Also, boys are behind girls all through k-12, not just in college. In my mind the most significant gap is in verbal skills. Those gaps appear before kids even start school. Verbal skills have become increasingly important in school and the workplace. As one close observer put it, "the world has gotten more verbal; boys haven't."
The Chronicle article linked to suggests that the decline in welding and auto repair program enrollment was due to the inability to move such hands-on coursework on line. Since the COVID enrollment slump of 2019-2021, male community college enrollment has picked up. Enrollment of males at community colleges increased 2% from 2022 and enrollment of females rose by 2.6%. And as students returned to the classroom, enrollment in hands on courses rebounded as well:
"But the fields with the biggest percentages of growth at community colleges were mechanic/repair technologies, which had an 11.3% increase in enrollment in fall 2023, and computer and information sciences, which drew 9.1% more enrollees than in 2022."
I'm not so sure about that. Steve-Stewart Williams just had a post, "The Gender Equality Paradox for Personal Academic Strengths". According to it, "In short, although we tend to worry more about girls’ disadvantages in math and science, boys’ disadvantage in reading is much larger and more consistent." Maybe times have changed?
I can't read the article--I followed you and it still didn't let me read it, so be careful with those gift articles!--but it's just flatly not true.
A lot of reading tests include writing, which is nonsense. Writing isn't reading. When writing is included, girls outscore boys by a large margin (NAEP, PISA). When the test is only reading comprehension, the girls score is slightly higher than boys, narrower than the boys margin on math. You can check this on the SAT and the ACT, in states where most of the students are tested.
And at the high end of reading, men are the higher achievers. More men get high scores on the SAT and ACT, men outscore women on the LSAT.
It's been pointed out that we have been using college degrees to try to not hire the kind of people who used to not be hired by failing employer testing. Since that was seriously reduced by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke, a degree became a substitute intelligence/skills test, with decreased correlation over time.
I apologize if lots of commenters say something similar, but I have been involved with a local community college that offers work internships with businesses as the students learn skills. (Not just auto mechanics, but all kinds of computer specialties.) They have a 100% placement record, almost always with the firm where the student interned. Why isn't more of this done.
I think it is a combination of social stigma against blue-collar work in general, pressure from parents to push their kids towards white-collar work, and the fact that college for many middle-class kids who are not paying for their tuition is sort of a 4-year vacation from having any real responsibility in life beyond maintaining a mediocre academic performance.
Not sure how much demand for college is actually just demand for restricted personal loans at favorable interest rates partially subsidized by scholarships and Pell Grants. Of course there is always a lot of demand for free government money with minimal strings attached.
No one else will lend so much money to borrowers with no credit history to be spent on credentialing, rent, food, and personal expenses. No other institution provides youth with a sort of magical spell of parent-pleasing at such a low immediate price to the borrower. The study material doesn't matter nearly as much as the access to financing. Most modern professors understand that they are just there to do a little hocus pocus dance for the customers to maintain accreditation.
Further, because of PSLF, no matter how large the loans are, the government will forgive a large portion of the costs if you choose to work for the government *or* a nonprofit *without* counting that loan forgiveness as taxable income. So the real life hack is loading up on degrees, going to work at a nonprofit, going on welfare, and then bouncing to a much better job either in government or the private sector once the loan forgiveness completes. This is effectively a much higher level of subsidy than the post-9/11 GI bill for private universities, but it also requires a lot of time in service to the great gods of Progress.
Broken record: The only way to put things back to reasonable is to take all public money out of university funding. And if you want REALLY reasonable, take it out of all education.
Yes. Broken record and turn up the volume. Abolish public education. Amend the Constitution to prevent funding of education just as we prohibit government funding of religion.
It already forbids it, because education (outside DC and the military) is not among Congress's enumerated powers (Article I, Section 8, with the "general welfare" clause to be interpreted in accord with the Federalist Papers).
I would amend the Constitution, though, to get the government out of the business of indoctrinating people entirely. Administrative law enables bureaucrats to enforce their partisan preferences on everybody, and only woke, big-government supporters are willing or able to make their careers there.
A good rule of thumb is, before you propose to create or expand a bureaucratic agency or give it more power, always assume that your opponents will be the ones who get to operate it and to interpret its regulations.
“Hillsdale College in Michigan, for example, not only does not directly take federal financial aid but does not allow its students to take federal loans or grants. It is truly private in every sense, and can act as any private club or organization does, restricting the composition or nature of its student body, faculty or curriculum anyway it wants. But Hillsdale is nearly unique.”
“It already forbids it, because education (outside DC and the military) is not among Congress's enumerated powers…”. Are you saying that’s the way it should be or that’s the way it is in practice?
