Tag Archives: education

A Thought

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Colleges and Universities are facing budget problems in the current and beginning to grow age of fiscal discipline after decades of profligate spending on one great idea after another and rampant hiring of school staff and management squads having little to nothing to do with academics. In their Wall Street Journal piece, Sara Randazzo and Heather Gillers distilled the problem to its essence:

As schools scramble to make cutbacks, they face broader questions about what kind of university they can be in this new era of financial constraint.

Here’s an idea. Work with me on this, it’s a-borning: how about these institutions turn their focus onto teaching and away from publishing and from pushing the latest politically correct claptrap, the latter which these days is illustrated by DEI bigotries and one-sided sexual offensivenesses “investigations?”

Get rid of all that non-academics-related staff bloat, freeze the gussying up of their labs with froo-froo that serves only to enhance academic shower appearances, take away the publish or perish foolishness that produces little more than word salads with science jargon dressings, reduce the rate of jobs-for-life awards, and stop fancying up student housing with stuff that does nothing to enhance studying and socializing.

Education Parity

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There are two paths for achieving some sort of “parity” in education. One path is through pushing for equality of opportunity. This path is exemplified by New York City’s gifted and talented programs that identify gifted children before they reach school age and try to funnel them into educational programs that are tailored to enhance their giftedness and encourage them to learn more and faster—to excel. This is a reflection of Theodore Roosevelt’s each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. Roosevelt was speaking economically, but the guarantee applies just as surely to education systems. That equality of opportunity makes each person—each student—equally capable of reaching his full potential, however large or small that might be from student to student.

The other path for education parity—it really is binary—is to push for—parity—in educational outcomes. This is the path Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani espouses. Mamdani promises to eliminate the city’s gifted and talented program under the fiction that children will benefit more from experiencing the breadth of ability in their peers than they will be harmed from being held back to the pace of their peers. Mamdani’s claim extends to insisting that the gifted children will, in the end, be unharmed from being restrained.

Oh, sure, Mamdani gussies up his move:

Mr Mamdani argues that New York City’s gifted programs have produced racially inequitable outcomes, and therefore all students should remain in the same classrooms, regardless of ability.

This is a Mamdani paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson: [removing gifted and talented programs] is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you [parents]. This is deeply insulting to those parents and to their children. This is Mamdani saying in so many words that black children and brown children are intrinsically inferior to white children and Asian children, they cannot hope to compete in school, and so they must get the protections of holding back the white and Asian children.

It’s inconceivable to Mamdani and his fellow Progressive-Democrats that blacks and browns could easily compete did they have the same access to opportunity as their white and Asian fellow children.

Wrong Answer

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A study of Purdue’s entering freshmen class of 2018 indicated that women freshmen who didn’t get their preferred class on registration were significantly less likely to graduate in four years than were their women counterparts who got their preferred class on registration. (There was no significant effect for that year’s male freshmen, but that’s neither here no there for this post.) Leave aside the various limitations of this study; focus on the particular outcome.

This is a conclusion of one of the study’s authors, Kevin Mumford:

Our estimates suggest that reducing course shutouts, particularly for STEM courses, can be an effective way to improve female-student outcomes[.]

No. Lowering standards—which is what “reducing course shutouts” amounts to, if only through increasing the class sizes of those courses that are in such demand—is not the way to improve women’s graduation rates.

The answer is insultingly wrong, too, suggesting as it does that women students need to be coddled in order to function in college.

What is necessary is to take steps to help these women overcome a disappointment that doesn’t bother men by helping them identify classes that are effective substitutes of their preferred class, classes that cover the same subject with a different professor, or is in a different section under the same professor, or take the preferred class in a subsequent semester, or….

Overwrought

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A letter-writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section offered this regarding the secondary education compact President Donald Trump (R) has on offer for, so far, a few of the more major colleges and universities.

The White House’s new compact is central planning in academic dress: dictating who colleges admit, what they charge and what professors may say….
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Higher education has always thrived on independence and competition, not government loyalty oaths.

There is no central planning here, neither is there any White House diktat regarding admissions, charges, or speech. There is no requirement for any of the institutions to accept the deal.

Higher education still can thrive on independence and competition—and it will regain that independence when it stops being dependent on Federal government funding. Were these institutions (and the rest of them not yet offered) to decline Trump’s offer, all that would happen is that they would not gain preferential access to the Federal teat.

That would be the first step toward true educational independence.

Short-Sighted and Narrow-Viewed

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The good editors at The Wall Street Journal opined on the leaked-to-the-press Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. They’ve missed on a couple of their points.

Where the compact goes too far is with its demand that schools freeze tuition for five years….

The editors noted that Mitch Daniels succeeded in this for more than just five years, and they insist that the matter should be left to the schools. The editors missed the simple fact that the matter is still left to the schools: they still can set their own tuition rates; they don’t have to sign the Compact, which is an entirely voluntary thing. They’ll still have access to Federal funding, too; they just won’t get preferential treatment.

…cap the enrollment of international students at 15%.

The editors worried about where that threshold came from, since they couldn’t understand it. The short answer, and the long answer, is Who cares? It’s a cutoff point easily achievable that leaves predictable room for (qualified) American students. As this graph shows, there are plenty of schools that would create that room were they to similarly cap their international enrollment:

The only serious question here is whether international enrollment should be capped at all, not quibbling over limits.

The editors’ rationalization for their beefs are that

Limiting tuition and international students at the same time could leave schools with a budget shortfall.

This would be just silly if the editors hadn’t tacitly accepted the Left’s penchant for spending as sacrosanct. The schools always can reallocate their spending, and they always can reduce their spending to fit the revenues coming in. There’s nothing in the proposed Compact to prevent that exercise in fiscal responsibility.

And this:

Well-intentioned but hard to implement is the compact’s effort to combat grade inflation. The compact demands that schools “commit to grade integrity and the use of defensible standards for whether students are achieving their goals.” Good luck trying to figure that out. Will a fleet of auditors investigate if slackers really deserved an A- in Econ 101?

What, then, is the editors’ solution? Just roll over and give up on solving a difficult problem? Their silence on this speaks volumes. It also demonstrates that their comfort zone is up on the porch, whence they can yap in complete safety.