At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, only 35 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate college, a rate that is more than 20 percentage points lower than that of their wealthier peers.
Why is anyone surprised by that?
I think, for you thinkers out there, that this is just another example of Reynold’s Law in action.
Steve Sailer in Taki’s Magazine from a little over a year ago:
In 2010, MIT unveiled plans to expand undergrad enrollment by six percent, which would only get it back to where it was in the 1990s.
These sorts of thing catch my attention due to the age of the Ace and Deuce. The Ivies could do wonders for this country if they would expand enrollment. It’s not just the Ivies, it’s also Rice, Stanford, Chicago and Northwestern, and on and on…
It’s a great article about colleges and universities.
A quote:
Because if there’s one group you’d pin your hopes for an American renaissance on, it would be state legislators.
Another one:
Imagine picking a thousand students at random from among our institutions of higher education. Now imagine unpicking everyone at one of US News‘ Top 100 liberal arts colleges or universities. You’d expel anyone from the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT. Anyone from from Emory or Rice. Anyone from Vanderbilt, Clemson, Drexel. Anyone from the famously good state schools—UMass, Virginia, the California universities. After ejecting those students from your group, how many of the original thousand would be left?
About 900.
Again:
This vitiation of the diploma is Goodhart’s Law in action, where a socially useful metric becomes increasingly worthless, because the incentives pushing towards adulteration are larger than those pushing towards purity. This is not some bad thing that was done to us in the academy. We did this to ourselves, under the rubric of ordinary accreditation…
Finally:
In the academy, we’re fine with anything that lowers the cost of education. We love those kinds of changes. But when someone threatens to lower the price, well, then we start behaving like Teamsters in tweed.
Please do go read the whole thing. It really is on point with the problems in higher education.
This video is funny, but there is just enough truth in there to make it a little uncomfortable:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4AeAl-63ic#![/youtube]
I really am struggling right now with recommending college to the Deuce. He just doesn’t enjoy school. Not that I blame him. He’s smart enough to know that school has very little to do with learning anything worth knowing.
HT: Gerard