Andrew Hartz and Eric Kaufmann on research funding; Austin Scholar on writing; Matt Continetti on Michigan's pass-fail semester; Ashley Rubin on sociology
I've now read dozens of comments about grade inflation and specifically the Michigan proposal (pass/fail the first term). No one mentions the fact that top law and med schools have absurd grade point averages for applicants. And the talented students have absurd expectations for themselves, not surprisingly given that many have absurd American high school gpa's higher than 4.00, even though 4.00 is perfect. The problems, whatever they are, won't be cured by simple gimmicks.
"I would argue for blowing up the whole system. Government funding controls research, and progressives control government funding.
I am a brokenist on this one. Don’t try to mend it. End it."
The amounts of money going to politically biased activities, including in medicine, is relatively small. Blowing it up for that reason seems an absurd reaction to me.
Ben Sasse was on Econtalk recently. I highly recommend it even if some people will get little or nothing from the last third to half that's mostly on religion. He strengthened my belief blowing it up is an absurd reaction.
He says a few interesting things about higher ed. In particular: (1) Far more students are coming in having never worked a part-time or summer job. Because of this, they are very different students in important ways he sees as negative, (2) Even though professors at U of Fla (where he was President) are on average near 60% research, most don't really do research. They are paid activists. He recommends this be changed. On a related noted, a tiny minority brings in almost all the research funding. (3) Universities are run in partnership with academic staff. Real researchers don't have time for this, so you end up with the activist types representing the academic perspective.
Is there a Kling's lemma operating here: The more you know about a [fill-in-the-blank]-industrial complex, the more likely you are to think it is broken and unreformable?
Imagine the innovation if we unleashed all the talent in academia into free enterprise?
Finally, another commercial for Anthony de Jasay's "The State" if you have never read a sensible shoes anarchist.
I shudder to think of what happen if profit-seeking businesses tried hiring academics. I am not sure where to put them where they will do less harm, but they are not ready for free enterprise.
The Hartz and Kaufman piece provides useful information, yet, I found myself annoyed by the framing of the issue using the left-right dichotomy. So I asked the browser chatbot for schools of political thought that do not fit into that dichotomy and was somewhat amused by the ultimate sentence it returned: “Finally, models like Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics use three axes—Liberty, Authority, and Solidarity—to better capture the moral and communicative differences between political groups that a binary scale misses.” I don’t recall having seen the three axes so labeled but maybe my memory fails: as I recall Dr. Kling’s comments on solidarity address how religion once met human psychological needs for relatedness and how certain clan social organization models can suppress individual autonomy. Perhaps an illustration of buyer beware when using chatbots?
At any rate, despite being immensely grateful for the enormous amount of medical progress that has been achieved during, and that has significantly extended, my lifetime, I also concur with Dr. Kling on blowing up the US federal grant making apparatus. As I like to include the makers of the many medicines that sustain me in my daily prayers, I look up who developed each of the medicines I use. Interestingly, there is only one from the United States. The UK is represented twice, and Taiwan, Canada, France, Germany, and Switzerland all are represented by single medications developed by individuals and teams from within their systems. Yes, my medicine cabinet could inspire a whole new season of House.
Nevertheless, curiosity drove me to interrogate the chatbot further with respect to what alternative systems of prioritizing research and grant decisions are in use in different countries around the world. The most interesting alternative suggested in the return was that of an agency in the UK, which the chatbot led me to discover via, perhaps ironically, a US federal agency white paper, uses a quantitative. “value-of-information” (VOI) approach:
“We identified only one organization that explicitly used modeling-based approaches, specifically cost-effectiveness analysis and VOI analysis, in its research priority setting. Not surprisingly, given the findings of the literature review, this was the UK NICE. In contrast to many of the other organizations, NICE is tasked with making recommendations about adaptation of specific technologies and further research into those specific technologies, rather than making recommendations across broader areas of research (for example, relative allocation of research funds for breast versus prostate cancer). These analyses are usually conducted within the context of specific systematic reviews. The combination of a ‘menu’of highly specific potential research questions and a context where costs and cost-effectiveness are explicitly part of the decisionmaking process facilitate the potential applicability of VOI to research priority setting. “
To blow up the Congressionally funded slop factory that is federally sponsored research, perhaps we need a law that would require Congressionally appropriated research funds to be specifically allocated in advance such that a calculation and publication of a statement of the value of information the research would be expected to produce could be published in the Congressional Record prior to any vote on such appropriation. Yes, burdensome. But it would more than likely generate a real return to the American people in putting an end to the endless funding of non-utilitarian political patronage grants and in ensuring high return research gets funded.
