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3) College students are not as independent as previous generations.
In my generation, during the summer, we were gone all day didn't return until dinner. Our parents had no idea of where we were. There were no cell phones or keeping in touch. We were expected to get summer jobs. We have chores and responsibilities at home. If we were bullied, we were told "sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never harm me." Believe me when I say it wasn't great, but we were expected to have a thicker skin. IMHO, we had higher graduation rates because we had more grit.
I would agree that high schools are failing in their jobs. And I agree that colleges are accepting students who shouldn't be there.
Where I disagree is number 3. From what I see, the students who would have been college students a generation ago have just as much grit and determination as previous generations. They hold jobs, they go away to college, the become independent pretty quickly. Just as previous generations. Instead, I think it goes back to number 2, students who don't belong in college. That part of the student body is dragging down the numbers. Making it seem like the typical student is worse. I think instead of a bell shaped curve, we have a bi-modal with two humps. The top hump of that curve is roughly the same for each generation. But there's a new hump at the bottom that didn't used to be there. And that's what's making everything from grades to ACT scores to ability-to-complete look worse.
Colleges focus on the wrong things. The traditional subject matters are mostly irrelevant. Once they get out of college, who actually uses algebra or reads a foreign language or discusses literature or psychology or biology or any other of the many required classes? It's all memorized and forgotten. College taught me how to stick it out to get the diploma, work more than a dozen different low paying jobs while in school, learn a lot of irrelevant subjects (including a few interesting ones like Art History and History for Historians), put up with the good and bad teachers, follow the rules.
These were all keys to sticking it out on the job, following the rules, putting up with good and bad bosses, doing things their way even if it made little sense. So there was a direct correlation between sticking it out and getting a diploma and sticking it out and making a decent living and retiring comfortably. I have no doubt that the diploma got me the jobs I got, but once in the door I started from scratch like everyone else.
Getting my MBA while working at the age of 40 did actually teach me two things I did use, double entry bookkeeping and statistics. Getting an A in calculus showed me I could solve any math problem if I put enough time into it. All of the other classes were largely irrelevant.
3) College students are not as independent as previous generations.
In my generation, during the summer, we were gone all day didn't return until dinner. Our parents had no idea of where we were. There were no cell phones or keeping in touch. We were expected to get summer jobs. We have chores and responsibilities at home. If we were bullied, we were told "sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never harm me." Believe me when I say it wasn't great, but we were expected to have a thicker skin. IMHO, we had higher graduation rates because we had more grit.
Excerpts: "The relationship between American businesses and their employees is undergoing a profound shift: For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand. ... Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications, and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work. ... the share of postings that say “no experience necessary†is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled. ... People are demanding more money to take a new job. The “reservation wage,†as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19 percent higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."
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Colleges focus on the wrong things. The traditional subject matters are mostly irrelevant. Once they get out of college, who actually uses algebra or reads a foreign language or discusses literature or psychology or biology or any other of the many required classes?
I still do. My husband and I are big readers. We still discuss literature. In garden planning, I use my design principles from art history.
I've try to be well read. In understanding writers, it helps to understand their time in history.
You can enjoy Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol" on its own. However, I think knowing Charles Dickens father's was incarcerated in a debtors' prison adds something. Additionally, how 17th Century Puritan banned Christmas celebrations (in Britain and Boston, MA). Christmas came back result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday, spearheaded by Charles Dickens.
All of this probably is irrelevant, but knowing it keeps my mind active and makes me happy.
It’s completely ridiculous to say people who don’t go to college aren’t ambitious. My FIL didn’t go to college and he is a multi-millionaire. Someone upthread said, and I agree, we need more paths to the middle class in this country. However, I would go further and rephrase that to we need more paths to success in this country.
I further take exception to PP’s blanket characterization of rural mid-westerners as bigoted and uneducated. I think he found what he was looking for, and as an outsider traveling through, he has no real basis to make such claims.
While we should all avoid painting with too broad of a brush, as someone who spent 20+ years in the midwest (both rural and suburban), I can say from heaps of personal experience that a substantial number of people living in the rural areas by and large are living, breathing examples of Dunning-Kruger ignorant with dashes of bigotry tossed in. The midwestern mindset and culture loves to vastly oversimplify and reduce otherwise complex problems until they're simple enough for a child (or adult, as it seems) to make sense of it, to the detriment of not actually understanding the original subject. It's not because they're from flyover country, though -- it's because they live in a world that is by and large hostile to education and intellectuals, and that world just happens to largely occupy the South and Midwest in the US. Theory is almost a bad word; if you can't touch it, see it, or use it 50 different ways to get through the day, it's not worth knowing to them. There's certainly pockets of this elsewhere too, but it's the dominant ideology in flyover country.
