Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins have written a piece for Brookings titled “Five Myths About Our Land of Opportunity.”  None of it’s new to those who’ve paid much attention to these things in recent years. What’s interesting, though, is the seeming contradiction in Myths 1 and 4.

1. Americans enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries.

Actually, some other advanced economies offer more opportunity than ours does. For example, recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they’re adults.

If you are born into a middle-class family in the United States, you have a roughly even chance of moving up or down the ladder by the time you are an adult. But the story for low-income Americans is quite different; going from rags to riches in a generation is rare. Instead, if you are born poor, you are likely to stay that way. Only 35 percent of children in a family in the bottom fifth of the income scale will achieve middle-class status or better by the time they are adults; in contrast, 76 percent of children from the top fifth will be middle-class or higher as adults.

[...]

4. If we want to increase opportunities for children, we should give their families more income.

Of course money is a factor in upward mobility, but it isn’t the only one; it may not even be the most important. Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent. (We define middle class as having an income of at least $50,000 a year for a family of three.)

Many American families need supplements to their incomes in the form of food stamps, affordable housing and welfare payments. But such aid should not be given unconditionally. First, the public is concerned that unconditional assistance will end up supporting those who are not trying to help themselves. Second, new research in economics and psychology has shown that individuals frequently behave in ways that undermine their long-term welfare and can benefit from a government nudge in the right direction.

And third, policies with strings attached have had considerable success. One example is the 1996 welfare reform law, which required most adult recipients to get jobs, and dramatically increased employment and lowered overall child poverty. In the midst of a recession, we can’t expect everyone to work. But social policies will be more successful if they encourage people to do things that bring longer-term success.

What this seems to say is that “opportunity” is not what keeps the children of the poor from economic progress.  Rather, it’s the passing along of poor habits and values.

The poor, by and large, are those who have made bad decisions:  Dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock, and been satisfied with government supported subsistence living.  Their children, in turn, are trapped in the same pattern of behavior by being surrounded by a culture that sees these things as the norm and actively discourages responsible behavior.

This point is emphasized when one looks at the part I omitted from Myth 1:

The United States is exceptional, however, in the opportunity it offers to immigrants, who tend to do comparatively well here. Their wages are much higher than what they might have earned in their home countries. And even if their pay is initially low by American standards, their children advance quite rapidly.

And Myth 3:

3. Immigrant workers and the offshoring of jobs drive poverty and inequality in the United States.
Although immigration and trade are often blamed, a more important reason for our lack of progress against poverty and our growing inequality is a dramatic change in American family life. Almost 30 percent of children now live in single-parent families, up from 12 percent in 1968. Since poverty rates in single-parent households are roughly five times as high as in two-parent households, this shift has helped keep the poverty rate up; it climbed to 13.2 percent last year. If we had the same fraction of single-parent families today as we had in 1970, the child poverty rate would probably be about 30 percent lower than it is today.

Among women under age 30, more than half of all births now occur outside marriage, driving up poverty and leading to more intellectual, emotional and social problems among children.

So, again, the problem is behavioral rather than one of raw “opportunity” in any macro sense.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that those who came up poor had the same advantages as the children of the wealthy and the upper middle class.  The latter were much more likely to be surrounded by role models that steered them in the right direction.  Further, there are huge advantages conferred by wealth and connections, such as a much greater likelihood of getting a good primary and secondary education and not only going on to college but a much higher propensity of going to a “good” school that opens up doors much harder to walk through for those who went to Podunk State Directional University.

This is interesting, too: “we have seen a growing tendency among well-educated men and women to marry each other, exacerbating income disparities.”  My strong guess is that well-educated men have always married bright, socially adept women.  But those sort of women are now likely to be college educated.  Further, beyond the social advantages marrying that sort of women always brought, the fact that most married women continue to work outside the home even after they have children means that there are economic incentives as well.

UPDATE:  Dave Schuler amplifies my point above about culture:

Many of the poor live in nearly self-contained communities and their exposure to the breadth of possibilities in the United States is really quite limited. There are places where the only lives that the kids can imagine for themselves are pimp, prostitute, hustler, professional athlete, performer, or cop. Becoming an accountant or a hospital administrator is unimaginable.

