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Friday, November 6, 2009 - 9:04pmSanction this postReply
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Advanced Placement tests can slash a year or more off the time needed to get a college degree. I basically entered college as a Sophomore due to AP credits.

Now, if you think the point of college is to take 4 years worth of classes, rather than to get a degree that will allow you to get the job you want, this won't save money, but for everyone else ...

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Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 6:11amSanction this postReply
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My wife's cousin, a brilliant young lady, attended Duke University and learned that although they would grant her AP credit, they still compelled her to take four years of classes. This meant still fulfilling their requirements for "butts in seats" for X number of hours of math courses, etc. They also require undergraduates to live on campus for most of their years there.

She attended on scholarships and earned extra money as a dormitory resident advisor (RA). This made the financing not very onerous. But still, having learned this, I would not recommend Duke unless one did earn such scholarships.

This young lady now works as a medical specialist dealing with women's health (especially HIV) in Chicago and is doing well for herself. So she achieved her career goals. Whether she could have done this in less time elsewhere I do not know.

I gathered from MIT's Web site that they have similarly onerous requirements.

Generations of college graduates have become unduly conditioned to the "entitlement" mentality of four years of campus "immersion." This includes not just actual academics, but the parties, the activism, the Greek houses, etc. This expensive artificial lifestyle bears little resemblance to real life and does little to prepare one for the rigors of marriage, family, or even civic activism.

There has to be a better way.

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 11/07, 8:49am)


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Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 9:05amSanction this postReply
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A lot of college is about getting your "union card", which strikes me as a waste of time. Basically, many people spend 4 potentially productive years of their life taking classes that will have little relevance to their future career or life, just to prove to an employer that they are reasonably intelligent, have perhaps learned a few things that might be tangentially related to the actual job they are applying for, and are able to complete a long-term project and are submissive enough to put up with a great deal of bullshit.

Most of this stuff could be ascertained during an employment interview.

The first criteria could be cheaply ascertained with an IQ test, if the federal government hadn't made that illegal because such tests tend to result in ethnic and gender outcomes that are not strictly in proportion to the ratios observed in the general population. For example, during the Sotomayor hearings, an issue was made of her ruling on the New Haven firefighter's exam, where everyone who qualified for promotion due to that test was white, with the exception of one Latino.

The problem the courts have been wrestling with is that this is not an unusual outcome, that if you give tests for most highly skilled work based strictly on merit and on objective facts, the outcomes, for whatever reason, tend to skew toward white applicants passing in numbers highly disproportionate to the general population.

And, since the EEOC laws and regulations assume that "fair" tests would not result in this outcome, that any ethnic disproportion must be due to racial prejudice rather than differences in the actual individuals applying for jobs, and that group "fairness" should take precedence over awarding jobs and promotion strictly on individual merit, it is basically impossible for employers to come up with objective tests of ability that meet liberal judges' desire for collectivism in the form of equality of outcomes, rather than equality of opportunities.

Curiously, nobody at the EEOC seems to be concerned about, say, the ratio of ethnicities and gender in the NFL or NBA, where you have teams where almost all the players are black, and where no woman has EVER made any team. Somehow it is accepted that there the difference in ethnic and gender outcomes is strictly due to individual merit and individual differences in ability, and that the pressures of a competitive marketplace have simply rewarded the most qualified individuals.

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Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 11:39amSanction this postReply
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There are many different colleges for many different types of students. The best way to control frathouse environments on campus is not through artificial measures, but by having a curriculum that sets high standards and fails students who don't meet them. This is almost unheard of now with rampant grade inflation even at elite schools.

Grade inflation hurts in 2 ways: 1. It cheapens the value of your degree 2. It doesn't give you accurate, quick feedback about whether you really have aptitude for the course of study you've chosen. 

Frankly, I find AP tests to be a woefully inadequate measure of mastery of a subject. Pick a college with a curriculum you want to study and a rigorous program, else why would you go?