I cite Richard Vedder’s work on this issue: “There Are Really Almost No Truly Private Universities.”
K-12 is, as far as I know, mostly locally controlled at the state level, so yes, you are correct, but each state has its own constitution which can be amended. Thanks for reminding me about this.
Well, imo you don’t have to take the money out of K-12 education completely. I’m both too compassionate *and* too self-interested in having children get education than that.
You just have to insist that all public money be in the form of school vouchers for parents to decide where to send their children, not go to the government quasi-monopoly public schools
And for university funding, I’d be fine with keeping or even increasing Pell grants for low-income high achieving students. And then with you on getting rid of all the rest, surely all the rest of *federal* spending and loan guarantees.
b) fitting better into a country and world facing TFR depopulation on the one hand, while having a welfare state massively tilted towards the elderly. [Childless cat ladies having to pay more taxes to fund youth education is to me a good, fair and societally self-interested thing.]
Having said that, to be *very* clear: I have far, FAR less disagreement about - and zero problem with - taking all public money out of university education, versus taking it entirely out of K-12.
Don't forget that almost all the majors that easily lead to degrees (from education to social work to "angry studies" and so on -- the ones that are hard to flunk out of -- are also the ones that attract the most females. I've watched that first hand for over 25 years.
“Perhaps going forward the cultural distance between college graduates and others will decrease. ”
I agree with every word in this as-usual well-written piece except this sentence.
It is, of course, qualified with “perhaps”. But everything AK wrote reinforces that the opposite is *much* more likely to be true: that the cultural distance between college graduates and others will *increase*, rather than decrease.
“Childless cat ladies” (i.e. unmarried women) vote 2-1 left these days. The rest of society - married women and all men - vote majority right. Common sense and what’s happening today suggests that college will far more likely continue to skew towards the preferences of childless cat ladies, whether cause or effect or interactive and mutually reinforcing, than to move back towards the center.
And this is likely true even if Tyler Cowen is proven correct that we have hit “Peak Woke”.
Because there is no evidence that the downslope is steep, and far, far greater evidence it is simply a plateau.
When I read statements like: "Young people with a college education have very different political and cultural beliefs than people who have never gone to college" I keep thinking that STEM and Non-STEM cultural split is also very real, even with the near total takeover of the universities by the Woke with their "own Truth".
Those that still have to deal with the real world of things (both living and non-living) must think in terms of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematical reality with engineering just adding a $ as another variable.
I respectfully disagree re: culture split of STEM vs non-STEM, as the most woke corporations today tend to be the tech companies, kowtowing to the desires of their highly “educated”, highly intelligent young workers.
(I am a now retired former Bay Area STEM grad whose two daughters graduated from college in the last 6 years, one with a STEM degree, one not.)
Now make no mistake, I agree there is still net positive value in STEM university education, even when it coincides with wokeness.
Which, unfortunately, reality demonstrates it does.
Schools used to be run in ways that were favorable to males. Today, it is the reverse. One small example: much more than females, males are okay with open competition. Many even like competing to find out who is better or worse (thus, the big gender skew in sports fans). So, years ago, it was not uncommon to post students' scores on a test on the classroom wall--to provide incentive to do well and, yes, to provide disincentive to do poorly. Nowadays, that is completely verboten. One is not supposed to feel, "I'm trying to do better than others".
(A shout out here to Joyce Benenson's "Warriors and Worriers". She refuses to relate her research to modern socio-political issues but some of the implications, like the previous paragraph, are obvious.)
What is the real basis of the common assumption that if the state withdrew from education and reduced taxes accordingly, most children would be worse off?”
I agree 100% on getting the state out of providing the actual education.
I disagree respectfully with eliminating state funding of K-12 education. Enough of the bottom 40% of income-level families’ children would likely be worse off if you did that.
Give parents vouchers. That could be used almost anywhere (punish fraud severely ex-post; don’t have much restriction ex-ante).
P.S. a *separate* reason I have for continuing to advocate state *funding* of K-12 education is that so many people are having zero or only one child that the developed world now has a TFR population crisis. True, it will negatively impact the U.S. the least.
But as the elderly siphon money from the young in our Ponzi-scheme entitlement welfare for the old system, it is even more important to encourage having children. Taking taxes from the richer and childless to pay for the education of less well off children I consider a good thing.
But also a wise thing in the best interests of the country.
And a fair thing considering the welfare state that disproportionately benefits the elderly.
And effectively giving more money to those who have 3 or more children - at any income level - I consider a very wise thing indeed for our culture and civilization.
