Education should be cheap for everyone, otherwise this will only get worse.
Additionally everyone that has finished High School should be accepted into any state-funded university. You can seed out the unqualified students during the first two semesters.
Could you imagine spending any time in a building that was originally designed to be a prison? Aren't those things made to break spirits and punish people simply by being in it? Have you ever entered a space and felt uncomfortable simply because it doesn't have windows or the walls are barren or it is just "cold"? We'd probably see a lot more drop outs if prisons were repurposed as dorms. Shit, some new schools are designed with the same brush as these prisons and we can probably easily predict the success/failure rates of students coming from them.
Many of the colleges I had visited and the one I went to had prison like dorms. It seems to be the default type of building to construct whenever there is an unexpected increase in students and they have to put as many people into a small place as possible. I know the room I shared with another student in college was smaller than some prison cells.
People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce. Guess which of those I believe drives college admissions right now.
Of course many careers will benefit from a college education, but here in the US we have long since surpassed that number of people attending college.
Because education is important, and our society is helped by everyone having access to improve their lives. I don't want to get into an automation discussion, but I personally believe that it will be even more important in the next few decades.
> People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce
I completely agree! But I think that is a separate problem. I'd love to go to school for things completely unrelated to my career. I don't think college should necessarily be easy, but getting into it should be. I personally believe that encouraging people to further educate themselves, especially "non-intellectuals"* , is a great way for everyone to benefit.
IME, most people who skip college aren't skipping it because they are dumb, but because they don't have the resources to attend easily. In my own experience: High-school wasn't reflective of my current educational desires. I want to attend more college classes, but don't have the resources to do so. I live a pretty simple lifestyle, and if college isn't easily accessible to me, I can't see how it's accessible to people with kids, two jobs, etc
* : I don't know how else to phrase that without sounding condescending. If someone has a better wording, let me know.
But then what's the point? Why admit a bunch of people that are very unlikely to get past the first 2 semesters anyway. What problem does that solve? Class capacity and on-campus housing would have to be increased dramatically to accommodate a lot more first year students that would ultimately be washing out. I don't think that serves the students or the universities.
If the problem is that there are many qualified students who can't get into college because there isn't enough supply, then the answer is to build new 4-year universities or reduce demand. Demand can be reduced by offering more vocational training opportunities or 2-year degree programs.
If the problem is that college is too expensive, that gets back to state funding of public universities as well as tuition inflation.
I'm not sure high school completion would reflect well on that. We already have a significant number of people not finishing college and university. Wasting resources on more profs doing remedial teaching wouldn't do any good. High schools need higher standards, and colleges should probably accept fewer students.
I just don't see how that's a good model. Make high school a little harder and let the degree have some worth, and have it so it's only 1/3rd or less that don't continue after the first couple semesters. In the context of the US post-secondary education is just too expensive to have such low standards. It probably works better in countries with low individual costs on education, but even then I'd want standards in place that are high enough not to need so many resources used to remove people who definitely don't belong there.
It seems more meritocratic, to me. The bar to enter is low, and the criteria for continuing their studies is proficiency in the subject at hand, not standardized test scores, extracurricular activities in high school or the best-written application essay.
On a side note, ETHZ (and other Universities in Switzerland) charge some $500-1000 per semester, and taking on student debt is rare. This way, by dropping out, students mostly only lose the invested time and don't face potential bankrupcy.
Education is a prestige game which you can't win. Banning school names from resumes would be far cheaper and more useful if you want to level the playing field.
Companies already avoid asking about marital status or children etc, this could easily be added to that list.
There's a difference. You aren't forbidden from listing your marital or child-care status on your resume, companies are forbidden from asking you about it. Banning applicants from disclosing their school would be a rather different step.
Amusingly people from 'elite' schools often will not say where they went to school by name in casual conversation. This seems to be especially true for east coast schools that are particularly elitist (a subset of the Ivies). This gets especially absurd when they say something like "oh, I went to school in New Haven" (Yale people do this semi-reliably).
In other words, there is a signaling and counter-signaling mechanism here. An investment banker saying they went to school in Philly is expecting you to understand they went to Wharton, and the only acceptable clarifying question is something like "oh, undergrad or for your MBA?"
Asking me not to say I went to an Ivy on my resume is fine -- I can disclose it in 50 other ways that will be obvious to the people who care and much harder to censor.
Instead my practice is to literally not look at people's resumes. This isn't perfect -- some co-workers will choose to ask about a project listed on the resume they are interested in, and I don't think that's a horrible idea usually. I simply don't like the assumptions I start to generate when I read people's resumes.
My experience is it's out of not wanting to appear elitist or boastful when talking with people who went to other schools. As soon as the name comes out there is an almost hostile change in attitude e.g. "ah look we got a 1-percenter here to take our jobs".
I could see that being the case from time to time, but saying something like "oh I went to school up in New Haven/Boston area/San Jose" seems like an obvious humblebrag in most contexts.
As someone who went to one of those schools, it's more simply that they all compete with one another and nobody feels like having those conversations anymore after the age of 25. The people that go to those schools tend to gravitate to NYC/Boston/Philly/DC, and we all know each other since those schools are all fed by the northeast boarding schools.
Anyway, school names tend to be worth vastly less in an interview than getting to that point. Face to face Ivy grads are better than average when selected randomly, but because of the selection effect people at elite institutions often get a negative bias to Ivy grads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
PS: You see similar things when look at people from say MIT by SAT score you would find the lower scores tend to be better indicators than high ones. Which is the same issue, people with low scores need other factors to get into the door.
This includes trade schools. The U.S. doesn't have a very good formality for matching high school students with particular trades, there are few public trade schools, and essentially no public funding.
If you want to go to a trade school, a lot of tribal community colleges are certified by the state[1] they are in as vocational schools and are always looking for students.
Tribal community colleges tend to be dual role institutions.
1) I am not going to discuss "sovereignty" as applied to the tribe and just say schools like getting state certification because it makes everything (including grants) easier
Oh so 12 years in the public education system wasn't enough to figure out of someone is prepared and is a good fit for college? Let's spend more money throwing another year (at a much higher cost) to see? Where is this money going to come from? I don't want to pay for this.
Look, if you turn college into another highschool, it will become just as worthless. College is already worthless for a large number of people who graduate with worthless degrees. Letting everyone to go to college? Why not just stay in highschool for another year. It will be cheaper and accomplish the exact same thing.
It would be silly to put a bunch of resources into expanding college and university accessibility. In the US, highschool is free and mandatory, but still 20% of students are not graduating. Then there's the portion of those who graduate who have GPAs lower than 3.0. A disappointingly large portion of students do not take education seriously and there is no real societal value in providing those students with four more years of tax-payer supported casual living.
Just to provide an example how other countries do it - in Poland, all higher education is 100% free for the student. It doesn't matter what and where they want to study - there is nothing to pay.
Of course, the problem you mentioned still exists - a lot, if not most of people are not cut out for higher education, and since there is no financial barrier to entry, why aren't people spending 3+ years on taxpayer's dime doing nothing?
Well, I believe there are two mechanisms at work here - it's stupidly hard to get into any university, even a relatively poor one. You need fantastically good results on the high school diploma or you are not even considered.
Second mechanism - first year is the sieve to rule out who is not cut out for higher education. It has a reputation for being harshly difficult, and it's not unheard of university courses failing or just losing 90% of all students that have enrolled in their first year. If you come to university with an attitude that you are going to party and play games, you will be out by the end of the first semester. Then, if you do reach the end, there's no "grades" on your diploma. You can't graduate with a low score so to speak - you need to have absolutely pristine record to actually graduate. People have finished their 3-4 years and have been re-taking final exams for years just because you need to get something stupid like 90%+ score to actually pass.
In comparison, I was shocked by education in country like the UK - in here, first year of uni is almost treated like kindergarten. It's not meant to be difficult. You are not meant to be treating it seriously. It's the year when you are supposed to get the partying out of your system and enjoy yourself. The grades from 1st year don't even count towards your final degree. The only way to fail in 1st year would be to assault a lecturer or something. Then anything above 40% is a pass. "First" is just a paltry 70% of higher. So you can cruise through higher education and graduate, even if your scores were below 50% average.
