You are not kidding about the Bishop mindset being a charitable interpretation. I have had faculty who were on my dissertation committee when I was getting my PhD 25 years ago tell me how wrong I am without explanation on social media. The mindset of the sage/bishop/smartest person in any room needs to go. A new college culture of mentoring is very much needed.
I think perhaps the bigger issue with higher education, and education more broadly, is that the credentialing function is performed by the same people performing (or not) the teaching function. As a result the answer to “did you teach this student what he is supposed to know” pretty much always is “yes” and if they can’t pass tests and that makes the teacher look bad the teacher just says they passed the test. Whether the teacher is of the bishop or mentor model seems unimportant in that case as the incentives are the same.
I think until teaching the material is uncoupled from testing whether students know the material we won’t be able to fix that.
I think I agree with you, and yet… that decoupling does exist in K-12, and yet despite all the “teaching to the test” going on, if I’m not mistaken test scores have continued to fall.
Not the identical problem, I realize, but not entirely dissimilar.
Agreed, although I think there is the added issue that 1: K-12 is compulsory and expensive to avoid and 2: teachers' unions are extremely powerful, usually one of the biggest donors in the state. Remember back when there was a law that schools that didn't meet certain testing standards were going to be shut down or put under new management? That lasted for what, a few weeks? K-12 is super broken along a couple of different margins (not even getting into family culture, motivation, what welfare does to all that, etc.)
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever built," said Kant. Out of not-too-bright not-too-motivated students, no "good" education system can be built. When is comes to students learning what they are supposed to learn, American schools do about as well as can reasonably be expected. What they are expected to learn is very unrealistic.
I disagree somewhat. I agree that the mix of what students are expected to learn is somewhat silly, but I do not think that basics like reading ability and most of the math are unrealistic, especially not such that the exceedingly poor results we see make sense. I don't expect every student to come out writing Shakespearean sonnets, or really able to ready them effectively, but most students should be able to read and do basic math if they graduate. The current bar is very low, and far too many students fail to even achieve that.
I want to agree with you but ... I certainly agree that "most students should be able to read and do basic math if they graduate." If you can't, you shouldn't graduate. But I fear that a non-negligible percentage (10%? 15%? 20%?) will never be able to (and I don't mean "able to" as in "you will keep taking the test and we will keep coaching you until you can pass it in your sleep--one time.").
Alas, educational professionals believe everyone should graduate high school so they will fudge to make it happen.
Yea I agree, there are definitely some 10-15% who can’t graduate high school. I am talking more about the 40% who can’t read at a basic level, based on Dept of Education numbers (that I am probably misremembering off the top of my head, but around there). There is room in the world for high school dropouts, but giving diplomas to kids who can’t read or do basic math just muddies the waters, and if you can’t get 75-85% of kids reading you are just doing a piss poor job. We do not live in a third world country with a room temperature average IQ after all.
"I believe that the role of the professor should shift to one of mentor. That is a radical shift, and most academics are neither willing nor able to take on that role."
I teach a large introductory course (100+ students) at a large public university. The above implies that there is little use for such classes. But I'm not sure that's true. These courses provided a guided tour of a discipline, one that has long been available to motivated students via books (before the internet), and now AI, but most students are not particularly motivated or self-directed.
The analogy you used of a tour guide pointing out interesting sights for further exploration seems to me to come a lot closer to Mr Kling's idea of a mentor than a bishop dispensing dogma.
A recently-graduated unemployment rate that's double all grads does not surprise me in the least. If only ~5.9% are grievance studies majors or other difficult to employ majors that sounds pretty good.
The real question is how much the ratio has changed. Given the strong job market I'd guess not much if any for the worse.
I was a terrible college student. I and some others found it was more interesting poking around an antique computer (UNIVAC SS-90, from the late 1950s), rewiring its instructions and teaching ourselves more than any classes were teaching us, and the school eventually kicked us all out for not going to classes. I don't know if we would have done better at an Alpha-style school, but we sure couldn't have done worse.
Intro classes would still benefit from someone more bishop than mentor, IMO.
More advanced classes, what AK advocates makes sense.
Unless, of course, AK is advocating an even more radical cutback of who goes to college than his previous post of the subject, to be, say, only the top 10%-15%. In which case of course said intro classes could all be done online, self-taught.