Thomas Edison, born in 1847, was a problem child. He was sent to school at age 8, but that lasted only three months. His teacher sent him home with a note declaring the child had “an addled brain” and was “dense as a stump and virtually unteachable” (Beals, 1997; Clark, 1977). In today’s world he would probably be diagnosed with ADHD and drugged.
Thomas never returned to school. His mother ostensibly took over his education, but really, he took it over himself. He soon found a copy of Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity and fell in love
The quality of public education in America today in many places is deplorable. Dr. Friedman identifies (1) the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of the educational establishment, which inhibits educators from seeing and responding to the needs of their “consumers” — parents and students; (2) our altered view of the relationship between the individual and society— the shift from seeing the individual as responsible for oneself to seeing the individual as someone controlled by social forces. An obvious solution is to give power back to the parents. The voucher system is an especially effective means of exercising that power; it can foster competition among public and private institutions and incite them to offer us a better quality educational “product.”
Parental choice and parental responsibility in the education of children is the U.S. tradition and is consistent with a free society. Centralized government control has eroded freedom and adversely affected the quality of education. The poor help pay for education for the future rich. Friedman has long advocated using vouchers to solve the problem. He explains why. Friedman visits U.S. and Britain.
America is spending an average of $15,000 per student annually on education. See here. Compare this to Thales Academy where tuition is approximately $6,000 per student.
Our public schools have not failed. They have succeeded incredibly in carrying out their own agenda, wholly at cross-purposes with the goals of those who pay the bills and those who send their children to them to be educated. Every demand for better results is turned into a demand for more money. Every failure is blamed on parents, television, ‘society.’ The greatest success of the educators has been in keeping their own performance off the agenda, the rewards wholly unrelated to classroom performance, and sanctions virtually nil in a tenure system where firing one teacher can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. At no point does the education establishment have to put up or shut up. In even the worst of the worst schools, typically in low-income and minority neighborhoods, the teachers unions bitterly oppose letting even a fraction of the students go to private schools with vouchers. This is not caprice or racism. It is naked self-interest…The survival of the existing system depends on results not mattering.
Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but, as he put it, "all the things we know that ain't so." Nowhere is that more true than in American education today, where fashions prevail and evidence is seldom asked or given. And nowhere does this do more harm than in the education of minority children.
The quest for esoteric methods of trying to educate these children proceeds as if such children had never been successfully educated before, when in fact there are concrete examples, both from history and from our own times, of schools that have been sucessful in educating children from low-income families and from minority families. Yet the educational dogma of the day is that you simply cannot expect children who are not middle-class to do well on standardized tests, for all sorts of sociological and psychological reasons.
Based on state standardized tests from the 2021-2022 school year—the first year since 2019 that all districts participated in such testing—FIA’s report shows that 36% of Oakland public school students attending Oakland Unified, charter schools, alternative schools, and Alameda County schools in Oakland, could read on grade level, a four-point increase since the 2014-2015 school year. By comparison, the statewide number is 47%. In math, 25% of Oakland students tested at grade level.
The results are more troubling for Black and Latino students, who make up the majority of Oakland’s public school kids: 12% and 15% tested at grade level for math, with 22% and 26% at grade level for English, respectively.
In Letter D5 I cited surveys showing that, by a large margin, US teens themselves attribute their high levels of psychological distress primarily to pressures associated with school. I also cited studies showing that teens’ anxiety, psychological breakdowns, and suicide rates have, in the years under consideration, plummeted during school vacations and risen again when schools reopened. I also referred to research showing that teens attending “high achievement schools,” where high grades and an impressive résumé are most valued, are even more prone to anxiety, depression, and suicidal behavior than are teens at other schools. I suggested that the increased focus on test drill, with consequent reduction in more enjoyable and creative school activities, brought on by No Child Left Behind and Common Core, increased the aversiveness and stress of school at the time when teen suicide rates began to increase.
Moe explores the politics and effectiveness of educational reform in the New Orleans public school system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Moe finds that policy-makers turned to charter schools for pragmatic reasons and students enjoyed dramatic improvements in educational outcomes as a result. Moe uses this experience to draw lessons about political reforms generally and the power of vested interests to preserve the status quo in the absence of catastrophic events like Katrina.
Pondiscio shares his experience of being embedded in a Success Academy Charter School in New York City for a year--lessons about teaching, education policy, and student achievement.
Russ Roberts and Rick Hanushek, of Stanford University, talk about why the standard reforms such as more spending or better educated teachers have failed and what needs to be done in the future.