Gary Lewandowski and David Strohmetz, psychology professors at Monmouth University, argue at Inside Higher Ed that college professors have unrealistic expectations of their students.  They begin poorly, with several paragraphs of the “both professors and students have shortcomings” variety.  But they eventually hit on an essential truth:

We run the risk of using our own past experience as the default comparison group. This presents two problems. First, our recollection of our own college experience may suffer from retrospective biases where we recall things more favorably than they were. Did we really do all of our reading? Did we really avoid procrastinating? Did we truly devote ourselves to our coursework? Were we really attentive in class 100 percent of the time? Certainly, we are prone to some degree of rosy retrospection.

The second problem is that even if we have perfect and bias-free retrospection, it is likely that you were not a typical college student. In fact, it is much more likely that you went on to become a professor because you were not a typical student.

This is, of course, exactly right.  It’s a trap that I fell into more than once when I was teaching.   And Lewandowski and Strohmetz are correct that “we should be careful to avoid portraying our personal academic experiences and motivations as the benchmark for comparisons.”

And I think this is right, too:

By focusing on student deficiencies, you may inadvertently perpetuate the problem. Case in point, by developing a mindset that students have significant deficiencies, you may become more prone to developing a confirmatory bias that leads you to more easily identify and remember students’ deficiencies. Worse, negative expectations about students might lead you to act in a way (perhaps unknowingly) that elicits negative behaviors from students.

For example, if you became convinced that your class was unenthusiastic, you might devote less effort to your next lecture because quite frankly “why bother? They aren’t interested anyway.” Thus, your next lecture is subsequently less engaging, and the students are, as you predicted, unenthusiastic. By identifying and resisting this self-defeating pattern, you can take steps to avoid it. After all, you are the person with the most influence on the classroom and have the most ability to produce the desired change.

On the other hand, this misses the mark:

In reality, we are much more like our students than we care to acknowledge. Who among us can say they have read all of the recent journals in their field, have never submitted a less than perfect manuscript or grant proposal, have never procrastinated on a project, have never missed a deadline, have never been late to class, have never skipped a meeting, or have not paid astute attention while a speaker provided information? If you have any doubt about this last one, I urge you to look around the room during your next faculty meeting to see how many of your colleagues are otherwise occupied.

This is, of course, all true.  But it misses the point:  We’re held accountable for this behavior.  We’re ultimately judged on the quality of our work, our desirability as colleagues, and all the rest.

Yes, it’s unreasonable to grade freshmen in our survey courses as if they were prospective graduate students and professional colleagues.  But it’s not only reasonable but vital for professors to treat students as young adults.  Being penalized for tardiness and absence, failure to do the assigned readings, and the like can serve as a powerful incentive to behave more responsibly.  And, certainly, the consequences for doing these things in college are markedly less severe than after joining the workforce.

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying.  But she makes a good point here about the fact that those who enable cheating never seem to get much attention:

Everybody notices the crooked defiant coach, the hapless sputtering president, the anonymous guys on the academic support staff who sit next to the players as they take the online quizzes and tell them what the answers are — but the professors who make the courses… who police the department for evidence of academic integrity…

These guys are the brains behind the operation! Lose the whore in Human Development and the stooge in Sociology, and game’s off, people. And yet “the public face,” as the New York Times puts it, of SUNY’s scandal is Sally Dear, a mere adjunct in Chair Leo Wilton’s department.

UD understands that you need whores up and down the line to produce outcomes like Binghamton’s and Auburn’s. Without “see no evil apologists” like Donna Shalala (who may be about to hire the most disgraced medical school professor in the country to run her school’s psychiatry department), the University of Miami couldn’t field what was recently the most violent team in university football; without national embarrassment T.K. Wetherell running it, Florida State couldn’t produce the biggest sports cheating scandal in the country, etc. But why overlook the tenured department chairs who use their curricular and hiring powers to turn large academic units into national laughingstocks?

Indeed, you’d think professors and department heads would get in especial trouble given that their mission is theoretically unclouded, whereas college presidents and athletic directors have terrific pressure to win at all costs.

Of course, if the system won’t even punish serial cheaters like John Calipari — who get caught cheating, leave their programs in shambles, and then move on unscathed to do the same elsewhere for more money — then it seems silly to bother with the small fish.

