Leslie Glazer posted an interesting comment on my last entry and I should like to respond to it. Here is the comment:
“I very much enjoyed the story and history, although I found
the solution posed not really clear. Maybe you could flesh it out more? My own
sense is that all the PR about affirmative action, diversity, and wholistic
admissions really is cover for the economic and power advantages indicated in
the steep pyramid you point to. These selective schools encourage as many
applications as they can get from as many students they can give false hope to
encouraging fantasies of joining the elite all the while going to the bank and
admitting those already networked in. The social impact is negligible but good
PR. I should say that it does allow some small number of minorities to enter
the elite club, but generally just gives them the ability to do what they want
to game the system. The idea of dropping standardized tests is the same--- a
way to allow them to do what they want without having to explain. But getting
back to your solution, I would counter propose [I may have misunderstood you so
this may be just a tweek] that each school set a reasonable set of minimal
standards--- GPAs, test scores, extracuriculars, whatever--- and then use a
lottery. I would also still allow each school to pick a limited amount of
special students, recruited for excellence in some way or other [not based on
arbitrary criteria like gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, legacy, and
so on--- but on being a great cellist, or athlete, or debater, mathematician,
history buff, researcher, community leader.... you get the idea. This way
harvard could still have a higher minimal standard than other schools but still
whoever meets that standard would have an equal chance. Finally, I was surprised
given your emphasis on the changing times you hadn't made suggestions about
creating ways people could find success without college. I think part of the
problem is that HS education is failing students with many graduating with
little actual education--- some cannot even read or write or do basic math,
nevermind know any history or civics or have job skills. So HS needs
improvement. And we need more technical education and training for skilled
trades---“
I think I agree with almost all of that and I am afraid I
did not make myself as clear as I might have. I agree completely that schools should set very reasonable minimal admission standards and then use a lottery. That was
what I was trying to say. I also agree completely that society should offer a
wide variety of successful careers that do not require a college degree as
entry to them. Part of my point about the MIT story was that a good deal of
what we consider a college education has nothing at all to do with one’s ability
to be an effective and productive worker but is part of a system of sorting too
many perfectly qualified people into too few positions. I have written in many
places, especially in my critique of Rawls, about the lack of justification for
the steeply pyramidal structure of compensation that drives the demand for
higher education.
TJ writes, “I think the educational goods that are available
at a university tell against having high standards for admission. You talk a
lot about how much you value the beauty of ideas like those of Kant or Marx;
why shouldn't that beauty be available to everyone?” Exactly! I agree completely. It would make
just about as much sense to have a selective set of standards for admission to
a museum or to a concert.
I do not understand the forces that create and sustain the
extremely unequal system of compensation in the modern capitalist work world. When I am arguing this point, I like to offer
the example of the compensation structure in the American military, which is
much, much less unequal and yet is perfectly compatible with a high level of
excellence in performance in dangerous and complex situations.
11 comments:
If there is a case for keeping a set of "elite" schools that set admissions standards high, it might be that one wants to ensure that the profs, particularly the natural scientists, who work at these places have students who can be co-workers or co-discoverers in terms of (natural) scientific work. This wd apply perhaps more to grad students but also might apply to undergrads in some cases as well. The rationale might be less applicable outside the natural sciences (though not completely inapplicable).
If there were to be a lottery, then the admissions bar that people have to clear before entering the lottery wd still have to be set at a certain level for some places. It wd make little sense and be a misuse of resources for Stanford, say, to open its doors to any h.s. graduate and then end up devoting time to teaching students how to write a grammatical sentence.
The fierce competition for admission at particular schools is as much a product of perceptions -- and misperceptions -- as it is of reality. Having an imprimatur from an elite school may be an advantage early in one's career but the advantage tends to dissipate or decrease over time. It matters more for certain career paths than for others. And how one does in college can often be more important than where one went. If young people realized all this, then the competition to get into a smallish number of places wd likely be less intense than it is now.
P.s. People now switch jobs and even occupations more than was the case in the mid 20th cent., prob at all levels of the economy. While income and wealth inequality have increased in recent decades, only part of that increase, I wd guess (I don't know the empirical research here), has been driven by inequality in the occupational and compensation structure, though that does account for a significant part of it probably.
