Why have any sort of metric for getting into college at all? Why are there better schools for kids who have rich parents who can lavish time and attention on them that working class parents struggle to do? Wealth tends to correlate with academic success, because the wealthy tend to live in areas with better funded schools and have access to tutors and the like for training kids to “win” the SAT. Is it any wonder why working class students are more likely to do poorly both on their HS transcripts and on the SAT?
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Because schools should know if kids can handle the work. Perhaps the most extreme example, but you should let kids into Cal Tech or MIT unless you know they can eat up advanced math without thinking twice. The only way to do that is a test or relevant grades.
Why don’t working class kids have access to this kind of education at a younger age? Why don’t they have good pre-schools, well-funded elementary and middle schools with well-paid teachers and reasonable class sizes? Why are the kids who can handle this almost always the kids who came from already elite backgrounds? Are they just natural smarter? More mathematically inclined? Or is there something else happening?
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There are metrics for getting into college so that the students who end up there are likely to do well there. The current selection model is skewed and needs to be fixed.
We have made going to college a necessity, because sometime in the 70s someone published a list of lifetime earnings showing that college graduates made more money over their lifetimes. Soon every high school student had to be college bound. But college isn’t supposed to be for everyone-it’s supposed to be for those people who love and excel at academics. Let’s face the unfortunate truth that there are plenty of actually stupid people out there, and trying to force them through a college education is bad for everyone.
There should be ways for anyone who wants to try to get into a college to do so, but not everyone should be told “college or bust!” Some students need more support going in, and what criteria are used need to be as broad as possible.
Reintroducing a serious vocational training system would help-letting people know that not being academic isn’t a sign of personal failure. Most of the students I was at culinary school with were totally uninterested in anything intellectual. They didn’t care if they were plagiarizing when writing a paper, they just wanted to pad out the page count. The guys I worked with at the printing press laughed when I had a book to read during break. They earned more than I ever have, being union printers where I was a part time line worker.
Rich people get more, better stuff because we live in an unequal society. We can work to shift that inequality, but it’s going to be with us for a long time.
The whole public education system needs to be fixed.
So you’re okay with a class system? [ETA] You know what… I don’t think that comment was very fair to you, so let me expand a bit… Back in the 70s, one COULD have a blue collar job, raise a family, send the kids to college, AND retire… NONE of that is true now. People started going to college in larger numbers because blue collar jobs started to get off-shored, leaving only low-paying service work to fill the gap. College is a means of getting a job that pays more than minimum wage. We didn’t get more people in college because someone published a list, we got more people in college because it’s become a necessity to NOT live in poverty. 
We do have vocational training. Most states have a robust technical college system.
Cooking takes intellectual work. As does any number of “manual” jobs. Where did we get it into our heads that intellectual work is only the humanities or hard science?
You might have accepted the status quo, but there is no reason to do so. How society is today isn’t how it should or can be. The status quo is not remotely acceptable. The status quo gave us Trump.
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I’m not advocating a class system, I’m staying that academia should not not the be all and end all for everyone. Those people going to college to get a better than minimum wage jobs? They weren’t there for degrees in literature. They were there for degrees in pharmacology, or IT, or all of those “practical” majors that colleges started offering. Many of those degrees could have be taught better not at an academic institution. I’m saying nothing about the personal value as human beings of people not interested in or suited to going to college, I’m saying that insisting everyone is, or ought to be, is bad for the institutions and the people. (How many times have you seen/heard the idea that getting any degree that isn’t, basically job training is stupid? The whole “underwater basket weaving” line?)
As for all kinds of jobs being intellectual-most jobs need more thinking and analytical skills than white collar workers realize. I’ve been working in food service for over 30 years this year, and let me tell you, most of my coworkers are not interested in any kind of deep exploration of the world or themselves. They like the feeling of accomplishment from getting a physical task completed, they like the rush of working the hot line when it’s busy, they like the competitive burn of working faster than the guy next to them. Then they get off work, drink, watch sports on tv and go to bed. They used to do a lot of drugs, but that has died down.
It may be similar to how Dolly Parton dislikes being considered a feminist, but if you tried to tell them they were doing intellectual work they would laugh at you-then tell you as offensive a joke as they could think of.
Being a good mechanical engineer requires skills and ways of looking at the world that being a good physicist doesn’t, and vice-versa. There are elements that overlap both fields. Making the requirements for both fields the same is silly.