A recent survey of Oklahoma public high school students found that the overwhelming majority can’t answer even simple questions about U.S. government and history.

A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens. About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.

Below are the questions and results:

Question		% of Students Who Answered Correctly
What is the supreme law of the land?		28
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?		26
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?		27
How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?		10
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?		14
What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?		61
What are the two major political parties in the United States?		43
We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?		11
Who was the first President of the United States?		23
Who is in charge of the executive branch?		29

Shocking, no?

This meme is spreading through the blogosphere with the consensus being that our education system is failing and our students are dumber than a bag of hammers.

But here’s the thing:  I simply don’t believe these results are accurate.   I taught Politics 101 to college freshmen for a decade, so I’m under no illusion that our kids have a strong working knowledge of how our system works.  (Indeed, having administered basic geography tests as part of my World Politics course, I’m shocked that 61% not only know the Atlantic Ocean but that they know east from west.)  I could see students not knowing the answers to several of the questions above, especially framed as they are.  But, seriously, your average 6-year-old knows who George Washington is.  They couldn’t tell you anything about his administration, of course, but they know:  wooden teeth, chopped down cherry tree, couldn’t tell a lie, Martha, and 1st president.  It’s, frankly, trivia.  (And hagiography in the case of the cherry tree fable.)  But they know it nonetheless.

Tom Maguire took the time to click the link to the actual survey results. He observes, “in defense of the Oklahomans, a ten question test was administered by telephone to one thousand high school students. That has to be an unfamiliar format for the respondents, and probably not all of them gave it their best shot. Still, this is pretty grim.”

Actually, it’s worse than that.  The exam was commissioned by a conservative activist organization whose mission is to show how lousy public schools are so as to advocate for home schooling and private, religious schools.  Read the long diatribe that serves as the press release for the survey’s results.

Here’s how they describe the methodology:

In Oklahoma, the telephone surveyors called a sample of 1,000 public high-school students and read the following statement: “On the next 10 questions, I will be asking you questions about American government and history. Give me your best answer, and it is permissible to respond ‘I don’t know.’”

Guess what the most popular answer was on just about every question was.  Yes sir: “I don’t know.”  It was the majority response on the two parts of the Congress (58%) and who’s in charge of the executive branch (51%) question and was in the 40’s on three others.  It was the number one answer on eight of ten questions.

How many of those were actually non-responses?  Given the purpose of the exam, I wouldn’t be at all shocked if the survey firm wasn’t instructed to code non-responses as “I don’t know” rather than going on to a student who would take the time to give thoughtful responses.  (The only thing holding back my confidence in this regard is that the Atlantic Ocean question is listed 6th and got a very high right answer rate.)

Interestingly, too, the right answer was the plurality actual response answer on almost every question.   And the runner-up answers were, for the most part, non-idiotic.  So, 17% thought the Declaration of Independence was the supreme law of the land, compared to 28% correctly identifying the Constitution and 41% “I don’t know.”  Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Adams were the most popular wrong answers on 1st president.

The chief “wrong” answer on the “Who is in Charge of the Executive Branch” question was “the Governor,” which garnered 10%.  That’s actually right, since the question doesn’t specify federal or state.  Similarly, shouldn’t the 11% who answered that the two parties are Communist and Republican be scored correctly?  (I jest, of course.)

Again, I’m not Pollyannish on how much our kids know.  In 2001, Steven Taylor had a bonus question on a multiple-choice test he administered to 101 students at the university where we both taught at the time asking who the vice president was.  A woefully small number got it right.  (In fairness, Dick Cheney was  new in office and much less controversial than he’d be later.  Also, Steve’s eldest son, then perhaps 6, knew the answer.)   But a telephone survey of 17-year-olds who have no incentive whatsoever to take it seriously administered by a group that wants to prove how lousy our schools are is simply unfair.

UPDATE:  Kevin Drum emails to point out something I totally missed:  “not one single student got even 8 answers right.”

Kevin says, “That’s just not credible.”

No, it isn’t.   Indeed, few people got more than 4 right!  My strong guess is that:  1) they rotated the questions, rather than asking them in the order above and 2) the vast majority of students hung up after no more than three or four questions.

Boston’s Bunker Hill Community College is experimenting with midnight classes.  Wick Sloane, who teaches a full class from 11:45 pm to 2:45 am, explains:

Two thirds of my class this morning enrolled at midnight because all the day, evening and weekend sections were full. The rest have night jobs, most of them at hospitals, and one is a taxi dispatcher. Almost all plan to go on to a four-year college. One loves physics. One is earning the credits to transfer to become a doctor of pharmacology. It was midnight or put their ambitions on hold.

Is this a good news story, or what?

No. This is a national nightmare. Not a cry but a scream for help from these students. Sure, it’s great that community colleges are finding ways to respond to the huge enrollment increases they are seeing. But, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, do we want to be citizens in a country that forces its poorest students to go to college at midnight?

So, why not just offer more classes during reasonable hours?  Sloane blames federal education policy,

But actually providing community colleges with enough money to meet the demands of their very hard working students? Actually give these institutions enough money so that there are professors and classroom space before midnight? No one is really talking about that – and students are being denied sections in massive numbers, nationwide this year.

[...]

As I’ve noted before, the federal tax policies of we, the people, through deductions on donations and tax-free endowments, subsidize Ivy League and other wealthy-college students by at least $20,000 per student. A single mother at a community college or a 23-year-old student supporting her parents are lucky to win a full federal Pell Grant. Harvard lost $8 billion from its endowment and Williams College, where I went, lost hundreds of millions by taking their charitable, federal tax-deducted dollars to the dog track. So what? We haven’t changed any of the federal tax rules, and these wealthy colleges are out panhandling for more money.

But what does any of that have to do with scheduling classes during the day? Presumably, teaching at night is more expensive than teaching during the day given that administration, climate control, and the like are largely fixed costs.  Maybe there simply aren’t enough classrooms available?  I’ve never seen that in the institutions where I taught but maybe it happens at Bunker Hill.

And what does that have to do with Pell Grants?  Presumably, if it were easier to get subsidized tuition, there would be more students competing for space.  (I’ve emailed Sloane and will update if he responds.)

Interesting sidebar to the story:  The guy who came up with the idea of midnight scheduling is John P. Reeves, chair of the behavioral sciences department, who’s been at Bunker Hill since 1967.  He was the inspiration for the Robin Williams character in “Good Will Hunting.”

UPDATE: I’ve heard back from Professor Sloane and, indeed, the issue is simply one of space:  “This semester, yes, all the classes, evening and weekends and days are full.  There is no room.  The registrar has added 109 new sections.”  He agrees that more Pell Grants would add to the problem but he’d welcome it nonetheless.  I gather, then, that this is just one of his frustrations with the system and largely unrelated to the midnight classes phenomenon.

It’s interesting how these problems vary from state to state.  In Alabama, the state where I got all three of my degrees (four if you count a high school diploma) and did the majority of my teaching, higher education is woefully underfunded.  But one can scarcely throw a rock without hitting a community college, thanks to George Wallace’s logrolling.  For that matter, there are really far too many four year schools, too, in a smallish state with only 4.3 million people.   So, while money for faculty and technology was limited, classroom space was always in abundant supply.  That was true in Georgia and Tennessee, the other states in which I taught, as well.

Matt Yglesias takes mock exception to President Obama’s assertion to our nation’s schoolchildren that “You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.” He notes that, “My father dropped out of tenth grade and has had a totally solid career as a novelist and screenwriter.”

Indeed, as several commenters point out, all manner of people drop out of school and wind up having enormously successful careers in business, the arts, and athletics.

Presumably, though, such people are covered by the president’s exhortation.   I’m sure Rafael Yglesias not only learned quite a bit at the elite private schools he attended for nine years but continued to work and train to become successful as a writer.   Certainly, Bill Gates didn’t stop learning after he dropped out of college to found Microsoft.  And even rock stars and athletes have to work and train and learn to excel in their chosen endeavors.

For especially talented and self-motivated people, formal education may actually be a hindrance to achieving their goals, since it at the very least requires divided concentration.  For most, however, that process will expose them to new insights and discipline that will improve their chances at figuring out what they’re good at and making a living doing it.

