US Education: a sandcastle at high tide, by 'Paddington'

Sackerson referred me to the following article, The intractable problem of finding a job with a university degree | Churchmouse Campanologist , discussing the relatively high rate of unemployment among university graduates.

I will preface my comments with a statement of my belief, which is that education is as important to the health of individuals and society as is exercise.

This lamentable situation should have been predicted, as it was inevitable.

Some of the pressures to increase percentages in higher eduation included:

By the 1980′s, the ‘good’ jobs were being eaten up by automation (around 80% of the drain), and outsourcing. Small family businesses were driven out by the large corporations, often aided by political corruption.

College presidents were delighted by the prospect of moving up in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. They could then grow their power and status, usually by expanding adminstrative, staff, but rarely faculty. At latest report, Harvard University has more non-teaching employees than undergraduate students.

The finance industry saw the potential for getting their hooks into a large part of generations of students, and had their pet politicians write laws which protected their ‘investment’, even through bankruptcy.

Politicians were shown studies that indicated that college graduates had higher incomes, meaning more tax revenues, and committed fewer violent crimes. That made them desirable and controllable.

Parents were conditioned to believe that the only road to upward social mobility for their children was education. In the US, prior to the crash of 2008, this meant any degree in any subject.

And so we in the US moved from 15-30% going to higher education to 60%, with a stated goal of 85% or more. To assume that we could maintain the same standards as before is to deny the reality that there is such a thing as scholastic aptitude, a fiction maintained by many extreme liberals, and professors in colleges of education. The richer ‘knew’ that their children were better, and so didn’t worry, until colleges actually looked at test scores, and many found out that they weren’t. That was the beginning of the slide to mediocrity, not DEI programs.

Private universities still had the luxury of selective admission, until the costs rose too much, so didn’t have to worry too much. The public ones, however, came under increasing political pressure from both the left and right to simultaneously increase graduation rates and competencies of those graduates. As anyone with knowledge of Statistics will tell you, this is, of course, impossible. The result has been an explosion of ‘useless’ degrees, and a dimunition of the quality of others, except those, such as Engineering and Accounting, who have professional licensure exams after graduation.

For a snapshot of reality, one has only to look at Math scores. Most US universities require a Math course to graduate. The lowest such is often called College Algebra, and is approximately at the level of the O-level of the 1970′s. Only 15% of high school leavers have enough mastery to enter such a course, which translates to about 25% of students entering higher education.

I spent my career in a more-or-less open admission university, and dealt a great deal with this issue. The overall graduation rate for much of that time was about 35% in 6 years. The 25% who were able to take a Math course at the university level graduated in 6 years or less at a rate of about 70%. Those who did not took remedial coursework, and graduated at a 23% rate. To make that clear, the Math-competent students graduated at 3 times the rate of the others, regardless of their field of study.

The common response, when I presented this data to administrators, most of whom had zero Math background, was to ‘teach slower’, or ‘teach better’. Never mind that I was unable to find anywhere on Earth that does better, nor that my colleagues had the highest teaching evaluations in the university, on average.

It is why I drink, and retired as soon as I could, only to watch all that I helped build collapse in ruin as bad decisions were compounded.

Source: http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2025/05/us-education-sandcastle-at-high-tide-by.html