I can't count how many times I've heard someone from Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and a few other states spout on about how they can so very clearly see a simple and obvious solution to the Israeli/Palestinian issue despite being unable to cite a single event that took place there in the last 100 years (and certainly nothing about 1948 or 1967), don't know a word of Hebrew or Arabic, and often can't even point to the locations on a map let alone having visited. But to them, intellectuals are too stupid to see the common sense answers they've reduced everything to, and this makes them think they're the smart ones when they're really, really not. This applies to so many complex things that get reduced to grossly incorrect assumptions about things based on guts and false intuition: the economy, science, immigration, or any number of other complex and political subjects. It's that dangerous powderkeg that is Dunning-Kruger again: incompetence in a subject mixed with more than enough confidence to make them dangerously convinced they're not incompetent.
I don't meet people from New Jersey or Vermont who think the answer to all our education problems in the US is mandating school prayer for every student. Yet, I've heard that literally hundreds of times from midwesterners, often with such a certainty that their particular messiah will solve everything that it's concerning.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bobspez
Colleges focus on the wrong things. The traditional subject matters are mostly irrelevant. Once they get out of college, who actually uses algebra or reads a foreign language or discusses literature or psychology or biology or any other of the many required classes? It's all memorized and forgotten. College taught me how to stick it out to get the diploma, work more than a dozen different low paying jobs while in school, learn a lot of irrelevant subjects (including a few interesting ones like Art History and History for Historians), put up with the good and bad teachers, follow the rules.
Every subject you listed is in my life just about daily. The problem, is, well.. the bolded above. If you treat those subjects as something to memorize and regurgitate for an exam, either education has failed you or you have failed yourself. It's not about knowing what happened on page 347 or rattling off kingdom/phylum/class/order/family/genus/species; it's about assembling the blocks of knowledge together and learning to build new things from them. That biology, that algebra, those books you read -- they're metaphorical Lego blocks that an intelligent person examines, tears about, categorizes in their mind, and understands it to a level it can be recalled to build new information later.
Why is this important? Because that critical thinking ability is what employers want. It trains people to be able to deduce something they don't know from things they do. It trains them to be able to make the next logical leap and figure out new solutions to old problems by seeing the relations between what they're doing now and what they read about someone else doing 20 years ago. The whole idea of algebra is to take things you know, isolate what you don't know, and figure out how to re-arrange the puzzle pieces so you can solve for the unknown. It's one big substitution equation that, to a practiced person, becomes easy to recognize and solve. To the uneducated and untrained, they become daunting challenges.
The theory is the value -- if someone just wanted practical hands-on training to do something, there's vocational and technical schools for that.
This is also why even 'useless' subjects like history and the arts are anything but. To do them for a living may not pay well, but the knowledge they impart is part of the toolbox.
This is likely one of our system's greatest failures. We're teaching people to wax the car and sand the floor, but apparently not teaching them how to put it together and apply it.
As I've noted before on here, I inherited my uncle's papers and effects. He was a magna c*m laude graduate of Princeton '63, majored in economics. He then went on to Harvard Law School.
I have his coursework and notes, at least what he kept. Including a lot of his papers and tests. Harvard Law seemed fairly hard and in his letters he talked about struggling with some work there. But his Princeton undergraduate work? It was not. Looked quite similar to the work I did at as undergraduate at an average state university. I minored in econ; the math in his econ classes looked similar to what I had. He did, however, do a senior capstone research thesis that I never did anything like until grad school.
His humanities and liberal arts courses looked no more difficult than mine were. His biggest struggle was apparently French, that he barely passed and complained a lot about. The French coursework he did looked like a typical language class to me. He just sucked at it.
Those were the days of in loco parentis. There were college staff that looked after and looked over students far more than now. He got much more guidance than I ever got (was also more restricted).
So I don't believe people when they say school was so much harder in their day.
....
Every subject you listed is in my life just about daily. The problem, is, well.. the bolded above. If you treat those subjects as something to memorize and regurgitate for an exam, either education has failed you or you have failed yourself. It's not about knowing what happened on page 347 or rattling off kingdom/phylum/class/order/family/genus/species; it's about assembling the blocks of knowledge together and learning to build new things from them. That biology, that algebra, those books you read -- they're metaphorical Lego blocks that an intelligent person examines, tears about, categorizes in their mind, and understands it to a level it can be recalled to build new information later.
