Reply to If it’s harder then ever to get into top colleges, why do professors complain students now are bad?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "If it’s harder then ever to get into top colleges, why do professors complain students now are bad?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you listen to any admissions officers’ podcasts, they are all trying to save people. They all sound like lovely humans who mean well, obviously got into this profession to make a difference, but you can tell they are also a little too idealistic and naive (so many sound so young, in their mid to late 20’s, but even the older ones sound idealistic). They talk so much about “distance traveled”, placing a lot of emphasis on helping first-gen, low income, and especially rural kids.

In principle I agree with them too, but it sounds like in reality, a lot of these kids are just not ready when they come on campus. A lot of resources are being spent on outreaching to these kids, flying them in all expenses paid, paying for college prep experiences for them during the summer after they are admitted, and setting aside special mentors and remedial classes for them once they arrive. Professors are complaining, but they also want to help these kids. I support efforts to advance upward mobility (the world is too unfair) and hope some of these kids do come out swinging on the other side, but there will be some who won’t make it. This is not a movie and life is not The Blind Side, but I understand why they try. In the long run, their well-intended crusade could end up fracturing long-standing institutions; you can already see that happening on campuses. I guess to them, that’s a risk worth taking.

America is an idealistic country and a young country so we always try to force things to happen sooner. In general, I tend to think that’s a good thing. In countries that have been around longer and are more practical like the UK, they let poor kids rise to the top on their own and somehow make it to Oxbridge from dirt poor families, but those kids are rare and typically white. Tuition is also much lower there so the economic barriers are not as high if the universities don’t go out of their way to manufacture a special path for the poor kids. [/quote]

FGLI encapsulates the issue.

First Generation - Why would you give a preference to less prepared kids whose parents did not go to college?  If they have the initiative to apply to college at all, there is a college somewhere that will take them. Community college if nowhere else.  And then the next generation after them will reach a little higher on the ladder and the generation higher still until they become UMC parents that start worrying about downward social mobility.  Why does all the social mobility have to happen in one generation?  Why do they need to be represented beyond their ability warrants at the most selective colleges and universities in America?

Low income - I understand that low income students need money to attend college but once again, but why do they have to attend colleges that are more selective than their abilities would warrant?  Why can't this happen over several generations?  Make colleges more affordable, sure, have lower standards based on income?  Why?  Sure it is harder for people with fewer resources to achieve the same level of mastery but they have in fact only achieved their actual level of academic mastery.[/quote] 
Low income students have less options for college, and most colleges are not as cheap as the top colleges will be for them. They also typically can’t take on steep loans, because their parents’ credit is poor. State schools can actually put many into a decent amount of debt compared to going to a top college. There’s also no evidence they are less prepared, that’s just dcum classist nonsense. Please read the privileged poor.[/quote]

DP here. There’s lots of evidence that they aren’t prepared. State testing scores, math and reading levels, placement test results and performance once they are in college. Kids from low performing schools with uneducated parents as a whole don’t catch up once they go to college. The gap in missing skills is too big.

People forget that the path to immigration for Asian immigrants has been graduate school, H1B or E something. This doesn’t mean that all Asians are more intelligent because of their race, far from it! It does mean that the population of Asian Americans in the US has a far higher IQ range than Hispanic Americans whose path was different. If the pathway to the US from Latin American countries was highly educated professional skills rather than manual labor it would be different. This can change over generations but not as fast as the education system is falsely portraying.[/quote]

It is true that many disadvantaged kids enter college academically behind those kids that have had more opportunity. (It is hard to take Calc if your school doesn't offer it.) Once admitted, however, kids from low-income first-gen backgrounds are just as likely to graduate from selective schools as their wealthier and more robustly-prepared peers.This is despite any initial skills gap. Further, lifetime outcomes for FGLI kids graduating from top schools are vastly better than those of peers who attended less-selective schools.  While it is true that lifetime earnings slightly lag those of privileged grads, much of this is influenced by debt, familial obligations, and lack of generational wealth buffering or transfer.[/quote]

It depends.

Based on a study of UC graduates, going to better schools helped the income of hispanics but not blacks.[/quote]

That isn't what that study said, though. Rather, it confirmed that educational prospects were lowered for both groups when shunted from selective to non-selective UC's. Further, the reason that incomes did not decline amongst black students in the cohort shunted from selective to non-selective UC's was because more opted not enroll there, but to attend Ivy leagues instead. [/quote]

I am looking at the bleemer paper now now.  Can you point to the page where the black kids that didn't get into UCLA ended up going to ivy?[/quote]
Page 142, though I read it in an interview with the author where he was directly questioned about this result. The paper also mentions the small sample size of black UC applicants as problematic when generalizing about outcomes. Certainly you would not extrapolate these results to the US at large.[/quote]

"While Prop 209 caused a [bold]small number[/bold] of mostly Black URM
UC applicants to enroll at out-of-state Ivy+ institutions, the effect
of their exit from California on the presented wage statistics can
be narrowly bounded. Consider, for example, the number of years
in which URM applicants earn at least $100,000 in the 6–16 years
after UC application. Observationally, URM Ivy+ enrollees are
about 15 percentage points less likely than other top-AI-quartile
applicants to work in California annually, and almost one-third of
URM Ivy+ enrollees who work in California earn over $100,000
between 6 and 16 years after UC application. Given the 0.5 (1.0)
percentage point increase in Ivy+ enrollment among URM (Black)
UC applicants after Prop 209, this implies an expected decline in
the number of years earning over $100,000 of about 0.003 (0.005),
small changes relative to the 0.08 fewer high-earning years among
URM applicants and the 0.11-year gap between the estimated effects of Prop 209 on Black and Hispanic applicants reported in
Table IV.

This seems to be saying the opposite of what you claimed and supported what I claimed.[/quote]

Look at this language qualifying the comparison:

"While the wages of Hispanic students sharply declined following Prop 209 relative
to academically comparable non-URM applicants, there is little
such evidence for Black applicants *(though their smaller sample
size results in larger standard errors)*

Further,

"This suggests that while UC’s affirmative action provided long-run wage
returns to Hispanic students, its average labor market benefits to
Black Californians may have been small, *although this finding is
tempered by Black applicants’ wider confidence intervals and the
unavailability of a Black-specific ACS wage distribution (due to
small sample size).*

The authors are clear that the confidence intervals are wide and the study may lack statistical power to discern exact outcomes for the black population. The authors attempted to show that the effects of an alternate Ivy pathway for black students should be minimal, but can't conclusively say. The lack of ACS data can't help.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics