Libertarianism and Privilege (aka FYIGM).

Oscar Gordon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

First off, a handful of SSC commenters do not constitute the body of libertarian thought re: IQ tests. If you want to run with that claim, you might want to find something more current & mainstream.

On to jobs & college. Let’s ignore the whole IQ test thing for the moment. I suspect there are more powerful incentives at play. Here are two that come to mind:

1) The education industry, both traditional private colleges, public schools, and the troubled for-profit schools have all worked VERY hard to convince employers that the training & education provided by their programs will result in a higher caliber of employee. They have also lobbied hard for the various levels of government to promote the baccalaureate model to the population (hence the decline in the perceived value of skill certifications & associates degrees).

2) The quality of high school graduates, thanks to movements like social promotion (which began to ebb in the 80’s), was inconsistent. A High School diploma was merely an indication you did not drop out of school, not any kind of evidence of expected basic skills. I remember talking to a family friend who ran a small manufacturing firm that employed a lot of unskilled workers for basic assembly work, and he started to prefer employees with at least some college, even if they didn’t finish, to just high school grads, because he was getting too many high school grads who were illiterate in both written language & basic arithmetic. The college admissions office was serving as the filter because as an employer, he was not allowed to request high school transcripts or administer relevant skills tests (not IQ tests).

Fixing either is no small thing. Employers have gotten used to using schools as a filter, and since there is pretty wide support for the idea that employers should not have access to large swaths of personal information, I don’t honestly see that changing. We could allow employers of unskilled workers more latitude in the use of relevant skills tests (with some kind of way to make sure the test is relevant to the work being done so as to limit the racial/political/etc bias tests can have). Improving the reputation of the HS diploma can also help, although I think that would require upgrading the public school curriculum considerably across the board (Bug is only 3, so I’m out of date as to what they are teaching in High Schools these days).

Issue 1, however, is a genie that may well be impossible to re-bottle. I think, by & large, the education industry has been wildly successful in making itself into a necessary tulip, and the best we can hope for is for the education bubble to pop, or deflate somewhat, or to make more of an effort for the cheaper daffodil to be a perfectly valid option as well.

Alternatively, we could tell schools that they have to stop dragging their feet & restructure education in this country. I know that many of them have been moving forward with non-traditional programs, but my impression is that the 4 year colleges & universities want it all. They want to be in tight control of the supply of a product with extremely high demand, and they want to justify that supply restriction based upon limited physical facilities. This is true in some limited cases (technical classes that require expensive lab equipment, for instance), but most topics can be taught virtually, although that may mean developing a new pedagogy & testing it out. But if Harvard allowed every student who met their admission criteria to take online classes, it would risk diluting it’s brand, and a lot of these schools succeed precisely because their brand is exclusive.

Likewise, the insistence that degree seeking students follow a specific4-6 year education plan for a BA/BS means that studentsoften have to choose between school & work/family, because a normal full time student has little free time for a career or family obligations. But the small handful of such students who do manage to juggle a full time load & a career/family are held up as proof it can be done & justification that no changes are needed.

This also leads into the idea (that I’ve said before) that college isn’t for everyone. It isn’t. For a small percentage of the population, college will never be for them. They have developmental issues that will not be overcome without exceptional effort*. For a small percentage of the population who won the developmental lottery, they will go straight from high school to college, get through college, gain much from it, and excel in life. For everyone else, college after high school will be a struggle. Perhaps a worthy one, or perhaps a failure. That initial failure should not count against them (but it does, admission offices weight failures & dropouts against the student unless there is some compelling hard luck story to accompany it – I just wasn’t ready doesn’t carry much weight). Not everyone leaves high school ready for college. Either they aren’t sure what they want, or they need money, or credit, or they have other obligations, or a combination of those & other issues. But we are told that if you don’t go to college right after high school, you’ll probably never go. Which is true, because going from working full time to studying full time is a massively difficult thing, especially as you accrue staggering debt.

In short, if we want to expand access to education, the Academy needs to step up & open up & restructure. They need more non-traditional paths to a degree, with as many options as can be reasonably supported (I mean, what else are they paying all that administrative overhead for, anyway, if not to make school more accessible?). They helped to create this mess, they need to help clean it up.

*People who may have the intellectual chops for college, but would need considerable psychological help before they could be in a headspace where they would believe it. That said, such people can still be very successful in other ways.Report