"rich parents, athletes, and legacy admissions who were spoiled brats."
I say that's BS.
1 yes, lots of athletes get scholarships when they are incapable of college work. Of course lots of non-athletes do too. Regardless, the under-achiever athletes don't go Ivy. The ones that go Ivy might be less qualified but they tend to chose ivy exactly because they are high achievers.
2 despite the stereotype, rich parents tend to have smart, high-achieving kids. That's in part why there's very little social mobility. Parents of ivy legacy students tend to be rich too. Again, like athletes these students might be somewhat less qualified but not many are going to be slackers.
3 while no doubt some ivy students take advantage of grade inflation to slack off, I don't think you are going to find many under-achievers even among those students.
4 I'd bet MIT student are even less likely to slack off.
Note: I purposely ignored "spoiled-brat." It seems tangential to the issue. High-achievers and students who are entirely merit admittance can be spoiled brats too.
If you take AK’s comments as absolutes, then I mostly agree with you.
If instead, one treats AK’s words here as Salena Zito famously said one should do of Trump (those who love him take him seriously but not literally), then he is of course correct.
Because there is no doubt whatsoever that higher percentages of the extremely rich, athlete and legacy admissions are “spoiled brats” and lower achievers than the kids admitted purely on merit.
Though I will argue that the enormously high percentage of students who are pro-Hamas - including those 31+ groups at Harvard - is some evidence for my position. As it is very unlikely that the hardest working, high achieving admits are disproportionately in the pro-Hamas camp and spending their time in these hard left advocacy groups.
Neither of us has hard data.
I am indeed willing to concede to you that the athletes in the major sports - I.e. basketball and football - at the Ivies are likely not disproportionately spoiled brats or low achievers. I agree with your argument on that front.
But all kids today well understand the signaling value of graduating from elite institutions. While neither of us has hard data, AK and I have logic for our position that rich kids, athletes in the non-major sports and most especially legacy admits are disproportionately spoiled brats and lower achievers, while you do not have this on yours.
As but one example, the grade inflation that is most severe at the Ivies is decidedly NOT caused by those high achieving students who get in on merit (it is clearly on the margin *against* their interests for it to be so), but instead from a combination of demands of parents of the rich/legacy/athletes plus the demand from the students admitted based on “minority” status.
Unless, again, you take AK’s words literally rather than seriously (i.e. directionally).
Agreed neither of us has hard evidence. In large part, that is my point. An assertion was made with no evidence to support it.
I don't agree with your subjective reasons either. I think mine are better and you haven't in any way refuted them.
There's another factor I'd like to point out to you. At least for Harvard, virtually nobody is there based solely on "merit." A perfect GPA and perfect sat scores doesn't guarantee admittance. Pretty much everyone has something on their resume that is considered special.
First off, they may not be at the top of their ivy class or get the best grades but that doesn't make them lower achievers. Do you think Gates and Zuckerberg had the best grades?
Second, I'd bet the percent who aren't high achievers is small and hasn't significantly grown.
Third their performance vs merit admitted hasn't significantly changed and, most importantly, the percent who are high achievers hasn't significantly shrunk.
If you want to tell me the kids who wouldn't have gone to college in past decades mostly aren't doing well in college, fine. That's probably true. But I still say any argument kids at the very top aren't doing well is BS.
You may or may not be correct that the “non-high achievers” at the Ivies is relatively small. We are unlikely to agree on this. I’d argue that the nature of grievance studies today alone contradicts your point.
But based on my listening to the stories of my daughter, who graduated 2022 from UCLA (not an Ivy but *very* close to it in student quality, and I’m confident higher in admit quality than some of the Ivies), however, I am quite certain of the “has significantly grown” bit.
For multiple reasons I'd bet the percent of grievance studies majors at UCLA is significantly higher.
I expect the percent taking grievance studies has grown at ivies and ucla. That is a related but separate question from the percent of low achievers. But it's a magnet for them.
I agree with a lot of this. But I don't think anything scholars would consider reasonable would satisfy everything you're looking for.
If one doesn't think pure research is worthwhile, one will inevitably have a negative impression of university culture. That's a common value judgment among libertarian-leaning people.
The exact opposite values are pretty universal among the kind of people who pursue scholarship as a vocation, and also among enough big donors that research will continue to dominate the mission of US higher ed. I don't expect that to ever change, and I'm not sure what to do about this disconnect, especially since I find the values you're starting from pretty alien myself.
