The big question for college admissions officers is whether an applicant has the chops to graduate. At least, that used to be the big question before it was supplanted by whether their admission demographics matched Skittles. And like so many worthy causes, it had unintended consequences. In this instance, the consequence was failure.
First, some good news: In recent decades, students from modest backgrounds have flooded onto college campuses. At many high schools where going to college was once exotic, it’s now normal. When I visit these high schools, I see college pennants all over the hallways, intended to send a message: College is for you, too.
How wonderfully inspirational, even if the positives of higher education too often fail to meet the promise of “averages.” If they paid tuition, there was a cost involved. Even if they didn’t, there was opportunity cost. And then there was the cost of realizing that you can’t make the grade, even if they gave you better grades than you earned because, well, reasons.
Now for the bad news: The college-graduation rate for these poorer students is abysmal. It’s abysmal even though many of them are talented teenagers capable of graduating.
No, David Leonhardt offers no cite to support his Gertruding that “many of them are talented teenagers capable of graduating,” but its impossible to believe otherwise if it would suggest they are inadequate. They may well have been smart enough, or not. They may well have had the desire, or not. But were they mature enough to dedicate their time and effort to succeeding? Were they willing to put in the work required? When you only had to study if mommy said so, it’s hard to push oneself without it.
But the fact that graduation rates are “abysmal” is a hard and unpleasant reality. It may be that Millennials, on the whole, aren’t equipped to go to college, relying instead on their mommy chewing their food for them their whole lives, and finding themselves generally incapable of independence and personal responsibility. But hey, it’s not as if there aren’t students graduating from college. It’s not as if one of the major lessons of college isn’t to grow up and become an adult.
Yet, they are failing. They are failing to graduate. They are failing to meet the expectations. They are failing to live up to the aspirational dreams that inclusion and diversity say are real. The joy of being admitted only lasts so long. When they’ve had enough of the hard work, or find work to be too hard, they quit. Bye, dream.
The surge in poorer students going to college hasn’t led to any meaningful change in the number of college graduates from poorer backgrounds. Among children born to low-wealth families in the 1970s, 11.3 percent went on to earn a bachelor’s degree. Among the same category of children born in the 1980s, only 11.8 percent did.
More go in. The same come out. There is a list of good reasons why this would be, but Occam’s Razor and inclusion hate each other. To consider otherwise would be to admit that the foundation of diversity and inclusion is shaky. It’s not that the poor and people of color are inherently inadequate to the task, but that not everyone is up to it. You can rationalize the problems they face, but that doesn’t make them capable of succeeding.
But Leonhardt’s solution isn’t to vet applicants more carefully, to tell moms to let kids chew their own food, to tell the kidz to take responsibility for the opportunity provided them and not blow it. A core belief of diversity and inclusion is that no person is responsible for their own failure. Failure simply means we didn’t hand them enough support.
Yet they often attend colleges with few resources or colleges that simply do a bad job of shepherding students through a course of study.
All colleges provide some level of support for their students. Advisers, counselors, therapists, RAs, TAs, and the biggest cadre on campus, Title IX administrators. But if students are failing, dropping out, the obvious answer to Leonhardt is that it’s not good enough. After all, if the support was adequate, no one would ever fail, quit, walk away.
You can think of college as adulthood’s first obstacle course. People who complete it learn how to overcome other obstacles as they go through life. People who don’t finish suffer a blow to their confidence. They also typically have to repay college debt without the extra earning power of a degree. It’s the worst of both worlds.
It sucks to drop out. Then again, obstacles like “a blow to their confidence” are part of life. Much as I would like to be timpanist for the Berlin Philharmonic, the obstacle of my lacking the skills necessary makes me feel bad. Nonetheless, I can appreciate von Karajan’s smiling up above. Sometimes, we’re just not good enough. Yes, it harms self-esteem, but if true, then self-esteem was unwarranted and needed to be lowered.
