. As cupcake points out, in Europe and many other parts of the world, going to college is quite a different kind of “rite of passage”. It is not an “expected” course of action but a deliberate decision to invest X number of years in school to prepare for a particular profession. </p>
<p>With the increasing cost of attendance of higher education in the U.S., the value of a 4-year liberal arts education cannot be said to be a sound investment if it is a market commodity that is simply not a good deal, in other words, not in the public good. On this score, Leef makes a good arguement that the 4 year college experience is not for, and should not be for, everyone, since we do have the expectation that students will “come out” better than they “went in” - especially in terms of critcal thinking skills and enhanced knowledge. The sad fact that it does not, means that American higher ed is falling short on both counts. So, then, if the public good is defined, as the creation of a more productive, literate work force, then logically, Leef’s answer to the question: "For high school graduates who might have gone to college but did not, is it the case that their earnings would be significantly higher if they had instead enrolled in college? is, indeed, a resounding “no”. </p>
<p>So, why do colleges and universities not only want but are willing to cater to students who are disengaged. According to Leef, it is the bottomline that counts and we are the losers. So, maybe not only will gap year(s) become more popular and accepted, but also the option just “not to go”.</p>
<p>From Leef’s paper:</p>
<p>"Why do colleges and universities want students who arent interested in studying? Its because they bring in revenue. Schools like Harvard and Princeton dont have to worry about their finances, but most schools are ravenous for every dollar of tuition, grant and loan money, room and board money, and student fees. (As Harvards president Derek Bok has written, Universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money to satisfy their desires. … They know that they accept large numbers of disengaged students, who will need remedial (or developmental to use the preferred euphemism) courses, and that even with those courses, many will struggle in school or drop out…</p>
<p>“Owing to the degradation of the curriculum, there is reason to believe that the typical college graduate today is no better educated than was the typical high school graduate of 1955.”</p>
<p>and </p>
<p>“Fortunately, many young Americans manage to navigate the islands of excellence and graduate with greatly enhanced human capital. For many others, however, college education is now a mushy concoction of watered down, trendy, and frivolous courses that do little to enhance their skills or build their knowledge base. Those students graduate with weak analytical and communication skills because such skills are no longer necessary to earning a degree. The conventional wisdoms assumption that college studies boost students to a higher plane of productivity by enhancing their mental capabilities is based on a view of college education that is sadly out of date. The accumulation and transmission of knowledge, unfortunately, is no longer the main business of many colleges and universities.”</p>
<p>Andrew Abbott in his hypothetical experiment posed an interesting alternative to the typical four year college curriculum, perhaps some one will try it.</p>
<p>"Our belief that college education has cognitive importance rests pretty completely on our belief that we can statistically solve the problems of selection bias and unmeasured variables, because the only nonstatistical way of handling them is controlled experiment. No one has ever taken 1,000 bright, ambitious young people and sent them not to college but to another, equally challenging, intellectual environment that did not involve classroom instruction, courses, or curricula. Suppose you could spend the next four years going through a structured rotation of working internships in businesses, not-for-profits, and government agencies, where you would be left to pick up skills the same way everybody else there does: by asking friends and coworkers what to do, by reading a manual, or by going to some organizationally sponsored classes on particular necessary techniques. You might still live in dormitories. You might still have an extracurricular life. But there would be no classroom instruction. I submit that in all but a few areas—the hard sciences and perhaps engineering— you would be every bit as ready for law school or business school or management consultancy or social-work training as you will be after your four years in classrooms… "</p>
<p>In the same article he goes on to suggest that there is little evidence for arguing that college provides much in thinking skills beyond what is learned in high school, prepares one for a particular occupation, or provides a vehicle for cultural transmission. He basically says that the aim of education is to be educated and experience being educated, other than that there is little evidence as to its value, particularly at “elite” universities.</p>
<p><a href=“http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/features/zen.shtml[/url]”>http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/features/zen.shtml</a></p>
<p>I think many of the problems above can be attributed to a US education system that I would describe as “One size misfits all”.</p>
<p>Thanks to NCLB, our K-12 education is now geared towards getting the maximum number of children to learn how to fill in the correct bubbles on a standardized test. </p>
<p>They are not taught to be able to understand and communicate our language, understand and employ basic logic (key to critical thinking), understand the basic principles of matter and life, be able to quantify and compute, and grasp the fundamentals of how humans feel, interact, and govern themselves in a society.</p>
<p>They just have to memorize basic facts, not be able to work together to solve the problems that will face them in life.</p>
<p>Of course, what can you do when 1 teacher has to deal with 25-30 children who all have different needs and styles of learning. Keeping order and filling in worksheets become the only way to manage such a crowd. Most children are naturally curious, but need help in working towards a socially correct way of cooperative learning. Sit down, shut up, and fill in the worksheet is about the only way to handle that number of students for many teachers, unfortunately. And after a while, these students are conditioned to do only that.</p>