A good practice for learning AI's limitations is to use it a lot for things that you know very, very well. This can be something like video games, sports games, or other low stakes things. You will find that even frontier models cannot reason like people do; they can only surface the commonly used reasoning of others. The models also try to save money all the time by not thoroughly "reviewing" the training data and provide sloppy or nonsensical answers in which left is right and a distance of 10 miles is evaluated as the same as a distance of 10,000 miles.
Where I deviate from Austin Scholar is in whether writing can be effectively trained in a school program. I side with the people who say that education ought to be about elevation of the spirit and cultivation of desire; it is teaching you to want good things and to avoid bad things. Technical training in writing skills will not have as much of a lasting impact because to borrow a metaphor from physical training the students will not get enough reps in. The training might do a little bit to improve skills, but a lot of what you will measure as an effect of the training is just the selection effect.
Continuing that metaphor, universities are in the business of using government money to take people who don't like running, making them do a few short laps during class, and then systematically limiting the fitness tests and races at the end of the term over the course of decades to conceal that their graduates are not good runners and do not care about running. This is neither effective training nor effective education.
It seems increasingly clear that human beings learn nothing from the past. we had the 1968 movement anarchy and violence with the objective of destroying the grade system and we saw the results: an army of illiterates mainly in liberal arts subjects but not exclusively. Many were careful about being treated by a doctor who graduated in those years. and still we are looking to go back to the same mistake. sounds perfect definition of madness according to Einstein
In the spring of senior year in high school, I noticed in the bookstore where I worked 16 hrs/wk a big book of addresses, basically, to apply for government or adjacent jobs (no internet) and so wrote away to one of the concessionaires of the Western national parks, for an application. I sent it back and received a job offer, and a date on which to report.
My parents hadn’t observed this correspondence, and when I told them I was leaving after graduation to take this job cleaning motel rooms or whatever - they were upset and said no: I must go to college. It was much the done thing at the time, in that milieu.
I was not quite strong-willed enough to overrule them, and ambivalent enough to have also filled out and sent the 📑 for State U - so instead of going off to work, I reported to college. With a bundle of scholarships lol.
I was a pretty terrible college student, especially as a freshman though basically my whole college career was a joke; all that really changed was I learned to be in on the joke and to not fail out. To do better than fail out on paper, but in fact, I imbibed almost nothing except for my botany class, in which I learned a lot despite getting a C.
So the irony is I feel I would’ve been a much better and more earnest student if I had followed my original plan, and put college off for awhile.
It’s true that in my case, I would’ve discovered that I prefer manual, physical labor, to classroom work and I probably never would’ve gone back. But that would’ve been for the best.
Some of the friends I met in the dorm were a year older than me, having done a rotary club year in another country. While not a job, even that seemed to have given them some preparation, some seriousness of purpose.
I knew a kid who whined that his parents would not underwrite a transfer to UC Berkeley, while he took Community College classes based entirely on what his friends had already taken so he could copy their homework. I tried explaining how worthless that was, that he had no plans and didn't even know what fields interested him. I suggested that tuition money would be better spent having him backpack around the world, but his parents would not have gone along. As an alternative, I suggested four years in the Navy, on ships not shore duty, to at least get a flavor of the world before settling down with a career and family which would have made those adventures impossible, plus he'd get the GI Bill paying for that UC Berkeley tuition if he still wanted it.
He wasn't interested and eventually ended up living in his car because his parents wouldn't pay for four years of partying. He was smart and knew how to work hard, so I assume he eventually got back on his feet, but I never heard any more about him.
