For everyone who can't be bothered to read the article:
'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.'
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'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.'
Basically, straightforward encouragement and promotion of a sense of belonging has a significant effect toward equalizing the health, academic performance and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged kids of the same aptitude as wealthier peers.
My own experience supports this claim. While I didn't grow up poor, my middle-class parents separated the week I started my freshman year of college. What money there was went to lawyers instead of college tuition. Realizing I was on my own, I took two jobs and tried to make passing grades (mostly succeeding), but after a year I was forced to face financial reality. Already in a lot of debt, I dropped out and never went back.
So when it comes to "who gets to graduate," I have little doubt that financial and emotional support are more important than academic ability.
Vanessa called home, looking for reassurance. Her mother had always been so supportive, but now she sounded doubtful about whether Vanessa was really qualified to succeed at an elite school like the University of Texas. “Maybe you just weren’t meant to be there,” she said. “Maybe we should have sent you to a junior college first.”
After reading the whole article, this is what really stuck with me. I just can't fathom a parent ever saying this to their child regardless of wealth or education. Why does her supportive mother suddenly undermine her at such a critical juncture?
Would the poor kids do better if only their parents consistently expected them to?
Her mother was right. Maybe weak students should -- like in CA -- go to a two year college that is a stepping stone between high school and college, with more oversight and structure; finish their gen eds; and transfer. The diploma says the same thing after 4 years.
And to be clear, it's not like Vanessa is a good student. fta:
a month into the school year, Vanessa stumbled. She failed her first test in
statistics, a prerequisite for admission to the nursing program. She was
surprised at how bad it felt. Failure was not an experience she was used to.
At Mesquite High, she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all
without really trying. (Her senior-year G.P.A. was 3.50, placing her 39th
out of 559 students in her graduating class. She got a 22 on the ACT, the
equivalent of about a 1,030 on the SAT — not stellar, but above average.)
So basically, she only got a 3.5 in hs, and never learned math particularly well. It's not exactly a surprise she struggles at a good university.
Sounds to me like it was the first time she had a reality check and she had no idea what to do about it. A GPA of 3.5 is equivalent to a middling upper-second-class degree in the UK, respectable by all accounts. This girl isn't stupid: she was inadequately prepared and inadequately counselled in the face of failure.
In her class, she was 39th out of 559. She was in the 93rd percentile of the only group she could compare herself to. Prior to college, I would say she was a phenomenal student compared to her peers.
The point of the article is that low-income kids, despite being intelligent and doing well among their peers, have a hard time transitioning to college. Universities could wash their hands of the problem and just reject the poor kids and send them to two-year universities like you suggest, but they’re trying to solve the inequality without further exacerbating our income differences.
Going to a 2-year college first and then transferring not only provides a smoother adjustment for students who might not be ready for university, it also costs a lot less and thus is more accessible to low-income students. I think it's a superior option for a lot of students, but one that universities actively discourage by heavily marketing the "4-year college experience."
I'm not sure parents are supposed to be encouraging no matter what. You are not supposed to encourage kids to waste years and get into debt if the kid can not finish.
That being said, neither mother probably can evaluate Vanessas chances correctly, one failed course is not a catastrophe. Her high school apparently suxed: "she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all without really trying." - that could not be good school. Learning how to study for math at 18 is hard if you never had to do it before. She really might need more structured support at this point.
> Her high school apparently suxed: "she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all without really trying." - that could not be good school.
Her high school was definitely awful, but that's not evidence. I never studied for math tests either. The difference here is that she aced all her math tests without knowing math.
In that case, your high school math was too easy for you too :). If you can learn it without studying, then it is too little no matter how talented you are.
>Why does her supportive mother suddenly undermine her at such a critical juncture?
I had the same reaction as you. Assuming that the mother has the best intentions for Vanessa, and that she know less of the ways of UT than Vanessa (and probably you or I), I'd hazard at the following meanings:
Maybe you just weren’t meant to be there = You have not failed (at something you were supposed to succeed). The failure was in walking down a path that does not lead to the (pre-ordained) future.
Maybe we should have sent you to a junior college first = It was my mistake to lead you down that path.
No matter how you spin it, it's not what Vanessa needed to hear. But putting your self in the shoes of someone who is trying to comfort their child, and who knows little of the university system, it seems like a natural enough reaction.
My mom, having grown up in rural Utah where she got married at 17 and never thought about going to college, had similar reactions to my educational ambitions growing up.
When I was 15, I sent an application to a prestigious summer program at Phillips Andover Academy. When I didn't hear back after a couple weeks and started to get worried (I had no idea how long applications took to process), my mom said "I didn't think you were going to get in anyway, it's alright." (I received an acceptance letter a couple weeks after that)
Similarly, we were watching Mona Lisa Smile, and I said "Oh, I think I got a brochure from Wellesley." Her immediate response was "No you didn't" I ran up to get the brochure, and she just said "Whoa, that's really weird."