Washington Monthly has put out its annual answer to the US News college rankings, even going so far as to launch a new blog devoted to the subject.

Steve Benen highlights some of the findings:

* Only one of the U.S. News top ten universities — Stanford — makes the Washington Monthly’s top ten, while high profile institutions such as Princeton, Duke and Penn fail to even crack Washington Monthly’s Top 25.

* Some of top universities on the Washington Monthly list, like South Carolina State (#6) and Jackson State (#22), are non-elite “red state” schools buried in the lowest tiers of the U.S. News list.

* While all the top twenty U.S. News universities are private, thirteen of the top twenty Washington Monthly universities are public.

* The University of California system grabs the top three slots-including number-one-ranked Berkley — even as the state of California is slashing higher education funding.

* Women’s liberal arts colleges score well in the Washington Monthly rankings, with Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bryn Mawr and Wellesley all in the Top 10. Historically black institutions, such as Spelman and Morehouse, also make strong showings.

Steve says that “We want people to use this information to change the way they think about colleges and universities, the first step toward changing the institutions themselves.” As such, they “rank schools based on what they are doing for the country — by improving social mobility, producing research, and promoting public service.”

As a graduate of non-elite “red state” schools, Jacksonville State and the University of Alabama, I’m all in favor of a ranking system that puts an emphasis on bang for the buck rather than institutional prestige.  But, as I’ve noted before, I’m not sure substituting one set of biases for another is that big a step forward.

While the U.S. News guide managed to transform the way we thought of college education a generation ago, I continue to be skeptical that Washington Monthly’s answer will do the same.  As many of my readers noted two years ago, when the rankings had Texas A&M as the best college in the country (it’s since dropped to 5th) how many of the magazine’s board and senior contributors are going to send their kids to College Station for school if Cambridge and New Haven are options?  For that matter, are their new hires going to be coming from South Carolina State instead of Harvard?

Lisa Jack, who snapped this picture of Barack Obama in 1980 while they were students at Occidental College,

is a wee bit irritated that NORML repurposed it to create this poster:

Fair use satire? Or theft of intellectual property?

I’m not an attorney and intellectual property law is particularly complicated.  NORML is engaging in political satire, for which the courts have tended to grant substantial leniency, but also selling the posters for profit, which tends to limit fair use claims.

Regardless, it’s amusing that NORML has prominently placed a copyright notice on its creation.

Stacy McCain, who along with myself is among the most notable graduates of Jacksonville State University*, laments the sense of superiority that comes with the increasingly meritocratic nature of American higher education.  Essentially, because the Ivy Leagues are now more open to the most intellectually gifted students, its graduates believe they must therefore be the best and the brightest and are therefore entitled to everything they get.

This view amounts to a repeal of the American founding. If the graduates of elite institutions are exclusively qualified to govern, then most citizens are thereby adjudged incapable of the self-governance which was the ideal of the Founders.

Stacy ascribes this view to Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks and the Sarah Palin controversy but it’s actually quite widespread.  See, for example, this week’s bizarre dustup between Jack Cafferty and Alec Baldwin in which the former asserts that, while Baldwin isn’t qualified to run for Congress because he’s a mere actor, Al Franken is qualified to be a United States Senator on account of “He’s Harvard educated.”   Baldwin doesn’t so much dismiss the absurdity of that argument as point out he himself went to NYU.

Regardless, Stacy notes, while many of our brightest kids go to the Ivies, many do not.

Not every kid who scores well on standardized tests decides to orient his life toward graduating at the top of his high school class and attending an elite university. Those who elect to follow that treadmill of “gifted” programs and honors classes, who grind for an all-A average and organize their extra-curricular activities with an eye toward how it will look on their applications to Harvard, can be said to differ from other children (including children of equal or greater intelligence) in terms of temperament.

The Sully-Brooks “meritocratic” theory ignores the influence of temperament in the operation of the cognitive partition system. Our public education system, after all, is not operated by geniuses. As The Bell Curve points out, education majors are, on average, the stupidest category of college graduates.

Despite the special pleading (I have it on good authority — Stacy himself — that he was less than a model student) and irony of decrying a meritocracy of IQ while engaging in a different form of it, this is certainly true.  Not every very bright kid is good at sitting quietly in a classroom in his youth.  Certainly, I wasn’t; I routinely got A’s in my academic subjects and C’s in deportment well into junior high.

