Tag Archives: college

The Effects of (Really) Counting the SAT and ACT

26 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Steve Sailer opts for a potential “take it if you can” approach towards the end of a very good article on some new (if unsurprising) research about elite college admissions.

We live in an era in which we are constantly lectured that white males are always ruining everything for everybody else by their feelings of entitlement and privilege. But when it comes to fancy colleges, the opposite is true. At any above-average test score, 18-year-old white guys are less likely to attend a prestige college and more likely to enlist in the military, enter a trade, or go to a local non-elite Directional State college.

And, there’s still the Asians v. Harvard case. Me, I’m not so sure about the idea of reclaiming the Ivy League. He’s probably right – for now. Whether it will matter in the future, as with all the rest of these thorny issues, remains to be seen.

The College Basket Case

17 Monday Jun 2019

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As I’ve pointed out a few times before, the American education system is, by and large, broken, from kindergarten to graduate school. A new survey reveals the magnitude of the underlying issues facing the modern college student.

A 2018 survey at 140 educational institutions asked almost 90,000 college students about their health over the past 12 months. The survey found that more than three in five (63%) respondents reported experiencing “overwhelming anxiety” in the past year, while two in five (42%) reported feeling “so depressed that it was difficult to function.” Students also reported that anxiety (27%), sleep difficulties (22%) and depression (19%) had adversely affected their academic performance.

In the same survey, 12% of college students reported having “seriously considered suicide.” Another study, which looked at college students with depression, anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who had been referred by college counseling centers for psychopharmacological evaluation, found that the same proportion—12%—had actually made at least one suicide attempt. Half of the students in the latter study had previously received a prescription for medication, most often antidepressants.

Colleges are feeling the squeeze, with demand growing nationally for campus mental health services. A study by Penn State’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health reported an average 30% to 40% increase in students’ use of counseling centers between 2009 and 2015 at a time when enrollment grew by just 5%. According to Penn State’s report, the “increase in demand is primarily characterized by a growing frequency of students with a lifetime prevalence of threat-to-self indicators.”

This is a system terminally out of control. The schools and their students are mirrors, reflecting a changed, fractured, and fragmented culture and society. Our enemies have done their jobs well, over many decades. None of this will be fixed soon nor easily.

Seminaries of the Progressive Religion

11 Tuesday Jun 2019

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The Universities:

One hallmark of religions is they often have an institution of higher learning, where the most ambitious and well schooled young people go to complete their religious training and enter the world as leaders of their faith. In Christianity, we call these seminaries. A seminary is the place where a devout believer goes before he enters ministry. Once this training is completed, he is called to go out into the world to minister to his flock and to convert the unconverted.

The Progressive Left has a seminary, too — a finishing school where the ambitious and well schooled are polished to become “ministers” of their religion. It is the American university system.

The average high school graduate of promise often has no idea what world he is entering. All he knows is that all of his teachers have encouraged him from kindergarten until the end of his senior year that, if he has the talent and ability, he must go to college. The reasons for this aren’t nefarious. He will make more money as a college graduate; he will have a lower unemployment rate as a college graduate; and his general prospects for marriage, mental health, and the chance to retire are greatly improved by college. College has been, and continues to be, a great benefit — just like the public primary and secondary schools — for these reasons. But he is also unaware that he is about to enter a world that is even more slanted against tradition and conservatism than his usually left-leaning public school teachers, where conservatives are outnumbered nationally by a ratio of only 6 to 1.

Even the American Thinker, in making a good argument, falls victim to some of the untruths (or formerly truisms) about college education.

There are alternatives. Find them.

The War on Books

08 Saturday Jun 2019

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VP offers some shocking (if predictable) insight into the removal of books from institutions of higher “learning.”

Less intelligent, but more ignorant

The Great Enstupidation of the United States proceeds apace:

When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian—who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system—of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location.

Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.

Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, it is commonplace. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.

One can make a very good case for outlawing so-called “higher education” now, as the Christian university created to educate young men has now devolved into a worse-than-useless factory for transforming young women into barren SJW debt-slaves.

 

This is a continuation of the trend from middle and high schools, in keeping with the general dumbing down. In some of those schools, what books are left are being caution-taped off to protect students from any random ideas.

IMG_20190524_073529540 - Edited

Picture by me. I was not kidding, sadly.

A College List

05 Wednesday Jun 2019

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10 Colleges that maybe aren’t completely converged by SJWs:

THE LIST

As our list of schools suggests, institutions of any type and size can differentiate themselves by emphasizing open inquiry in their curricular and co-curricular efforts. By welcoming diverse people with diverse views to campus—and, crucially, creating opportunities for the community to learn and practice nuanced, respectful engagement—colleges can both advance their core academic mission and equip graduates to thrive in their post-graduation pursuits.

No guarantees but it beats the now-normal horror stories. And, there are more than these ten. Maybe I’ll do another list myself. Thomas More of NH! That’s one.

Restoring the Promise Review Preview

23 Thursday May 2019

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I have just finished reading Richard Vedder’s Restoring the Promise. It’s good, spot-on in many places. Vedder is an economics professor so his take on academia is geared as such. Many, may charts and graphs, but most of the astoundingly worthwhile variety. He goes well beyond a purely financial analysis and he isn’t afraid of the tougher social issues. He essentially lays out two paths of redemption: the “conservative,” and the radical. Guess which one I favored?