It may be in some cases misleading to think in terms of a small number of "good" jobs at the top of a hierarchy and the rest below. People who become partners in big law firms, for ex, make a lot of money but, depending on the practice, the work likely involves counseling and representing clients whose main goal is profit maximization and who aren't doing anything v. admirable. The work itself may not be that interesting (though I wouldn't know for sure). So is being a big-firm corporate lawyer a "good' job? In terms of compensation and the lifestyle it can underwrite, yes. In other respects, it's much less clear that the answer is yes.
LFC,
Why wouldn't it make sense to have the faculty at Stanford teach someone how to write a grammatical sentence? Why would that be a misuse of resources? It seems to me the exact opposite is the case.
One thing to consider, why doesn't that person know how to write a grammatical sentence? The answer is likely to have something to do with the K-12 education that person received. But the quality of one's K-12 education is largely dictated by where one is born. Rich people born where rich people live have rich school districts that can hire good teachers, hire enough of them to keep class sizes small, hire specialists who can provide extra tutoring to students who struggle learning to write a grammatical sentence, etc. Why is the fact that one is born here rather than there a good reason to restrict access to education?
Another thing to consider, why is it beneath Stanford's faculty to teach someone to write a grammatical sentence? Maybe you think (counterfactually) that Stanford's faculty has so much brainpower that they shouldn't be made to perform tasks that some idiot with a PhD from Podunk State could perform. Leave teaching grammar to the Podunk alumni and Stanford faculty can spend their time plumbing the depths of the universe. But how did the Stanford faculty get to be so smart? How did Stanford get all of the money to attract the smartest people?
Well, the parents who send their kids to Stanford, pay Stanford tuition, and donate to Stanford's endowment got their money by exploiting the parents of the student who can't write a grammatical sentence. Stanford is at the top of the hierarchy because it brings its boot down on people like our ungrammatical student. It seems a bit rich to suggest when we consider the possibility of the Stanford elite using their resources to educate the people whose exploitation makes the Stanford elite so elite that such an arrangement would be a waste of so precious a thing as the time and attention of Stanford's faculty.
"I do not understand the forces that create and sustain the extremely unequal system of compensation in the modern capitalist work world."
In 1950 the top marginal rate was ~90% and finance was ~2% of the economy. The stock market had yet to recover fully from the 1929 crash. The U.S. was still in the New Deal dispensation. Bill Buckley had just graduated from Yale and had just joined the CIA. The two major parties weren't ideologically sorted. An organization like Heritage was but a gleam in Lewis Powell's eye.
Finance is now ~8% and the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts left a lot of motivated money sloshing around. The Washington Consensus replaced the New Deal.
The reason carried interest is still a thing is that Biden needed fifty votes in the Senate and private equity owns them a Sinema. Capital's investment in ideology has paid off.
For the military the pay off is deferred but can be sweet. It's more complicated then it used to be but the retirement is good and post retirement opportunities at ~40 are there. There's also inequality at the top for general officers - check out the BODs of military contractors (those board seats often pay low six figures).
T.J.
I could answer by questioning some of your "global" premises but perhaps it might be more useful to give an answer arguably grounded more in quotidian reality.
Let's say Stanford admits anyone with a high school diploma by lottery (and also that it agrees to give highly subsidized tuition or free rides to anyone whose financial need warrants it). Let's say that 25 percent of the admitted kids in this lottery system, through no fault of their own, have attended K-12 schools that didn't teach them how to write minimally well (I mean minimally) or to do math etc. So Stanford sets up remedial classes for them, presumably taught either by grad students or junior faculty (because that's who doesn't have the bargaining power or clout to resist admin demands that they do this).
However, Stanford grad students and junior faculty aren't trained to teach these kinds of remedial classes and moreover they really don't want to. In fact, in many cases their PhD programs haven't emphasized much in the way of systematically training them to teach, period. So you're actually maybe doing a disservice to these kids by having them taught in these classes by these people. Whereas if they went to certain higher-ed institutions in California that are more used to giving these remedial classes, they'd learn more effectively. (Again, arguably.) And then, once they'd learned what they were supposed to have learned in middle school and high school but didn't, they can apply to Stanford as transfer students or, if they're so inclined, for grad school.