Private schools for the poor are a global phenomenon. In Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Colombia, Chile, India and elsewhere parents are deserting failing public schools and 'edupreneurs' are emerging to meet local needs. South Africa has a small but growing low-fee private school sector. Between 2000 and 2010 the number of public schools declined by 9 per cent, while the number of independent schools grew by 44 per cent (from a much lower base). Growth in low-fee private schooling will accelerate. How do we make these schools more affordable?
There is strong evidence that teaching is better in private schools than in state schools, in terms of higher levels of teacher presence and teaching activity as well as teaching approaches that are more likely to lead to improved learning outcomes.
There is moderate evidence that private school pupils achieve better learning outcomes when compared with state schools. Many children may not be achieving basic competencies even in private schools.
There is moderate evidence that girls are less likely than boys to be enrolled in private schools.
There is moderate evidence about the cost-effectiveness of private schools and cost of education delivery is lower in private schools than state schools often due to lower salaries for private school teachers compared with their government school counterparts.
There is moderate evidence that the perceived quality of private schools is a key factor in parents’ choice.
There is moderate evidence that where state regulation of private schools exists it is not necessarily effective or may be selectively enforced offering opportunities for rent seeking and bribery.
His latest report is based on field research in the slums of Hyderabad, India, a big city in which, amazingly, some, 61 percent of low-income students attend private schools. This is due to the widespread failure of government schools to provide a decent education and has, predictably, caused an explosion in the number of private schools despite official attitudes that range from disinterested neglect to overt hostility toward private education, as well as onerous government regulations. Tooley says that many of these schools are demonstrating remarkable success in educating students at an amazingly low cost--with essentially no public subsidy and with tuitions set at levels that all but the very poorest can afford. As for the stifling government regulations, school operators have found a very Indian solution: bribing officials to wink at them.
“All across the developing world, from Ghana to Pakistan to China, poor parents are turning away from public schools and investing their meager incomes in low-cost private education for their children—and seeing positive results.”
“My days in college were very exciting ones. There was a free atmosphere at Morehouse, and it was there I had my first frank discussion on race. The professors were not caught up in the clutches of state funds and could teach what they wanted with academic freedom. They encouraged us in a positive quest for a solution to racial ills. I realized that nobody there was afraid. Important people came in to discuss the race problem rationally with us.“ MLK Jr.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or EDUCATION, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Agree with the overall assessment, but would add there are very smart people all along who have not opted for college. My brother is a case in point, testing high IQ but bad (because bored) with school, a voracious reader, etc. He bounced around doing jobs in Alaska before finally getting into law enforcement via a slightly different path. Attained detective rank, recently retired, married to an attorney. Perhaps he represents a minority demographic, but intelligence and profession aren't always neatly correlated.
Agree with this: note also that most of the decline is among men in 2 year colleges in training programs like welding and auto repair. (https://www.chronicle.com/featured/student-success/student-centric-institution/male-enrollment-crisis?sra=true) Those programs don't attract many women so it's unlikely that men left because they thought the programs were too "girly."
Also, boys are behind girls all through k-12, not just in college. In my mind the most significant gap is in verbal skills. Those gaps appear before kids even start school. Verbal skills have become increasingly important in school and the workplace. As one close observer put it, "the world has gotten more verbal; boys haven't."
The Chronicle article linked to suggests that the decline in welding and auto repair program enrollment was due to the inability to move such hands-on coursework on line. Since the COVID enrollment slump of 2019-2021, male community college enrollment has picked up. Enrollment of males at community colleges increased 2% from 2022 and enrollment of females rose by 2.6%. And as students returned to the classroom, enrollment in hands on courses rebounded as well:
"But the fields with the biggest percentages of growth at community colleges were mechanic/repair technologies, which had an 11.3% increase in enrollment in fall 2023, and computer and information sciences, which drew 9.1% more enrollees than in 2022."
( https://www.ccdaily.com/2024/01/enrollment-growth-continues-at-community-colleges/ )
"Also, boys are behind girls all through k-12, not just in college."
No, they aren't. Boys have slightly lower scores than girls in verbal, much higher scores in math.
The whole notion that boys are suddenly doing poorly is completely invented.
I'm not so sure about that. Steve-Stewart Williams just had a post, "The Gender Equality Paradox for Personal Academic Strengths". According to it, "In short, although we tend to worry more about girls’ disadvantages in math and science, boys’ disadvantage in reading is much larger and more consistent." Maybe times have changed?
https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/the-gender-equality-paradox-for-personal?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=1nfvp&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I can't read the article--I followed you and it still didn't let me read it, so be careful with those gift articles!--but it's just flatly not true.