I feel that stricter systems like this require an extremely homogeneous society to work. Everyone has to be on the ball, educating the kids from a young age. This includes both the actual education of things they learn, as well as instilling the values of respect for learning and education. When you have a fragmented society it feels like it's hard to fix the low performers at the college level, and even having a much stricter and/or free system would not help without a huge upstream culture change.
I don't know what the solution is (US-centric). Push the education and values as widely as possible relentlesly, hoping to get a positive first derivative, and maybe in 50 years things will be better?
First year aside, having personally been through the high education pipeline, I would say the post is still mostly wrong. The list of the most elite schools is much shorter and they often deal with law, management and politics. Some of those are expensive. The high price is paid for making connections, education is comparable to best public ones.
Likewise, best schools are clearly based in major cities and metropolises. Those are not cheap, though thanks to not as silly housing market as in the US, the difference is less than half order of magnitude for rental and cost of the living; decent system of tax funded boarding houses further evens it out some.
I've seen people barely pass all along, the 90% thing is a joke. Some even just cheat.
That said, even those barely making it are generally not half bad.
> A disappointingly large portion of students do not take education seriously
This is one of those things where there's a very long causal chain. Stopping your explanation at "students do not take education seriously" grossly and negligently oversimplifies things. [1]
For example, you ignore all the perfectly serious people who have low GPAs but have bad teachers, bad schools, abusive parents, are in deep poverty, have experienced severe trauma, or are homeless. You also ignore the many, many reasons people might end up in high school not taking education seriously.
You also ignore the people who are serious and did well but still aren't getting the college educations they need. Of which there are plenty. Apparently in your view we shouldn't help them just because there are other people you deem not serious enough.
It doesn't matter the reasons why they don't take education seriously, the fact is that they don't. It would do absolutely nothing for these students to provide them with free college tuition unless you can solve those other problems first. It's not until we have 95-99% high school graduation rates, with a majority of those graduating also have high GPAs, that we need to consider whether we are providing sufficient access to colleges and universities.
([1] According to the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry you linked there are studies that suggest the fundamental attribution error doesn't even exist in practice.)
First, you again ignore the students who do take education seriously but have other issues.
Second:
> It doesn't matter the reasons why they don't take education seriously, the fact is that they don't. It would do absolutely nothing for these students
The reasons do matter, because some are more amenable to fixing than others. They also matter because we should fix them.
> It's not until we have 95-99% high school graduation rates, with a majority of those graduating also have high GPAs, that we need to consider whether we are providing sufficient access to colleges and universities.
This is monstrous. It is an excuse for inaction, not a serious plan.
If only one student needs more education but cannot get it, then we need to consider why. That other students are unready does not lessen their need. That other students are unready does not lessen the potential benefit to society of having a more productive, better-educated person in society.
[1] So? More work suggests that it does. And whether or not it's a primary effect or the derivative of other effects, you are certainly engaging in the pattern of behavior here, which is the point you are so busily ignoring.
You should stop trying to paint me as evil and instead read what I'm writing.
You're also ignoring the point: There is zero societal value in providing cheap college to a student who, for whatever reasons, has dropped out of school in the eighth grade. We need to fix high school, not college.
And as far as providing for those who are ready, do you have any statistics that show that students who would benefit from college are unable to do so? We provide tax breaks for colleges and universities, we have grants available for needy students, we have subsidized loans available for most every student. The average student loan debt in 2016 was ~$30,000. The lifetime earnings benefit of having a bachelors degree is $600,000 - $900,000. There doesn't seem to be a college access problem.
That point is different than the one you made previously, and is much narrower. Plenty of people are excited to fix high school. But you're saying we should refuse to improve college access until high school is comprehensively fixed. (And you ignore all the other problems that reduce readiness for college besides high schools.)
Sorry, why should I provide statistics that you can readily look up since you're the one claiming you already have all the answers here? It's not my job to forcibly educate you one study at a time. Especially since you demonstrate no willingness to actually understand the problem.
I don't find a problem with GPA's lower than 3.0 out of a 4.0 scale: If a C is supposed to be average - which is slightly lower than a 3.0 - this should really be around what the average student earns. Those that get a 3.0 or 3.5 actually have to have put in extra effort to earn those and it makes it much easier to see who takes it seriously.
Instead, person A can waft through making A's and B's while person 2 has to work their butts off, when a C should really be acceptable.
Seems like a huge burden on students. They have invested one year of their life and possibly moved to attend, only to find out they don't cut it. One year of college is worth very little if you don't graduate, but supporting one's self (at a young age with no work experience) can be very hard even if tuition is free.
Most states have a variety of institutions that cater to students of different fields and levels. What is the advantage of them all accepting everyone?
Tell me that somebody has finished high school, and I don't know much about how ready he is for college. Tell me which high school, and if I know the area, I might be able to guess. It has been this way for many years.
Reforming the primary and secondary education systems in this country would make a great difference. But that is easier said than done.
I don't think this is a good idea. There are many high school graduates that are woefully unprepared for college. It will be a huge waste of time and resources. No point of throwing students in the deep end and let them sink or swim.
At a local community college I worked at previously, the most popular math course was college algebra. Many kids right out of high school were in this course with very weak math skills. Now this is only one subject, but I think education needs to be addressed earlier.
And just to add, local community colleges are a fairly cheap avenue for just about anyone to take college course (and remedial high school courses like algebra). It shouldn't be the job of a four year college to devote extensive resources to re-teaching material that should have been learned in high school. Let's focus on making education better before college so more people are ready and qualified to enroll after high school.
This and the "healthcare should be cheap for everyone" positions are so intellectually lazy. "Education" and "healthcare" aren't some intangible pie-in-the-sky assets that are being magically bestowed upon certain individuals. They are services provided by institutions that must pay for high tech facilities and competitive wages in order to retain the best staff, accreditations, and reputation. Those costs have to be paid by someone. A half-baked solution that is subsidized or mandated only reduces competition and drives prices higher.
It's almost as if we didn't give historically large tax breaks to billionaires and funded two wars in the middle east, bail out banks playing the poorest and most vulnerable using subprime loans, all that stuff was "necessary" and "needed" and no one ever asks who had to pay for those.
But, education for all is "expensive," even though it would cost fraction per year for what we spent in Iraq per year.
Nice diatribe... yet you provide no solution to the problem other than hand waving. How else besides a strong commitment to public funding (possibly even free college like exists in some countries) do you propose to resolve this?
A population less than 3% the size of the US, a GDP per capita 50% higher than the US, and a physical size of about 0.5% of the US.
Switzerland has about the same physical area and population as the state of Virginia, only it's about 50% richer by raw GDP. Not exactly a good analog for the entire US.
Purchasing power is similar. This means the higher GDP per capita is compensated by higher spending on government employees, social welfare (A person without a job or children gets around 2800CHF/months) and so on.
> a physical size of about 0.5% of the US.
How does that affect government spending/GDP? The only thing I see here is potentialy lower cost for infrastructure. But then the alps that take up 60% of the land area and building tunnels is expensive.
It's a matter of logistics and scale. A small, homogeneous population is far easier to manage than an expansive, diverse one. Switzerland doing it is roughly equivalent to one state in the US doing it. The staff required to support such an operation is reasonable. Probably one central office employing a few dozen people to manage accounts, provide support, and oversee a modest number of nearby service providers.
Contrast that with a federal program and all of a sudden you have dozens of offices across the entire country. You have to add another layer of management to oversee those offices and ensure they are adhering to the same standards. Rolling out even a minor change requires re-training hundreds if not more staff. You've taken what was a relatively lean operation and turned it into a bureaucracy of the largest scale. And now it's a target for fraud because they're handing out free money and inevitably poorly investigate abuses at a snail's pace.
University education is a red herring. Vocational education is just as important, if not moreso. There are plenty of people who would benefit more from a major in carpentry or engine maintenance than in communications, psychology, or history
As someone who was born into a bottom 20% family and went to a supposed "Ivy Plus/Elite College" this is not shocking to me at all. The culture shock for me personally was amazing. In particular, I'll never forget when some students wanted to go to Asia of all places for a 4 day weekend.