Something that has always amazed me was parents’ eagerness to subsidize fraternity/sorority membership.
To pay in advance to neglect one’s schoolwork, essentially.
I suppose that there maybe Greeks that impose discipline in that regard: we party together and now we are going to buckle down and pass our exams together. That may be.
And I realize that making social connections is most of the point of college for some.
A relative’s sorority-heavy college career seems to be more closely bound up with Instagram influencing than with academics. Not singling her out - just actually seems like that’s the point of the whole thing.
But every time I read a story about some terrible mishap involving a fraternity - I think: parents- you paid extra for exactly that.
George Will had a column imagining Michigan's grade policy applied to its football team. Which made it sound incredibly stupid. But it missed one important thing about football practice. Football players are held to a high standard but they are constantly observed by the coaches and shown what they did wrong and how to improve. Freshman courses are often a large lecture and "I have office hours from 2-4 every Thursday." Otherwise, the students are largely left on their own.
If the teaching faculty kept track of every student, required them to show what they had learned every week, and then showed them what was wrong and what was right, they might well have students who learned the subject like football players learn how to play their position.
Of course, football players have tried out for the team, showing some intrinsic motivation. And if they are on a football scholarship, it can be discontinued if they are cut from the team, which is quite an incentive to listen to the coaches and put in the work.
Mr. Will’s imagining has been obsolete for many years now.
College football is a profession and has been since 2021. Marquee Michigan football players make something like $1-3 million per year and the average player makes something like $300k.
There were too many temptations in college for pass/fail classes to be as motivating as graded classes. At UC Santa Cruz, grades were not offered in some classes, and in any one class students had the option to opt-out of grades. In these, we received narrative evaluations in which the professor (or sometimes just the TA) described how your essay was lacking or wasn’t politically correct. Narrative evaluations allowed some of my professors to essentially write: “Warning, Mr. Gibb is not one of us and here’s what he wrote about welfare programs and natural selection.”
Or, “Mr. Gibb is not a computer scientist and therefore didn’t have the relevant background for Technical Writing for Computer Scientists.” Truth is, I was pretty depressed surrounded by so many hippies and progressives, and I didn’t have much respect for you as a teacher, not just because you didn’t shower or wear shoes, but because the lectures and material were so dry.
I attended Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp before grades were instituted, and before the place went 'woke.' The narrative evaluation written for me by the professor of a calculus class basically said 'if UCSC had graded classes, this student would have gotten an A.'
70s. One of the 'old colleges,' which at that time included Cowell, Crown, Kresge, and college VIII (?). I am not aware of any 'new colleges.'
I got a call from a student fundraiser at least a decade ago. When I refused to donate and he asked me for my reasons, the discriminatory treatment of Jews (according to David Horowitz's Freedom Center) was at the top of my list, but I also mentioned the 'wokism' of the stories in the alumni magazine (almost invariably featuring professors or students belonging to some 'oppressed' minority group), which somehow finds its way to my mailbox no matter how many times I move.
I would likely have a favorable opinion of freshmen pass/fail at Michigan if I had some sense of what the distribution of the previous grades were before the new regime. When I was in college, it was possible to do pass/fail but letter grades were the default and students did, in fact, get Fs and fail. My prediction for what the Michigan system will produce is 99.9% pass and no student will have to suffer the ignobility of getting a D- when he really deserved an F.- in short, participation trophies all around.
That would be my preference, and of course I speak for no one else.
The core problem is that government bureaucrats and politicians have one common goal: expanding their reach. The more funds they dole out, the more power they have, the more prestige, etc etc etc.
That relates to the second problem: pushing college qua college as the be-all solution. It pushes margin students into college, who require marginal fields to be able to pass and get that four-year sheepskin. Those marginal fields require marginal researchers who need marginal subjects, all primed to soak up all those taxpayer funds.
Nobody has any skin in the game. There is no accountability. You end up with Jason Arday on the one hand, and on the other hand you get CERN particle physics papers with over a thousand authors debating string theory which hasn't had any testable predictions in 50 years. The fraud is rampant. One report said 3/4 of medical research could not be replicated, and either 9/10 or 10/10 of the soft "sciences".
