The Value of College: It’s Not Just Correlation – NYTimes.com.
I just posted a comment I made on the above article. I added a second comment. Two people responded. I think the two responses are informative, of both thinking and facts. I will post all the comments.
MY COMMENT:
Today’s college “degree” is not your grandmother’s college “education” – and that is meant literally. From Arum and Roksa’s excellent book, “Academically Adrift”, we learn that, after four years of college, average critical thinking improved by one sigma for freshmen in the 80’s, .5 sigma for the 90’s, and, .18 sigma in the 2000’s. We also learn that studying outside of class went from 25 hours a week in the 60’s to 13 hours a week in the 2000’s.
Today’s college is not yesterday’s college,but neither is today’s high school yesterday’s high school (since today’s high school teachers did not get the education of yesterday’s teachers).
The pay gap for a college degree over a high school degree may be growing (since the dumbing down of high school may be progressing faster than the dumbing down of college), so it is probably good advice to tell young people to go to college. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something terribly wrong.
In many cases, we have spread the cost of a high school education over eight years, with the final four years generating a giant misallocation of resources.
We could do much better for your youth; and thus for our economy and our politics. To do that, though, we have to carefully watch our institutions of higher education, and be very careful when we tout them. They know what we don’t know and they know how to use it to their advantage. Believe me. I’ve been there.
Disclaimer: Some places are ok – but not as many as people think.
BILL FROM ITHACA REPLIED:
This is nonsense. To give a concrete example, when I first began teaching in the engineering college at Cornell, it was assumed incoming students had not had a first course in calculus and the 2 year math sequence began with intro calculus. Today, we assume incoming students have already had intro calculus in high school and the standard math sequence, still 2 years, begins with second semester calculus (first semester calculus is now effectively a remedial course).
Our increasingly technical and knowledge-based society requires more knowledge, more education and many high schools, including the one my kids attended, provide more, not less, than the did when I was in high school. Whether they provide enough is a different question. And this, of course, is not to say that many school systems are in fact failing to provide a strong basis for a university education.
Its true that college is the new high school in the sense that it is a necessary step to economic success. It is not true in the sense that colleges now teach what was once taught in high school.
I RESPONDED TO BILL:
Listing years of “taking” what the AP, and many colleges, call calculus is not the same as stating that high school students “learn” calculus. Very few do, even if they make a 5 on the AP exam.
I started teaching outstanding high school students a course in multivariable calculus at Wash. U. in St. Louis in 1996. Most of them went on to schools like MIT, Harvard and Princeton. (One of your colleagues, John Hubbard, know of my course. You can also read about it on my blog www.inside-higher-ed.com) Now for the bad news.
i was shocked to find that these brilliant students did not have the essential understanding of the material that is not only the essence of calculus, but is important for engineer, which I was once. That essence had been dropped from the AP exam years before – most likely so that more schools could say “Our students know calculus.”
I’m sure that Cornell has a good program. I certainly know that John Hubbard’s book is outstanding. But you are mistaken when you count taking “woefully inadequete” courses as evidence of education – even if those courses are called AP.
(There is a post on my blog about how the AP picks topics for English – if “enough” colleges cover it.)
MARK FROM NYC WROTE THIS:
Bill and Mark Feldman, I think that probably in some respects you are both right. But what is remedial at Cornell, first semester calculus, is not what is remedial at certain other colleges. I am entirely willing to believe that Mark got students who didn’t actually understand the material. I taught calculus in high school and, in the text we used, there was an introductory chapter that thoroughly discussed the concept of the derivative and related concepts. I was discouraged from spending much time on that, but urged rather to go on to the mechanics of plugging a function into a rule for finding the derivative. It was teaching to the test.
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