Though I've personally benefited from diversity recruiting for low income, first in family to go to college, etc. I still believe the solution is to fix K-12. In particular, Boston is an example of there being great higher education, but terrible public schools.
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Short of that, I would recommend for the following actions:
1. Anonymous interviewing for all companies, mandatory. Let's be honest, those attending elite schools are the biggest beneficiaries of "discriminatory recruiting." Oh, except, not if you're the stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action [1] (ironic because really white women are those who benefit the most [2]). The idea here is to level the playing field. I imagine most resistance to this will come from people who went to schools similar to mine.
2. Banning of private schools. This probably won't happen, but private schools simply perpetuate the problems with access. How is it that rich cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco have terrible school systems? Don't get me wrong, this isn't THE solution, there's still the rich suburb effect [3]. Practically, this probably wouldn't work. Those in control generally either live in rich suburbs or send their kid to private school. It would take one heck of a politician to pull this off.
3. Affirmative action should now be implemented at the beginning, not at the end. Helping people who already succeeded is unnecessary for real change, and expensive. Not to mention it's cheaper and more effective [4]. The tin-foil hat in me says that people wouldn't want this to happen, simply because it'd produce better competition. Affirmative action at the end is more tame.
4. More advocacy of college alternatives. Personally, I went to a two-year college and transferred to an "Ivy Plus/Elite College" in order to not pay loans. Ironically, that was not necessary since they paid for everything anyway, but hey, I didn't know that. For many, college loans are just entrapment [5]. Two year college is a factor to help mitigate the pain, in the short term [6].
5. Complete banning of for-profit school. There's already been movement in this direction, with the prevention of enrollment of students with federal aid to ITT. [7]
I have many more ideas about this, but unfortunately things are very complicated. The intersection between the economy, parenting, culture, the government as well as racism, discrimination and access make it very difficult to propose a general solution.
I disagree with my own advice above depending on the city, and the circumstances. Ultimately, this is too tough a problem to solve merely with broad strokes, but I do believe the sentiment "fix K-12" summarizes my view.
If you want affirmative action to be implemented at the beginning, why not take that thought further and discourage someone from producing kids when they are not yet ready to be parents?
Honestly, government help is definitely necessary to help the less privileged kids. But it is by no means sufficient if the home environment is broken and parents don't have time to develop their children.
I don't believe that's necessary. Education already promotes not having kids, or at least waiting. [1][2] What you propose is also politically impossible (I completely agree, in theory, however). We already know how challenging the abortion and sex education issue has been. Proper sex education (and K-12, generally) will implicitly implement what you're suggesting.
Education promotes smart people not having kids, especially smart women.
But it doesn't diminish in any way the dumb people. If you have no intention of getting an education or supporting yourself in the modern world, a tougher education system with higher standards won't discourage your reproduction.
I think at least as much effort on poverty needs to happen as fixing K-12. Already by the time kids enter kindergarten, there's a massive effect of poverty; and it persists through K-12 even in the form of who eats what kind of food and how. Very basic.
I like the way the French do food with kids in school. Kids eat lunch at school. They do not bring sack lunches, and they don't get to leave for lunch. All of them have access to the same food, and kids experiment with foods from an early age.
This is a capitalism country. We reward individuals who are rich. What is wrong with rich kids getting into college? This is the bonus they got from creating more economy growth for the society. And to be honest, the 1% income limit is misleading. The real rich people will laugh at the 1% income threshold. With 1% income in nyc, you can't even raise a family in decent life style.
Being richer doesn't correspond to having more potential. For every rich person in college (top 1% of pop), there's a cohort of roughly 30x that would do as well or better.
>With 1% income in nyc, you can't even raise a family in decent life style.
I don't know much of NYC but isn't it... huge? I'm sure that there are parts of it far away from Manhattan that aren't shitholes and where you can live with a "normal" wage.
I've known some 1% commuting 3hrs round way. Just because the "aren't shitholes" area could be really far away. Plus after tax 600k will turn into 350k.
The 1% cutoff is about $400k/year. If you want to live in lower Manhattan that sounds about right. Upper Manhattan has a bit more opportunity, but even then you're looking at old and tiny apartments for your family.
If you want to own property in Manhattan probably, or at least close to it.
If you want to own property elsewhere (Brooklyn, Queens, SI, Bronx), you need to be upper middle class and have some savings—no millions needed though unless it's some super prime location.
The 1% that commute long hours to Manhattan do it because they want to live in their large Long Island or upstate estates/houses, not because they can't afford Manhattan. If they wanted to be close to work, they'd just have to live in a smaller house/condo without a large front lawn or private pool.
Millions of families live "decent" lifestyles in NYC all the time without being millionaires.
I think that's pushing it a little. With a $1,000,000 mortgage 30 year @ 4.0% APR, that payment would be $57,288/year + $5,000 property tax/year. So someone with mid 200,000/year salary could afford it.
That's fair, haven't really delved into NYC real state. That said, I've never seen or heard of a property (condo, house, apartment, etc) for a million in a desirable Manhattan location. Even in Park Slope or Sunset Park in Brooklyn you go over the million mark quick.
Friend just bought an apartment in the East 40s for less than $300,000. That's a $60,000 down payment he saved from his ~$100,000 salary over six years. With taxes, HOA, PMI, et cetera he is paying $2,500 (20 year) to $2,800 (30 year) a month, or about 30% of his pretax salary. It's a stretch, but it's totally doable.
Probably important to note that for $300,000 in the East 40s of Manhattan, you're almost undoubtedly getting a co-op and not a condo... meaning you aren't getting "ownership" in the traditional American sense of "owning one's own home".
Its your job to shovel yourself out of the shit that we keep shitting on you. Don't stop or you will drown! If you work real hard you might even get yourself uncovered to your waist, that's social mobility!
One of the caveats of capitalism is that capital creates capital, wealth accumulates naturally at the top. This is why it has to be balanced with strong social welfare systems to avoid reverting to feudalism.
If anyone's interested in learning more about this topic I can't recommend Revisionist History's episode 4, 5 & 6 enough.
Malcolm Gladwell uses a very compelling and thought-provoking narrative to dissect educational philanthropy and how hard the elite universities trying to be more inclusive (or are they?)
In first world nations it is. The US has 3.2 million farmers and a population of 325 million or so. I don't know if your figure is inaccurate, misleading or farmers in India are extremely inefficient.
"Today, India ranks second worldwide in farm output. Agriculture and allied sectors like forestry and fisheries accounted for 13.7% of the GDP (gross domestic product) in 2013,[2] about 50% of the workforce.[3][4]" - Wikipedia
50% of the population is in agriculture, not farming. Total agriculture represents about 10% of US jobs, but only 10% of agriculture jobs are farming jobs.
What's funny is, all the farmers I have met were millionaires. I know that isn't strictly true, but many do very well for themselves. Land value has a lot to do with it, I suppose.
India keeps its agricultural sector inefficient as a jobs program.
Compare the yields from India to best-in-class producers of the same products [1]. For the top 5 products (excluding Buffalo milk) Indian production is 70% less efficient. (Buffalo milk is excluded because I don't have a source for best-in-class production.)
About 3% of people in modern developed rich countries work in farming. In every other kind of country, it's more. In Africa and India it's the majority still.
But 150 years ago—and for 10,000 years before that—farming employed 90% or more of the workforce in every country.
Sports cars don't determine the trajectory of your life.
Also, farming is heavily automated and done by very few hands outside of truck crops. Farming truck crops is low wage, incredibly difficult work that we generally use illegal labor for.
That having been said, I'm in a CCNT course for a reason: I could be lliving on a steady 40 grand and not have to wprry about backbreaking work every day.
Better watch it, common sense is downvoted pretty hard here at HN!
There are ways to better oneself without ever setting foot in a college or university. How did America's forefathers survive! I was the first person in my entire male lineage to attend college and yet I come from a long line of successful businessmen.
The poorer 20% are also much more likely to go to for profit "colleges". I don't think this is as simple as saying they can't afford to go to the best colleges.
