Category Archives: education

College Admissions and Diversity

Posted on by
1

Harvard is claiming that it needs to select preferentially for race in its admissions in order to achieve its student body diversity goals.

…it has tried alternatives to race-conscious affirmative action to diversify its undergraduate student body, but such efforts would harm both the diversity and academic strength of the class.

This is nonsense.

“Affirmative action” programs, giving preferential treatment as they do (however small the preference is claimed to be) to persons based on their race (and/or sex in most other such programs), are fundamentally racist. More broadly, when there are limited classroom seats (let’s say) discriminating in favor of one group—whether by race or by merit—necessarily discriminates against other groups: those not preferred.

Harvard’s claim that they need race-based affirmative action admissions is at best cynical. Were Harvard serious about improving diversity, they’d be moving to improve the quality of education in K-12 schools so that diversity would fall out of the merit of those graduates and not out of race-based selection. Harvard is silent on its actions in that milieu.

Non-Merit Discrimination in College Admissions

Posted on by
Reply

The non-merit discriminants that colleges and universities use—Harvard comes to mind—center on race, ethnicity, and gender.  The Trump administration has moved to reduce that reliance on bigotry for admissions (ironic word, that), and the Left is crying race.

Anurima Bargava, ex-President Barack Obama’s DoJ head of “civil rights enforcement” (an ironic title), insists that the rollback of regulations authorizing racism and sexism in determining who will be admitted—and who will be barred from admission—is

a purely political attack that benefits nobody.

The rollback benefits those being discriminated against without harming anyone else. But the Obama administration’s politics of divisiveness and…identity…considered those people to be nobodies; that’s why the policy discriminated.

The bigotry lives loudly within the Left, to paraphrase a Progressive-Democrat Senator from California.

Taxpayer Money

Posted on by
Reply

This is how the citizens of Missouri are seeing their tax money being used, this time by the University of Missouri.  You remember the U of M, the place where a professor demanded students attack a student reporter because he was covering a student protest.  The place where little discipline was applied to the students who answered the professor’s call. The place where the president and chancellor were forced to resign because they weren’t coddling the snowflakes enough.

With those failures, it seems that the school’s enrollment is still greatly reduced, so it decided on a public relations campaign to “restore” its image.  $1.3 million worth.  And, at the recommendation of the branding company they hired for those $1.3 million, they spent an additional

$1.8 million on marketing tied to recruiting and enrolling for the fall—which amounts to about $230 per student.

This is a waste, and it’s the wrong approach.

Mizzou placed blame on the press for the negative perception.

Because, as is the norm with such institutions, it’s someone else’s fault.  Somebody ran a scam and conned their professor into doing what she did.  Somebody ran a scam and conned the school’s management into reacting as they did, instead of taking corrective action within their house to restore free speech and quality instruction to their campus.

The school is wasting taxpayer money on image, of all things, instead of committing its energies and resources to improving its academic programs and working on actual teaching—which would include free speech, balanced approaches to teaching philosophy and literature, teaching STEM subject, teaching entering children how to think objectively and logically so they can graduate as thinking adults.

Improve the quality of its performance, and the enrollment at the school will improve.  A lot.  Playing games with image won’t attract actual students, just game players.  Or PR hacks.

Student Loan Delinquency

Posted on by
Reply

…rates are declining.  Or so a headline number implies.

The share of new delinquencies on student loans has fallen to the lowest level in more than decade—and it’s not just due to the healthy labor market.

In the first quarter, slightly over 9% of student debt outstanding was newly delinquent….

Aside from employment rates, which encourage jobs as trade-off for college, the decline is laid off to a couple of causes.

[F]forbearance[] allows borrowers to go months without making a payment while remaining in good standing on their debt.

And

[I]ncome-driven repayment[] sets borrowers’ monthly payments as a share of their income….

These are legalist sophistries only; the debts still aren’t being repaid along the timelines nominally agreed.  The lenders—us taxpayers—still are being hurt by these legal shenanigans, and there’s no real expectation that these loans actually will be repaid, even in the long (much longer) run.  Nor is there any serious hope that the opportunity cost of the forgone monies, tied up as they are in those practically, if not legally, nonperforming loans, will be repaid at all.

How Bad is a Vocational Education?

Posted on by
Reply

Especially compared with a formal college education?  Oren Cass, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, had some thoughts on that in a recent Wall Street Journal piece.

Elevating vocational education, and prioritizing its students, must begin with a substantial reshaping of American high schools. Vocational education will not succeed so long as culture and public policy consign it to second-class status—a dumping ground for students who interfere with what school districts consider their real mission, college prep.

It’s absolutely true that we shouldn’t be deprecating the status of those with or who prefer, for any reason, vocational educations.  These folks—the VoTech graduates, the OO graduates—the trades and secretaries are critical to our economy. What road gets built, what office buildings or houses get built, what communications networks get laid out without the trades?  What office is operable without the secretaries and office managers who do the actual nitty-gritty of running things?

What will a designer or an engineer or an architect do without the trades and secretaries to turn ideas into action?

Cass is spot on.