I’m not particularly happy with the status quo of public education and how the college system works-I just realize that it’s not going to change in a hurry. Maybe the shutdown will force a reorganization of schooling, but there’s huge inertia in the system. And even if we could wave a wand a create a perfect schooling system, the students in it would still be years away from joining the work force.
We can create a separate topic for why college has become the necessity it is, should we want to.
It’s not just a college problem, though, it’s a general educational problem across the board. Getting a BA is a necessity for many American workers, like it or not, and denying them that chance to improve their lot in life via various kinds of gate keeping is not particularly helpful.
How do you know, and why shouldn’t they? Why is a degree in literature only for those who come from enough money to not worry about paying their bills?
And they often are at technical colleges.
That’s because we’re thinking of education in terms of “job training” rather than education (by we, I mean the US, not you and I as individuals).
As someone with a phd in history, quite a lot, actually.
That’s not necessarily the limits “intellectual”.
Yet food service (\which I did for years, too, as did I suspect many other people) does take some intellectual know how, not in the “philosophical” sense, but in thinking about what you’re doing, rather quickly.
Those skills of a mechanical engineer is a form of intellectual labor, because some amount of it happens inside your head.
it better change, or we’ll continue this slide into a failed state. But maybe it is too late. We can’t even do the basics to save ourselves from a fucking pandemic… maybe that’s because people believe “intellectual” is some sort of emasculating thing that means you can’t work with your hands, too, rather than, you know, doing anything that involves thinking things through logically and rationally, and having thoughts over and above base emotions, fucking, and shitting.
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Degrees in literature are for anyone who wants to try to get them. Higher education should be accessible to anyone who wants it. That said, should the colleges and universities not have any demands on ability? Should getting a BA become another participation trophy?
I’m not, I repeat, NOT saying that college is only for the rich-I’m saying that academia-where you got that PHD-shouldn’t be made into the community swimming pool. Is that an elitist idea? Sure-but so is getting into the NBA. Is it possible that being short, fat, clumsy and lacking much eye-hand coordination is what’s kept me from basketball fame, not a broken system?
For a complex set of reasons having a college degree is now a necessity for many jobs. This is not really part of the discussion on the use of biased tests to determine who gets in.
If, as the current saying has it, being white in America means you’re racially biased because you live in this society, then we need to acknowledge that everyone is biased. We cannot create a bias-free test that covers every possible test-takers background. We can, and should, create other ways of discerning if applicants are likely to succeed at getting through college. I’m not advocating for anything like England’s old 11plus tests, which determined whether you went to university, apprenticeship or polytechnic at the mature age of 11. But saying that not everyone should be pushed to go for academia is not discounting the vast majority of life and jobs beyond the ivory towers.
Mostly what testing well shows is that you are good at taking that kind of test. Schools in poor communities that have focused on the skills needed to pass those tests see more of their pupils ending up at college. Expecting parents with the means to not use them to improve their children’s likelihood of admittance is naive. Look at the whole set up where parents were paying other people to take tests for their kids, creating athletic careers out of thin air and so on. If anything, making higher education free might well end up making testing more important, since getting cash from parents will be less of an incentive to the schools.
Right. We agree on that. It’s not accessibly to everyone because we don’t have a level playing field in k-12.
I would argue that what we have right now is emphatically not working.
But right now, academia is becoming once again, the domain of the upper classes.
I don’t think that’s the same thing at all.
I disagree. I think it’s the entire core of the problem. The guy who made the SAT to keep the “wrong” people out was not much different than all the other people divising way to keep the “wrong” people out of academia to begin with.
maybe boiling everything down to biased testing IS the problem. If we can’t agree that a test that was literally developed with racist intentions needs to go, then we’re only perpetuating racism.
I’m not doing that. I’m saying that our educational systems are failing us all. I’d argue that should get a rounded education that includes “intellectual” fields as well as “blue collar” fields. Shop class and literature classes for everyone at a young age. I don’t think one is more important than the other, I think there are many fields of knowledge which are valuable, which young people would benefit from being familiar with.
Which is why we should rethink education, as too many working class people end up getting a “teaching to the test” which isn’t very inspiring or conducive to actual learning.
Again, education is a human right, not just for those who can take tests and do well.
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Who should it be for? Only those that "deserve” it?
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By no means. I can make no assertions either way. I can’t even prove that you exist let alone this socalled Kellyanne Conway or Trump or Spicer.