A lot of reading tests include writing, which is nonsense. Writing isn't reading. When writing is included, girls outscore boys by a large margin (NAEP, PISA). When the test is only reading comprehension, the girls score is slightly higher than boys, narrower than the boys margin on math. You can check this on the SAT and the ACT, in states where most of the students are tested.
And at the high end of reading, men are the higher achievers. More men get high scores on the SAT and ACT, men outscore women on the LSAT.
It's been pointed out that we have been using college degrees to try to not hire the kind of people who used to not be hired by failing employer testing. Since that was seriously reduced by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke, a degree became a substitute intelligence/skills test, with decreased correlation over time.
I apologize if lots of commenters say something similar, but I have been involved with a local community college that offers work internships with businesses as the students learn skills. (Not just auto mechanics, but all kinds of computer specialties.) They have a 100% placement record, almost always with the firm where the student interned. Why isn't more of this done.
I think it is a combination of social stigma against blue-collar work in general, pressure from parents to push their kids towards white-collar work, and the fact that college for many middle-class kids who are not paying for their tuition is sort of a 4-year vacation from having any real responsibility in life beyond maintaining a mediocre academic performance.
Not sure how much demand for college is actually just demand for restricted personal loans at favorable interest rates partially subsidized by scholarships and Pell Grants. Of course there is always a lot of demand for free government money with minimal strings attached.
No one else will lend so much money to borrowers with no credit history to be spent on credentialing, rent, food, and personal expenses. No other institution provides youth with a sort of magical spell of parent-pleasing at such a low immediate price to the borrower. The study material doesn't matter nearly as much as the access to financing. Most modern professors understand that they are just there to do a little hocus pocus dance for the customers to maintain accreditation.
Further, because of PSLF, no matter how large the loans are, the government will forgive a large portion of the costs if you choose to work for the government *or* a nonprofit *without* counting that loan forgiveness as taxable income. So the real life hack is loading up on degrees, going to work at a nonprofit, going on welfare, and then bouncing to a much better job either in government or the private sector once the loan forgiveness completes. This is effectively a much higher level of subsidy than the post-9/11 GI bill for private universities, but it also requires a lot of time in service to the great gods of Progress.
Broken record: The only way to put things back to reasonable is to take all public money out of university funding. And if you want REALLY reasonable, take it out of all education.
Yes. Broken record and turn up the volume. Abolish public education. Amend the Constitution to prevent funding of education just as we prohibit government funding of religion.
It already forbids it, because education (outside DC and the military) is not among Congress's enumerated powers (Article I, Section 8, with the "general welfare" clause to be interpreted in accord with the Federalist Papers).
I would amend the Constitution, though, to get the government out of the business of indoctrinating people entirely. Administrative law enables bureaucrats to enforce their partisan preferences on everybody, and only woke, big-government supporters are willing or able to make their careers there.
A good rule of thumb is, before you propose to create or expand a bureaucratic agency or give it more power, always assume that your opponents will be the ones who get to operate it and to interpret its regulations.
From Vedder’s article
“Hillsdale College in Michigan, for example, not only does not directly take federal financial aid but does not allow its students to take federal loans or grants. It is truly private in every sense, and can act as any private club or organization does, restricting the composition or nature of its student body, faculty or curriculum anyway it wants. But Hillsdale is nearly unique.”
“It already forbids it, because education (outside DC and the military) is not among Congress's enumerated powers…”. Are you saying that’s the way it should be or that’s the way it is in practice?
I cite Richard Vedder’s work on this issue: “There Are Really Almost No Truly Private Universities.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/04/08/there-are-really-almost-no-truly-private-universities/
K-12 is, as far as I know, mostly locally controlled at the state level, so yes, you are correct, but each state has its own constitution which can be amended. Thanks for reminding me about this.
I like your last two paragraphs.
Well, imo you don’t have to take the money out of K-12 education completely. I’m both too compassionate *and* too self-interested in having children get education than that.
You just have to insist that all public money be in the form of school vouchers for parents to decide where to send their children, not go to the government quasi-monopoly public schools
And for university funding, I’d be fine with keeping or even increasing Pell grants for low-income high achieving students. And then with you on getting rid of all the rest, surely all the rest of *federal* spending and loan guarantees.
While your suggestions appear modest and reasonable, the problem is that they’ll never stay that way.
Likely true.
But almost as likely true of yours as well.
And mine have the twin virtues of
a) being *far* more likely to be achieved, and
b) fitting better into a country and world facing TFR depopulation on the one hand, while having a welfare state massively tilted towards the elderly. [Childless cat ladies having to pay more taxes to fund youth education is to me a good, fair and societally self-interested thing.]