Why is this important? Because that critical thinking ability is what employers want. It trains people to be able to deduce something they don't know from things they do. It trains them to be able to make the next logical leap and figure out new solutions to old problems by seeing the relations between what they're doing now and what they read about someone else doing 20 years ago. The whole idea of algebra is to take things you know, isolate what you don't know, and figure out how to re-arrange the puzzle pieces so you can solve for the unknown. It's one big substitution equation that, to a practiced person, becomes easy to recognize and solve. To the uneducated and untrained, they become daunting challenges.
The theory is the value -- if someone just wanted practical hands-on training to do something, there's vocational and technical schools for that.
This is also why even 'useless' subjects like history and the arts are anything but. To do them for a living may not pay well, but the knowledge they impart is part of the toolbox.
This is likely one of our system's greatest failures. We're teaching people to wax the car and sand the floor, but apparently not teaching them how to put it together and apply it.
What do you do? I can imagine a scientist or science teacher using what he learned in algebra or biology class daily, but not an accountant or a lawyer or credit analyst. I acknowledged that it was useful to solve problems in calculus because it taught me that if I put enough thought into it I could solve a problem that was difficult. But I could have had the same experience solving a computer programming problem. As a subject matter, calculus became irrelevant. I don't accept that it was a failure in my education or in me as a student because after the class was over I never used it or thought of it again. It was just a tool that I no longer needed.
I challenge a hundred people who learned calculus to sit down and solve a differential equation with just a pencil and paper. I'm guessing 99 won't be able to do it. Did their education fail them? And for the person who can do it, so what? Who cares?
Why not make problem solving more interesting if that is your goal? Why stick to the same curriculum from a hundred years ago?
I studied Latin in high school and college. So I know the Latin origin of English words. But who cares? I studied history and politics in college. But I have just one vote like everyone else, so what good does it actually do?
You can fool yourself into thinking a college education makes you a superior person to those who don't have one, but I don't believe it.
What do you do? I can imagine a scientist or science teacher using what he learned in algebra or biology class daily, but not an accountant or a lawyer or credit analyst. I acknowledged that it was useful to solve problems in calculus because it taught me that if I put enough thought into it I could solve a problem that was difficult. But I could have had the same experience solving a computer programming problem. As a subject matter, calculus became irrelevant. I don't accept that it was a failure in my education or in me as a student because after the class was over I never used it or thought of it again. It was just a tool that I no longer needed.
I challenge a hundred people who learned calculus to sit down and solve a differential equation with just a pencil and paper. I'm guessing 99 won't be able to do it. Did their education fail them? And for the person who can do it, so what? Who cares?
Why not make problem solving more interesting if that is your goal? Why stick to the same curriculum from a hundred years ago?
I studied Latin in high school and college. So I know the Latin origin of English words. But who cares? I studied history and politics in college. But I have just one vote like everyone else, so what good does it actually do?
You can fool yourself into thinking a college education makes you a superior person to those who don't have one, but I don't believe it.
I think you're taking for granted what the effects of that education did for you. As the other commenter noted, it's like legos. Individually the classes aren't worth much, but cumulatively they form a structure.
I never thought literature did me much good. Seemed like a waste. Until I realized that reading literature from a target type of person and culture is the best way to get inside their heads. This was YEARS after college. I put this skill to work when I had to work with middle eastern people. Because I had been in college I had experience processing lots of information in a limited time. Read some (translated) Arabic literature chosen based on research skills I gained from college training. My relations with these Arabic partners went much smoother as a result.
It's also helped me in my personal life. I'll never know how women think. But by reading literature by and about women it gets me closer, and that has helped my personal relations with them including my wife.
And being able to speak and write with a little poetic flair that you only get from reading a lot, has done WONDERS for my ability to...ahem.... get women to like me. Believe it or not they are not impressed by "hey how r u" texts. When you want to express how you feel, suddenly that poetry class becomes relevant.
College educated people have much lower divorce rates.
I think you're taking for granted what the effects of that education did for you. As the other commenter noted, it's like legos. Individually the classes aren't worth much, but cumulatively they form a structure.
I never thought literature did me much good. Seemed like a waste. Until I realized that reading literature from a target type of person and culture is the best way to get inside their heads. This was YEARS after college. I put this skill to work when I had to work with middle eastern people. Because I had been in college I had experience processing lots of information in a limited time. Read some (translated) Arabic literature chosen based on research skills I gained from college training. My relations with these Arabic partners went much smoother as a result.