I’m not even fully convinced I can prove I exist. I mean I think I can, (therefore I am) but I’m not really sure…
There are a lot of things about which we seem to have a great deal of indications pointing very strongly one way or the other, but fundamentally, we really don’t have proof of anything except possibly our own existence in some form.
Assuming such an event as the inauguration of President Trump actually took place (which given the evidence I’m prepared to posit), then (again) the given the information I appear to have it seems overwhelmingly likely not to have been the best attended such event in history - but I really can’t prove it to a certainty either way.
Really? You think you’re going to dispose of a school of philosophy which has resisted the best efforts of some of the world’s greatest thinkers for millenia by means of a glib “If that’s what you think, go jump off a building?” 
The theory of universal gravitation is as you say ‘just a theory’ (which means both a great deal more and a great deal less than one might think).
It appears to explain a great deal of what we observe around us but is it actual reality? Who knows?
I think we can safely put it in the category of ‘true opinion’ and therefore decide that stepping off (what appears to be) a building is overwhelmingly likely to lead to the appearance of falling a considerable distance, followed by the appearance of physical pain and quite likely the cessation of any further external stimuli.
Which is a bit of a mouthful and it’s no surprise we routinely shorthand it by saying “Don’t jump off that building or you’ll die”.
All of which is considerably off-topic. I just wanted to interject a word in favour of skepticism and philosophy in general into what was a bit of a selfcongratulatory lovefest for mathematics and physics.
Regardless of whether one comes down on the side of skepticism or decides that ‘yes, we can know things’, it remains a worthwhile intellectual exercise to challenge those assumptions now and again.
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Who is college for? Anyone who wants to try to get through it. However-there are lots of stupid people out there. They are fine human beings, just not intellectually acute. There are people for whom working on the factory floor is the perfect job. Even with perfect assessment not everyone is capable of or interested in the kinds of studies academia specializes in. Why should those people be required by the job market to go to college?
Why is there any ranking at all of abilities, which is what started this thread in the first place? Why not say anyone is good at anything, despite real world evidence that that is not true?
Yes, our education system is farked. Yes, we need to reform how it is funded, what is taught and how and by whom. Yes, higher education should be free or cheap enough for affordability by all. There will still be people better served by an available apprenticeship or job-specific training than by a traditional college education. Should a hair stylist have a college education? Sure, if they want one. It shouldn’t be a requirement if they don’t.
The conservative backlash against academia since it’s become more diverse tells you all you need to know on that front…
Please. There are plenty of people who’d do well for college who simply can’t afford it, or end up deeply in debt (like house levels of debt) trying to finance college.
Someone can game the system and know how to work a standardized test, and be “stupid” about anything number of things. “Smarts” are relative to any given situation, not the same across all things.
Whether they should or not, they are. Again, education is NOT about job training. And education is what is a human right.
Learning how to cut hair is a skill that requires some level of education, though. Yes, it’s the skill part you want to acquire, but hair stylists also (well, until recently) have to regularly interact with the public, and having a baseline of knowledge about the world actually helps them do their job better. Having a general understanding of say, the history of hair styles, would also be informative and make them better at their job…
You’re acting like a good, solid education that is accessible to everyone already exists, and we all bloody well know that that is absolutely not the case.
Again, it’s time to rethink education as more than job training.
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You are totally correct. You are also conflating a few very different points. Who is college for is not the same as who can get access to college in today’s system. Perhaps I should have said who should college be for.
Claiming that the schools are the only difference between who does and who doesn’t attend which college is just wrong. Yes, the schools and the discrepancies between access to high quality education plays a major part in the situation, but personal preferences also do. Yes, everyone benefits from being exposed to both “hands-on” and “mostly intellectual” studies. I’m a big believer in getting kids into all kinds of workshops. Help them find out what they are good at, and what they want to do. Can we at least agree that not everyone wants a PHD in history, or to study sociology or to be a car mechanic without assuming that any one of those jobs is more valuable than another?
You seem to starting from “given that everyone needs to go to college to get a job” to discuss inequalities in the education system. Totally valid points. I am trying to point out that, if we are going to try to redress those inequalities, perhaps we can rethink the idea that everyone must go to college, without that decision trapping people in poorly paid jobs or second class status.
What does college do? In a best case scenario it encourages and trains critical thinking skills (which should be introduced in grade school); it exposes the students to a broad and deep variety of subjects and ways of exploring the world; it encourages the development of networks of friends and acquaintances; it helps create a place where all people can express their views and be heard, if not agreed with.