Having said that, to be *very* clear: I have far, FAR less disagreement about - and zero problem with - taking all public money out of university education, versus taking it entirely out of K-12.
"I would bet against college being as salient ten years from now as it is today."
I'll take that bet.
Agreed.
However, betting that woke-Ivy college degrees won’t be as salient ten years from now as they are today, that bet I *would* take.
Still salient, to be clear. But less so than today and the last 50+ years.
I'd much prefer the bet I agreed to.
There are more unknowns in regards to the position of Ivies and a few peers but I suppose I'd take the second bet too.
Today I saw an article which I think explains the decline in demand for higher ed better than this one:
https://voxday.net/2024/10/17/the-mediocre-death-spiral/
Don't forget that almost all the majors that easily lead to degrees (from education to social work to "angry studies" and so on -- the ones that are hard to flunk out of -- are also the ones that attract the most females. I've watched that first hand for over 25 years.
“Perhaps going forward the cultural distance between college graduates and others will decrease. ”
I agree with every word in this as-usual well-written piece except this sentence.
It is, of course, qualified with “perhaps”. But everything AK wrote reinforces that the opposite is *much* more likely to be true: that the cultural distance between college graduates and others will *increase*, rather than decrease.
“Childless cat ladies” (i.e. unmarried women) vote 2-1 left these days. The rest of society - married women and all men - vote majority right. Common sense and what’s happening today suggests that college will far more likely continue to skew towards the preferences of childless cat ladies, whether cause or effect or interactive and mutually reinforcing, than to move back towards the center.
And this is likely true even if Tyler Cowen is proven correct that we have hit “Peak Woke”.
Because there is no evidence that the downslope is steep, and far, far greater evidence it is simply a plateau.
Sadly.
When I read statements like: "Young people with a college education have very different political and cultural beliefs than people who have never gone to college" I keep thinking that STEM and Non-STEM cultural split is also very real, even with the near total takeover of the universities by the Woke with their "own Truth".
Those that still have to deal with the real world of things (both living and non-living) must think in terms of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematical reality with engineering just adding a $ as another variable.
I respectfully disagree re: culture split of STEM vs non-STEM, as the most woke corporations today tend to be the tech companies, kowtowing to the desires of their highly “educated”, highly intelligent young workers.
(I am a now retired former Bay Area STEM grad whose two daughters graduated from college in the last 6 years, one with a STEM degree, one not.)
Now make no mistake, I agree there is still net positive value in STEM university education, even when it coincides with wokeness.
Which, unfortunately, reality demonstrates it does.
Schools used to be run in ways that were favorable to males. Today, it is the reverse. One small example: much more than females, males are okay with open competition. Many even like competing to find out who is better or worse (thus, the big gender skew in sports fans). So, years ago, it was not uncommon to post students' scores on a test on the classroom wall--to provide incentive to do well and, yes, to provide disincentive to do poorly. Nowadays, that is completely verboten. One is not supposed to feel, "I'm trying to do better than others".
(A shout out here to Joyce Benenson's "Warriors and Worriers". She refuses to relate her research to modern socio-political issues but some of the implications, like the previous paragraph, are obvious.)
Sorry for the rant today folks, but I’ve been holding back for a long time about public schools.
“Why should the state, or government, educate?
Do we believe that others cannot be trusted?
What is the real basis of the common assumption that if the state withdrew from education and reduced taxes accordingly, most children would be worse off?”
-E.G. West
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/fundamental-questions-about-education
I agree 100% on getting the state out of providing the actual education.
I disagree respectfully with eliminating state funding of K-12 education. Enough of the bottom 40% of income-level families’ children would likely be worse off if you did that.
Give parents vouchers. That could be used almost anywhere (punish fraud severely ex-post; don’t have much restriction ex-ante).
“Enough of the bottom 40% of income-level families’ children would likely be worse off if you did that.“
What evidence do you have that leads you to believe this?
P.S. a *separate* reason I have for continuing to advocate state *funding* of K-12 education is that so many people are having zero or only one child that the developed world now has a TFR population crisis. True, it will negatively impact the U.S. the least.
But as the elderly siphon money from the young in our Ponzi-scheme entitlement welfare for the old system, it is even more important to encourage having children. Taking taxes from the richer and childless to pay for the education of less well off children I consider a good thing.
But also a wise thing in the best interests of the country.
And a fair thing considering the welfare state that disproportionately benefits the elderly.
And effectively giving more money to those who have 3 or more children - at any income level - I consider a very wise thing indeed for our culture and civilization.
What evidence do YOU have that leads you to believe the opposite? And to do so with supreme confidence?