I like the Bishop Mindset as a metaphor. Part of the Bishop's job is to weed out any potential non-conformist Martin Luther types, which seems not so different from the self-appointed tasks of modern university faculty.
Some professors long ago, way before Ai, became a guide by the side. I agree with Issac Asimov; all education is self education. But a good guide and perhaps mentor sometimes brings something more than content knowledge to the enterprise of self education. A good guide brings experience, of which an Ai has none and never will. An Ai is a mind in a vat.
I tell my students that I cannot teach them anything, but they can learn all they have intention to learn, that I can show them a path that helped me learn, but that's all I can do.
Re: "A background in athletic coaching can be good preparation for becoming a guide."
A caveat: If the academic mentor works with a group of students, then a mindset of current athletics coaches in youth sports might frequently involve punishment of the whole group for individual wrongdoing. Regrettably, sports coaches often punish the whole team if an individual athlete misses practice or arrives late. This version of "No I in team" inculcates notions of accountability that do not square with the rule of law in a liberal polity, and that ill serve education to citizenship.
Am I the only one who thinks that the huge grade inflation in college - especially elite ones - is not merely a symptom but also a problem in and of itself?
Perhaps, even better, the government should just butt out entirely in defining university governance, and leave that to the universities. What bright-eyed busybody thought it was any of the government's business in the first place?
I'm not exactly a big fan of faculty governance, but it's worth looking at the market for international students and the capitalization of the higher ed sectors in the countries you're talking about, and comparing them to the US. By those fairly objective metrics, the US higher ed industry is much more successful.
I'm not saying the system can't be improved, I'm saying European systems are not models to aspire to.
Re international students, the most important comparison is how much tuition money each country brings in (how good of an "export" is higher ed). Canadian and especially British schools charge much lower tuition than US schools.
You are not kidding about the Bishop mindset being a charitable interpretation. I have had faculty who were on my dissertation committee when I was getting my PhD 25 years ago tell me how wrong I am without explanation on social media. The mindset of the sage/bishop/smartest person in any room needs to go. A new college culture of mentoring is very much needed.
I think perhaps the bigger issue with higher education, and education more broadly, is that the credentialing function is performed by the same people performing (or not) the teaching function. As a result the answer to “did you teach this student what he is supposed to know” pretty much always is “yes” and if they can’t pass tests and that makes the teacher look bad the teacher just says they passed the test. Whether the teacher is of the bishop or mentor model seems unimportant in that case as the incentives are the same.
I think until teaching the material is uncoupled from testing whether students know the material we won’t be able to fix that.
I think I agree with you, and yet… that decoupling does exist in K-12, and yet despite all the “teaching to the test” going on, if I’m not mistaken test scores have continued to fall.
Not the identical problem, I realize, but not entirely dissimilar.
Agreed, although I think there is the added issue that 1: K-12 is compulsory and expensive to avoid and 2: teachers' unions are extremely powerful, usually one of the biggest donors in the state. Remember back when there was a law that schools that didn't meet certain testing standards were going to be shut down or put under new management? That lasted for what, a few weeks? K-12 is super broken along a couple of different margins (not even getting into family culture, motivation, what welfare does to all that, etc.)
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever built," said Kant. Out of not-too-bright not-too-motivated students, no "good" education system can be built. When is comes to students learning what they are supposed to learn, American schools do about as well as can reasonably be expected. What they are expected to learn is very unrealistic.
I disagree somewhat. I agree that the mix of what students are expected to learn is somewhat silly, but I do not think that basics like reading ability and most of the math are unrealistic, especially not such that the exceedingly poor results we see make sense. I don't expect every student to come out writing Shakespearean sonnets, or really able to ready them effectively, but most students should be able to read and do basic math if they graduate. The current bar is very low, and far too many students fail to even achieve that.
I want to agree with you but ... I certainly agree that "most students should be able to read and do basic math if they graduate." If you can't, you shouldn't graduate. But I fear that a non-negligible percentage (10%? 15%? 20%?) will never be able to (and I don't mean "able to" as in "you will keep taking the test and we will keep coaching you until you can pass it in your sleep--one time.").
Alas, educational professionals believe everyone should graduate high school so they will fudge to make it happen.