She wasn't being mean, she just had a very clear distinction between "things we do" and "things other people do." It just wasn't possible, in her mind, to cross that boundary. There was just no thought in her mind that someone _she_ gave birth do could go to places or do things she only saw on TV. She wasn't trying to discourage me -- she always wanted the best for me, but there were still some things that she wasn't capable of imagining possible. If she wasn't capable of imagining that these things were possible, the best course of action was to let me down gently.
Having talked to peers with similar backgrounds, I think this is an extremely common phenomenon, and one that holds a lot of potentially-successful people back, before they ever realize they're being held back.
> I just can't fathom a parent ever saying this to their child regardless of wealth or education.
It's hard for me to imagine, too; for a long time I thought Beauty School Dropout was one of the funniest songs I'd ever heard for that reason.
However, like my sibling says, the mother is correct. This girl is quite far below a normal student at UT Austin -- it's not good for her to be in classes targeted at them, and it's not good for them to be in classes targeted at her.
I rarely down vote, but this is borderline classist. As in "screw the poor and disadvantaged, we should only support those who win, not those who can win."
I really like UT's 7% rule. You have to believe that ability is equally distributed, just not opportunity. But when you get the abled from the disadvantaged high schools, they need more tools to succeed. Frankly, I think the disadvantaged shouldn't be segregated, they should make the advantaged pair up with them for tutoring so both can learn something valuable. Maybe for those that already know how to learn, they shouldn't be graded on learning more but on learning how to help others. Now that would be an eye-opener.
Remember if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate (that's a chemistry joke).
In a nutshell, a two-parent family can better shuffle duties of picking up kids from school and practice, assisting with homework, and just be around to have conversations.
IQ is correlated to wealth and IQ is hereditary, so it follows that children from wealthy parents would, on average, have higher IQ than their classmates.
When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
Risk reward ratio is entirely different when you are poor and when you are rich. If you are from super rich family, failure to finish university is no big deal. If you are poor, had to take ton of debt, failure to finish makes your life sux for years to come.
If intelligence is hereditary, then putting at-risk students in a special program would make no difference in their graduation rates. But it did. So maybe intelligence isn't as hereditary as you think. And maybe IQ isn't a great measure of intelligence.
This is interesting because it shows a specific mechanism by which smart kids of non-college-educated parents drop out. She failed a test in her first month in college, and her mother told her maybe she wasn't meant to be there. I vaguely remember failing a test early in college too, but it never would have occurred to my (intelligentsia-class) parents that I wasn't meant to be educated. I can only imagine how discouraging that feels.
Her mom's doubt certainly makes things worse, but I think the mechanism in motion in this case is best described by Eric Raymond's "Curse of the Gifted" [0]. She's smart, intuitive, and hadn't had any trouble in academia before. When things get really complicated in college, everything collapses, and it takes a lot of effort and support to get back on your feet. Having college educated parents helps with the support part, but it doesn't prevent you from collapsing in the first place.
If the primary effect was "smart kid hits wall when natural smarts aren't enough," then we would see drop-out rates consistent across socioeconomic status.
Many kids in college have those moments. What the data tells us is that the ones with the social and economic infrastructure in place to see it for what it is - a minor setback - tend to graduate more. That indicates to me that it is inaccurate to elevate this phenomenon higher than the social and economic support structures.
Quick fact check: she's not smart. She's smart only in comparison to the rest of her high school, and the article points out she was admitted under UT's affirmative action program, wherein (for Austin) if you outperform 93% of your high school classmates, they let you in. But the article also points out that she scored the equivalent of a 1030 on the SAT. She's barely above average for the ACT-taking population of Texas as a whole (she scored 22 vs a state average of 21).
I see. So this whole "smart" concept can be reduced to a simple quiz. Tell that to my brother, who is bad at test taking, and almost failed high school. He now has a doctorate and makes a 3 figure salary.
As in poor analytical thinking non-technical? Edit: I just re-read my previous post and your response and I realize that I left out my masters degree (and bachelors) were in computer science. I'm guessing you inferred from the English and history tests that I am non-technical. My fault for leaving out the subject of my degrees.
I don't know. I've generally been one of the top engineers on every dev team I've been on, was the first engineering hire of one startup and am the director of engineering for the current one.
Is classify myself as an above average engineer. Not a superstar, but solid and I get things done and done well.
I basically see no correlation between my SAT score and my ability and success. It's hard for me to look at only the SAT scores of others and say much of anything about them.
I'm surprised more people are not calling you out on your elitism. How can you fail to grasp that people in disadvantaged situations don't get the support to succeed the way non-disadvantaged students do. Maybe she had a job in high school to help out her single mom and buy a smartphone to participate in her social circles. Kids in the better high school in the same town had brand new cars and phones and time to study and to party.
And you also seem to be saying these disadvantaged kids shouldn't be helped to reach their potential.
> The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers.
Not true, it's taken by a self-selecting minority of college-aspiring high schoolers. The SAT-taking population is far, far more representative than the ACT-taking population. In isolation, that actually makes an ACT percentile better than it would appear, but there are other effects around.
In 2005 22 was the 62nd percentile among ACT takers nationwide (21 was the 55th). Assuming ACT takers are mostly representative of the population, this girl is smarter than 55-62% of US high school students, roughly as smart as 0-7% of them, and dumber than the remaining 38%. For a college student, this is not an inspiring figure.
> If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.
No, the top 7% figure is for GPA. And you don't need to overcome anything to be at the top of a group that isn't competing for the position. For any group, there will always be a top 10%.
This comparison is to the wrong cohort. She was among the top of her high school cohort. That's the point -- among a pool of people in the community he was raised in, she rose above the pack, didn't come through a culture the tests are optimized to select for.
So apparently getting a certain grade on a standardized test makes you smart? Having never met this girl, none of us have any idea if she's smart, but she's certainly not dumb for a score she got on a standardized test when she was like 16...
You do realize the entire idea of a standardized test is to give you information about someone you've never met? The ACT and SAT are well-developed intelligence tests.
That's the idea, but the idea that it's even possible to test intelligence with a multiple choice test is fallacious. Intelligence is simply too difficult to define. The fine tuning on these sorts of tests simply betrays a false sense of confidence of their usefulness in measuring intelligence.
I will concede that scores on the ACT or SAT are correlated with intelligence. But like most tests, you can improve your score with practice and study. If I can get a better score after preparing for the test, it doesn't measure intelligence, at least not directly.
Anecdotally, I have seen ACT scores improve with work and time. Most people at my high school took the ACT not the SAT, so possibly the effect is not the same. But, as I'm sure you would agree, it's a terrible argument to say a given study must be wrong because I observed differently in a unscientific sample from my own personal life. I will concede that changing your score is difficult, and possibly much more so than my experience shows.
That still does not change my central assertion that the ACT or the SAT are not good tests of intelligence. Or that IQ tests are not good tests of intelligence. I don't deny that high scoring test takers of such tests are usually intelligent but as the famous line goes, correlation does not imply causation.
Intelligence is a very tricky thing to define. People typically try to quantify intelligence as one's ability to solve tricky problems, solve problems quickly, retain hordes of knowledge, etc; but these things leave out rather important aspects of intelligence such as creativity, so-called "emotional intelligence", and the value of personal experiences. This is not an exhaustive list of things that are missed by these tests. Suggested reading here is Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book Outliers.
I'm moving the goal posts a bit on this conversation, but an even broader point to make about intelligence is that if you have a certain amount (what ever that means, again I'm not claiming that you can measure this), magically gaining more intelligence would have relatively little impact on your ability to have a successful life. It is my opinion that hard work, social connections, and even luck are more important than intelligence. Again, anecdotally, I have seen brilliant friends struggle to gain any sort of measure of success in life while the friends I judged as less intelligent are blowing them out of the water. Successful people are intelligent people, but they are rarely geniuses.
And this is where my argument begins to loop back around to the point the original article makes: Outcomes improve for people from poor and underprivileged backgrounds when they are integrated into a social groups with people who make them feel like they belong in higher education and encourage them to learn from bad test scores or rough semesters. So what does it matter if this girl has only slightly above average intelligence (as measured by tests that are flawed indicators of intelligence anyway)? If participating in these programs helps her become a productive member of society and become successful against her personal goals, isn't that a huge win?
> in this case is best described by Eric Raymond's "Curse of the Gifted" [0]. She's smart, intuitive, and hadn't had any trouble in academia before. When things get really complicated in college, everything collapses, and it takes a lot of effort and support to get back on your feet.
Might as well just call it spoilt brat syndrome. They were never given any challenges and they never sought them out (intellectually anyway, it seems). Then a few obstacles comes along and they collapse, never having had to deal with such things before. Then woe is them for having been lulled into a false sense of security all their life, including their parents.
Grade inflation and overoptimistic parents are probably partly to blame for this. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for these spoilt brats. Oh, so you actually have to work in order to get an A, or even work for a measly B? Life truly is unjust for demanding anything from you.
>They were never given any challenges and they never sought them out
This is the point - basic education and high schools aren't challenging students enough to prepare them to higher ed. If in addition to that you also don't have adults with higher education in your life to use as a reference, it makes it pretty hard to realize that you're not actually that good. Who wants to criticize themselves when all they hear is praise?
She is really not all that smart, nursing is something you would learn at a vocational school in other countries and I can't imagine the statistics they had to learn in the first year were harder than what you usually would learn in an advanced high school class. Being smart would mean that you are able to absorb new material quickly, which she obviously failed to do.
I wonder what the data says for people with "Tiger moms", even if they are first generation college students. Is that level of encouragement helpful, in comparison?
How the fuck does failing a test indicate anything that harsh? You could fail 10 tests for all that matters as long as it is indicative of something else or w/e. How can any of that ever be indicative of such negative BS unless you replace 'grades' with 'mental congruence metric' which does not exist.