> But some elite colleges have focused more on being affordable to low-income families than on expanding access. “Free tuition only helps if you can get in,"
This is, I think, the bigger problem. Educational opportunities are highly differentiated by wealth at a young age. Better public schools require living in more expensive neighborhoods. Private schools are expensive and even on financial aid difficult for some people to get to. Poor people can't afford to send their kids on summer trips (i.e. summer camp) and effectively the poor are more likely to have learning stop in the summer. To top if off, the guidance people in poor school districts get in/around their senior year is rarely helpful and sometimes just terrible (I.e. councilors telling students to not even bother applying to Harvard, etc...)
So yes, I'd say it's more complicated. When you're poor you're playing against students with a stacked deck. That's not to say there is no personable accountability, but it's not the only determining factor.
I don't know if we can account for the wealth difference and "stacked desk" at the school level. My city school district has five high schools in difference part of the city. The best ones is near the top of the state academic ranking while the others are average. They all get the same level of funding from the city and the schools look all equally run down. The difference is the demographics of those attending these schools. When they started statewide ranking of schools, families started gravitating to the slightly better schools and driving up the prices on neighboring houses. So this school is full of wealthy and high achieving families despite equal levels of funding.
Yup. I believe that the success of a person has much more to do with their family than what school they go to. But that would place the responsibility on parents instead of the government so this is not a popular opinion.
I'm an immigrant. I used to be poor. (after rigorous testing, etc., etc.,) I was given financial aid and accepted into one of the more prestigious private middle schools near me. After that, I went to a (very good) public high school. The difference was that of night and day.
The middle school put me ahead of my high school colleagues. I was a year ahead in math, and two years ahead in english. Their computer science education led me to taking APCS a year early, with CS courses at a university shortly thereafter. They had even prepared me for standardized testing like the SSAT and SAT.
Yes, your family's important. Yes, there's some anti-intellectualism along the bottommost socioeconomic ranks. But the quality of one's school is a massive factor in how one learns.
Don't most cities contribute a proportion of a school district's property taxes to that district's school(s)? So districts with expensive housing receive more funding than those with cheaper housing.
I agree that home life influences schooling outcomes as well. Families with higher incomes can afford for one parent to stay home or to pay for a nanny or whatever. But in addition, many schools are funded disproportionately, where the schools with the most need receive the least funding.
For us the school district and city are both the same set so all the property tax funding is pooled together and divided among the schools based on student population and other needs.
If I recall, many of the worst school districts (inner cities) also spend the most dollars per student. I've been told this multiple times, but can't look for a source at the moment. Can someone else confirm or deny?
Not disagreeing with the overall point, but summer camp? My grandma had us spend the summer reading and solving exercises of the following grade's textbooks. A trip would have meant to stop learning.
Yes, summer camp. For example, I spent 2 weeks at a college between 11th and 12th grade taking a graphic design thing - and earned college credit for doing so. I got introduced to plenty I didn't have access to and thoroughly enjoyed the time.
Now, my family hasn't been rich by any means, but they wouldn't have been able to afford such a thing just a few years prior. The same goes for after school activities - or even just a trip with the French club to France or Canada. When you are poor, these things are out of reach.
Huh, interesting. Where I'm from, summer camp is spending time with the Boy Scouts, or volunteering, or literally camping. American movies don't paint a very different picture, so I wasn't aware of "go to college"-kind of camps.
It doesn't even have to be summer camp. Until I could get a job and drive myself, I had trouble even finding transportation to and from extracurriculars, which made my experience at my very good public high school quite a bit less than that of my peers. I also ended up dropping a zero hour AP class, because there was no bus service for classes that early.
Any time things like summer camp came up, I just tuned out, because I knew it wasn't going to happen for me. As an adult, I can see that, in some cases, I could have made something happen if I had really wanted it. But as a child, I had the mentality "that's not for me" and could not have even begun to figure out how to make it happen, because I wasn't just poor, but lacked any real support at home. (I was babysitting, but I fell into the poor person trap of spending money to feel better. All my cash went straight to comic books and soda.)
I'd be curious to see which colleges - because many of the "for profit" colleges I can think of are basically schools where you buy your degree. Low admittance requirements and low standards for graduation - catering to people who performed poorly through secondary school (even if that was more due to socioeconomic status than to any fault of their own) and are primarily just getting the degree to look better on paper. In those cases, I think making it cheaper or easier to attend such schools wouldn't really change much - getting them a real education for education's sake or eliminating the obligation society places on them to get even a rather phony education would be better.
for profit and non profit some times don't mean much different costs in the end. let alone some non profits can cost the state, city, and federal, governments more in lost tax revenue the defaulted loans.
Ok. Lets look at this for a minute. A poor person has two choices: A traditional college and an online college.
If the person has to work, or if they have been out of high school for a while and has family responsibilities, for-profit schools generally seem to be more flexible, especially the ones that are mostly online. You don't have to worry about missing class if kids are sick and you don't have to worry about your work hours getting cut because you have to go to class.
Heck, some people lose jobs because the jobs aren't flexible enough for school or don't go to school because of their job.
It winds up feeling like the colleges cater only to a traditional student - young, without a family, and not needing to work anything but a part-time job - but this doesn't reflect the reality some folks are facing. It isn't a financial decision whatsoever: It might be if they had to pay a little bit upfront, but that would be enough to keep some folks from going: I'm not sure this is an improvement or not.
The fact that these colleges aren't elite actually hurts the article's argument.
Also, the top colleges from that population that enrolls the highest percentage of low income students are much more prestigious than the top 1% income colleges.
Right, they're so elite that the mainstream hasn't really heard of them. But, if you were to wander onto the executive floor at Goldman Sachs or a top law firm, I guarantee you'd see their banners hanging in the offices.
These schools aren't elite because they attract the smartest students, they are elite because they attract the richest ones, who then have a leg up with their wealthy and well-placed alumni network.
For some corroboration, I grew up as a 1%-er and I went to one of those schools with a student body of ~2k. I studied in London for a semester. My first week off the plane, there was a meet and greet with alums that were living there at the time. Before finishing my first drink I had an internship lined up at Credit Suisse for the summer.
The school I went to was almost 25% Econ majors. Out of a class of ~500, we had 18 Math majors. We didn't even have a CS major available. The value wasn't in Linear Algebra, it was in people. I'm one of two people I know from school that work in STEM. All of my college buddies work in finance or politics. I still attend the meet and greets in NYC, and I end up as the center of attention because I DON'T work in finance (anymore).
Funny enough, my brother also went to one of those schools. He's at GS.
A big endowment ($13.5B / class size = 940 => $14M/student) + the will to use it on scholarships. Kudos to them.
I did undergrad at WashU, which in this ranking is the poster child for regressive admissions. WashU is opposite MIT in this respect: a medium-sized endowment ($6B / class size = 1400 => $4M/student) and no will to use it, at least not on scholarships.
It was not that way back when I attended. The only way I can make sense of the graphs of diversity vs. time is that they are aggressively increasing tuition, recruiting among the wealthy, and erecting fancy buildings.
The worst ones on the top 10 list, in my experience, have very "upper class" reputations that aren't necessarily justified by their academic standards. For example, at Trinity College, only 43% of students were top 10% in high school, and the median SAT scores are in the 600-700 range per-test, while the estimated total annual cost is $68,940 [0]. Compare to nearby Yale, where 97% of students are in the top 10% and the middle range of SAT scores is 700-800 (i.e., the top 25% of SAT scores are perfect), while the annual cost is $68,950 [1].
I haven't looked at the rest, but I'm guessing (by repuation) that for a lot of those schools, "elite" is more about class and networks than academic ability.
I went to a college like this, albeit not as extreme as Trinity. I didn't pay tuition though.
Most colleges like Trinity and my alma mater make money off wealthy but average students and international students. Both pay full price most of the time.
The first top ten list is about the schools who have the biggest gap between the top 1% and the bottom 60% (the first top ten list is the only top ten list that contains tufts in the article). That list is ranked in order by the largest gap being in number one spot. If you are want to go to the school with the largest ratio of students who come from the top 1% then Washington University in St. Louis is the school to go to.