Yea I agree, there are definitely some 10-15% who can’t graduate high school. I am talking more about the 40% who can’t read at a basic level, based on Dept of Education numbers (that I am probably misremembering off the top of my head, but around there). There is room in the world for high school dropouts, but giving diplomas to kids who can’t read or do basic math just muddies the waters, and if you can’t get 75-85% of kids reading you are just doing a piss poor job. We do not live in a third world country with a room temperature average IQ after all.
"I believe that the role of the professor should shift to one of mentor. That is a radical shift, and most academics are neither willing nor able to take on that role."
I teach a large introductory course (100+ students) at a large public university. The above implies that there is little use for such classes. But I'm not sure that's true. These courses provided a guided tour of a discipline, one that has long been available to motivated students via books (before the internet), and now AI, but most students are not particularly motivated or self-directed.
The analogy you used of a tour guide pointing out interesting sights for further exploration seems to me to come a lot closer to Mr Kling's idea of a mentor than a bishop dispensing dogma.
A recently-graduated unemployment rate that's double all grads does not surprise me in the least. If only ~5.9% are grievance studies majors or other difficult to employ majors that sounds pretty good.
The real question is how much the ratio has changed. Given the strong job market I'd guess not much if any for the worse.
I’d bet marginally for the worse. But yours is the right comment and question.
I was a terrible college student. I and some others found it was more interesting poking around an antique computer (UNIVAC SS-90, from the late 1950s), rewiring its instructions and teaching ourselves more than any classes were teaching us, and the school eventually kicked us all out for not going to classes. I don't know if we would have done better at an Alpha-style school, but we sure couldn't have done worse.
This seems very right but I don’t really see what is going to push colleges or high schools to change the status quo
Two points.
First, the achiever/spoiled brat metaphor maps the growth/fixed mindset concept championed by Carol Dweck.
Second, the mentor/bishop metaphor maps, well, pretty much every progressive education model of the 'guide on the side' since at least the late 60's.
Intro classes would still benefit from someone more bishop than mentor, IMO.
More advanced classes, what AK advocates makes sense.
Unless, of course, AK is advocating an even more radical cutback of who goes to college than his previous post of the subject, to be, say, only the top 10%-15%. In which case of course said intro classes could all be done online, self-taught.
"rich parents, athletes, and legacy admissions who were spoiled brats."
I say that's BS.
1 yes, lots of athletes get scholarships when they are incapable of college work. Of course lots of non-athletes do too. Regardless, the under-achiever athletes don't go Ivy. The ones that go Ivy might be less qualified but they tend to chose ivy exactly because they are high achievers.
2 despite the stereotype, rich parents tend to have smart, high-achieving kids. That's in part why there's very little social mobility. Parents of ivy legacy students tend to be rich too. Again, like athletes these students might be somewhat less qualified but not many are going to be slackers.
3 while no doubt some ivy students take advantage of grade inflation to slack off, I don't think you are going to find many under-achievers even among those students.
4 I'd bet MIT student are even less likely to slack off.
Note: I purposely ignored "spoiled-brat." It seems tangential to the issue. High-achievers and students who are entirely merit admittance can be spoiled brats too.
If you take AK’s comments as absolutes, then I mostly agree with you.
If instead, one treats AK’s words here as Salena Zito famously said one should do of Trump (those who love him take him seriously but not literally), then he is of course correct.
Because there is no doubt whatsoever that higher percentages of the extremely rich, athlete and legacy admissions are “spoiled brats” and lower achievers than the kids admitted purely on merit.
What is your evidence that the spoiled brats at ivies are rich, legacy, or athletes rather than the merit admittances?
I have exactly as much evidence as you do.
Though I will argue that the enormously high percentage of students who are pro-Hamas - including those 31+ groups at Harvard - is some evidence for my position. As it is very unlikely that the hardest working, high achieving admits are disproportionately in the pro-Hamas camp and spending their time in these hard left advocacy groups.
Neither of us has hard data.
I am indeed willing to concede to you that the athletes in the major sports - I.e. basketball and football - at the Ivies are likely not disproportionately spoiled brats or low achievers. I agree with your argument on that front.
But all kids today well understand the signaling value of graduating from elite institutions. While neither of us has hard data, AK and I have logic for our position that rich kids, athletes in the non-major sports and most especially legacy admits are disproportionately spoiled brats and lower achievers, while you do not have this on yours.
