THIS is a huge problem.
Student’s are told they “have” to go to college to get a “good” job.
It pisses me off so much to see students LIED to, and then have to go into massive debt to do something they don’t really want to do to end up with a job that is similarly unsatisfying.
As ChuckV pointed out, you can fail the crap out of any number of classes, and still stay in school, as long as your cumulative GPA is above a threshold. Even then, it’s usually academic probation with 2 semester to bring it back up.
But the pressure to pass is a very real thing. Part if it comes from the “students are customers” end of things, but usually dealing with entitled pricks is (for tenured faculty) pretty easy. More importantly is pressure from higher up the administration food chain, where DFW (rates of D, F and Withdraw) grades are a de-facto measure of “effectiveness.”
With the two combined, the all too predictable pattern of grade inflation and lowering standards starts to set in. Which then leads to degree inflation. But, we tend to use a degree as a stand in for other things, like this.
(My experience, talking to “employers” is that beyond a basic skill set, the things they are looking for a “problem solving” and “hard work” and “dependability” and “independence” and “leadership” and “team players” which tends to work against point 4, in large part. 3, is, of course very valid for those who are lucky enough to go the “skull and bones” route.
I always turn the “correlation/ causation” maxim around and state that if one correctly identifies the true cause of any phenomenon, however accidentally or through otherwise non-scientific means, it will without exception demonstrate a high degree of correlation. Sorting correlation signals is a highly effective way at arriving at the truth. But a 4 word trope tends to stick in the minds of the incurious
So correlation should be more near the beginning of a study rather than the conclusion of it, yeah?
Personally, I think a good starting position would be to make all community colleges, trade schools, and state universities (as long as you stay in your own state) free. Just like with health care, there will always be private alternatives for those who wish to pay for them (Harvard, etc.).
That’s definitely not true. Causation is complex. Events usually have more than one cause or have a cause that only causes the even given certain background conditions. Plus, the same event may cause more than one thing that work at odds. And, we are almost always looking at a set of events we’ve selected based on some set of criteria which themselves bias the results.
Having a cold might give you a headache, but it might also cause you to take medicine that knocks you out so you don’t have a headache anymore. Meanwhile you might get headaches for other reasons, so having a headache might be negatively correlated with the cold that definitely caused a headache.
The following is probably a bit long, but this pebble has been in my shoe for half my life. Also forgive the rather abstract initial paragraphs–
There’s a bit of semantic imprecision in Cory’s original post, borrowed, to be sure, from the general discussion. No social good is good “in itself,” any more than such a good is ever “free.” A non-exhaustive list of questions would include “good for what?” and “good for whom?” and “how good?” Matters of cost cross those questions, and since “cost” is connected to the allocation of finite resources, the matter of “payment” depends on an audit of the resources required to deliver the goods (deliberate play on words there) and decisions about priorities.
The trouble with accounting for social goods (individual and public health, education, public safety, infrastructure) is that while the benefits of some of them can be quantified, others can’t–at least not with the tools used by businesses to decide whether it would be a good idea to open a new store or change a supplier or add or eliminate a product line.
Economic and business-practice metaphors don’t map well onto the complex, um, business of running a society. If the value of education is simply the production of workers with skill-sets that allow them to support themselves and keep things operating, then business-style cost-benefit accounting makes sense. If there are less material, less quantifiable benefits, then the accounting gets a lot more complicated–in fact, “accounting” becomes a metaphor for thinking through the point of the whole activity.
I grew up in a nation that thought higher education important enough to provide multiple means of access for those who earlier would not have been able to afford it: state colleges and (in New York State) a scholarship system that fed into private schools. (Most of my private-college tuition was covered by a Regents Scholarship.) The New York State public college system was driven primarily by a perceived need for teachers, farmers, and foresters, but the effect was also to open college to the children of families who in earlier times would have topped out at high school. Then there’s the history of CCNY, especially in the first half of the 20th century, and all those land-grant universities west of NY.
The political arguments that drove this all were, to be sure, often utilitarian or pragmatic (for example, the Cold War rivalry that justified the loans and fellowships of the National Defense Education Act). Nevertheless, my blue-collar parents saw education as both a practical/economic and a personal/civic good, and my recollection is that the latter edged out the former.
A side note: When I started college, the professoriate was not particularly highly paid, at least compared to other professions that required extensive graduate education. Nor was the administrative overhead as extensive and expensive as it is now. Both of those gradually changed, thanks perhaps to the baby-boom-driven expansion of the post-secondary segment and the economic good times. But the internal economics of the university are not quite at the center of this discussion, though they certainly contribute to the intensity of the problem.
