NAS Blog

Last Friday, the Pope Center published this letter from biology professor Steven Aird to his students, encouraging them to meet the challenge of his course and not expect a passing grade just for showing up.

None of the infamous “faculty/student non-aggression pact” for him.

The New York Times has turned into a good forum for critics of our higher ed system, with sharp pieces on law schools this year and “Room for Debate” features questioning the supposed need to push more and more kids through college. Last Friday, the paper ran this op-ed piece by Gail Collins, in which she notes that while higher ed expenses and concomitant student debt loads have risen greatly, many students put in little effort to get B or better averages. She quotes Richard Arum to the effect that in Europe, only students in the Slovak Republic put in less time studying than do American students.

With such columns running in the NYT, perhaps it’s now officially all right for liberal and progressive types to admit (or at least consider the possibility) that higher education has been undermined by the twin notion that almost everyone ought to go to college and that all students should get pretty good grades so they’ll feel good about themselves.

In today’s Pope Center piece, I write about a new AEI paper reporting what has been widely known for a long time: education schools take in weak students and give them high grades. The author suggests that the schools should demand more stringent grading, but that merely scratches the surface of the problem.

If it weren’t for state regulations, which mandate that almost all public school teachers get their “training” in approved programs, these schools would be much different if they’d exist at all. The Japanese, notably, don’t have ed schools at all.

Today’s Pope Center piece is a somewhat abridged version of a talk Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, recently gave at a meeting of the UNC Board of Trustees. She urges trustees to find out what’s actually going on at their schools and to stop sitting around like potted plants and do something about the clear erosion of academic standards and student learning.

I posted this as a comment on Richard Kahlenberg’s Innovations blog post, “The College-for-All Debate“:

Peter Wood and I debated Education Sector’s Kevin Carey last week in a four-day online debate through Minnesota Public Radio. The assertion was: The drive to increase college enrollment threatens to lower academic standards.

You can find our debate here and the MPR forum (with comments by the moderator and readers) here.

Some main points from our closing statement:
1. Everyone should have access to college, but not everyone should go to college.
2. Most-educated is not the same as best-educated.
3. If almost everyone goes to college, a degree won’t signify any particularly noteworthy achievement.
4. A society that recognizes the laws of human nature – that each person is unique and that a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work – can then begin to help its rising generations to choose their paths. Such a recognition can also save higher education from trivializing itself into irrelevance.

While tying my shoes last night in the gym locker room, I overheard a snippet of two women’s conversation. An Asian woman in a green t-shirt was saying to the tattooed (non-Asian) Zumba instructor, “Well, you know, their school is so easy, and then summer is all play…” She was concerned about academic rigor, especially for her son in first grade. Zumba woman asked if the teacher could give the boy extra work, and she recommended a summer math program she’d heard good things about.

Green t-shirt made an effort to appreciate the suggestion, but it was clear from her voice she felt she needed a more profound solution. I mentally recommended, “You could home-school him,” but as if she read my mind she dismissed the idea aloud: “He wouldn’t listen to me if I tried to teach him.”

“Maybe it’s better than you think,” offered the other woman. “It’s only first grade. You never know what’s easy and what’s hard at that level.”

“Yeah, maybe I just don’t know the difference,” said Green Shirt, trying to be agreeable. But she did. “I mean, it seems like he’s moved ahead in language arts since last year, but I compared his math homework to a Chinese math assignment, and his is much easier.”

How different she sounded from the typical American mother, worried that school is stressing out her child, defiant toward any teacher who might dare to give a low grade, quick to make excuses for poor performance. This mom blamed the school, but only because it didn’t push her child harder.

I may be stereotyping to assume that her Asian-ness lent itself to this mindset, but the words of Amy Chua in the Wall Street Journal are still ringing in my ears and I can’t help but wonder if her cultural heritage, with its focus on academic excellence, had something to do with it. The woman at the gym was American and spoke without an accent, and clearly she was trying to accept the  ”normal” level of U.S. education, but the comparison to China made her doubtful.

I realized I had just been given a glimpse of the troubled mind of the Americanized Tiger Mother. I don’t know which school her son attends (probably one in Hoboken, where the gym is), but I hope it gets the chance to hear her concerns before she conforms to the lenient parents around her and resigns her children’s education to schools that are “so easy.”

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I continue with the topic that took center stage at our event on May 10 — the low quality of many college courses. The problem is that at many colleges and universities, it’s easy for professors to take a lackadaisical approach (instigating what Murray Sperber calls the faculty/student non-aggression pact) because they lose nothing by doing so. Although most college leaders pay lip service to educational excellence, it’s only talk because relatively few students really want a rigorous education and would have a hard time identifying good or bad professors even if they did. But as the air starts going out of the higher ed bubble and people figure out that merely getting a piece of paper isn’t good enough any more, all of that will change.

In today’s Pope Center article, I review the new book by sociology professors James Cote and Anton Allahar (University of Western Ontario), Lowering Higher Education. Although Canada supposedly has a “world class” educational system that puts a higher percentage of young people through college than in the U.S., Cote and Allahar find that it’s just as wasteful as is our system. Rather than offering a valuable liberal education, Canadian higher ed is mostly about what the authors call “pseudo-vocational training.”

In today’s Pope Center piece, Jenna Ashley Robinson continues examining the case that higher education is a bubble that may burst or at least deflate. Among other evidence she presents, long-term average earnings for individuals with BA degrees have not risen much and the the last few years have dipped. Also, degree holders seem to be learning less, as shown by the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

Yes, on average, those with college degrees continue to earn more than those without them, but not everyone is average. A large number of marginal students are lured into college, spend much time and money there, but even if they get the degree will find employment in jobs that high school grads can do.

So argues Cal State Fresno professor Bruce Thornton in this excellent City Journal article.

Among other dismal revelations in the article, we learn that more than half of the students who now enroll in the CSU system need to take remedial coursework. The original idea was that CSU schools were for good high school grads who weren’t quite up to the elite University of California institutions. That they now accept large numbers of students who essentially need to go back to high school (or earlier) tells us a lot about the degradation of California’s K-12 system.