As long as you know the grade is not representative of you, you're all good. WTF that level of external validation seeking will destroy you.
The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.
I find this very interesting in light of studies I've seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental income was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental education. Poor kids of well-educated parents were far more likely to graduate than rich kids of uneducated parents.
Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility.
> I find this very interesting in light of studies I've seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental income was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental education.
All past US studies I've seen have shown the same thing, or at least that parental educational attainment is a better predictor of a persons educational attainment than any other factor, including parental income.
> Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility.
Or: a lot of the education necessary to success in formal education happens outside of its bounds in less-formal interactions, including, especially, those in the home.
It is also about opinions on college utility. Do parents think college is a waste of time? If parents think it is waste of time, you are more likely to think the same and drop out.
I think that's part of it, but I think its also about the ability to actually have an informed discussion about what college is and isn't, about what you need to do to be ready for college, and about dealing with problems that arise while in college.
Parents having actual directly relevant experience seems intuitively to be quite likely to have value there.
My personal interpretation is that a lot of this effect is driven by the fact that income (which I think we tend to think about as a proxy for standard of living, including quality of school system and safety of neighborhood, and not just what their family can buy) is often difficult to measure, and parental education might actually offer a much better measure of "standard of living" children experience (which is why it may show up as significant, while income may not, in those analyses).
Wealth is a poor indicator of education. Usually the questions will be how much do the parents earn, rather than where they live or their standard of living. My Dad has a doctorate in physics from a top university, yet he's pretty much given up normal employment and lives a happy sustainable life. Measured by annual income alone, he's probably below the poverty line.
On an individual scale, wealth is a poor indicator of education, but in the aggregate the correlation is very strong: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm
Doctoral degree-holders are unique in that they're the only group that earns less than a lesser-educated group (professional degrees).
A professional degree isn't exactly "less" than a doctorate, though. Traditionally speaking, Medicine and Law are doctorates... and they both rank ahead of the Doctor of Philosophy (but behind a Doctor of Divinity, which is the highest doctorate).
> Traditionally speaking, Medicine and Law are doctorates... and they both rank ahead of the Doctor of Philosophy
No, while medical doctors and lawyers (civil doctors), were recognized uses of the term "doctor" for quite some time, traditionally the professional degrees in both fields have been baccalaureate degrees (the MBBS in medicine/surgery and the LL.B. in law), outside of certain Scottish universities, and the change to make the degrees generally doctorates were fairly recent (19th Century) US innovations.
The most depressing thing for a parent to realise is that a lot of the factors that will determine whether or not their child is successful at attaining higher education are locked in place before the child is ever conceived.
That is - quite apart from genetic differences - your own education level, motivation, attitudes and various other influences are set by the time you become a parent. It's difficult and unlikely that you will change, and your child will begin to be influenced by their environment the moment they arrive. Probably your biggest choice of determinant is your partner, but even that is influenced by all the things already in place.
The only usable piece of information from these types of studies is that, if you didn't graduate, you're going to have to work very hard to assist your own children to graduate.
The hopeful message is that some people are working hard to change this situation, so that able yet disadvantaged students can break the cycle and get a higher education.
They both could be the same variable. If "Wealth doesn't matter once you factor in parental education" and "Parental education doesn't matter once you factor in wealth" are both true, then it's probably the same effect.
Not to divert from the main point of the article, but this is frightening:
More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.
It is astonishing that 2/5 of American students can be saddled with huge debts without having generated the means to repay that debt (increased wages through a college degree).
Mind that '4 year college' includes a lot of places that are outside of what you may be thinking of. U. of Phoenix is an example that is very predatory in their loans. Also, many bible and other religious colleges may be included and there are a lot more of those that you'd think. The reasons for dropping out are also complicated: Having a baby, family health problems, personal health issues, mental health, debt from other sources, plain not wanting to continue anymore, drinking or smoking in the dorms, getting engaged (at BYU they say 'ring by spring or your money back') , etc. As with any population, there are a lot of circumstances. Still, I agree with you, the debt incurred here is unsustainable, especially as employers see a degree as a basic test for employment more so.
If you compensate schools for enrolling as many students as possible and don't penalize them for enrolling (and subsequently failing) unqualified candidates, schools will enroll as many students as possible and subsequently fail unqualified candidates after squeezing their LTV (lifetime customer value).
"According to USA Today, the University of Phoenix's Detroit campus has a graduation rate of only 10%, but a student loan default rate of 26.4%.[38] A 2010 report found that the University of Phoenix's online graduation rate was only 5 percent."
They aren't necessarily getting saddled with huge debts. I think taking one semester counts as starting (so many of the 4 year college students will have a few thousand dollars of debt, the community college less; I'm basing some of that point on lower level public colleges in my area that charge less than $5000 a semester for tuition, of course many will still pay more than that).
