I see where you’re coming from. However, I’ve talked with a lot of kids who are freshmen/sophomores in college recently (my daughter is starting college next year). They work their respective butts off. I’m not sure I buy that it’s less work now than 20 years ago.
Regarding grade inflation, I also think YMMV. I compared notes with some of my friend from high school who went to other very good colleges, and there were already big differences then. There have also been some major changes in educational philosophy over the past couple of decades, that can look like “grade inflation” from outside the system, but is rooted more in a collaborative approach to the teacher-student relationship. The goal of these modern approaches isn’t to create a discernible difference between a similarly-talented group of students (the dreaded “Curve”) but rather to establish what the proficiency standards are for the class and teach (and grade) to those goals. If every student achieves those goals, why not give them all As? If none achieve them, then no As? If a school has done a good job of recruiting and selecting students, and their advisors steer them toward the right curriculum, that would be the ideal outcome, after all.
The goal of education is to educate, not humiliate.
I’ve lived in the university world as grad student, teacher, and faculty spouse for more than a half-century, so I do have some idea of the working end of things. I also spent eight years teaching on term-by-term or year-by-year contracts. So I do know what has happened to the work environment since entering it officially in 1977, because I sit in the middle of it. We had the good fortune to wind up in a unionized state system, which has had both money and working-condition benefits–though the system’s adjuncts (as distinct from limited-contract full-timers) still get the relative short end.
BTW, at our school at least, in 1977 beginning assistant-professor salary was just above the national household median. Not poverty, but not plush, either. R1s and ivies certainly would have paid more, but at that period just getting a job was a major triumph. (My wife was the only one of her graduating cohort to find a teaching job. Most of my classmates left the academy for government work, law, or banking.)
Full government control of post-secondary educational institutions is long overdue. They already pay the lion’s share of the cost (about 80% in Canada), yet the state only indirectly mandates how these institutions run.
With government covering the entire cost, we can organize universal post secondary education along the same lines of universal health care. Government control and direction of post secondary institutions would allow for more efficient allocation of students to various institutions. Program acceptances can be tailored for society needs and we can vary those rates as needs change and those acceptances can be tailored to meet greater social needs. Best practices can be examined and adopted in order to provide the greatest educational outcome for the time and money spent.
These are all tried and true measures that help provide Canadians with the best health-care outcomes for the resources spent upon them. It’s long past time we used those same measures to maximize post-secondary educational outcomes for the resources that we as a society spend on post-secondary education.
Another advantage of universal post-secondary education is that it provides another tangible benefit that people can point to when we pay taxes to support necessary programs (most of which are worthy, but not universally appreciated.)
If you are a Canadian doing decently, you probably see a marginal tax rate around 50%. We point to our health care to justify the tax rate. If we throw universal education in the mix, we can probably increase the marginal rate to 55 or 60% without too much hue and cry, which would allow the state the extra revenue to pay for the programs that help the people most in need.
Which schools should be free? All of them? Nobody deals with this. In my parents’ generation, the City College of NY was free, and a stepping stone for the children of immigrants and the poor. Columbia was not. As far as I know, the state college system was free or nearly, but not every school in the country. Is that not sufficient?
Nobody deals with this? I’m pretty sure that the position is made pretty clear every time this comes up: attending community college at a bare minimum is covered under this, including trade schools. The vast majority of others here argue for a return to tuition-free state/public schools: the UC system was tuition free until Reagan, and in North Carolina, my state, it could in fact be argued that the state has a constitutional mandate for state schools to be tuition free, per Article 9 Section 9: " Benefits of public institutions of higher education.The General Assembly shall provide that the benefits of The University of North Carolina and other public institutions of higher education, as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the State free of expense." I imagine other states have similar language, but I’m only familiar with higher education here
depends on if we are talking about how to properly run a study or cheap shot debate tactics. If one seeks to shut down a discussion with CDEC then I don’t think they care about experimental methods.
I’m there now and as a grad student now VL about to have to make the jump to either adjunct or something else entirely. More and more of us are not getting employment in the university system that is comparable to tenure track. The one’s that are getting tenure track work are doing fine, so again, I agree there. But the problem is that more people are either being pushed out of the academy entirely or ended up with jobs that do not pay as well as the tenure track. In my state (which is granted not a unionized state so that makes a difference) - scroll down to see the difference between tenure track and lecturer (which is a full time, benefitted position at least):
For my particular department (history) we’ve lost a total of 8 professors from the time I was working on my phd (2 passed away, 6 left for other jobs for various reasons)… none of whom have been replaced by a TT job, but all by lecturers or VL positions which are only for 2 years and are non-renewable. I’m at our second largest (or largest, I can’t remember) state university, which has a growing campus over all, but is pushing STEM fields over other fields.
Some of this is specific to history, of course, and probably across other humanities and social sciences fields, since as a society, we’ve come to believe that those fields are unimportant and probably full of cultural marxists anyway doing silly work about silly things.
Also, you should know that you’re talking about the difference in my literal entire lifetime, so it’s a very different world from 1977 to 2008 with the crash. The world of academia in 1977 is not the same place as the world of academia in 2019.
“Government controlling schools” is how you end up with chucklefucks mandating that trans kids can’t go to the bathroom and science taking a backseat to whatever nonsense propaganda the government of the day wants to push. It’s one of those things that sounds like a great idea, until you look at the kind of people who seem to end up governing.
