Reply to Wilson/College Matriculation?

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[quote=Anonymous]
I hope that those "making policy" will know that comparing absolute numbers of people in two populations makes no sense when the population size is so different. Singapore has all of 5.5 million or so in the whole country versus ~320 million in the US.

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Singapore has four official national languages and comes top, or near the top, of the PISA listings for math.

The US has one national language. English.

We got a scholarship to a private.

[/quote]

This post is unintentionally illustrative of the point about diversity.

Unlike most countries, the US has ZERO official languages due to the diversity of languages spoken here.  Dozens of languages are spoken in the US, including indigenous languages in Native American communities and a huge number of immigrant languages, the largest of course being English.  For many non-English world languages, the largest or second largest community of speakers in the world is here rather than in the country of origin.  Speaking of Singapore, we do have larger communities of almost every Singapore language group than Singapore does --- 250K Tamil speakers vs about 170K in Singapore, 3.4 million Chinese speakers (all dialects) versus 1.7 million for all dialects in Singapore.  The only possible exception is Malay, for which I didn't immediately see US data (and which I know nothing about).  [b]This is the kind of American history/culture 101 stuff that's important if you hope to make policy, participate in politics or run an HR department in a city like LA or New York (or Sheboygan Wisconsin, where board meetings for many companies were until recently conducted in German).

The ability to work with data like this and not just confidently spout nonsense about language and ethnicity is an important skill, and one that Wilson students are more likely to have than many others.  But yes, math is important too, and is something that Wilson could do much better[/b].[/quote][/quote]

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