What's interesting is that I had a very similar experience as a white male (first to go to college out of my siblings/family), and got a 0.4 the first semester.
Things seemed easy in high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing, until I realized that University is serious business academically.
With friends failing out right and left, I forced myself to attend paid tutoring sessions (worth it) and meet others who had study groups.
In the end, it worked out after years of making up for that one mistaken semester, but I had to buckle down on my own because of the fear of telling my parents how bad I performed...
Universities should weigh the first semester less and cap the number of hours taken. I know plenty of people who fucked up their first semester due to culture shock/feelings of isolation.
Vanessa averaged A's in high school but tested a 22 on the ACT: she was the top of her class, but her class was very far behind the students in the rest of the country. Her high school was clearly ineffective and set her up for failure on her first test. Good for her for sticking with it and working through/around/with a terribly unequal system that disadvantaged her from the start.
Perhaps instead of an SAT or an ACT, there should be a test where different colleges contribute questions that are representative of intro level classes at the school. Questions would progress from relatively easy (large state school questions) to more complex, esoteric questions that would show up for the more selective, private school caliber students.
This would overcome an important informational friction: high school students don't see college-level test questions until they're enrolled and sitting in class, with the test in front of them. If you are going to make a $200k investment, you should have as much information as possible about your chances of success before signing on the dotted line.
Wow, did you really just say that state schools are easy, while private school are complex, and then use the phrase "private school caliber students" to punctuate that judgment?
I went to a private college. I am not better than my friends who went to state schools.
My charitable interpretation is that the OP is suggesting that large state schools might choose questions from broad, comprehensive body of material, to determine general aptitude. A liberal arts college might select more narrow or field-specific questions that would improve the resolution of the test for specific subjects.
It's not even that any person is better than another... Classes at elite public schools like Berkeley, UCLA, UMich, etc. are more demanding than at any but a few private colleges.
And it isn't really fair to paint with even this broad a brush. The fact is that large public universities generally have a broader charter than small, elite private schools. This is a factor of how they're governed on the one hand (things like mandating x% of students are admitted from in-state, or enforcing affirmative action), and the fact that they [usually] have to provide a reasonably comprehensive set of study options on the other. I went to an "elite" state school and studied history & comparative religion. My wife went to a small private women's college (~750 students) and studied biology. The resources available at my uni, which has a $2b/yr operating budget, were orders of magnitude better than hers, but the education I received was far less personal and -- again speaking in generalities -- not as good as what she received with the small class sizes and personal tutelage from her professors.
I was speaking in general terms because I did not want to pick out specific schools that are considered "better" and more academically rigorous than others. I simply wanted to acknowledge that the average freshman at Harvard or Williams probably sees a harder test than her counterpart at Ohio State. The price and prestige of a school are not always good indicators of quality, but I am very confident that selective schools that receive the top students have curricula to challenge those students. There are certainly exceptions: I go to a private university that is leagues behind some of the top public institutions: Berkeley, UCLA, UMich (among others) provide excellent educations, and they are much more academically rigorous than my private institution and many like it.
I am not saying that students who go to a private college are "better" or more likely to succeed. My point is that more selective (and generally private) schools are accustomed to receiving students that have been groomed for academic success throughout high school, and thus the bar for academic rigor starts out at a higher level. The crux of my original comment was to propose a solution for identifying just how high the bar is set on that first batch of exams, to see if you are ready. Knowing what is coming would prevent the overwhelming feeling of depression and "not belonging" that comes with failing a test in a new, scary environment. My point was somewhat obscured and vague, so thank you for challenging me to clarify.
As a rising senior in college, this is just a personal observation derived from my choices and conversations I have had with friends.
Do you not think the SAT/ACT work well for measuring aptitude? Quite a bit of research has gone into these tests, although the organizations behind these tests are not very forthcoming about what they measure (for example, the FAQ on the ACT’s website claims that the ACT is an “achievement” test and the SAT is an “aptitude” test, which is a bunch of crap, since they’ve both been shown to be highly g-loaded and are pretty similar tests). Unfortunately, the College Board is yet again making changes to the SAT, presumably for political reasons (e.g., no longer asking questions about “obscure” vocab words) and won’t really have the data to know how these changes affect the test until they’ve been giving it for several years, so that sort undermines my confidence in the groups behind these exams, and/or makes me think that they’re useful only because it’s apparently pretty difficult to make a test with absolutely no correlation with aptitude, despite the political factors at play, not because they actually have a coherent model of what they’re trying to measure and how to do it.
It's interesting because my younger brother and I fared very differently. He had a very low score after high school (I think it was the second lowest score one could get) and never graduated college (despite being accepted for an online degree which he then dropped out). I had a high score in high school, graduated from college (and picked up awards along the way), got accepted in two masters (one of which I dropped out to pursue another masters). We were two years apart and in fact my family gained more income by the time I started college. However I sympathise with this article because not only did I moved cities and am a minority but also because I too failed some subjects in my first year. All you need is perseverance and support.