<p>Our higher education system for the most part is no better. They take these passers of standardized tests and quickly discover, they cannot write, much less articulate a point of view effectively, be it of social or scientific nature. So they spend freshman year remediating basic reading and math skills, and filling in the rest of their credits by satisfying their angst with pop-culture ideas because the great thinking of man is not interesting because the students have been taught not to think, just do as instructed. </p>
<p>Those who continue to just do (not think), just continue on with their indoctrination, learning the “facts” they are told and come out with a uniform view of the world thoroughly ingrained in their heads. </p>
<p>In many ways this is no different than the education system of the Madrassas that teach radical Islam. The students come out spouting what the instructors want them to think, not finding their own way through a vast world of conflicting ideas and experiences learning how to critically evaluate information, formulate and test ideas, present ideas based upon their observations and graciously accept both praise and criticism of their work.</p>
<p>Fortunately, our universities don’t teach bomb construction to undergrads.</p>
<p>Yes, higher education is oversold on its benefits to a society.</p>
<p>But for an individual who is prepared to properly, it is well worth the money and time, provided you find an institution that will challenge a student, not indoctrinate.</p>
<p>“Andrew Abbott in his hypothetical experiment posed an interesting alternative to the typical four year college curriculum, perhaps some one will try it.”</p>
<p>I know homeschoolers all over the country who have participated in this “experiment”, with excellent results. I know a few who have gone to law school and engineering school, without college degrees. I know of two in Ph.D. programs. I know many who have started businesses and non-profits, published books, written music for motion pictures and become screenwriters, and contributed back to their communities.</p>
<p>I would rewrite the question - it is the overselling of high school that is the real problem. Leon Botstein, the Pres. of Bard, notes that the pattern of American high schools hasn’t changed in more than a hundred years even as, at a very basic level, youth are sexually mature a full three years earlier than they were in 1900. He sees absolutely no reason why a normal, average, healthy child with a decent elementary education shouldn’t be ready to enter college at 14 or 15, and has put his money where his mouth is, with Bard’s program in NYC. The program takes youth - not gifted ones, mind you, and not wealthy ones - just those who have demonstrated they are willing to do the work - and given them a full college curriculum at ages 14 and 15, and they are doing just fine.</p>
<p>“The program takes youth - not gifted ones, mind you, and not wealthy ones - just those who have demonstrated they are willing to do the work - and given them a full college curriculum at ages 14 and 15, and they are doing just fine.”</p>
<p>I could not agree more. High school is a massive waste of time.</p>
<p>idad, thanks for posting the U of Chicago piece - the last line is telling: “There are no aims of education. The aim is education. Ifand only ifyou seek it education will find you. Welcome to the University of Chicago”. All in all, a compelling argument that a four-year, elite liberal arts education is just that - elite, and as such, it is certainly not the only path to enlightenment (or success in the job market) out there.</p>
<p>Also of interest, is Stuart Tannock’s article “Higher Education, Inequality and the Public Good”: </p>
<p>"Yet even as demand for college education swells across the nation, the sobering truth is that college, in its current form at least, can help only a few of us resolve our labor market difficulties. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, no more than 30 percent of jobs in the United States currently, and for the foreseeable future, will require a college degree. </p>
<p>“Unless we rethink fundamentally the approach we have been taking to college we may well be backing ourselves into a corner from which there is no way out. Such rethinking requires us to enter into a new conversation about the relation of higher education not just to inequality in this country (and beyond) but also to our vision of the public good. This conversation needs to include individuals of all social backgrounds, occupations, and levels of income and educationunlike todays, in which research and debate on higher education is preoccupied with what is happening on college campuses, in isolation from what is happening away from them, and is dominated by the voices of current and former chancellors, provosts, and presidents from elite universities.”…</p>
<p>“SINCE THE BEGINNING of this country, public and private institutions of higher education have received extensive public financial support, in the form of direct subsidy and investment, as well as through tax breaks to college students and their families and tax exemptions to colleges and their donors. Unlike with primary and secondary schools, we have never expected colleges (particularly four-year colleges) to serve directly all individuals in the countryincluding the shift, in the period following the Second World War, from an elite to a so-called mass or universal model of higher education. But we have expectedand we should expectthat, in return for public support, colleges will benefit all of us, even if indirectly, regardless of whether we go to college or not.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=407[/url]”>http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=407</a></p>
<p>I don’t know if I can express myself clearly- I think college- or further education is important- but I also feel like we are digging ourselves into a hole
so we have a great number of jobs ( service/sector) that pay little and don’t require college
We also have a great number of jobs that “require” college- but realistically, not to do the work. Do order fillers at amazon really need a college degree?