And even your quote only said “most of”. Well the ones who will be worse off are disproportionately those who start off worse off to begin with.
Thomas Edison, born in 1847, was a problem child. He was sent to school at age 8, but that lasted only three months. His teacher sent him home with a note declaring the child had “an addled brain” and was “dense as a stump and virtually unteachable” (Beals, 1997; Clark, 1977). In today’s world he would probably be diagnosed with ADHD and drugged.
Thomas never returned to school. His mother ostensibly took over his education, but really, he took it over himself. He soon found a copy of Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity and fell in love
https://petergray.substack.com/p/28-great-amateurs-in-science?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
The quality of public education in America today in many places is deplorable. Dr. Friedman identifies (1) the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of the educational establishment, which inhibits educators from seeing and responding to the needs of their “consumers” — parents and students; (2) our altered view of the relationship between the individual and society— the shift from seeing the individual as responsible for oneself to seeing the individual as someone controlled by social forces. An obvious solution is to give power back to the parents. The voucher system is an especially effective means of exercising that power; it can foster competition among public and private institutions and incite them to offer us a better quality educational “product.”
https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/ideachannel/ic_program.php?itemId=100
Parental choice and parental responsibility in the education of children is the U.S. tradition and is consistent with a free society. Centralized government control has eroded freedom and adversely affected the quality of education. The poor help pay for education for the future rich. Friedman has long advocated using vouchers to solve the problem. He explains why. Friedman visits U.S. and Britain.
https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/programs/free_to_choose/index_80.php?id=whats_wrong_with_our_schools
America is spending an average of $15,000 per student annually on education. See here. Compare this to Thales Academy where tuition is approximately $6,000 per student.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/the-top-15-outcomes-of-thales-academy
Our public schools have not failed. They have succeeded incredibly in carrying out their own agenda, wholly at cross-purposes with the goals of those who pay the bills and those who send their children to them to be educated. Every demand for better results is turned into a demand for more money. Every failure is blamed on parents, television, ‘society.’ The greatest success of the educators has been in keeping their own performance off the agenda, the rewards wholly unrelated to classroom performance, and sanctions virtually nil in a tenure system where firing one teacher can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. At no point does the education establishment have to put up or shut up. In even the worst of the worst schools, typically in low-income and minority neighborhoods, the teachers unions bitterly oppose letting even a fraction of the students go to private schools with vouchers. This is not caprice or racism. It is naked self-interest…The survival of the existing system depends on results not mattering.
https://www.liberty.org/education/thomas-sowell-on-education
Then you don’t pay attention to the actual words I wrote.
I agree wholeheartedly with doing away with the public schools themselves.
I just want taxpayers to continue funding K-12 education via vouchers that parents can use to send their children to the school of their choice,
Somewhere between 90% and 100% of your text above is arguing the point I ALREADY AGREED WITH!
Little to none of it is arguing the point and question I actually posed.
I doubt you read or listened more than 20% of the mountain of evidence I just put in front of you.
Sure vouchers. Try them out.
Have you provided any evidence to back up your claim?
Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but, as he put it, "all the things we know that ain't so." Nowhere is that more true than in American education today, where fashions prevail and evidence is seldom asked or given. And nowhere does this do more harm than in the education of minority children.
The quest for esoteric methods of trying to educate these children proceeds as if such children had never been successfully educated before, when in fact there are concrete examples, both from history and from our own times, of schools that have been sucessful in educating children from low-income families and from minority families. Yet the educational dogma of the day is that you simply cannot expect children who are not middle-class to do well on standardized tests, for all sorts of sociological and psychological reasons.
https://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html
Based on state standardized tests from the 2021-2022 school year—the first year since 2019 that all districts participated in such testing—FIA’s report shows that 36% of Oakland public school students attending Oakland Unified, charter schools, alternative schools, and Alameda County schools in Oakland, could read on grade level, a four-point increase since the 2014-2015 school year. By comparison, the statewide number is 47%. In math, 25% of Oakland students tested at grade level.