More on this when I have time. There’s going to be a lot more, from me, on education.

BUY YOUR COPY TODAY

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Vedder.

Vedder Vets the Academy

18 Saturday May 2019

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Today, I began my foray into “Restoring the Promise, Higher Education in America,” by Richard Vedder. I’m only the “praises,” the introduction, and chapter one in so far. And, so far, so good. This is a preliminary review preview, but for the most part, I like what I’m reading.

Sayeth Amazon and the Publisher:

American higher education is increasingly in trouble. Universities are facing an uncertain and unsettling future with free speech suppression, out-of-control Federal student aid programs, soaring administrative costs, and intercollegiate athletics mired in corruption. Restoring the Promise explores these issues and exposes the federal government’s role in contributing to them. With up-to-date discussions of the most recent developments on university campuses, this book is the most comprehensive assessment of universities in recent years.

An initial thought: The forward is a list of quotes by industry “leaders,” heavies in academia, many from government or NGO-ish positions, like Bill Bennett. That’s fine and to be expected. However, many of these folks have been around the business for a long time – all while the problems worsen. Not blaming, just saying. Vedder too, by his admission, is a seven-decade veteran. I’m wondering if those who are certainly in the know, because of their long involvement, also know how to extricate from the current dilemma (if that’s even possible). On the other hand, when a deep insider recognizes systemic failure, that says volumes.

We shall see. More on that, here, later.

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Amazon/Independent Institute/Vedder.

PS: And, I mean HERE. Amazon would not run my (Amazon custom) review of  A Fatal Mercy, allegedly because it linked back to my review here. There’s also the “Terms” thing about authors not doing reviews, which never made full sense to me so long as one refrains from reviewing one’s own book(s). Anyway: Stars (only and only so long as that’s allowed), there, and review text, here (the CH thing with WP…). I am also wondering if this is part of the SJW/Tech push to shadowban. Promise and Fatal Mercy are both right-of-center. I note no reviews for either, even as I’m prompted to enter at least a star review, immediately upon purchase and without the benefit of reading. Odd.

 

American Collegiate Restoration

15 Wednesday May 2019

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Dr. Walter Williams, once again, examines the failings of American higher education. He reviews a new book on possible restoration.

For the high cost of college, what do students learn? A seminal study, “Academically Adrift,” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, after surveying 2,300 students at various colleges, argues that very little improvement in critical reasoning skills occurs in college. Adult literacy is falling among college graduates. Large proportions of college graduates do not know simple facts, such as the half-century in which the Civil War occurred. There are some exceptions to this academic incompetency, most notably in technical areas such as engineering, nursing, architecture and accounting, where colleges teach vocationally useful material. Vedder says that student ineptitude is not surprising since they spend little time in classrooms and studying. It’s even less surprising when one considers student high school preparation. According to 2010 and 2013 NAEP test scores, only 37% of 12th-graders were proficient in reading, 25% in math, 12% in history, 20% in geography and 24% in civics.

A quarter-century after the fact, I almost – almost – question the collective wisdom of the University of Georgia. It’s almost like technology worship and diversity uber alles isn’t the answer. Dunno,maybe it’s bigger athletic budgets.

The Real Shame

01 Monday Apr 2019

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Read what Philip Salzman and Paul Craig Roberts have to say about what passes for America and her colleges.

Universities in the 20th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, because the ideology presents fixed answers to all questions. And, although the most important thing in universities today is the diversity of race, gender, sexual practice, ethnicity, economic class, and physical and mental capability, there is no longer diversity of opinion. Only those committed to the ideology are admitted to academic staff or administration.

Universities have been transformed by the near-universal adoption of three interrelated theories: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and social justice. These theories and their implications will be explored here.

There Is No Truth; Nothing Is Good or Bad

The great shame is that most of the students do not know and do not care. Neither do their idiot parents. Neither do other idiots. Maybe they should.

Add in the second- and third-generation migrants, and you’re looking at around 85 million foreigners in a population of 310 million. That’s why I said, on a recent Darkstream, that the level of violence that can be reasonably anticipated in a US-breakdown scenario is Cultural Revolution-magnitude, which would indicate fatalities in the 50M to 100M range.

That’s Vox Day’s assessment. I was thinking 50 – 80 million. Another shame is that, again, nearly none care. (The greatest shame may be that 80 – 100M is too few).

The College Fix – from TPC

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

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The Old College Try: Nation Concentrates on One of Many Higher Ed Scandals ***With Mueller Report Note***

A week or two back, the news broke of a DOJ crackdown on several score celebrities, all accused of bribing and lying their children’s way into elite colleges. The better-heeled Americans allegedly paid big money and told tall tales about Little Suzie; the colleges allegedly lapped it all up.

Some actresses I’d never heard of and some others stand indicted, facing prison time. Some of the children (not indicted) are “influencers,” celebrities because they are celebrities are some such rubbish. People like this undertake such nefarious actions because, A, they can, and B, because they’re kids were not bright enough to qualify otherwise.

Announcing the investigation, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling made an interesting statement: “For every student admitted through fraud, an honest and genuinely talented student was rejected. …

READ AT TPC