I think there are also a lot of other jobs that fit that description.
Just as requiring a college degree for a job that really you don’t need one for is expensive, then these jobs may become too expensive for the employer to fill in this country- so they send that dept overseas where they can pay less.
It really isn’t uncommon for folks with 4 year degrees to need to attend vocational/tech school to become employable.
I think we need to make public universities more affordable- acknowledging that fact- its great to want to get everyone a college education- but to watch students take out loans for expensive schools, and then watch them take out loans to get trained as a respiratory tech - is painful</p>
<p>Not everyone is going to be a doctor or a lawyer ( god no) if high school was meaningful*and it is in some places- I have been very impressed with the level of classes in my daughters public school- the jewel of the city if not the state - I also was very impressed with the level of classes at her sisters private prep school- but I admit that the reason that we have national testing, is because there is too much disparity in educational systems across the country and even within districts ( I didn’t say that necessarily the testing system is the way to fix it- but at least it acknowledges disparity- without putting enough money behind the idea of course)</p>
<p>But I don’t see any changes in store to divert from the path requiring a degree for any job that pays a living wage- which is going to be more and more expensive.</p>
<p>I have relatives who are/were carpenters, police officers, etc. These are jobs that do not require a college degree, but all have one and are glad they do. Not because a better cabinet can be made, but because of how it has affected their world view and has enriched their lives. They love their work and love having had a four year degree even if it isn’t vocationally related. I think one of the problems we have is that we too closely link job and education rather than emphasize the wonderful state of being educated, no matter what we do.</p>
<p>thats why I suggested we need to make public higher education more accessible and affordable</p>
<p>If someone is going to be making at most $35,000- to $45,000 a year, as the average national income suggests, can they really afford to have college loans of over $40,000?</p>
<p>Wont that affect their ability to start a family, to afford housing and to cover medical costs?</p>
<p>There are other ways to be educated- I think I can hold my own with many on the board, and I never graduated from high school, although I have taken some community college classes.</p>
<p>But in my own community, I see students who attended expensive private colleges, working at Schucks or Old Navy</p>
<p>We have adult children- often even married, living with their own parents, because that is what they can afford.