Stacy is also right that many academically talented students prefer to spend their time fixing cars, playing sports, chasing girls, and otherwise diverted from doing the things necessary to get into Harvard.  This is especially true of boys, for whom academic excellence is not necessarily the path to social popularity.  The quarterback on my high school football team, for example, went from being a grade school honor student to a rather mediocre student afterwards because of an accurate assessment of the short-term rewards.  (He went on to do well enough in college — Jax State, in fact — to wind up teaching and coaching at our high school.)

This, though, is even more important:

This, of course, doesn’t even begin to confront the “meritocratic” myth that socioeconomic class no longer presents obstacles to the bright-but-poor student’s admission to elite schools. Legacy admissions afford an important advantage to the children of alumni, and there is no point in a student applying for admission to a school that he could never afford to attend. (My own daughter was offered scholarships we couldn’t afford for her to accept.)

For all the talk of “diversity” at elite schools, their student bodies are overhwelmingly composed of young people from affluent backgrounds whose adolescence was consumed by a single-minded devotion to the goal of being admitted to a top university. It is their affluence and precocious ambition, rather than intelligence per se, that distinguishes them. Having excelled in bookish ambition, members of this elite then congratulate themselves on the proof of their superiority to others: Je suis un meritocrat!

I made decisions about both college and graduate school with affordability very much near the top of the list.  Beyond that, while I understood that Harvard and Yale and Princeton and MIT were great schools and graduating from one of them was beneficial, I had no clue how much difference it made.  Nor did I have any idea the degree to which there’s a pecking order below that.  (Something that’s even more true now than it was then.  The infamous US News ranking system, for example, started in 1983, the year I was applying for college.)

My college application process, then, was limited by issues of finances and a lack of cultural awareness of what mattered.   MIT is the only big time university I considered but I didn’t bother to apply because it was expensive to take all the tests and submit the various applications required.  (In hindsight, it was just as well as my math SATs weren’t competitive; I could likely have gotten into one of the lesser Ivies but not the world’s top engineering school.)  The schools to which I applied, then, were:  West Point, Annapolis, Air Force, the Coast Guard Academy, Alabama, and Jax State.    I got accepted at West Point, Alabama, and Jax State (with full scholarships at all three) and waitlisted at USCGA.  I also had Army, Navy, and Air Force ROTC scholarships that would have paid tuition and books anywhere I got in but the costs of living were not covered.

West Point was my first choice and I eagerly accepted but, alas, I didn’t fit in for a variety of reasons.  (Long story short, it was a jock school whose students were also exceptionally bright and I adjusted to the challenges too slowly, prioritized the wrong things, and ultimately couldn’t maintain the juggling act.)   When I left after three semesters with a 2.08 GPA, my scholarships were no longer available and I wound up at my safety school where, through a combination of ROTC and the Army Reserves, I was able to pay for tuition, books and incidentals while living with my parents a few miles away.

After four years in the Army, I wanted to get my PhD and applied to exactly one school: Alabama.  I was accepted but my going was contingent on getting a graduate assistantship that paid for tuition and books and provided a monthly stipend in exchange for working 20 hours a week.  Fortunately, I got one.  The combination of that and the GI Bill allowed me to graduate debt free three years later.

Had I known what I would just a few years later, I’d have applied to more schools.  But I reasonably figured that I wasn’t going to get into one of the great schools with a degree from Jax State and a mediocre GPA (owing to having transferred in all those credits from USMA) and had no understanding at all that there was a difference in attractiveness to hiring committees between, say, Alabama and Georgia, let alone between Alabama and North Carolina or Ohio State.

Money also matters at other points in the process, especially in the elite professions.  Many jobs in media and public policy, for example, require an entry level apprenticeship in DC or New York for little or no pay.  It never seriously occurred to me to apply for any internships or to take a job making next to nothing in a big city when a real paycheck was a ready alternative.  It’s not surprising, then, that kids with wealthier parents to supplement their earnings, predominate in these jobs.  And, considering that these same kids are more likely have gone to the right schools and be attractive to the selection committees, it’s a two-fer.  (This is a fascinating subject.  See “Unpaid Internships? No Such Thing,” “The Internship Racket,” “Progressive Non-Profit Work Only for the Privileged,” “Unpaid Interns Slaves to the System,” and “Are Unpaid Internships Destroying America?” for a variety of views.)