These are mostly liberal arts colleges. They're pretty selective (though several in the list are a notch or two less selective than Harvard/Yale), but have much less generous aid packages. The applicant pool is very self-selecting and unsurprisingly skews towards rich families. They're for people who want a liberal arts education in small-school setting, and are aiming at careers (law, politics) where the relevant people will have heard of those schools.
(To be fair, if I had a trust fund I would've liked to go to one. You can be in a setting where you can get a lot of personalized attention, and the focus is in undergraduates than the big research programs that bring in the money.)
Also, the high-social-mobility list of schools is dominated by schools in high CoL areas, particularly NYC.
Graduates from NYC schools (including graduates with non-wealthy backgrounds) disproportionately stay in NYC and make an NYC salary, which looks upper-middle-class by national standards but doesn't go very far when your rent is three grand.
Therefore the claimed effect is at least somewhat spurious, being driven purely by geographic CoL variation. A better analysis would compensate for this, perhaps by normalizing by local CoL's.
Most of them are on US News & World Report's List of top Liberal Arts colleges. Smaller schools with an undergraduate liberal education focus that tend to have less financial aid and attract richer kids.
I wouldn't necessarily call them elite (especially those further down the list) but they are good schools.
Colorado College - 24th
Washington & Lee - 11th
Colby - 12th
Trinity - 38th
Bucknell - 32nd
Colgate - 12th
Kenyon - 27th
Middlebury - 4th
In any context I've ever seen, income percentiles are always nation-wide.
Re-read OP, didn't see them explicitly call it out, but they did implicitly mention "[percent] of American families" in places, so likely it's nation here too.
Article has a bad way of representing how they use their data points but the data is nationwide income percentiles. The top 1% household income is > $630k
True. But I think it takes a distinct editorial mind shift to publish articles that have interactivity features, though. It's not enough to have "a very strong web team" if they're only focused on dimensions like uptime and page load times.
It's disappointing that the article leads into this as a discussion about income inequality at certain universities, when the study is branded as a tool for low income students to determine which colleges provide the best opportunity for upward mobility.
Why is starting such a discussion "disappointing"? It seems like a fair extrapolation to make, and a conversation worth exploring. Is income inequality at particular universities not an interesting issue to explore?
The article links to the page you've linked to, and includes links to data and source information. I haven't personally vetted what NYT has done here, but it seems fair to take original research and run with it in new directions.
Well yes, income inequality at a particular university is not interesting because the paper concludes that upward mobility is a better metric to identify schools that should be expanded. I see comments below about capitalism, supply/demand, luxury cars, tuition, affirmative action, banning private/for-profit schools, and social status. Some of those are totally irrelevant, and the relevant ones ought to be in the context of how they relate to access to high mobility schools.
There are accompanying NYT articles, and I agree that it's fair to jump off from the research. I believe the discussion needs to incorporate the conclusions from the paper into that new direction.
Ivy League degree is not about education, but a social status certificate. That is why 1% are paying for it in the first place. No wonder that most of the Ivy Leagues colleges are of liberal arts.
Your disdain for the liberal arts is misplaced. I'd think that, on Hacker News of all places, people would value an education that values algorithms and data structures on as equal a footing as economics, sociology, political science, communication... all components of finding a market, building a business and disrupting an industry.
MIT practices the same undergraduate admissions shenanigans as Ivy League universities. At a certain point, the course material is largely identical. I really doubt 6.006 is going to significantly differ from CS 31 in terms of student outcomes [1]. Liberal arts are great to study at top schools if you'd like to work in investment banking or consulting.
This is partially a side effect of admissions that are skewed by racial affirmative action, as opposed to taking into account overall socioeconomic status. Race is still a factor for two families of similar income, but Obama's children received a enjoyed significantly more educational opportunities than the children of an average working-class West Virginia white family -- yet admissions only sees race.
I went to Purdue, which I considered fairly blue-collar as far as 4-year universities go. Stats: 3.1% from the 1% and 21.1% from the bottom 60%. Even more sobering is that there are more people from the bottom 40% at MIT than at Purdue.
I then thought of what would be the most blue-collar state university in Indiana, and checked ISU: <1% from the 1% and 46.5% from the bottom 60%.
I don't find this surprising at all. I spent a summer program at ISU once and had plenty of friends that wound up going there. In the mid-90's, it was cheaper than both Indiana University and Purdue, with smaller class sizes - and they have a completely different focus it seemed. If I remember correctly, ISU seemed to cater towards lower income much more than Purdue ever did.
1. I think its interesting/notable that the colleges that are most successful at helping poorer kids, are not elite schools, but rather are training people for well paying "middle class" jobs like teaching them how to be an air traffic controller
2. nowhere does it talk about the cost of providing an education...if it costs College X $75,000/year/student and College Y costs $15,000/year/student then making Y "affordable" is eminently easier than X...the point being some schools may want to have a more economically diverse student body, but in order to achieve that end, they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious), raise more money/get more grants, or charge the students that are already paying full tuition even more...none of which appealing/easy...
On the first point, there's an interesting discussion to be had about what we mean by successful---for any given student, they're just as well off on average at Vaughn Aeronautic College as U Chicago (and better off at Stanford, Princeton, or MIT). However, Vaughn takes so many more low income students that their marginally lower success rate helps so many more.
As a graduate of an elite college coming in from a highly privileged background (and thus as someone trying to minimize cognitive dissonance), I do think we would lose something if we as a society only put our resources into colleges that focused on lower income students. That said, I wouldn't be too bummed if more of my tax dollars ended up in places where it was actually helping people who benefited from that help.
>they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious)
Given many studies (notably Google's) showing that school performance is not a good indicator of future performance. Is losing prestige such a bad thing? It would be if the prestige was correlated with significantly smarter and better performing graduates.
But if the prestige only comes from being associated with higher class individuals, all you are losing is a false-positive signal.
I think the conventional wisdom is that prestige allows schools to attract better students and professors, and to raise more money from alumni sort of creating a virtuous cycle...but to a certain extent its zero sum, so some schools actually end up trying to compete in races that they can't win to their detriment, and effectively to the detriment of their students.
But some elite colleges have focused more on being
affordable to low-income families than on expanding
access.
The article talks about access multiple times, but never defines what that might mean. If financial commitment is removed from the table, either qualified low-income applicants aren't being accepted at the same rates (unsubstantiated here) or qualified low-income applicants simply aren't applying (supported by linked research[1]). Or colleges accept students based on qualification alone and are "blind" to economic circumstances—which may be good or bad depending on your POV.
If the second, the question then becomes how to encourage those applicants. Is that "access"?
Or do we need to re-think "qualification" to be more democratic (if it includes, say, international exposure that can be bought)? Are institutions obligated to change their qualification criteria to this end? Should they all?
The selectivity-vs-income ("rainbow") chart is interesting and fairly linear. I wonder what a similar "qualification-vs-income" chart would look like: e.g., are top 0.1%-ers "more qualified" (e.g., more likely to get into a selective university by performance alone) than other bands?
Then we're either into really dangerous territory (e.g., wealth correlated with intelligence), we're back to (re-)defining qualification criteria, or we shift the "blame" from university admissions to childhood education.
Sure, but that's a pretty blind metric. "If Harvard (6k undergrads) accepted as many students as Texas A&M (50k undergrads), it would be more diverse!" But then it wouldn't be selective; it wouldn't be Harvard.
Presuming Harvard is interested in increasing enrollment at all, that alone doesn't help increase these percentages. If Harvard accepts 1 low-income student for every 10 people, and accepts 100 more people in total, the mix is still 10%. I don't think that's "increased access".
Elite schools may provide generous financial aid, but what this ignores is that typically students from lower income families go to secondary schools that are weaker than traditional schools upper middle class students attend. Some provide few AP courses, one where no one may explains/prep students for the SAT and only schools students are recommended to attend are local community college/nearby schools. Take a top student from this school and she may have 0 AP courses, 3.8 unweighted GPA, 0 ECs, average SAT score (after taking it blind) and from a low income family. Elite universities will not lower their admission requirements to accept her, nor would top public universities. Due to her background, she is forced to attend a lower ranked school. She failed at a game she never had a chance to win to begin with.