The results are more troubling for Black and Latino students, who make up the majority of Oakland’s public school kids: 12% and 15% tested at grade level for math, with 22% and 26% at grade level for English, respectively.
https://oaklandside.org/2023/06/22/families-in-action-oakland-ousd-charters-public-schools-student-test-scores/
In Letter D5 I cited surveys showing that, by a large margin, US teens themselves attribute their high levels of psychological distress primarily to pressures associated with school. I also cited studies showing that teens’ anxiety, psychological breakdowns, and suicide rates have, in the years under consideration, plummeted during school vacations and risen again when schools reopened. I also referred to research showing that teens attending “high achievement schools,” where high grades and an impressive résumé are most valued, are even more prone to anxiety, depression, and suicidal behavior than are teens at other schools. I suggested that the increased focus on test drill, with consequent reduction in more enjoyable and creative school activities, brought on by No Child Left Behind and Common Core, increased the aversiveness and stress of school at the time when teen suicide rates began to increase.
https://petergray.substack.com/p/d8-multiple-causes-of-increase-in?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Moe explores the politics and effectiveness of educational reform in the New Orleans public school system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Moe finds that policy-makers turned to charter schools for pragmatic reasons and students enjoyed dramatic improvements in educational outcomes as a result. Moe uses this experience to draw lessons about political reforms generally and the power of vested interests to preserve the status quo in the absence of catastrophic events like Katrina.
https://www.econtalk.org/terry-moe-on-educational-reform-katrina-and-hidden-power/
Pondiscio shares his experience of being embedded in a Success Academy Charter School in New York City for a year--lessons about teaching, education policy, and student achievement.
https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pondiscio-on-how-the-other-half-learns/
Russ Roberts and Rick Hanushek, of Stanford University, talk about why the standard reforms such as more spending or better educated teachers have failed and what needs to be done in the future.
https://www.econtalk.org/making-schools-better-a-conversation-with-rick-hanushek/#delve-deeper
Private schools for the poor are a global phenomenon. In Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Colombia, Chile, India and elsewhere parents are deserting failing public schools and 'edupreneurs' are emerging to meet local needs. South Africa has a small but growing low-fee private school sector. Between 2000 and 2010 the number of public schools declined by 9 per cent, while the number of independent schools grew by 44 per cent (from a much lower base). Growth in low-fee private schooling will accelerate. How do we make these schools more affordable?
https://www.cde.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Affordable-Private-Schools-in-South-Africa-CDE-Insight.pdf
There is strong evidence that teaching is better in private schools than in state schools, in terms of higher levels of teacher presence and teaching activity as well as teaching approaches that are more likely to lead to improved learning outcomes.
There is moderate evidence that private school pupils achieve better learning outcomes when compared with state schools. Many children may not be achieving basic competencies even in private schools.
There is moderate evidence that girls are less likely than boys to be enrolled in private schools.
There is moderate evidence about the cost-effectiveness of private schools and cost of education delivery is lower in private schools than state schools often due to lower salaries for private school teachers compared with their government school counterparts.
There is moderate evidence that the perceived quality of private schools is a key factor in parents’ choice.
There is moderate evidence that where state regulation of private schools exists it is not necessarily effective or may be selectively enforced offering opportunities for rent seeking and bribery.
https://gsdrc.org/document-library/the-role-and-impact-of-private-schools-in-developing-countries-a-rigorous-review-of-the-evidence/
His latest report is based on field research in the slums of Hyderabad, India, a big city in which, amazingly, some, 61 percent of low-income students attend private schools. This is due to the widespread failure of government schools to provide a decent education and has, predictably, caused an explosion in the number of private schools despite official attitudes that range from disinterested neglect to overt hostility toward private education, as well as onerous government regulations. Tooley says that many of these schools are demonstrating remarkable success in educating students at an amazingly low cost--with essentially no public subsidy and with tuitions set at levels that all but the very poorest can afford. As for the stifling government regulations, school operators have found a very Indian solution: bribing officials to wink at them.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/private-schools-poor-case-study-india
“All across the developing world, from Ghana to Pakistan to China, poor parents are turning away from public schools and investing their meager incomes in low-cost private education for their children—and seeing positive results.”
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/private_schools_for_the_poor#
Now where’s yours?
At best that’s merely evidence that MANY would be better off.
At best. It’s really not ANY evidence that they’d be better off in your system versus with private vouchers. It’s actually evidence for MY point.
What evidence would convince you?
“My days in college were very exciting ones. There was a free atmosphere at Morehouse, and it was there I had my first frank discussion on race. The professors were not caught up in the clutches of state funds and could teach what they wanted with academic freedom. They encouraged us in a positive quest for a solution to racial ills. I realized that nobody there was afraid. Important people came in to discuss the race problem rationally with us.“ MLK Jr.
https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-141045565
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or EDUCATION, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/religion-education-and-identity
Agree with the overall assessment, but would add there are very smart people all along who have not opted for college. My brother is a case in point, testing high IQ but bad (because bored) with school, a voracious reader, etc. He bounced around doing jobs in Alaska before finally getting into law enforcement via a slightly different path. Attained detective rank, recently retired, married to an attorney. Perhaps he represents a minority demographic, but intelligence and profession aren't always neatly correlated.