I don’t have any complaints about any of this, really.  I’ve been more fortunate than most, have been able to do the kind of work I enjoy doing for years, and have made a pretty good living.  But it’s undeniable that growing up in an elite household confers enormous advantages in preparation, connection, and understanding of the impact various choices have on the available paths later on.

My wife went to college at Southern Connecticut State, within walking distance of Yale, and has also done quite well for herself.  But she’d no doubt have been better off with a degree from Yale, provided she maintained the same work ethic.

Our daughter is only six months old, so we’re a little ways off from worrying about what college she’ll attend.  But chances are good that she’ll be able to go to the best school she can get into and that she’ll have a pretty good idea of the implications of various choices she faces.

______________________________

*I was going to make this joke before realizing we were both actually on the Wikipedia page, which makes it funnier.  I hasten to add that hundreds of JSU graduates of whom even fewer people have heard of than Stacy and myself include physicians, nurses, teachers, and military officers who have gone on to do far more important things in quiet obscurity.

Thomas Ricks believes that we should shutter West Point and the other service academies because they’re expensive and, as far as he can tell, they produce no better officers than ROTC.  Plus, their instructors don’t have PhDs, making them essentially junior colleges.

The first of these assertions is thinly sourced but worth exploring.   The second, though, is rather silly.  About a third of the academy professors are civilian PhDs and some percentage of the military faculties are PhDs, too.  Yes, most of them are still mid-career officers fresh out of a good master’s program.  But I’m not sure what evidence exists that the PhD — essentially a certification of proficiency in independent research — necessarily makes its bearer a more rigorous teacher of undergraduates.

Additionally, as his CNAS colleage Andrew Exum notes, Ricks seems to be under the illusion that closing West Point would mean more officers from Yale.  That ain’t necessarily so.  Indeed, as Jules Crittenden reminds us, many of the elite schools long ago shuttered their ROTC programs.

Ricks also suggests closing the war colleges while we’re at it, arguing that, “These institutions strike me as second-rate. If we want to open the minds of rising officers and prepare them for top command, we should send them to civilian schools where their assumptions will be challenged, and where they will interact with diplomats and executives, not to a service institution where they can reinforce their biases while getting in afternoon golf games.”

Indeed, the Services themselves now send a substantial number of their officers to civilian graduate programs and fellowships in lieu of the senior service colleges.  We get star field grade officers from each of the Services at the Atlantic Council for one-year stints and believe the exchange is mutually beneficial.

Then again, the typical graduate student at Harvard isn’t a thirty-something peer to a battalion commander honing his skills in anticipation of brigade command but a twenty-something brainiac right out of undergrad.   And the faculty at the war colleges are generally PhDs, including a healthy number of civilians, if perhaps too many retired colonels that have been recycled as “civilian” faculty.

Further, as Robert Farley adds, “the curriculum is much different than what you find in civilian graduate programs, and the faculty is allowed to work on policy-oriented topics that aren’t well supported in the rest of academia.” Exum agrees, explaining, “the American academy does not reward those who do strategic studies and military history. Very few history and political science departments have much room for military historians and security studies geeks like me. As Richard Betts and others have lamented, there are no ‘war studies’ departments in the United States. So the government might need to step in to make sure first-rate scholars like the Cronins (Patrick and Audrey), the Biddles (Steve and Tami Davis), Steve Metz, etc. have homes to continue their work.”

Beyond all that, it strikes me that some diversity is in order.  While it makes sense for most officers to continue to come from ROTC, it may well be worth the investment to cultivate those who want the immersion of a military academy and find the part-time exposure of ROTC insufficiently challenging.  Similarly, while it makes sense to send a goodly number of future flag officers to the Ivies and think tanks there’s something to be said for specialized training as well.   Having everyone follow exactly the same path may simply not produce the range of viewpoints and experiences we need.

UPDATE: Pat Lang says the academies are here to stay but agrees the war colleges have outlived their usefulness.