The system is broken. No doubt the Gates and other foundations would also be suckered by marginal researchers, but at least there would be some pushback, because their funding is limited, unlike milking taxpayers.
I agree- I don’t see first semester pass/fail as the issue. MIT has done it for at least 50 years. Cal Tech does it. Swarthmore did it, as you noted.
The key is for the student to understand the level of effort that is going to be required to learn the material and methods of studying (re-watching lectures, problem sets, meeting with TAs).
Too many high schools students have never been asked to do any real work and don’t know how to study or how to write (or even how to read dense material and take notes). Many will be lacking the prerequisite knowledge.
Michigan needs study skill courses and remedial learning. The problem is that you can’t fix a foundational problem at the top of a pyramid.
Let’s start in grammar school and make sure kids can read and write and do math, and then challenge them as they go through secondary school..
A big difference between high school and college is that most of the learning in high school goes on in class and most of the learning in college goes on out of class. A high school physics course will have lots of explanation in class and lots of problems done and gone over by the teacher in class. A college course will have one lecture on a topic and problem sets to be done out of class (but maybe partially gone over by a TA in a "session").
College requires the student to time manage and self-motivate. It often requires puzzling things out for yourself rather than having the teacher explain it for you. This can be very annoying :)
Some would say that sociology and economics embraced some time ago at the crossroads.
I've now read dozens of comments about grade inflation and specifically the Michigan proposal (pass/fail the first term). No one mentions the fact that top law and med schools have absurd grade point averages for applicants. And the talented students have absurd expectations for themselves, not surprisingly given that many have absurd American high school gpa's higher than 4.00, even though 4.00 is perfect. The problems, whatever they are, won't be cured by simple gimmicks.
"I would argue for blowing up the whole system. Government funding controls research, and progressives control government funding.
I am a brokenist on this one. Don’t try to mend it. End it."
The amounts of money going to politically biased activities, including in medicine, is relatively small. Blowing it up for that reason seems an absurd reaction to me.
Ben Sasse was on Econtalk recently. I highly recommend it even if some people will get little or nothing from the last third to half that's mostly on religion. He strengthened my belief blowing it up is an absurd reaction.
He says a few interesting things about higher ed. In particular: (1) Far more students are coming in having never worked a part-time or summer job. Because of this, they are very different students in important ways he sees as negative, (2) Even though professors at U of Fla (where he was President) are on average near 60% research, most don't really do research. They are paid activists. He recommends this be changed. On a related noted, a tiny minority brings in almost all the research funding. (3) Universities are run in partnership with academic staff. Real researchers don't have time for this, so you end up with the activist types representing the academic perspective.
Is there a Kling's lemma operating here: The more you know about a [fill-in-the-blank]-industrial complex, the more likely you are to think it is broken and unreformable?
Imagine the innovation if we unleashed all the talent in academia into free enterprise?
Finally, another commercial for Anthony de Jasay's "The State" if you have never read a sensible shoes anarchist.
Much, most? talent was hunted out of general academia, decades ago.
I shudder to think of what happen if profit-seeking businesses tried hiring academics. I am not sure where to put them where they will do less harm, but they are not ready for free enterprise.
The Hartz and Kaufman piece provides useful information, yet, I found myself annoyed by the framing of the issue using the left-right dichotomy. So I asked the browser chatbot for schools of political thought that do not fit into that dichotomy and was somewhat amused by the ultimate sentence it returned: “Finally, models like Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics use three axes—Liberty, Authority, and Solidarity—to better capture the moral and communicative differences between political groups that a binary scale misses.” I don’t recall having seen the three axes so labeled but maybe my memory fails: as I recall Dr. Kling’s comments on solidarity address how religion once met human psychological needs for relatedness and how certain clan social organization models can suppress individual autonomy. Perhaps an illustration of buyer beware when using chatbots?