It's also helped me in my personal life. I'll never know how women think. But by reading literature by and about women it gets me closer, and that has helped my personal relations with them including my wife.
And being able to speak and write with a little poetic flair that you only get from reading a lot, has done WONDERS for my ability to...ahem.... get women to like me. Believe it or not they are not impressed by "hey how r u" texts. When you want to express how you feel, suddenly that poetry class becomes relevant.
College educated people have much lower divorce rates.
There's other ways to do all that. Visiting Mexico and going native taught me more about Mexican culture in less than 2 weeks than reading about it could have. I was an English major in college and switched to political science in my senior year. Nothing I read in college resonated with me as much as things I read on my own after college. I commuted to work on the subway for 35 years and probably read a book a week in that time.
I guess times have changed. I still don't text. All of our pitches to get girls were in person, and the only poetry we saw was in greeting cards. I went to college but never had any success with college educated women. A bunch of my friends have been married about 50 years. Some of the guys went to college, none of the wives did. My wife and all of my girlfriends just had high school diplomas. I've never understood women at all, even after being married close to 50 years.
What do you do? I can imagine a scientist or science teacher using what he learned in algebra or biology class daily, but not an accountant or a lawyer or credit analyst. I acknowledged that it was useful to solve problems in calculus because it taught me that if I put enough thought into it I could solve a problem that was difficult. But I could have had the same experience solving a computer programming problem. As a subject matter, calculus became irrelevant. I don't accept that it was a failure in my education or in me as a student because after the class was over I never used it or thought of it again. It was just a tool that I no longer needed.
I challenge a hundred people who learned calculus to sit down and solve a differential equation with just a pencil and paper. I'm guessing 99 won't be able to do it. Did their education fail them? And for the person who can do it, so what? Who cares?
Why not make problem solving more interesting if that is your goal? Why stick to the same curriculum from a hundred years ago?
I studied Latin in high school and college. So I know the Latin origin of English words. But who cares? I studied history and politics in college. But I have just one vote like everyone else, so what good does it actually do?
You can fool yourself into thinking a college education makes you a superior person to those who don't have one, but I don't believe it.
I'm an engineer, and I find use in biology and literature all the time in my work and personal life.
Algebra is universal. Every time a cashier makes change, that's algebra. Anything that requires substitution and knowing how to rearrange a problem from X + 4 = 7 to X = 7 - 4 is algebra. Schools teach algebra in 1st and 2nd grade, but we call it addition or subtraction. All "algebra" is doing is building on basic arithmetic to train the mind to look at the same problem in different ways as one of those ways may reveal a simpler path to a solution.
Calculus is a bit more specialized, but there's still lessons it has imparted at the fundamental level that are valuable. Whereas algebra trains us to re-design problems to expose simple solutions, calculus teaches us to extrapolate the next solution based on prior ones. Series, patterns, recurrences...all fundamentals of calculus. If you have something you know is true at fixed values/inputs, but need to know it will always be true regardless of what value/input is provided (and, as importantly, know what the result will be), that's calculus. Few will have a specific use-case for a differential equation, but the principles it taught and the thought processes it invokes are used much more often.
Biology is organization and relationships. Identify common traits among things and put them together. Define things that separate groups and re-organize. Literature is expression and learning new ways to communicate the same message for different audiences. English teaches the building blocks, but literature shows you how to apply those blocks in countless ways.
Regarding Latin, you (should) care as it's useful knowledge, unless you already happen to have learned every word in the English vocabulary (and are already fluent in several foreign languages). You've already mentioned prefixes and suffixes to figure out what some words mean, but it also applies to foreign languages. The Latin word for water is aqua, so if you hear a foreign language say a similar word, it is likely to have similar meaning...agua in Spanish, acqua in Italian, etc. Latin for interrogate is per****or..in Spanish ... preguntar. Congrats, Latin speakers: you're already able to fumble through half a dozen foreign languages as a result.
Regarding superiority, that's completely missing the point. The difference between an intelligent person and an ignorant one is the intelligent one knows what they don't know and isn't afraid to accept that and seek out the answer. The ignorant one wants to BS his or her way through it because they don't want to look weak. The difference between an educated person and an uneducated person is the educated person can apply those blocks of knowledge to solve problems whereas the uneducated one just tries the same thing 1,000 times and expects different results. If either of those trigger insecurities or inferiority complexes in uneducated/unintelligent people, that's unfortunate and unnecessary.
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