Harvard and the like may offer great financial aid to those students, but those students are the very ones that aren't going to be accepted Harvard.
I find it very interesting that many so-called "Ivy Misser" schools such as WUSTL and Tufts have more 1%ers and fewer 60%ers than extremely elite schools such as Princeton and Harvard. Even Yale has a lower ranking on the list. Perhaps the elite of the elite are more concerned with giving their progeny a broad exposure to different classes of people, while more middling members of the upper class concern themselves with status signalling.
Maybe we should replace affirmative action w/ one based on income... Average incomes of student families must = average american salary -- or absolutely 0 tax savings, grants, etc.... from the government.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadAdditionally everyone that has finished High School should be accepted into any state-funded university. You can seed out the unqualified students during the first two semesters.
Which, in relative terms, is not that hard: simply re-purpose state prisons.
If you filter out a lot of students early on, you don't need to build new ones.
People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce. Guess which of those I believe drives college admissions right now.
Of course many careers will benefit from a college education, but here in the US we have long since surpassed that number of people attending college.
Because education is important, and our society is helped by everyone having access to improve their lives. I don't want to get into an automation discussion, but I personally believe that it will be even more important in the next few decades.
> People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce
I completely agree! But I think that is a separate problem. I'd love to go to school for things completely unrelated to my career. I don't think college should necessarily be easy, but getting into it should be. I personally believe that encouraging people to further educate themselves, especially "non-intellectuals"* , is a great way for everyone to benefit.
IME, most people who skip college aren't skipping it because they are dumb, but because they don't have the resources to attend easily. In my own experience: High-school wasn't reflective of my current educational desires. I want to attend more college classes, but don't have the resources to do so. I live a pretty simple lifestyle, and if college isn't easily accessible to me, I can't see how it's accessible to people with kids, two jobs, etc
* : I don't know how else to phrase that without sounding condescending. If someone has a better wording, let me know.
If the problem is that there are many qualified students who can't get into college because there isn't enough supply, then the answer is to build new 4-year universities or reduce demand. Demand can be reduced by offering more vocational training opportunities or 2-year degree programs.
If the problem is that college is too expensive, that gets back to state funding of public universities as well as tuition inflation.
I think I can't really explain that system well, so here is a short pdf that explains the options you have in the Swiss education system:
http://www.edudoc.ch/static/web/bildungssystem/grafik_bildun...
After you finished high school you can go there. (I'm not sure, but there might be some exception where you need to pass an exam)
Depending on the course, 2/3 of the students will be gone after two semesters.
On a side note, ETHZ (and other Universities in Switzerland) charge some $500-1000 per semester, and taking on student debt is rare. This way, by dropping out, students mostly only lose the invested time and don't face potential bankrupcy.
Companies already avoid asking about marital status or children etc, this could easily be added to that list.
In other words, there is a signaling and counter-signaling mechanism here. An investment banker saying they went to school in Philly is expecting you to understand they went to Wharton, and the only acceptable clarifying question is something like "oh, undergrad or for your MBA?"
Asking me not to say I went to an Ivy on my resume is fine -- I can disclose it in 50 other ways that will be obvious to the people who care and much harder to censor.
Instead my practice is to literally not look at people's resumes. This isn't perfect -- some co-workers will choose to ask about a project listed on the resume they are interested in, and I don't think that's a horrible idea usually. I simply don't like the assumptions I start to generate when I read people's resumes.
Anyway, school names tend to be worth vastly less in an interview than getting to that point. Face to face Ivy grads are better than average when selected randomly, but because of the selection effect people at elite institutions often get a negative bias to Ivy grads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
PS: You see similar things when look at people from say MIT by SAT score you would find the lower scores tend to be better indicators than high ones. Which is the same issue, people with low scores need other factors to get into the door.
seems like cheapening the credentialing might be a better way to attack this problem
This is a great study if you want to learn more:
http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_financially_sustai...
Tribal community colleges tend to be dual role institutions.
1) I am not going to discuss "sovereignty" as applied to the tribe and just say schools like getting state certification because it makes everything (including grants) easier
Look, if you turn college into another highschool, it will become just as worthless. College is already worthless for a large number of people who graduate with worthless degrees. Letting everyone to go to college? Why not just stay in highschool for another year. It will be cheaper and accomplish the exact same thing.
Of course, the problem you mentioned still exists - a lot, if not most of people are not cut out for higher education, and since there is no financial barrier to entry, why aren't people spending 3+ years on taxpayer's dime doing nothing?
Well, I believe there are two mechanisms at work here - it's stupidly hard to get into any university, even a relatively poor one. You need fantastically good results on the high school diploma or you are not even considered.
Second mechanism - first year is the sieve to rule out who is not cut out for higher education. It has a reputation for being harshly difficult, and it's not unheard of university courses failing or just losing 90% of all students that have enrolled in their first year. If you come to university with an attitude that you are going to party and play games, you will be out by the end of the first semester. Then, if you do reach the end, there's no "grades" on your diploma. You can't graduate with a low score so to speak - you need to have absolutely pristine record to actually graduate. People have finished their 3-4 years and have been re-taking final exams for years just because you need to get something stupid like 90%+ score to actually pass.
In comparison, I was shocked by education in country like the UK - in here, first year of uni is almost treated like kindergarten. It's not meant to be difficult. You are not meant to be treating it seriously. It's the year when you are supposed to get the partying out of your system and enjoy yourself. The grades from 1st year don't even count towards your final degree. The only way to fail in 1st year would be to assault a lecturer or something. Then anything above 40% is a pass. "First" is just a paltry 70% of higher. So you can cruise through higher education and graduate, even if your scores were below 50% average.
I don't know what the solution is (US-centric). Push the education and values as widely as possible relentlesly, hoping to get a positive first derivative, and maybe in 50 years things will be better?
Likewise, best schools are clearly based in major cities and metropolises. Those are not cheap, though thanks to not as silly housing market as in the US, the difference is less than half order of magnitude for rental and cost of the living; decent system of tax funded boarding houses further evens it out some.
I've seen people barely pass all along, the 90% thing is a joke. Some even just cheat.
That said, even those barely making it are generally not half bad.
This is one of those things where there's a very long causal chain. Stopping your explanation at "students do not take education seriously" grossly and negligently oversimplifies things. [1]
For example, you ignore all the perfectly serious people who have low GPAs but have bad teachers, bad schools, abusive parents, are in deep poverty, have experienced severe trauma, or are homeless. You also ignore the many, many reasons people might end up in high school not taking education seriously.
You also ignore the people who are serious and did well but still aren't getting the college educations they need. Of which there are plenty. Apparently in your view we shouldn't help them just because there are other people you deem not serious enough.
[1] Note also that this is a pretty clear example of the fundamental attribution error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
([1] According to the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry you linked there are studies that suggest the fundamental attribution error doesn't even exist in practice.)
The US has 300 million people, we are allowed to work on more than one thing at a time.
Second:
> It doesn't matter the reasons why they don't take education seriously, the fact is that they don't. It would do absolutely nothing for these students
The reasons do matter, because some are more amenable to fixing than others. They also matter because we should fix them.
> It's not until we have 95-99% high school graduation rates, with a majority of those graduating also have high GPAs, that we need to consider whether we are providing sufficient access to colleges and universities.
This is monstrous. It is an excuse for inaction, not a serious plan.
If only one student needs more education but cannot get it, then we need to consider why. That other students are unready does not lessen their need. That other students are unready does not lessen the potential benefit to society of having a more productive, better-educated person in society.
[1] So? More work suggests that it does. And whether or not it's a primary effect or the derivative of other effects, you are certainly engaging in the pattern of behavior here, which is the point you are so busily ignoring.
You're also ignoring the point: There is zero societal value in providing cheap college to a student who, for whatever reasons, has dropped out of school in the eighth grade. We need to fix high school, not college.