College students are already provided with far more support than earlier generations, with the cost of support staff and administration sucking on the teat that once fed mostly academics. If it’s still inadequate, if students need to not only be given the opportunity to rise to the occasion of being given a college education but “shepherded” through it, are we forsaking one enormous purpose of college, transitioning from childhood to adulthood?
It’s likely that with enough hand-holding, or lowered expectations, anyone could graduate from college. Does Leonhardt think that little of the poor? Does he think that little of higher education? Is the desire for inclusion and diversity worth the watering down of a diploma?
Not everyone who is poor or a person of color is capable of succeeding in college. Not everyone who is white and comes from a financially comfortable family is either. If colleges don’t want abysmal graduation rates, then they need to make sure they’re admitting students who can cut it, regardless of poverty and color. And if they don’t believe this can be done, then they think pretty damn poorly of the students they pretend they’re helping.
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Dear Papa,
“Are we forsaking one enormous purpose of college, transitioning from childhood to adulthood?” That ship sailed a long time ago. College is about beer and circuses and baby-sitting and diversity now.
Sure, Mama told us that we have to go to college. It wasn’t a choice, but an expectation. Not going to college is for losers. Your grandparents used college and military service to reach past their stations. Your relatives in trailer parks are examples of public school education failures. College wasn’t even a question, but Mama couldn’t see that the colleges had changed with the times, like so much else.
Some of us don’t cut it? You don’t say. But your precious standards have already been lowered to the floor. Don’t cry for college, Papa. It died alone, a long, long time ago. Cry for those who can’t even make the cut.
Some people are smarter than others. Life is unfair. It can be fairer if anyone really cared to try. More racial discrimination isn’t going to help anyone in the long-run.
Much love,
PK
It’s unfortunate that a lot of smart kids without the wonderful father you enjoyed are never imbued with the value of hard work and education. Should they be denied the opportunity to break out of the rut their circumstances put them in? But at some point, they need to take charge of their own life and make use of the opportunity that you take for granted.
Yes, college has already been watered down to taste like Kool-Aid, but it can always get worse. And maybe, just maybe, if we persist in extolling the virtue of hard work and responsibility (and get rid of all those teary-eyed and mushy-headed profs), we can make it better.
Ignorance is bliss. Don’t wish education on the poor. They might start learning things you don’t want them to. Except those mushy-headed profs can’t even infect their students with proper leftism.
Oh well. Might as well expel them and get people in who can actually teach the hard sciences the right way. At least then bridges might be safe.
There are still many intelligent, hard working students. But the classes were I am, are aimed to a median student for which we have lower expectations. The administration is fine with this, although they claim that our students are getting better every year.
The brightest students do undergraduate research to graduate with honors or express their talents in student project teams. Most of the ‘regular’ students will do project management or be a “CAD jockey” because they don’t have the drive, creativity, and in-depth knowledge to do more.
One approach to higher ed is to push students to up their game, but that means students who aren’t equipped to tackle the work won’t cut it. Another approach is to lower the bar. When my son went to MIT, he came in having aced AP physics, gotten a 5 on the AP test and a couple of prizes for his mad physics skillz. MIT made him take remedial physics, as his knowledge was inadequate for their introductory course. That’s what a high bar looks like.
I like a high bar. Industry will take advantage of it. But mediocrity makes mom and dad happy and fills the seats at a state school.
Not just industry, but the individual student will benefit from competence where mere passage won’t cut it when the job demands he accomplish something he can’t do. The moment of pride at graduation isn’t enough to overcome the years of agony when junior can’t get or keep a job.
C’mon. High bars are terrible.
You can’t see the video poker machine embedded in the countertop.
You are making that up. MIT would not do that, not to your son. Precious darling. If physics is not his bailiwick, he can always fall back on the law, where he presumably has an “in”. (It’s not what you know; it’s who you know that counts, especially in Law. Constituition, fuhgedda about it.)
You have an uncanny knack for going in the wrong direction.