Definitely Not True Always or Definitely Not True In Some Cases? Pedantry is so fun!!! Also, I want to see the math behind a negative correlation between a “definite” root cause and its effect. I need simple diagrams please, because complexity confuses me so
Actually there are some striking similarities between the mid-1970s and the current situation: a very bad mismatch between Ph.D. production and job openings, with ABDs and new Ph.D.s leaving the academy or taking what would a few years earlier have been considered crap jobs at two-year or bottom-tier schools (where once a Ph.D. would have been considered overqualified) and hoping that the old promotion-via-migration model would work. It didn’t. Which is why my wife has spent 42 years at the same university–for which situation we are pretty grateful, even if it has meant a very different career trajectory from those of our grad-school mentors. (Our combined job-search efforts stretched over three years and involved hundreds of applications, which yielded no more than a half-dozen interviews and two offers.) The adjunct/part-time end of things has grown over the last two decades to become a scandal, but even that has its roots in the 1980s, when our union finally fixed part of it (proportional pay) for the Minnesota system.
Our English department has seen the same kind of hollowing-out that you describe, a process that has been going on for several years, as retirees are not replaced, while the adminstration becomes bloated with middle managers, swarms of vice presidents, and ever-inflated top-level job titles. (Since when does a third-tier provincial university need a chancellor?)
Some of these processes began in the 1970s, as the university world bought into the corporate/business metaphor-set, treating students as customers, tailoring curriculum to some moving-target notion of what the marketplace wanted, and deprofessionalizing the professoriate. All this with the enthusiastic support of politicians and politicized boards of trustees.
None the less, here I am, a real person with a very real problem of not having many good options for a job in the near future. I can’t go back and NOT have gotten my phd and I feel ill-prepared for almost anything else. So I’m fucked.
Here’s a specific set of not terribly unrealistic but obviously fit-to-purpose data that gives a negative correlation between a cause and its effect. Over a month you record two sets of data a day, one in the morning one in the evening. The data two numbers: the first is 1 if you have a cold, 0 if you don’t. The second is 1 if you’ve experienced a headache in that half day, 0 if you haven’t.
You get a cold that lasts five days. On one of those days it’s very bad and gives you a bad headache and you take some powerful meds that means you don’t experience the headache in the afternoon.
The rest of the days you don’t have a cold. If you experience 5 other headaches in the month the correlation between having a cold and having a headache is positive. If you experience 6 or more other headaches then it is negative (although at 6 the negative correlation is unbelievably tiny, lie 10^-17).
We know the cold caused the headache, but it is still possible negatively correlated over that month. So that’s a case where causation doesn’t imply positive correlation because there are other causes and because the cause doesn’t happen 100% of the time.
Another way to get negative correlation despite causation is to look at a population where there is a pressure towards negative correlation. This happens all the time without us intending it to. A fairly obvious real life example is that if you correlated height and free throw percentage over the entire population you’d almost certainly find they were positively correlated and we’d even say there are causal realtionships at work: tall people are more likely to play and thus practice basketball, tall people are closer to the net.
But if you did the same study among professional basketball players you’d find the correlation works the other way. Shaq’s free throw percentage was abysmal, Steve Nash’s was fantastic. I looked up Yao Ming and it turns out he was pretty good but the article mentioned, “especially for his size”. Everyone knows giant centers don’t hit free throws the way point guards do.
That happens because you only get into the NBA if you are fantastic at something. If you are only 6’3" you need to be a better shooter than a person who is 7’2". So the correlation is negative in the part of the population we’d actually bother to study despite the causation.
There’s no reliable relationship between correlation and causation, but obviously they hint at one another. It’s sort of like correlation and causation are correlated but don’t have a causal relationship.
Well, it provides a model. Lest people say it’s “unamerican” or something dumb like that, we can point to what is arguably the most “American” point in our history – right after WWII. Americans in the mid-century were perfectly open to a mildly socialistic regime, with free state or city colleges, very high marginal tax rates, universal military draft, high rates of unionization, and more (though not socialized healthcare, except for veterans), as long as it was segregated.
What we (ok, what I) want now is something similar to that, but without segregation and with the addition of some flavor of socialized healthcare.
To be fair, I think plenty of people have pointed this fact out (the liberal consensus era, the postwar expansion, etc). But they’d also point out that much of that was built on the realities of the Cold War, where one of the largest sectors of government investment in the private industry was defense contractors (and universities that worked along side them and the DOD). The Cold War order was not exactly unproblematic in and of itself, and it was part of what drove the liberal consensus into it’s grave in the Reagan era. The other part that drove the liberal consensus into the grave was integration, because America was and in many ways remains a white supremacist nation. Part of the reason why the white working class moved away from unions and support of universal institutions like schools, was because of the civil rights movement and their success.
So, given that, how are we to bring that about again, given the amount of distrust for government and institutions that exists (especially among Boomers)? We sure as hell are not going to back away from integration (and we need to double down on it, given how incomplete it remains), women’s or gay rights, or anything else of that nature (or we SHOULD NOT) and many of these postwar institutions that benefited from the Cold War mindset have been effectively gutted anyway. We need to rebuild them, or build something better in their place (including with healthcare that works for all of us), but do you see a way forward on that? We can all talk until we’re blue in the face about the value of all these things, but if there is some large enough voting block that sees it as unfair to them somehow, we’re screwed on that count.