"But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the Dashboard."
I was also wondering if it was responsible of those involved to be talking to the press about their work, even before they said this. They run the risk of counteracting their effects if the students think it is a gimmick. Also, students not selected for extra help could turn against them, as so many have against affirmative action in general.
A lot of junior colleges offer more personal instructional programs and are geared more towards helping out first time students. The more interpersonal relationship between professors and students are community colleges seems like an overall better way to transition students from high school to university. Not to mention they are far more efficient to run!
Surely one potential solution would be to remove the social stigma of attending a community college? I am proud that I went to a CC with professors that cared about their students, class sizes in the 20s, and office hours that extended throughout the day.
I had brilliant professors across multiple subjects, the common thread running throughout my entire community college experience was that each and every professor who worked there was there because they loved to teach and spread their joy of their field to students.
The other obvious issue is poor study skills taught in HS. I tell students in HS that if they get one thing out of HS, which is otherwise a large waste of time, it should be to learn how to study.
One thing I didn't realize until it was too late was that attending community college first forfeits an extremely large amount of potential scholarship money. Transfer scholarships pale in comparison to freshman 4-year scholarships.
> It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating.
I hope they controlled for the admission criteria here. Otherwise, the obvious reason to see a correlation like this is that more selective colleges select students who are better at studying for tests (and therefore more likely to graduate).
There's also the signaling theory of higher education: the point of selective colleges is to show that you could get into them; the actual classes don't matter, so they might as well let everyone graduate and with honors (eg Harvard).
Speaks to the failure of affirmative action. She should not have gotten into this school, but instead went to an easier one where she would have passed the exam. Imagine how bad the second pick students are?
> It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating.
Selective colleges have the resources to give focused attention to people who can (demonstrably) do the work, but lack the necessary habits and structural support.
I thought it actually showed how to fix affirmative action. If you just admit the disadvantaged students, a higher percentage of them will sink. But if you help them with motivation, study habits, and positive outlook (which many lack due to their disadvantaged background), then they can succeed at the same rate, or nearly.
The distribution of grades ... didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you
might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.”
I guess I should have added context. I thought it was funny that it sounded like the author thought that "bimodal distribution" was coined by the chemistry prof.
This is a phenomena also encountered in European universities. I know for a fact that it occurs in Physics and Math, since our professors were in the habit of showing us performance statistics.They even tend to adjust the grading accordingly. That is you get a B approximately at the first peak and fail if you are significantly behind the second peak. I don't think it nescessarily has to do with income / prior education.
I'm curious: how would the achievement gap change if all or most post-secondary education was delivered online instead of at physical colleges/universities?
I know someone who teaches at a community college and she said that student groups who normally do poorly in regular classes do even worse in online courses. Random paper here seems to agree with that: http://www.ashe.ws/images/Gross%20and%20Kleinman%20-%20Need%...
I don't think that would change much. This isn't so much about how the kids are being taught but rather about whether or not the working-class kids feel like they belong. Also, online classes are arguably worse for kids who are already doing poorly, since they get less opportunity to ask questions in class or get help from the professor and TAs.
Given the mechanism which seems to cause people to drop out (basically, lack of encouragement and/or sense of belonging) you can make arguments both ways.
The completion rate for online courses is very low anyway, so it is likely this difference might be immaterial in the noise of that overall low rate.
> a) has this study been reproduced (i.e. the Dashboard business)
Nope. Did you notice the part of the article where they declared victory and extended the program to all students?
> A rise of four percentage points might not seem like much of a revolution. And Yeager and Walton are certainly not declaring victory yet. But if the effect of the intervention persists over the next three years (as it did in the elite-college study), it could mean hundreds of first-generation students graduating from U.T. in 2016 who otherwise wouldn’t have graduated on time, if ever. It would go a long way toward helping David Laude meet his goals. And all from a one-time intervention that took 45 minutes to complete. The U.T. administration was encouraged; beginning this month, the “U.T. Mindset” intervention will be part of the pre-orientation for all 7,200 members of the incoming class of 2018.
How nice of them. Besides helping out the student body, this also spares them the risk of having to falsify a cherished idea.
I didn't read the whole article, but from the introduction, it seemed she failed the test because she wasn't used to studying hard in high school. Richer students do have more resources but I can't figure why money was a relevant factor in this case.
I heard a good article on NPR a while back (that I can't find now) that talked about the difference between rich and poor college students. A big factor that helped students from affluent homes is the fact that their college-graduate parents were familiar with college campus services and how to navigate them. So when their children failed tests and called home upset they would tell them to go to a tutoring center, or encourage them to go to office hours and ask for help. Students from poor homes, with parents that never went to college, didn't understand the resources available to them and were more likely to drop out because of that. If anyone can find a link to the article, it would be appreciated.
The larger difference is what happens after a test is failed and a student is feeling down. It seems that the more affluent group has more "identity formation" in that they know that they belong at college, whereas the more at risk groups (like students with parents that aren't college educated) sometimes panic, and feel like they don't belong at college, after a mistake of similar size. And that feeling is what causes them to drop out, more than X number of failed tests.