At any rate, despite being immensely grateful for the enormous amount of medical progress that has been achieved during, and that has significantly extended, my lifetime, I also concur with Dr. Kling on blowing up the US federal grant making apparatus. As I like to include the makers of the many medicines that sustain me in my daily prayers, I look up who developed each of the medicines I use. Interestingly, there is only one from the United States. The UK is represented twice, and Taiwan, Canada, France, Germany, and Switzerland all are represented by single medications developed by individuals and teams from within their systems. Yes, my medicine cabinet could inspire a whole new season of House.
Nevertheless, curiosity drove me to interrogate the chatbot further with respect to what alternative systems of prioritizing research and grant decisions are in use in different countries around the world. The most interesting alternative suggested in the return was that of an agency in the UK, which the chatbot led me to discover via, perhaps ironically, a US federal agency white paper, uses a quantitative. “value-of-information” (VOI) approach:
“We identified only one organization that explicitly used modeling-based approaches, specifically cost-effectiveness analysis and VOI analysis, in its research priority setting. Not surprisingly, given the findings of the literature review, this was the UK NICE. In contrast to many of the other organizations, NICE is tasked with making recommendations about adaptation of specific technologies and further research into those specific technologies, rather than making recommendations across broader areas of research (for example, relative allocation of research funds for breast versus prostate cancer). These analyses are usually conducted within the context of specific systematic reviews. The combination of a ‘menu’of highly specific potential research questions and a context where costs and cost-effectiveness are explicitly part of the decisionmaking process facilitate the potential applicability of VOI to research priority setting. “
( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62139/ )
To blow up the Congressionally funded slop factory that is federally sponsored research, perhaps we need a law that would require Congressionally appropriated research funds to be specifically allocated in advance such that a calculation and publication of a statement of the value of information the research would be expected to produce could be published in the Congressional Record prior to any vote on such appropriation. Yes, burdensome. But it would more than likely generate a real return to the American people in putting an end to the endless funding of non-utilitarian political patronage grants and in ensuring high return research gets funded.
Re: Austin Scholar
A good practice for learning AI's limitations is to use it a lot for things that you know very, very well. This can be something like video games, sports games, or other low stakes things. You will find that even frontier models cannot reason like people do; they can only surface the commonly used reasoning of others. The models also try to save money all the time by not thoroughly "reviewing" the training data and provide sloppy or nonsensical answers in which left is right and a distance of 10 miles is evaluated as the same as a distance of 10,000 miles.
Where I deviate from Austin Scholar is in whether writing can be effectively trained in a school program. I side with the people who say that education ought to be about elevation of the spirit and cultivation of desire; it is teaching you to want good things and to avoid bad things. Technical training in writing skills will not have as much of a lasting impact because to borrow a metaphor from physical training the students will not get enough reps in. The training might do a little bit to improve skills, but a lot of what you will measure as an effect of the training is just the selection effect.
Continuing that metaphor, universities are in the business of using government money to take people who don't like running, making them do a few short laps during class, and then systematically limiting the fitness tests and races at the end of the term over the course of decades to conceal that their graduates are not good runners and do not care about running. This is neither effective training nor effective education.
It seems increasingly clear that human beings learn nothing from the past. we had the 1968 movement anarchy and violence with the objective of destroying the grade system and we saw the results: an army of illiterates mainly in liberal arts subjects but not exclusively. Many were careful about being treated by a doctor who graduated in those years. and still we are looking to go back to the same mistake. sounds perfect definition of madness according to Einstein
In the spring of senior year in high school, I noticed in the bookstore where I worked 16 hrs/wk a big book of addresses, basically, to apply for government or adjacent jobs (no internet) and so wrote away to one of the concessionaires of the Western national parks, for an application. I sent it back and received a job offer, and a date on which to report.
My parents hadn’t observed this correspondence, and when I told them I was leaving after graduation to take this job cleaning motel rooms or whatever - they were upset and said no: I must go to college. It was much the done thing at the time, in that milieu.
I was not quite strong-willed enough to overrule them, and ambivalent enough to have also filled out and sent the 📑 for State U - so instead of going off to work, I reported to college. With a bundle of scholarships lol.