And as far as providing for those who are ready, do you have any statistics that show that students who would benefit from college are unable to do so? We provide tax breaks for colleges and universities, we have grants available for needy students, we have subsidized loans available for most every student. The average student loan debt in 2016 was ~$30,000. The lifetime earnings benefit of having a bachelors degree is $600,000 - $900,000. There doesn't seem to be a college access problem.
That point is different than the one you made previously, and is much narrower. Plenty of people are excited to fix high school. But you're saying we should refuse to improve college access until high school is comprehensively fixed. (And you ignore all the other problems that reduce readiness for college besides high schools.)
Sorry, why should I provide statistics that you can readily look up since you're the one claiming you already have all the answers here? It's not my job to forcibly educate you one study at a time. Especially since you demonstrate no willingness to actually understand the problem.
Instead, person A can waft through making A's and B's while person 2 has to work their butts off, when a C should really be acceptable.
Most states have a variety of institutions that cater to students of different fields and levels. What is the advantage of them all accepting everyone?
Reforming the primary and secondary education systems in this country would make a great difference. But that is easier said than done.
At a local community college I worked at previously, the most popular math course was college algebra. Many kids right out of high school were in this course with very weak math skills. Now this is only one subject, but I think education needs to be addressed earlier.
And just to add, local community colleges are a fairly cheap avenue for just about anyone to take college course (and remedial high school courses like algebra). It shouldn't be the job of a four year college to devote extensive resources to re-teaching material that should have been learned in high school. Let's focus on making education better before college so more people are ready and qualified to enroll after high school.
This and the "healthcare should be cheap for everyone" positions are so intellectually lazy. "Education" and "healthcare" aren't some intangible pie-in-the-sky assets that are being magically bestowed upon certain individuals. They are services provided by institutions that must pay for high tech facilities and competitive wages in order to retain the best staff, accreditations, and reputation. Those costs have to be paid by someone. A half-baked solution that is subsidized or mandated only reduces competition and drives prices higher.
But, education for all is "expensive," even though it would cost fraction per year for what we spent in Iraq per year.
Switzerland has about the same physical area and population as the state of Virginia, only it's about 50% richer by raw GDP. Not exactly a good analog for the entire US.
How does that affect government spending/GDP?
> a GDP per capita 50% higher than the US
Purchasing power is similar. This means the higher GDP per capita is compensated by higher spending on government employees, social welfare (A person without a job or children gets around 2800CHF/months) and so on.
> a physical size of about 0.5% of the US.
How does that affect government spending/GDP? The only thing I see here is potentialy lower cost for infrastructure. But then the alps that take up 60% of the land area and building tunnels is expensive.
Contrast that with a federal program and all of a sudden you have dozens of offices across the entire country. You have to add another layer of management to oversee those offices and ensure they are adhering to the same standards. Rolling out even a minor change requires re-training hundreds if not more staff. You've taken what was a relatively lean operation and turned it into a bureaucracy of the largest scale. And now it's a target for fraud because they're handing out free money and inevitably poorly investigate abuses at a snail's pace.
You can't predict the general governemnt spending based on the size, population and PPP/capita.
The fact remains, Switzerland has an extended welfare state, cheap education and still lower general government spending than the US.
But well, maybe it is also because the Swiss people have greater power over the government than any other country.
Though I've personally benefited from diversity recruiting for low income, first in family to go to college, etc. I still believe the solution is to fix K-12. In particular, Boston is an example of there being great higher education, but terrible public schools.
-----------------
Short of that, I would recommend for the following actions:
1. Anonymous interviewing for all companies, mandatory. Let's be honest, those attending elite schools are the biggest beneficiaries of "discriminatory recruiting." Oh, except, not if you're the stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action [1] (ironic because really white women are those who benefit the most [2]). The idea here is to level the playing field. I imagine most resistance to this will come from people who went to schools similar to mine.
2. Banning of private schools. This probably won't happen, but private schools simply perpetuate the problems with access. How is it that rich cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco have terrible school systems? Don't get me wrong, this isn't THE solution, there's still the rich suburb effect [3]. Practically, this probably wouldn't work. Those in control generally either live in rich suburbs or send their kid to private school. It would take one heck of a politician to pull this off.
3. Affirmative action should now be implemented at the beginning, not at the end. Helping people who already succeeded is unnecessary for real change, and expensive. Not to mention it's cheaper and more effective [4]. The tin-foil hat in me says that people wouldn't want this to happen, simply because it'd produce better competition. Affirmative action at the end is more tame.
4. More advocacy of college alternatives. Personally, I went to a two-year college and transferred to an "Ivy Plus/Elite College" in order to not pay loans. Ironically, that was not necessary since they paid for everything anyway, but hey, I didn't know that. For many, college loans are just entrapment [5]. Two year college is a factor to help mitigate the pain, in the short term [6].
5. Complete banning of for-profit school. There's already been movement in this direction, with the prevention of enrollment of students with federal aid to ITT. [7]
I have many more ideas about this, but unfortunately things are very complicated. The intersection between the economy, parenting, culture, the government as well as racism, discrimination and access make it very difficult to propose a general solution.
I disagree with my own advice above depending on the city, and the circumstances. Ultimately, this is too tough a problem to solve merely with broad strokes, but I do believe the sentiment "fix K-12" summarizes my view.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/06/elite-college...
[2] http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-help...
[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/even-if-...
[4] RestlessMind ↗ If you want affirmative action to be implemented at the beginning, why not take that thought further and discourage someone from producing kids when they are not yet ready to be parents? tabeth ↗ I don't believe that's necessary. Education already promotes not having kids, or at least waiting. [1][2] What you propose is also politically impossible (I completely agree, in theory, however). We already know how challenging the abortion and sex education issue has been. Proper sex education (and K-12, generally) will implicitly implement what you're suggesting. WildUtah ↗ Education promotes smart people not having kids, especially smart women. cmurf ↗ I think at least as much effort on poverty needs to happen as fixing K-12. Already by the time kids enter kindergarten, there's a massive effect of poverty; and it persists through K-12 even in the form of who eats what kind of food and how. Very basic.
Honestly, government help is definitely necessary to help the less privileged kids. But it is by no means sufficient if the home environment is broken and parents don't have time to develop their children.
[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/9/education-lev...
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-pa...
But it doesn't diminish in any way the dumb people. If you have no intention of getting an education or supporting yourself in the modern world, a tougher education system with higher standards won't discourage your reproduction.
I like the way the French do food with kids in school. Kids eat lunch at school. They do not bring sack lunches, and they don't get to leave for lunch. All of them have access to the same food, and kids experiment with foods from an early age.
I don't know much of NYC but isn't it... huge? I'm sure that there are parts of it far away from Manhattan that aren't shitholes and where you can live with a "normal" wage.
If you want to own property elsewhere (Brooklyn, Queens, SI, Bronx), you need to be upper middle class and have some savings—no millions needed though unless it's some super prime location.
The 1% that commute long hours to Manhattan do it because they want to live in their large Long Island or upstate estates/houses, not because they can't afford Manhattan. If they wanted to be close to work, they'd just have to live in a smaller house/condo without a large front lawn or private pool.
Millions of families live "decent" lifestyles in NYC all the time without being millionaires.
See here: http://streeteasy.com/condos/midtown-east?sort_by=price_asc
Cheapest studio condos go for upwards of $500k.
One quibble: it's not them, it's their parents.
There are 18 year old entrepreneurs who've created lots of economic growth, of course, but they're very much not the crowd we're talking about here.
History will not be kind to this point of view.
One of the caveats of capitalism is that capital creates capital, wealth accumulates naturally at the top. This is why it has to be balanced with strong social welfare systems to avoid reverting to feudalism.
[0] - http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes
For the past 7 years I've been involved in education from pre-k to university and my BS detector didn't budge during these episodes.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161228/23550336364/malco...
But the guy can be good, I'll check these out.
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.ph...
Besides, farming is the backbone of civilization. You don't need much education for that. Everything we have nowadays is extra.
Compare the yields from India to best-in-class producers of the same products [1]. For the top 5 products (excluding Buffalo milk) Indian production is 70% less efficient. (Buffalo milk is excluded because I don't have a source for best-in-class production.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India Largest agricultural products in India by value
But 150 years ago—and for 10,000 years before that—farming employed 90% or more of the workforce in every country.