The point isn't that she didn't learn to study. If you had read just a little bit farther, you would have seen the real reason: at the first minor setback she met, she began to question whether she really belonged at a prestigious four-year school. That's a pretty understandable reaction given the culture shock she experienced in going to UT. Rich people with educated parents get to feel like they belong at colleges; poor and working class people don't.
I'm sorry, but it's not very useful to the community to comment when you haven't read the article. It was written precisely to address your skepticism. I recommend reading it if you're curious about the issue.
Well, in the article, it does say that after the mind-set intervention was applied to all the student (minus the control group), the gap between the at risk group and the affluent group cut in half, as the affluent group's drop out rate was not really affected by it.
And again, as they say, it was only 45 minutes, and it didn't "do" a lot. It did however, change how the students interpreted bad events in the future, and reduced the chance of the student feeling that, say, because they failed a test, they don't belong in college at all.
As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements:
house them together, encourage them to form study groups, provide them with mentors and tutors, meet with them regularly to stress the importance of academic achievement, monitor their progress closely, involve them in research, take away their scholarships if they fail to make a "B" average, they will perform better than students deprived of these benefits.
And before anyone gets hung up on the "scholarship" part: I know plenty of students who had parents pay for at least some of their college, but knew they had to perform or their parents would stop paying. That expectation of performance is the same.
> As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements
Well, yes.
So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance.
Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable? More or less so than this?
Pretty much everything in college is geared to those students who aren't failing. What you're really asking is why do we help them at all and instead give even the last 1% of help to those for whom everything is already given?
It might be the case that the techniques, etc. being taught to failing students were already known to the not-failing ones, so in that case, there would be diminishing returns to having the students who were already doing better do the same things. It is an interesting question though: should we be more concerned with having everyone reach some uniform level of performance, or is it worth investing more resources in the “best and brightest” students, even though they’re already ahead of everyone else? I think it’s important for public schools at the K–12 level to provide resources for above-average students, which shouldn’t be that difficult except for political questions like how to motivate schools to focus on this, and how to justify spending resources on students who are already going to pass the standardized tests.
Again, I'm not suggesting we teach normal students to do things they already do. That would be stupid. I'm saying, what if we invested similar amounts of higher-level support? You can hold people's hands at all levels of achievement.
Once you know how to study and want to learn, there's a whole internet full of knowledge. Before, things like access to a fancy library, or labs would definitely boost productivity for a successful student. At least for the more theoretical subjects, we have far more resources available to learn from than 100 years ago.
Let's say society prospers when there's more stuff and withers when there's less stuff. The traditional way to measure the amount of "stuff" is by looking at GDP (on a societal level) or GDP per capita (on an individual level). None of this has any obvious effect on the population of the country, so they're the same thing.
I'll also make the assumption that your lifetime earnings are a multiple of your entry-level salary, just to have an anchor for the numbers. Equivalently, assume that whenever you get a raise, it's defined as a percentage of your current salary.
With that assumption and the GDP definition of value-to-society, we can immediately see that it's 50% better to, by intervention, raise someone's starting salary from $50K to $80K than to raise a different person's starting salary from $10K to $30K. But it might be cheaper and easier to produce a 60% improvement in the $50K guy than a 200% improvement in the $10K guy.
"I had never before heard of La Griffe du Lion. His
article was so full of egregiously bad methodology
and other mistakes that I at first assumed it was a
satire of racist pseudoscience, the sort of thing
that might be written for the Annals of Improbable
Research or (if you're Alan Sokal) Social Text."
Finally someone calling out thaumasiotes for his dubious anti-affirmative action screeds. And what a surprise to find he links to racist websites. Not.
I don't trust that site's analysis, and I don't trust them to accurately report the underlying data without cherry-picking or selecting dubious studies.
Given your comment history, you seem like somebody with an ideological axe to grind on the subject of racial and gender diversity, and I don't believe you selected this article from such an obscure source solely for its topicality.
Did you read TFA? It's not talking about "dramatically underqualified" students.
> If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
The article is talking about supporting students who are admitted to a flagship school in their affirmative-action program despite being below the 25th percentile for students at that school. It specifically calls them out as being in the bottom quartile. It lists the human-interest protagonist's appallingly low standardized test scores. What more do you want here?
According to http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1572-University-o... , the 25th percentile student at UT Austin (entering in 2011, I think) scored 540 verbal and 580 math on the SAT (annoyingly, this doesn't mean that the 25th percentile student scored 1120 overall, but it's the closest thing I could find). The girl in the article scored the ACT equivalent of 90 points lower. But she's not dramatically underqualified?