One other comment, college costs now are ridiculous. I look back at the cost of attending college from 1989-1993 and it was much cheaper then and by many lights better.

Jim

(Edited by James Heaps-Nelson on 11/07, 11:46am)


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Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 12:05pmSanction this postReply
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JHN wrote:

Frankly, I find AP tests to be a woefully inadequate measure of mastery of a subject.

"The perfect is the enemy of the good." -- Voltaire
"The excellent is the enemy of the adequate." -- Setzer

I do think that getting the core classes like English, history, foreign language, etc. out of the way overcomes a major obstacle to staying motivated. I know I considered much of my freshman year in college a drudge because I felt like I had already "been there and done that." Had I understood how to leverage AP courses in high school I could have avoided that dreadful experience. I do agree that getting a solid foundation is most important, however.

Pick a college with a curriculum you want to study and a rigorous program, else why would you go?

"But enough philosophy. In their way, your parents and teachers were right: If you want a well-salaried career, get a degree. The days when you could work your way up from the mail room to corporate mogul are long gone. [...] (The bad news: You wanna ride the train, you gotta have a ticket. The good news: Once you have it, nobody looks at it.)"
-- Brady Lessard, Your Guide to Slide: The Slacker's Guide to College

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 11/07, 12:28pm)


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Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 1:19pmSanction this postReply
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Luke,

Those are good, practical answers. College, for me, was an irreplaceable 4 years of intellectual exploration. If it is mostly pre-professional preparation (which is not a bad thing) then the aim should be to get in and get out in as short a time as possible. I don't have a very complete picture of how bad some of the intro classes can be at a standard liberal arts school or state university, except for second hand information. Many people aren't aware that standards for lower level undergraduate classes can be extremely low, even at elite institutions.

Jim

(Edited by James Heaps-Nelson on 11/07, 1:43pm)

(Edited by James Heaps-Nelson on 11/07, 1:44pm)


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Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 2:23pmSanction this postReply
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College was, for me, several years of getting high a lot and continuing adolescence despite being physically mature. I did learn a lot of stuff, though it wasn't very applicable to what I wound up doing and wasn't stuff that I couldn't have studied in my spare time.

Granted, that irresponsibility continued to some extent after graduation, though holding down a middle-class job did force me to shape up somewhat. But, I didn't really clean up my act until I got married and more responsibility was thrust upon me.

So, while I'm glad I went to college since it probably kept me out of working in a dead-end job, I can imagine a society organized around less expensive and less time-consuming ways of determining individual fitness and qualifications for a job than a piece of paper saying you completed a college degree.

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Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 10:13pmSanction this postReply
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Jim,

I can imagine it too and it would be better if there were more flexibility and more choices. Lamar Alexander wrote an editorial about 3 year college programs, but given the amount of colleges, programs, and scholarships there's usually a college that suits most high school graduates. Matching students with the right college is usually the problem.

Jim


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Sunday, November 8, 2009 - 11:04amSanction this postReply
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People balking at MIT's price should send their children to Olin College of Engineering. All students get a four-year $80,000 scholarship and the students are quite impressive.

Jim


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Monday, November 9, 2009 - 9:10pmSanction this postReply
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What we really need is education care reform with a public option.

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Monday, November 9, 2009 - 9:25pmSanction this postReply
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As Dagny would say, Oh God Ted that's not funny!

Jim


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Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - 4:01amSanction this postReply
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This link elucidates Jim Henshaw's remarks about IQ testing and discrimination.

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 10:09amSanction this postReply
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My coworker returned to my desk after watching the videos quite anxious about his son graduating "too soon" and entering full time employment at the tender age of 20. After much discussion back and forth, I finally asked him why he had so much reluctance about that prospect. My coworker was raised in Vietnam and moved to America at the age of 15. He said that in his culture, a parent whose child went to work "too soon" reflected a bad parent not "well off" enough to keep him in the educational system longer.

I encouraged him to re-think his position in light of the prospect of his son getting a head start on financially independent adulthood.

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