I was a pretty terrible college student, especially as a freshman though basically my whole college career was a joke; all that really changed was I learned to be in on the joke and to not fail out. To do better than fail out on paper, but in fact, I imbibed almost nothing except for my botany class, in which I learned a lot despite getting a C.
So the irony is I feel I would’ve been a much better and more earnest student if I had followed my original plan, and put college off for awhile.
It’s true that in my case, I would’ve discovered that I prefer manual, physical labor, to classroom work and I probably never would’ve gone back. But that would’ve been for the best.
Some of the friends I met in the dorm were a year older than me, having done a rotary club year in another country. While not a job, even that seemed to have given them some preparation, some seriousness of purpose.
I knew a kid who whined that his parents would not underwrite a transfer to UC Berkeley, while he took Community College classes based entirely on what his friends had already taken so he could copy their homework. I tried explaining how worthless that was, that he had no plans and didn't even know what fields interested him. I suggested that tuition money would be better spent having him backpack around the world, but his parents would not have gone along. As an alternative, I suggested four years in the Navy, on ships not shore duty, to at least get a flavor of the world before settling down with a career and family which would have made those adventures impossible, plus he'd get the GI Bill paying for that UC Berkeley tuition if he still wanted it.
He wasn't interested and eventually ended up living in his car because his parents wouldn't pay for four years of partying. He was smart and knew how to work hard, so I assume he eventually got back on his feet, but I never heard any more about him.
Something that has always amazed me was parents’ eagerness to subsidize fraternity/sorority membership.
To pay in advance to neglect one’s schoolwork, essentially.
I suppose that there maybe Greeks that impose discipline in that regard: we party together and now we are going to buckle down and pass our exams together. That may be.
And I realize that making social connections is most of the point of college for some.
A relative’s sorority-heavy college career seems to be more closely bound up with Instagram influencing than with academics. Not singling her out - just actually seems like that’s the point of the whole thing.
But every time I read a story about some terrible mishap involving a fraternity - I think: parents- you paid extra for exactly that.
George Will had a column imagining Michigan's grade policy applied to its football team. Which made it sound incredibly stupid. But it missed one important thing about football practice. Football players are held to a high standard but they are constantly observed by the coaches and shown what they did wrong and how to improve. Freshman courses are often a large lecture and "I have office hours from 2-4 every Thursday." Otherwise, the students are largely left on their own.
If the teaching faculty kept track of every student, required them to show what they had learned every week, and then showed them what was wrong and what was right, they might well have students who learned the subject like football players learn how to play their position.
Of course, football players have tried out for the team, showing some intrinsic motivation. And if they are on a football scholarship, it can be discontinued if they are cut from the team, which is quite an incentive to listen to the coaches and put in the work.
Mr. Will’s imagining has been obsolete for many years now.
College football is a profession and has been since 2021. Marquee Michigan football players make something like $1-3 million per year and the average player makes something like $300k.
So if the teaching faculty did that, they might get an awful lot of drop-outs.
There were too many temptations in college for pass/fail classes to be as motivating as graded classes. At UC Santa Cruz, grades were not offered in some classes, and in any one class students had the option to opt-out of grades. In these, we received narrative evaluations in which the professor (or sometimes just the TA) described how your essay was lacking or wasn’t politically correct. Narrative evaluations allowed some of my professors to essentially write: “Warning, Mr. Gibb is not one of us and here’s what he wrote about welfare programs and natural selection.”
Or, “Mr. Gibb is not a computer scientist and therefore didn’t have the relevant background for Technical Writing for Computer Scientists.” Truth is, I was pretty depressed surrounded by so many hippies and progressives, and I didn’t have much respect for you as a teacher, not just because you didn’t shower or wear shoes, but because the lectures and material were so dry.
I attended Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp before grades were instituted, and before the place went 'woke.' The narrative evaluation written for me by the professor of a calculus class basically said 'if UCSC had graded classes, this student would have gotten an A.'
What years? What college? When I walk the old colleges like Cowell I wonder what it was like to attend in the sixties, seventies and eighties.
Yeah, narrative evaluations for calculus, chemistry, physics, and large econ classes were pretty silly. Why not just say the actual grade?