In today’s system college provides entry level job training, a smattering of liberal arts exposure and some minimal amount of exposure across disciplines. It also supports class division because of how it’s paid for and who gets allowed to attend. Finding more inclusive ways to decide who gets to attend is a necessary move at this point.
100 years ago, plenty of people never went to high school. 50 years ago plenty of people never went to college. The societal shifts that led to everyone going to high school, then everyone going to college aren’t the focus of a topic about biased college selections.
Good thing I did not say that. But inadequate K-12 in working class communities is a huge barrier for many people, and we need to deal with that reality.
Well, I didn’t assign value to any of those. They are all equally valid and I don’t know how you got any of that from what I’ve said. I will say, one doesn’t need to have a phd in history in order to get an education that includes history. The effects of inadequate historical education has made itself known with a vengeance, with people not knowing basic things about American or world history.
No. I’m saying that we have a system where to get ahead you need at least a BA. I think that’s a fact at this point. If that’s going to continue to be true, we should think in terms of k-16 rather than k-12 as public education.
Or we expand to k-16 model. I’d also argue we need to rethink education from the ground up anyway.
Everyone benefits from that, not just people getting advanced degrees. This should be baked into our thinking about education from the start.
I’m aware, as a adjunct professor.
I am also aware of this…
Again, you didn’t need to, because the division of labor was very different in both cases.
I think they are, actually. Part of the reason why you get a conservative backlash against college education during the neo-liberal era was because of the expansion of higher education and greater inclusion. These are all intertwined issues.
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Well, there is your metric right there! (/s)
Seriously, I don’t know how you measure something intrinsically unmeasurable like “potential,” but that is what we actually need to overcome the biases in the system. Radio Lab on NPR is going to be doing a 4-parter on this subject, which I am dying to catch.
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I wonder do some people even realize that they end up showing the world who they really are in the course of conversations like these…
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This sounds very much like the “unitary intelligence” thinking that has been disproven over and over. I know quite a few folks with advanced degrees whom I would describe as “stupid” in regards to interpersonal skills and (especially now) political leanings. But in their fields, they are probably brilliant. Difficulty navigating the increasingly minefield like educational experience, especially for women and minorities, does not indicate, to my thinking, at least, lack of ability. In fact, some of those folks I mentioned, had they had to negotiate said minefields lacking their white male armor, would very likely fall into an entirely different category. Just a thought experiment, but try it out…
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Either that or they learned to navigate the system, or they came from a privileged background that all but guaranteed them a seat at the table, or they just failed up.
But it’s entirely true that brilliance in one field does not guarantee smarts at anything else… I’d argue that THIS is why a broadbased education matters, to become well rounded individuals as much as productive citizens.
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I am talking about the sort of intelligence useful in academia. This is by no means the only type of intelligence, Or the only, much less the “best” way to be a competent, well-rounded, well educated person. Interpersonal skills could be considered one type of intelligence, but political beliefs I would argue are not.
I had a roommate who was a perfectly nice person, a good human being, a reasonable person to live with, etc. etc. She wanted to get into the local community college to get the degree required to be a police dispatcher-she was working as mall security at the time. I helped her, as much as I could, with the essay she needed to finish her application. She could not grasp how to write a coherent paragraph. Her sentences were ok, if clunky, but stringing five together to make an argument? It was beyond her comprehension. We worked on outlines, on topic sentences, on fact sentences, on conclusions-getting them to stick as a framework in her mind? I failed. Maybe some other instructor succeeded. Expecting that person to cope with a college workload? I wouldn’t want to. I’m not sure why the degree was necessary for the job she wanted, but it was so she struggled along trying her best. I could write a persuasive paragraph without much effort in fourth grade. We are two people with different ways of being intelligent.
I’ve been saying that my kind of intelligence might be better suited to academia than hers. She seemed mostly confused by any complex situation. Probably some of that was a not-great education, but a lot of it was her ability to think in certain ways. Giving her more exposure would not have changed that.
Giving every student the best possible education won’t change the fact the people have different abilities and inclinations.
At the moment, too many people are stifled by the lack of high quality education. Changing that situation is a societal necessity. But saying the “correct” end result of that would be to see every student end up in college is just as stifling. Let’s find a way for people to get well paying jobs without having to go through the hoops of college and its concurrent debt load. Let’s allow colleges to have students who want that educational experience and will succeed at it.
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