<a href=“http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/286762_parents28.html[/url]”>http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/286762_parents28.html</a></p>
<p>I think one of the problems is that we equate attending a university with being educated-</p>
<p>Weve seen that homeschoolers can educate their kids at a level matching some of the top schools in the country, why would we believe that an adult couldn’t educate and inform themselves to be a participating member of society by taking a few enrichment courses and doing a lot of reading?</p>
<p>And if your plumber and house painter have a college degree, shouldn’t they expect to be paid more an hour because of it? They need to pay back those loans after all.</p>
<p>This strikes me a good companion piece to the theme of this thread:</p>
<p><a href=“http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2NjMWYzNDI0ODhhZDAzNWNhMjMxMmVhOGZhYjcwOGM=[/url]”>http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2NjMWYzNDI0ODhhZDAzNWNhMjMxMmVhOGZhYjcwOGM=</a></p>
<p>An excerpt:
"I assigned the first half of Allan Bloom’s new surprise best-seller The Closing of the American Mind. When the time came to discuss the Bloom book, I asked them what they thought of it.</p>
<p>They hated it.</p>
<p>Oh, yes, they understood perfectly well what Bloom was saying: that they were ignorant, that they believed in cliches, that their education so far had been dangerous piffle and that what they were about to receive was not likely to be any better.</p>
<p>No wonder they hated it. After all, they were the best and the brightest., Ivy Leaguers with stratospheric SAT scores, the Masters of the Universe. Who is Bloom? What is the University of Chicago, anyway?</p>
<p>So I launched into an impromptu oral quiz.</p>
<p>Could anyone (in that class of 25 students) say anything about the Mayflower Compact?</p>
<p>Complete silence.</p>
<p>John Locke?</p>
<p>Nope.</p>
<p>James Madison?</p>
<p>Silentia.</p>
<p>Magna Carta? The Spanish Armada? The Battle of Yorktown? The Bull Moose party? Don Giovanni ? William James? The Tenth Amendment?</p>
<p>Zero. Zilch. Forget it.</p>
<p>The embarrassment was acute, but some good came of it. The better students, ashamed that their first 12 years of schooling had mostly been wasted (even if they had gone to Choate or Exeter), asked me to recommend some books."</p>
<p>Couldn’t have said it any better.</p>
<p>I loved the article, but the ignorance of his students sounds a bit suspect to me. While I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge and expect that my classmates do as well, there is absolutely no way that a professor could ask 25 of us those questions directly and not get an answer to all of them. Yet this professor claims his Dartmouth students couldn’t answer one. I find that next to impossible to beleve. I mean, I’m not saying I know a lot about most of those things, but I could at least have given a quick, cursory, and reasonably confident answer to each one.</p>
<p>So some penny-ante professor decides its time to play Jeopardy in his classroom and then is surprised that a bunch of students paying for an elite college education don’t want to play? “Impromptu oral quiz”, my eye. Pitiful.</p>
<p>Reminds me of something I wrote recently about a 5-year-old (true story):</p>
<p>"A friend of mine, a homeschooling mom, related the following incident to me. She had gone to a local corner grocery with her five-year-old son at 11 o’clock in the morning and, it being a “school day”, the shopkeeper asked the boy where he went to school.</p>
<p>“I homeschool,” the boy replied proudly.</p>
<p>“Oh, I see,” said the shopkeeper. “Can you count to ten?”</p>
<p>Homeschool mom’s first response, of course, was to be offended. How dare a perfect stranger feel entitled to go about testing her five year old simply because they went shopping together at 11 o’clock in the morning? The nerve! What an outrage! How would he like to be tested by anyone who happens to cross his path?</p>
<p>Had this gone on much longer, there would have been red and black smoke emerging from her ears and nostrils. But then she looked down at her son. He was taking too much time to answer the question. “Come on, Billy,” she thought, you can count to ten. I know you can.” Her palms began to sweat. It was not her son who was being tested, but she herself! Legs a little rubbery. Her self-esteem, her very identity as a homeschooling parent was on trial, and might be found wanting. “Come on, Billy,” she would have prayed, except she wasn’t the praying sort, “Answer the man.”</p>
<p>Billy had his hands in his pocket, and was seemingly bashfully looking down at the floor. At last he picked up his head, looked at the shopkeeker, and in a small, thoughtful voice, asked,</p>
<p>“Would you like me to count to ten in English, French, German, Russian, or Japanese?”</p>
<p>Would you like me to count to ten in English, French, German, Russian, or Japanese?</p>
<p>zing!</p>
<p>what is it about people that compels them to grill kids who are homeschooled?</p>
<p>I consider someone educated if they could take their profession and acquired knowledge and land almost anywhere in the world and survive.</p>
<p>But perhaps I am more practical than some
In my world- knowing where to find what you need to know & knowing how to use it- is much more important than being able to endlessly rattle off esoteric facts
wasn’t it Einstein who said * Education means developing the mind- not stuffing the memory*?</p>