70s. One of the 'old colleges,' which at that time included Cowell, Crown, Kresge, and college VIII (?). I am not aware of any 'new colleges.'
I got a call from a student fundraiser at least a decade ago. When I refused to donate and he asked me for my reasons, the discriminatory treatment of Jews (according to David Horowitz's Freedom Center) was at the top of my list, but I also mentioned the 'wokism' of the stories in the alumni magazine (almost invariably featuring professors or students belonging to some 'oppressed' minority group), which somehow finds its way to my mailbox no matter how many times I move.
1. Cowell founded 1965
2. Stevenson 1966
3. Crown 1967
4. Merrill 1968
5. Porter 1969
6. Kresge 1971
7. Oakes 1972
8. Rachel Carson 1972 was College Eight when I attended in 1994-97. Nicknamed College Straight.
9. College Nine 2000
10. John R. Lewis 2002
Yep, must be ubiquitous that universities have the ability to track their alumni.
I would likely have a favorable opinion of freshmen pass/fail at Michigan if I had some sense of what the distribution of the previous grades were before the new regime. When I was in college, it was possible to do pass/fail but letter grades were the default and students did, in fact, get Fs and fail. My prediction for what the Michigan system will produce is 99.9% pass and no student will have to suffer the ignobility of getting a D- when he really deserved an F.- in short, participation trophies all around.
Re: "I would argue for blowing up the whole system. Government funding controls research, and progressives control government funding."
The rot extends to private funding of research. For example, the Mellon Foundation plays a massive role in funding of research in the humanities.
But their funding has limits, unlike taxpayers, and they have competitors, unlike government.
I think economics isn't on the road- it is at the destination.
True of Hayek and Smith?
Are they still active?
Yes, through their children.
About federal research funding, do you want to remove all funding, including medicine and tech? Let industry do it?
That would be my preference, and of course I speak for no one else.
The core problem is that government bureaucrats and politicians have one common goal: expanding their reach. The more funds they dole out, the more power they have, the more prestige, etc etc etc.
That relates to the second problem: pushing college qua college as the be-all solution. It pushes margin students into college, who require marginal fields to be able to pass and get that four-year sheepskin. Those marginal fields require marginal researchers who need marginal subjects, all primed to soak up all those taxpayer funds.
Nobody has any skin in the game. There is no accountability. You end up with Jason Arday on the one hand, and on the other hand you get CERN particle physics papers with over a thousand authors debating string theory which hasn't had any testable predictions in 50 years. The fraud is rampant. One report said 3/4 of medical research could not be replicated, and either 9/10 or 10/10 of the soft "sciences".
The system is broken. No doubt the Gates and other foundations would also be suckered by marginal researchers, but at least there would be some pushback, because their funding is limited, unlike milking taxpayers.
I agree- I don’t see first semester pass/fail as the issue. MIT has done it for at least 50 years. Cal Tech does it. Swarthmore did it, as you noted.
The key is for the student to understand the level of effort that is going to be required to learn the material and methods of studying (re-watching lectures, problem sets, meeting with TAs).
Too many high schools students have never been asked to do any real work and don’t know how to study or how to write (or even how to read dense material and take notes). Many will be lacking the prerequisite knowledge.
Michigan needs study skill courses and remedial learning. The problem is that you can’t fix a foundational problem at the top of a pyramid.
Let’s start in grammar school and make sure kids can read and write and do math, and then challenge them as they go through secondary school..
A big difference between high school and college is that most of the learning in high school goes on in class and most of the learning in college goes on out of class. A high school physics course will have lots of explanation in class and lots of problems done and gone over by the teacher in class. A college course will have one lecture on a topic and problem sets to be done out of class (but maybe partially gone over by a TA in a "session").
College requires the student to time manage and self-motivate. It often requires puzzling things out for yourself rather than having the teacher explain it for you. This can be very annoying :)
True, and I think colleges need to invest more time showing kids those ropes.
Used to be done organically via peer pressure and feedback (bad grades).
On the other hand, when I sometimes saw what was required to get an “A” in a STEM class, I decided I was happy doing less to get the “B”.