Corrupted College
Check out this Edsource story on the California State University system’s announcement of its intent to abandon the “strategy” of remedial courses.
At last! I thought. CSU was finally telling low-skilled applicants to attend adult education or community college. Hahahaha. Five years of education policy writing just isn’t enough time to become properly cynical.
CSU is not ending its practice of accepting students who aren’t capable of college work. CSU has ended its practice of remediating students who aren’t capable of college work. It makes such students feel “unwelcome.” Students who aren’t capable of doing college work are getting the impression that they don’t really belong at college.
And so, CSU is going to give students who can’t do college work college credit for the classes they take trying to become ready for college.
Understand that the CSU system has been accepting these students for over 30 years. CSU used to offer unlimited remediation until 1996. After taxpayers protested, CSU passed regulations reducing remediation efforts to one year and vowed to ultimately eliminate all remediation by 2001. But alas, when 2001 came along, ending remediation would dramatically reduce black and Hispanic enrollment, so the deadline was extended to 2007. (Cite ) But 2007 came along and things were even worse. After that, well, California ended its high school exit examination and retroactively awarded diplomas to all the students who hadn’t been able to pass it. Why bother? CSU was accepting students who didn’t have the diploma anyway.
So, CSU decided on a new “strategy”, defining “college readiness” as “student is earning us tuition dollars”. They’re even looking at ending any sort of reliance on California’s version of the Smarter Balanced test, the Early Assessment rating that California has used for years to guide high schools towards getting their students ready for college.
I swear, some days it feels like I’m in some kind of a contest as to whether I can make it to a respectable retirement age (I am 48, could minimally retire under my state’s pension system at 60, had plans to stick it out until 65 or 70) before the whole higher-ed thing implodes.
I love teaching but I hate what’s happening to higher ed. And yes, I have seen a decline in the “average” student in the past 15 years – the best students we get are still excellent and are as good as they were when I first started teaching, but we seem to get more students who just lack preparation. That’s not SO bad….if someone knows they need to step up and is willing to do the work, I can help them. But the problem is the people who don’t know much but have an attitude about it, like, it’s my fault they’re failing because whatever I’m covering is “too hard.” (No. If I have people in my class earning As, it is NOT “too hard.”)
I await with trepidation the outcome of the “free college*” experiment in New York State; I suspect it will be rife with unintended consequences.
(*Some terms and limitations apply)Report
I’m presuming it’ll turn the college that is free into an extension of high school: that thing everyone does and no one values.Report
Yeah, pretty much. I would be more inclined to go the Berea College route for price-reduced/”free” college: expect the students to do work on-campus to help pay for it, because then maybe they value it more.
I have students who work to pay their way through college (going to college part-time). Anecdotally, their attendance seems to be better than the students using loans or parental money to attend.Report
How long do you figure before employers will want a copy of your transcript along with a resume?Report
It’s pretty common for employers to ask for that sort of thing in some industries.
I even had one ask me for my SAT scores, which for some reason really pissed me off, and for that matter still kinda annoys me years later. That despite the fact that in retrospect, I’m really glad I didn’t get the job.Report
I’ve had employers ask about my High School transcripts after I was in Grad School. I had one that was obviously weighing my fitness for an Aerospace Engineer position upon whether or not I played High School or College sports.
Both pissed me off, and the reason was pretty clear – they cared more about who I was as a teenager, not who I am as an adult.Report
For me, I think it just felt unnecessarily intrusive. I’d gone to college, I’d gone to grad school, they had my transcripts for both–what possible information could the SAT possibly add?Report
What annoyed me was when some Office Functionary needed them for some kind of box-checking work (I think it was accreditation renewal), instead of checking to see if HR still had them from fairly-recent hires (like me, at that time), he just told us all to get new copies sent to his office.
At that time, two of the universities I had been at charged money. I had to pay something like $20 out of my own pocket for transcripts. Yes, $20 isn’t a LOT, but it’s the principle of it.
My grad school was late getting theirs in, too, and the guy called me to harass me about it. I offered to bring in my diploma from my Ph.D. to show him and his response was, I’m not kidding, “Those things can be faked.”
(The guy was well known as an a-hole or I would have been more upset)
In retrospect, I probably should have brought my 350-page bound copy of my dissertation to his office and dropped it on his foot.
(I like nearly everyone, but there was no love lost between this guy and me. That wasn’t the only time he was openly rude to me)Report
Exactly!
I have an honorable discharge, a degree, and almost a second degree. What could you possibly learn from HS that would be of value?Report
It’s not about you, they already know you’re going to pass that filter.Report
There are worthless degrees, worthless programs, and people who were only admitted and graduated from what should be good programs because of what should be called “quotas”.
A business can’t only ask for SAT scores from people that it thinks fit that description because they’re in a protected class. So it asks for SAT scores from everyone, because the SAT hasn’t been corrupted yet.Report
If a recruiter/interviewer has to rely upon an SAT score to determine potential value, they have no business being in that role.Report
Interviews are expensive.
An SAT score would be a way to avoid that if colleges are devaluing their signal. It should be a light filter, not a “determinate”.Report
When the economy is down, or a job is desirable, whittling down the number of applicants from 150 to 15 takes on a premium. Using SAT scores probably has slightly more predictive value than just throwing away the 135. And – until or unless quality applicants actually use this as a basis not to apply at a greater rate than non-quality applicants – it costs them nothing!Report
This is the sort of thing that I would now be inclined to hold against an prospective employer.
Then again, I’m no longer a beggar, so I can be a chooser.Report
Yes, exactly that, and at the moment, it’s not being gamed.
Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”Report
Except SAT/ACT is a really bad measure past a certain point. Tests like that have an expiration date on the results for a reason. If I’m getting weeded out for a professional job based upon the results of a test I took more than 5 years ago, I’m going to be offended, and rightly so. Not because the test results aren’t valid, but because there are much more salient metrics available.
But towards@will-truman point, if they’re relying on such a dated metric for culling, that tells me a lot about what kind of place it is, and that I probably won’t enjoy working there.
Such metrics work both ways.Report
My expectation is you didn’t go to college lacking a middle school understanding of math/english.
And yes, these tests expire, your 2nd or 3rd employer certainly won’t care… but a fresh out of school pup with nothing but a CSU degree? I can see why the SAT might be thought of as useful.Report
Ah, well, that is why I’d want a transcript. That would tell me how many remedial classes you took for college credit.
Now, that alone might not put you in the circular file; but if, say, you fulfilled a subject matter credit load requirement with mostly remedial classes, and took little to no college level classes in that subject, that might result in an attempt at an office 3 point shot.Report
Oscar,
Yes, if you got a degree in physics and the highest math you took is College algebra, well… you’d better have enough documentation that you can actually solve those E&M problems.Report
True, but that’s also burning more and more of my time, and it’s also assuming “remedial classes” will be usefully labeled from a place like that.Report
The other thing is that asking about stuff is a good way to judge office dynamics and whether you will get along with someone or not.
I have my BA, MFA, and JD on my resume. I am sure my MFA has helped and hurt me because it makes me seem “interesting.” There are probably employers who saw it and ran away because they thought I would flake out and then there are employers who find it fascinating. So I do get some short term pain but long term benefit from having it on my resume.
Work is also a social place whether we want it to be or not and part of HR’s role or management’s role is to find who is going to be a good social fit for an organization or not.Report
There is asking about stuff to flesh out culture fit, and there is watching the interviewer just shut down when you answer, “no, I never played team sports in High School or College”.Report
One of the things that gets missed in conversations like this is how much the internet has changed the job hunt process. People can literally apply for hundreds of jobs before coffee, jobs that they might or might not be qualified more that tangentially. And add to that the recession of not too long ago and it wasn’t unheard of for HR people to get 4-5 hundred apps/CV’s/resumes for a job that would have gotten maybe 20 applicants before.
And in some situations, especially public service, every single one of them must be evaluated. So additional qualifiers are added. And every time they ask for something, there are applicants who will forget to include that. And so you can disqualify them automatically. And then if you increase the requirements (but include some verbage about possible other qualifications to keep you legal) you can weed out more. And this is awesome when you have an internal candidate but must post the job publicly.Report
Aaron,
Yeah, public service. Where I come from, half the time the qualifier was “Did you go to Penn State?”Report
The first time I interviewed with my current employer, they asked what my college GPA was. I had been working in software for almost 30 years.Report
Mike,
Still way better than my friend, whose first job coding was when he was in middle school. Everyone assumed he was at least 30.Report
Every search committee I’ve been on has required them.
Of course, we’re a special case: if we’re hiring an anatomist, we kind of, you know, expect considerable subject-matter-experience in anatomy.
(You’d be surprised at how many applicants we reject out of hand because they apply for the job with zero experience in the field, like someone who’s only ever done fungal cell biology applying to teach and do research in field entomology….)Report
That would bug me too.Report
I see employers ask for transcripts all the time. I see them ask for transcripts even if the position requires 10 years of experience.Report
Oscar,
for CS at my alma mater, that’s standard procedure. You can tell a lot based on whether someone took Operating Systems or not. (that’s the “you and team will build your own OS. have fun!” death-course)Report
You know, I don’t really have a problem with this sort of thing. Education should benefit students first. I’m skeptical that grades and rankings and standards and certifications should matter for every student and for every profession. Sure, if we think of college as a screening test for life, then it makes sense to judge students the way we do, but college seldom de facto serves this purpose. If a student wants to pay tuition to attend college, engages with the material, and ultimately becomes better off as a result, then why do we need to impose our bean-counting and judgmental ways upon such students; why do we need to exclude them simply because we are in a position of power over them and can? I think this is the ultimate corruption of our education system and something we’ll look back at 200 years from now and wonder why we were so stupid and evil.Report
The problem here is that college shouldn’t be a screening test for life, but employers insist on treating it like one. This is often a more-or-less reasonable approach for an individual employer to take, but when they all do it, the whole system of higher education ends up being deformed by it in a way that doesn’t really benefit much of anyone.Report
Yawn. Anyone ever had to teach Business Calculus here????
Figured NOT.
There’s plenty of classes that count toward college that oughtn’t.
At least they’re being honest about it.
(And, ya know, if you’re going to be an english major, I’m okay if you’re only passing College Algebra).Report
There are a few issues I see here.
1. There is a huge history of structural racism and de facto segregation and the horrible way that we fund K-12 education in the US that leaves black and Hispanic students at a disadvantage.
2. This leads to endless debate about whether blacks and hispanics are less intelligent than whites and Asians because they are decades behind in equality and the resources are still not spent equally.
3. You also have the pernicious “model-minority” speeches which ignore the whole history of Jim Crow and Slavery as a form of lecture. Sullivan in New York mag is the most recent variant of this.
4. All of this makes a horrible stew with no good policy solutions and a lot of bad blood.Report
Saul,
Ending debates is easy. Ending liberalism is harder.
The willfully ignorant are always the hardest to reach.Report
testReport
Who was the goalie for AC Milan in 1977?
This is a closed book exam.Report
But open i-phone?Report