As but one example, the grade inflation that is most severe at the Ivies is decidedly NOT caused by those high achieving students who get in on merit (it is clearly on the margin *against* their interests for it to be so), but instead from a combination of demands of parents of the rich/legacy/athletes plus the demand from the students admitted based on “minority” status.
Unless, again, you take AK’s words literally rather than seriously (i.e. directionally).
Agreed neither of us has hard evidence. In large part, that is my point. An assertion was made with no evidence to support it.
I don't agree with your subjective reasons either. I think mine are better and you haven't in any way refuted them.
There's another factor I'd like to point out to you. At least for Harvard, virtually nobody is there based solely on "merit." A perfect GPA and perfect sat scores doesn't guarantee admittance. Pretty much everyone has something on their resume that is considered special.
No.
First off, they may not be at the top of their ivy class or get the best grades but that doesn't make them lower achievers. Do you think Gates and Zuckerberg had the best grades?
Second, I'd bet the percent who aren't high achievers is small and hasn't significantly grown.
Third their performance vs merit admitted hasn't significantly changed and, most importantly, the percent who are high achievers hasn't significantly shrunk.
If you want to tell me the kids who wouldn't have gone to college in past decades mostly aren't doing well in college, fine. That's probably true. But I still say any argument kids at the very top aren't doing well is BS.
You may or may not be correct that the “non-high achievers” at the Ivies is relatively small. We are unlikely to agree on this. I’d argue that the nature of grievance studies today alone contradicts your point.
But based on my listening to the stories of my daughter, who graduated 2022 from UCLA (not an Ivy but *very* close to it in student quality, and I’m confident higher in admit quality than some of the Ivies), however, I am quite certain of the “has significantly grown” bit.
For multiple reasons I'd bet the percent of grievance studies majors at UCLA is significantly higher.
I expect the percent taking grievance studies has grown at ivies and ucla. That is a related but separate question from the percent of low achievers. But it's a magnet for them.
I agree with a lot of this. But I don't think anything scholars would consider reasonable would satisfy everything you're looking for.
If one doesn't think pure research is worthwhile, one will inevitably have a negative impression of university culture. That's a common value judgment among libertarian-leaning people.
The exact opposite values are pretty universal among the kind of people who pursue scholarship as a vocation, and also among enough big donors that research will continue to dominate the mission of US higher ed. I don't expect that to ever change, and I'm not sure what to do about this disconnect, especially since I find the values you're starting from pretty alien myself.
I like the Bishop Mindset as a metaphor. Part of the Bishop's job is to weed out any potential non-conformist Martin Luther types, which seems not so different from the self-appointed tasks of modern university faculty.
Some professors long ago, way before Ai, became a guide by the side. I agree with Issac Asimov; all education is self education. But a good guide and perhaps mentor sometimes brings something more than content knowledge to the enterprise of self education. A good guide brings experience, of which an Ai has none and never will. An Ai is a mind in a vat.
I tell my students that I cannot teach them anything, but they can learn all they have intention to learn, that I can show them a path that helped me learn, but that's all I can do.
Re: "A background in athletic coaching can be good preparation for becoming a guide."
A caveat: If the academic mentor works with a group of students, then a mindset of current athletics coaches in youth sports might frequently involve punishment of the whole group for individual wrongdoing. Regrettably, sports coaches often punish the whole team if an individual athlete misses practice or arrives late. This version of "No I in team" inculcates notions of accountability that do not square with the rule of law in a liberal polity, and that ill serve education to citizenship.
Am I the only one who thinks that the huge grade inflation in college - especially elite ones - is not merely a symptom but also a problem in and of itself?
Perhaps, even better, the government should just butt out entirely in defining university governance, and leave that to the universities. What bright-eyed busybody thought it was any of the government's business in the first place?
I'm not exactly a big fan of faculty governance, but it's worth looking at the market for international students and the capitalization of the higher ed sectors in the countries you're talking about, and comparing them to the US. By those fairly objective metrics, the US higher ed industry is much more successful.
I'm not saying the system can't be improved, I'm saying European systems are not models to aspire to.
Re international students, the most important comparison is how much tuition money each country brings in (how good of an "export" is higher ed). Canadian and especially British schools charge much lower tuition than US schools.