We like to think the Ivies have a narrower range, though. This girl was admitted under UT's explicit policy of admitting unqualified students as long as they come from awful schools. That sort of thing can cause quite a large gap between, say, the 25th percentile student and the modal student.
update: for reference:
UT Austin 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 590 - 710
Cal Tech 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 770 - 800
How significant do you think it is that a quarter of Cal Tech students are below the 25th percentile? How far below do you think they range?
this follow-up is better. But you're asking me to guess!
>How significant do you think it is that a quarter of Cal Tech students are below the 25th percentile? How far below do you think they range?
I don't know.
It would help if your figures didn't cut out at the bottom-quarter mark, i.e. if you gave some figures on the lowest SAT math score (and what about verbal?) admitted to these institutions, or some other indication rather than asking what we 'like to think' about the range or having me guess :)
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the way you expressed it, "despite being below the 25th percentile for students at that school" and "It specifically calls them out as being in the bottom quartile" in your original comment is probably not a great way to show your case. Your range comment is much better, but stops short of indicating what the full range is or where this student falls.
Basically, I am directly saying that being in the bottom quartile is not itself an indication of sub-standard performance - at any school. Because nearly a quarter of students will be below the bottom quartile - at every school.
I gotta chase thaumasiotes all over this thread and stand up to his elitism. He wrote:
"What's wrong with describing the students who can't succeed outside of the bottom tier as "substandard"?"
The article tells you what's wrong with that: it keeps people who COULD succeed from doing so by undermining their confidence and their motivation. Why are you really intent on knocking down the disadvantaged at every turn? Why don't you want to help them learn how to succeed?
Because trying to lift these people up is one of the least cost-effective things we could be doing. It has knock-on negative effects all over, directly wastes tons of money, and produces very little to show for it.
You appear to be saying that while these students are in fact substandard, we shouldn't say so because it will hurt their feelings. How is admitting two (or more) tiers of students, banding them into classes by ability, and then telling them they're all in the top tier better than letting different schools admit students from narrower ability bands, so that when you tell them they're more or less as good as the other students it has the virtue of being true?
There was a scandal recently (I believe at UNC chapel hill) where the classes for football scholarship students were found to be fictional, just a bureaucratic vehicle for giving them grades so they'd qualify to keep playing for the school. Would you be willing to call those students substandard? What if it undermined their self-confidence?
Of course your own hand-wavy numbers will support your argument, it doesn't mean they are correct, nor that your socioeconomic assumptions are correct. And the topic of this article has nothing to do with athletics or the shady academic policies thereof.
I never said these students were substandard. I do believe their performance is substandard and they are at greater risk of dropping out because of all the disadvantages they had and continue to have in life. I believe good schools should admit them because their potential is equal to the non-disadvantaged students, and the results in the article prove this. The article even points out that disadvantaged students with potential do better when admitted to the better school.
Your view does not separate performance from potential, and you keep insisting on using low performance to limit admissions to good schools, and thus in a way, limit how much potential these students can develop. You are essentially arguing that the poor and uneducated (who are likely to be minorities) should stay poor and uneducated.
I believe that it is a net gain for society when all students are given a chance to meet their highest potential. This article shows that he cost of doing so is minimal, and thus the gain for society is even greater.
I'm talking in terms of 25th and 75th percentiles because those figures are public. You're more than welcome to provide other numbers if you have a way of getting them.
And I provide exact numbers for the girl under discussion. Someone else was nice enough to point out that the ACT average for students at UT Austin is 28 (91st percentile nationwide), and the 25th percentile is 25 (80th). This girl got 22 (62nd). Compared to the average student at her school, that's abysmally low.
From memory, the range for verbal scores at caltech was 720-800, and the range at UT Austin was 120 points. The "true top end" at caltech probably isn't that far above 800, since the writing range was 720-790, so UT Austin is displaying much much more variation (120 points compared to 80). In contrast, there's going to be a lot more variation in math ability at caltech than the 30-point math range implies, due to the very low ceiling on the SAT-math. That makes it impossible to say how much variation there really is by looking at SAT scores.
On the other other hand, caltech being a technical school, you might suspect that they're targeting math ability, and the range should be narrower than it is for verbal. ;p
> Because nearly a quarter of students will be below the bottom quartile - at every school.
You could change this to exactly a quarter and you wouldn't be wrong (except in cases like, as we've seen, caltech and other high-end schools, where well over a quarter of the students are in the top 25th percentile by math SAT score). But the sentence preceding it is obviously false. Yes, a quarter of the group will always be in the bottom 25%. Does that mean they're not performing as well as the rest of the group? Of course it does. That's how we measured them.
If your top students and your worst students are very close in ability because of restriction in range, you can sensibly put them in the same classes. If, as at UT Austin, they're very far apart, you can't. I went to a large public university myself, and the course catalog was full of classes covering the same material but differentiated by "difficulty". What's wrong with describing the students who can't succeed outside of the bottom tier as "substandard"?
'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.'
---
'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.'
Basically, straightforward encouragement and promotion of a sense of belonging has a significant effect toward equalizing the health, academic performance and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged kids of the same aptitude as wealthier peers.