I find that this debate often leaves out any consideration of highly viable non-college options, most importantly trade apprenticeships. These can be a ticket into the middle class for loads of young adults who prefer doing over reading, and/or would be better served economically by working for a wage than by going deeply into debt. However, even when I was in high school, the teachers (who had grad-school educations themsevles, no matter how dim-witted) viewed the skilled trades as the enclave of the dumb-as-rocks. They really believed that we set our weakest minds the task of securing our food supply, of building and maintaining the infrastructure of a technological civilization, so that our best and brightest could be freed up to analyze Pride and Prejudice through the lens of Critical Race Theory. I fear that this attitude has not improved in the intervening years, and if anything it’s gotten worse.
It’s not that it’s left out (and this has been a discussion here in other posts, as is often the case), but that it’s not what this post is about. Focus.
Looking at some National Center for Education Statistics data (link below – delete if you want), graduation rates for first-time college students seeking 4-year bachelor degrees have actually increased over the past decade plus, so us Millenials (2009 cohort: 55.3% after 5 years) are graduating at a slightly higher rate than Gen X’ers (1996 cohort: 50.2% after 5 years).
No easily-Googleable data available for fossils.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_326.10.asp
Screw the poor and downtrodden, what about the honor of Millennials?!? Good thing they now offer degrees in gender and deviant sexual studies or English where you never have to read a book.
“It may be that Millennials, on the whole, aren’t equipped to go to college, relying instead on their mommy chewing their food for them their whole lives, and finding themselves generally incapable of independence and personal responsibility.”
You’re the one who brought up Millennials.
Regarding the poors, there’s no easily available recent data (read: first page of Google results) on enrollment or graduation rates by income level over time. The best I could find is one longitudinal study comparing educational attainment across socioeconomic status cohorts for 2002 high school sophomores (the choice of population of which is confusing, to say the least). Spoiler alert: rich kids have higher educational attainment than poor kids.
However, a older study (published 1991) shows college enrollment rates between high school graduate class years 1961, 1972 and 1982 (link below). It shows a significant increase in enrollment of women over this time period, but there’s no discernible increase in enrollment for the lower income quartiles between the three cohorts (see p. 15). I imagine the dip in men’s enrollment for the class of 1972 cohort is due to Vietnam.
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6079.pdf
Yeah, I did bring up Millennials, though for a different reason, and general graduation rates alone don’t answer the question. As for graduation rates for the poor, did you look at the graphs in Times op-ed? Google isn’t everything.
I did see the chart in the op-ed, but the source link is blocked by the Corporate Overlords. When dealing with op-eds, always look at the source data instead of relying on the author’s interpretation.
To wit, the groups they use aren’t equal thirds based on income level; the “lowest wealth group” is actually the bottom 40% of households, whereas the “highest wealth group” is only the top 20%. “Household wealth” is defined as the person’s parents’ wealth when the person was 10-14 years old as opposed to household wealth during their post-high school period. And it excludes other potentially significant information about how they define “college”; it could be that those in the “lowest wealth group” attend 2-year, online or for-profit colleges at a higher rate than other groups, which have a much lower graduation rate for all students than traditional 4-year brick-and-mortar public/private schools. Without additional information on other significant variables, the NYT analysis is facile at best.
I know I’m needlessly banging on about this, but there’s nothing more frustrating than drawing simple conclusions onwildly complex subjects from rudimentary (possibly intentionally deceitful) analysis.
That’s why I said the graphs, not the source, as I would have gone there as well if it was available, though they are usually very disappointing. But I’m accepting the general premise that grad rates are abysmal and moving forward from there.
Of course, if schools don’t worry about qualifications (other than whether the student can get a loan to pay tuition), they can admit more students more easily. “Diversity” has become a cynical tactic to bamboozle the unqualified and dress it up as something noble.
Salaries have to be paid. Buildings have to be built. They don’t come free, you know (because the course of study was rigorous when you went to college).
When the O in GIGO doesn’t take place, then we have (borrowing from inventory control thought) FISH students. First In, Still Here.