Without getting into the question of exactly why K-12 education is so unequal (property taxation as the main vehicle of public-school financing has something to do w it), it, yes, doesn't make a lot of sense to have a Stanford prof of history or economics or whatever teach remedial literacy (maybe you cd find someone in Stanford's ed. or psych depts who cd do it effectively but who knows. I don't even know whether Stanford has an ed. school).
It's not that a Stanford historian has more "brainpower" than an instructor of remedial writing at Chico Community College (made-up name). It's that the latter probably actually knows how to teach reading and writing and the Stanford historian doesn't. Now maybe this generalization is overbroad, and maybe you'll say: Look, who better to teach kids writing than someone who's published prize-winning books? But that's not what the prof signed up for when they became an historian. So chances are fairly good that they'll just leave for another university. And soon Stanford won't have two-thirds of its profs bc they've all quit or gone elsewhere.
Anyway this whole discussion is hypothetical because, as RPW himself said, this is not going to happen.
P.s. This is not to imply btw that all students who go to community colleges or similar need remedial work. I know that many of them or perhaps most of them do not. But for those who do, it perhaps makes sense for them to get it in places that are used to delivering it.
What this boils down to is that it's not feasible to ask all US universities and colleges as a category to fix, after the fact so to speak, the problems that inequality in K-12 education has created. That's not what most universities were set up to do, and they can't do it. Rather, the problems w K-12 education have to be tackled more directly, at the front end so to speak, and in that undertaking universities can be helpful.
T.J, there's a lot to learn in a limited time. There's also developmental windows. Expecting a university to make up K - 12 deficiencies isn't a good use of resources.
A beter solution might be to restructure how we do pre-K to 12.
Gee aaall, I took multiple paragraphs and you took four sentences.
Good on you.
The situation may have changed, but in the mid 1970's I worked as a writing tutor in Laney Community College in Oakland, California.
That was a paid-by-the-hour non-academic job tutoring students one on one in writing skills.
There were a lot of students in Laney Community College at that time who did not have basic writing skills and I don't mean that they couldn't write as well as George Orwell.
Those students needed a lot of remedial work in writing and in reading and simply would not have been capable of following a normal course load at Stanford or Berkeley.
Not all Laney students were like that. As a matter of fact, a few of the other tutors were Laney students with good writing skills, who after finishing two years there, generally transferred to Berkeley. One guy I met there was quite a talented poet, of chicano origin, who for one reason or another had not done well in high school. I see that he later became a high school teacher, union and Green Party activist.
LFC,
It doesn't make sense to me to talk about ideal changes to university education while holding fixed all of the features of the current system. Of course any change won't make sense if we hold everything else fixed. So, if we're going to be awarding spots at Stanford by lottery, then we're going to need remedial courses for the students who don't know how to write grammatical sentences, so we're going to need instructors qualified to teach such courses, so we're going to need to hire such instructors, so we're going to need institutions which train such instructors, etc. etc. etc.
It's not an objection to the lottery ideal that Stanford doesn't have such courses, that it doesn't have such instructors, that institutions don't train such instructors, etc. Of course not. All of those are features of the current university system. But what we're considering is what we might replace the current university system with. If it were ever possible to institute such fundamental changes as instituting the lottery, then there's no reason to think we wouldn't be able to change everything auxiliary to the lottery system too.
Of course that we're considering such fundamental and widespread changes is part of why it will never happen. But we're not considering a new policy to start this coming Fall, we're considering the ideal of the university.
aaall,
I agree that we should change how K-12 education works. In my view, that seems more important than changing how university education works. But that wasn't the topic. The topic was what an ideal university system would be like. I think it's plausible that an ideal university system would have something like a lottery for awarding admission. It's not an objection to that ideal to say that instituting it without changing K-12 education would be worse than instituting it along with changes to K-12 education. Of course that's true.
T.J., I was referencing your comment on using scarce resources to remediate Pre-K to 12 issues. Any lottery system would still have to have cut-offs.
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