This isn’t even a particularly radical idea in the U.S.; public colleges and Universities in California were tuition-free until Reagan was elected governor. That’s one of the big reasons silicon valley got a foothold here.
I think our problem is with the words. In my dialect of English, imply means suggest. If you hypothesise a causal relationship between two things and do not find a correlation, then your causal relationship is pretty much dead. But yes, correlation itself does not prove causation, but it does imply, or suggest, that continuing to explore the hypothesis may be worthwhile.
Three! There are three lights, er, shifts. The implication that the poor would pay for the rich to go to college is fed by a regressive tax system here in the U.S.
Mine too. I didn’t mean that those are different
I really don’t think our problem is with word choice. I agree that correlation implies that “continuing to explore the hypothesis may be worthwhile”, but that is not at all the same as suggesting that the correlation is due to a direct causal connection.
There is a high correlation between my carrying an umbrella and it raining, but my umbrella does not cause rain.
When people see correlations in systems which we don’t well understand (social behavior and macroeconomics both count), we often here “A is correlated with B” and think that if we increase A then B will increase too.
But, its good to have a steady reminder that even if 2 aspects of society (or health) are strongly correlated it is still highly unklikely that you will cause one to increase by manipulating the other. For every time there is a direct causal link, there are over 100 times we’re just bringing umbrellas to the desert to make it rain.
I agree there may be some of those effects; but with 500% ROI I can afford to be just half right.
And I would want “Free” college to include technical skill training too. Not everyone is into book learning, but can become a highly skilled worker.
but that is not the same as suggesting that the correlation is due to a direct causal connection.
But the hypothesis is a ‘direct causal connection’ so any suggestion that the hypothesis is worthwhile is suggesting a direct causal connection. This does not mean that there is a direct causal connection, just a suggestion that there might be.
When working with systems which we don’t well understand, we are also often working with a paucity of quality data. Often correlations between data sets is all researchers have to go on for now. So you can try to increase A and see if B increases, and then try it the other way around to see what happens. Often that still isn’t enough to prove causation as the system may be very complex with multiple intertwining factors. Proving causation can be extremely difficult.
I think the free language matters and ceding it now actually hands a stronger rhetorical cudgel to the right, both now and in the future. Any construction will be twisted, but it is easier to clarify free at point of use than to get dragged down into a precise level of subsidy discussion every time the idea is raised. People know that their free roads are in fact paid for by taxes. We’ve actually had this debate before, as a society, and the linguistic effects are still with us. Philadelphia’s Library system is still called the Philadelphia free library because that is what differentiated it from other types of library systems. When you change to a language of subsidized tuition or assisted tuition any increase in the rates is still within the language and every fight returns you to the initial state of having to justify your position from zero. Embracing the free language means that any increase in rates has to show that it isn’t violating the intent of the system. You’re trading a harder fight upfront for a more stable system.
You’re missing the second part of what I said. The threshold (2.0 gpa) has remained the same, but the level of work needed to attain that is much less than it was 20 years ago, and even then, we were already well down the path of grade inflation. Also there is a lot of pressure on professors, and even more on graduate teaching assistants, not to give people bad grades, even if their work warrants a bad grade. For that first part to be meaningful, the other parts need to be fixed, too.
And yet, it is not proposed as new, only recent. It can have come up many times before, including recently.
You need to make the case for this, right now you’ve accidentally made the argument that Cory is only wrong in that this view is new and asserted Buttigieg is right on a separate item without evidence. It doesn’t parse.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t. A huge portion of the nation’s technical programs are provided by community colleges.
No it is not. A test of correlation is in no way whatsoever a test of causality. The hypotheses of correlation tests have nothing to do with causality. Its a test of covariance that is wholly agnostic about causality.
Ah, yes. You are quite right.
Edit: thanks for taking the time to explain!
Edit2: Wait, I still don’t get it. Let’s return to your umbrella example. There is a correlation between you carrying an umbrella and it raining. Carrying an umbrella does not cause the rain. Nevertheless there remains the implication of a direct causal link between you carrying an umbrella and the rain. So let’s see, we have excluded that the umbrella causes the rain. Perhaps the rain causes you to carry an umbrella?
My only addendum to your post here would be that the professoriate was highly paid and in some cases still are. However, more and more academic positions are moving away from tenure track to either lecturing positions with higher class loads and less time for research (the main function of a research university) or to adjuncting positions, which have no job security and much less pay (which is a disaster for folks who are coming out of a phd program with a heavy debt load). So the tenure track folks are indeed well compensated, but the rest of us are not, and more and more students are being taught by us (contingent faculty). There was a peak and we’re in the midst of the valley.
Administration is highly compensated, which is why many profs now aim for administration jobs after being chairs of their departments…