Also, farming is heavily automated and done by very few hands outside of truck crops. Farming truck crops is low wage, incredibly difficult work that we generally use illegal labor for.
That having been said, I'm in a CCNT course for a reason: I could be lliving on a steady 40 grand and not have to wprry about backbreaking work every day.
There are ways to better oneself without ever setting foot in a college or university. How did America's forefathers survive! I was the first person in my entire male lineage to attend college and yet I come from a long line of successful businessmen.
This is, I think, the bigger problem. Educational opportunities are highly differentiated by wealth at a young age. Better public schools require living in more expensive neighborhoods. Private schools are expensive and even on financial aid difficult for some people to get to. Poor people can't afford to send their kids on summer trips (i.e. summer camp) and effectively the poor are more likely to have learning stop in the summer. To top if off, the guidance people in poor school districts get in/around their senior year is rarely helpful and sometimes just terrible (I.e. councilors telling students to not even bother applying to Harvard, etc...)
So yes, I'd say it's more complicated. When you're poor you're playing against students with a stacked deck. That's not to say there is no personable accountability, but it's not the only determining factor.
The middle school put me ahead of my high school colleagues. I was a year ahead in math, and two years ahead in english. Their computer science education led me to taking APCS a year early, with CS courses at a university shortly thereafter. They had even prepared me for standardized testing like the SSAT and SAT.
Yes, your family's important. Yes, there's some anti-intellectualism along the bottommost socioeconomic ranks. But the quality of one's school is a massive factor in how one learns.
I agree that home life influences schooling outcomes as well. Families with higher incomes can afford for one parent to stay home or to pay for a nanny or whatever. But in addition, many schools are funded disproportionately, where the schools with the most need receive the least funding.
Now, my family hasn't been rich by any means, but they wouldn't have been able to afford such a thing just a few years prior. The same goes for after school activities - or even just a trip with the French club to France or Canada. When you are poor, these things are out of reach.
Any time things like summer camp came up, I just tuned out, because I knew it wasn't going to happen for me. As an adult, I can see that, in some cases, I could have made something happen if I had really wanted it. But as a child, I had the mentality "that's not for me" and could not have even begun to figure out how to make it happen, because I wasn't just poor, but lacked any real support at home. (I was babysitting, but I fell into the poor person trap of spending money to feel better. All my cash went straight to comic books and soda.)
not all non profits are innocent.
If the person has to work, or if they have been out of high school for a while and has family responsibilities, for-profit schools generally seem to be more flexible, especially the ones that are mostly online. You don't have to worry about missing class if kids are sick and you don't have to worry about your work hours getting cut because you have to go to class.
Heck, some people lose jobs because the jobs aren't flexible enough for school or don't go to school because of their job.
It winds up feeling like the colleges cater only to a traditional student - young, without a family, and not needing to work anything but a part-time job - but this doesn't reflect the reality some folks are facing. It isn't a financial decision whatsoever: It might be if they had to pay a little bit upfront, but that would be enough to keep some folks from going: I'm not sure this is an improvement or not.
Also, the top colleges from that population that enrolls the highest percentage of low income students are much more prestigious than the top 1% income colleges.
These schools aren't elite because they attract the smartest students, they are elite because they attract the richest ones, who then have a leg up with their wealthy and well-placed alumni network.
The school I went to was almost 25% Econ majors. Out of a class of ~500, we had 18 Math majors. We didn't even have a CS major available. The value wasn't in Linear Algebra, it was in people. I'm one of two people I know from school that work in STEM. All of my college buddies work in finance or politics. I still attend the meet and greets in NYC, and I end up as the center of attention because I DON'T work in finance (anymore).
Funny enough, my brother also went to one of those schools. He's at GS.
> 12 “Ivy plus” universities (the Ivy League colleges, Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago)
They mostly have smaller enrollments though, and probably not a lot of research programs.
I did undergrad at WashU, which in this ranking is the poster child for regressive admissions. WashU is opposite MIT in this respect: a medium-sized endowment ($6B / class size = 1400 => $4M/student) and no will to use it, at least not on scholarships.
It was not that way back when I attended. The only way I can make sense of the graphs of diversity vs. time is that they are aggressively increasing tuition, recruiting among the wealthy, and erecting fancy buildings.
I haven't looked at the rest, but I'm guessing (by repuation) that for a lot of those schools, "elite" is more about class and networks than academic ability.
[0]: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search... [1] https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search...
Most colleges like Trinity and my alma mater make money off wealthy but average students and international students. Both pay full price most of the time.
(To be fair, if I had a trust fund I would've liked to go to one. You can be in a setting where you can get a lot of personalized attention, and the focus is in undergraduates than the big research programs that bring in the money.)
Graduates from NYC schools (including graduates with non-wealthy backgrounds) disproportionately stay in NYC and make an NYC salary, which looks upper-middle-class by national standards but doesn't go very far when your rent is three grand.
Therefore the claimed effect is at least somewhat spurious, being driven purely by geographic CoL variation. A better analysis would compensate for this, perhaps by normalizing by local CoL's.
I wouldn't necessarily call them elite (especially those further down the list) but they are good schools.
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...Their parents' income relative to what...
The city their parent works or lives in? The state? Country-wide?
Seems like an important thing to clarify. You can be in the top 5–10% in a small blue-collar town and still middle of the road across the country.
Re-read OP, didn't see them explicitly call it out, but they did implicitly mention "[percent] of American families" in places, so likely it's nation here too.
What a great idea! NYT really capitalizes on this medium and doesn't simply deliver print articles via web.
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
The article links to the page you've linked to, and includes links to data and source information. I haven't personally vetted what NYT has done here, but it seems fair to take original research and run with it in new directions.
There are accompanying NYT articles, and I agree that it's fair to jump off from the research. I believe the discussion needs to incorporate the conclusions from the paper into that new direction.
There is MIT for education.
[1] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~cs31/journal.html
I then thought of what would be the most blue-collar state university in Indiana, and checked ISU: <1% from the 1% and 46.5% from the bottom 60%.
1. I think its interesting/notable that the colleges that are most successful at helping poorer kids, are not elite schools, but rather are training people for well paying "middle class" jobs like teaching them how to be an air traffic controller
2. nowhere does it talk about the cost of providing an education...if it costs College X $75,000/year/student and College Y costs $15,000/year/student then making Y "affordable" is eminently easier than X...the point being some schools may want to have a more economically diverse student body, but in order to achieve that end, they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious), raise more money/get more grants, or charge the students that are already paying full tuition even more...none of which appealing/easy...
As a graduate of an elite college coming in from a highly privileged background (and thus as someone trying to minimize cognitive dissonance), I do think we would lose something if we as a society only put our resources into colleges that focused on lower income students. That said, I wouldn't be too bummed if more of my tax dollars ended up in places where it was actually helping people who benefited from that help.
Given many studies (notably Google's) showing that school performance is not a good indicator of future performance. Is losing prestige such a bad thing? It would be if the prestige was correlated with significantly smarter and better performing graduates.
But if the prestige only comes from being associated with higher class individuals, all you are losing is a false-positive signal.
If the second, the question then becomes how to encourage those applicants. Is that "access"?
Or do we need to re-think "qualification" to be more democratic (if it includes, say, international exposure that can be bought)? Are institutions obligated to change their qualification criteria to this end? Should they all?
The selectivity-vs-income ("rainbow") chart is interesting and fairly linear. I wonder what a similar "qualification-vs-income" chart would look like: e.g., are top 0.1%-ers "more qualified" (e.g., more likely to get into a selective university by performance alone) than other bands?
Then we're either into really dangerous territory (e.g., wealth correlated with intelligence), we're back to (re-)defining qualification criteria, or we shift the "blame" from university admissions to childhood education.
[1]http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586
Presuming Harvard is interested in increasing enrollment at all, that alone doesn't help increase these percentages. If Harvard accepts 1 low-income student for every 10 people, and accepts 100 more people in total, the mix is still 10%. I don't think that's "increased access".
Harvard and the like may offer great financial aid to those students, but those students are the very ones that aren't going to be accepted Harvard.