These mid-career schools were founded at the end of the Victorian age to provide advanced professional education for exceptionally promising officers.  They were created with European models in mind.  The “Ecole Superieur de Guerre,” and the “Kriegsakademie” were the models,  Over the years these schools have declined and degenerated until they are now third rate graduate schools, paper mills that grind out certificates with which officers can satisfy the bureaucratic demands of their services with regard to advanced degrees and promotion.  These schools are also expensive to run and, as Ricks says, they allow officers who need exposure to diversity of opinion to “hide” in an isolation that weakens the intellect rather than strengthens it.  These schools are still very selective.  One does not apply for attendance.  One is selected by a service wide board.   Sending the selected to good civilian Graduate schools as a substitute opportunity is an appealing alternative and that is done with some of the best selectees.  A representative group of civilian employees of the government are allowed to attend the war colleges.  The method of their selection is quite different.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I was selected for and graduated from the resident course at the Army War College.  It was a delightful but not very challenging year except for the chance it gave me to learn from the great Israeli/American Clausewitz scholar, Michael Handel.

Ed Ruggero, a USMA grad who has written a book about West Point, seconds my point about multiple sources:

But if diversity is an important goal (and I agree that it is), closing the federal service academies would be counter-productive. Some segment of the population with an interest in the armed forces as a career wants the academy experience–call it culture, bragging rights, challenge–and might not be willing to serve otherwise. If you lose this segment, diversity suffers.”

Retired Army LTG Walter Ulmer thinks the academies are a bargain:

West Point is the only institution of higher education devoted exclusively to creating leaders of character for our Army and the nation. Its graduates still lead from the front and are paying a high price in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tom Ricks continues to do good work. But his gears seem to be meshed regarding the academies. As an academic institution, West Point has produced more Rhodes Scholars than any university except Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; more Hertz Fellowships (”for rare young scientists and engineers,”) than any but MIT, Stanford, and Princeton; and even gained a high spot in the 2009 US News & World Report ratings of liberal arts colleges. Opportunities for leader development abound at West Point: a unique leadership laboratory and reservoir of standards for military professionalism. A true national treasure, given the price of things these days it may be the best return on the money that taxpayers can get!

But retired Navy captain Bob Schoultz, who has taught at both USNA and the Naval War College, thinks Ricks is on to something.

I continue to believe that the service academies and war colleges CAN offer the nation a uniquely positive service, and that questions such as Tom’s must regularly be asked to hold the institutions accountable to the society they serve, rather than the service cultures they often see themselves ordained to protect. Even the best institutions must regularly be jolted out of the self-congratulatory complacency that can take hold when excellent organizations come to believe their own propaganda and mythology.

Robert Reich points out that, if we make up a new way of counting unemployment, we’ve got a lot of unemployment:

The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who’d rather be working full time, it’s now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.

And, if we count people working full time who’d rather get paid a lot more money, put in fewer hours, and do things that are more fun, it’s now up to 99.9 percent. Virtually one in every one workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed!

QED:

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.

Despite skepticism with how he got there, I’m actually inclined to agree.  Bailing out bad companies is a stupid idea.  Lending a helping hand to people down on their luck, on the other hand, is something I can get behind.

Naturally, however, Reich loses me on implementation:

Energy independence and a non-carbon economy should be the equivalent of a war mobilization.

So, we should declare war on fossil fuels?  Will that go as well as the wars on drugs, crime, and poverty?

Hire Americans to weatherize and insulate homes across the land.

We’re going to have a WPA for caulking windows and blowing in insulation?!  Really?!  Not only would these people presumably be competing with people who currently do that sort of thing for a living but it would surely count as underemployment for the vast number of the recently unemployed.  Wouldn’t we rather, I dunno, get jobs that require some level of skill?

Don’t encourage General Motors or any other auto company to shrink. Use the auto makers’ spare capacity to make busses, new wind turbines, and electric cars (why let the Chinese best us on this?). Enlarge public transit systems.

So, we’re going to spend vast sums of money taking a giant leap back in personal freedom and convenience?  The automobile was a wonderful invention that made our lives radically better.  We’re going to give that up for buses and other forms of public transit?  Yee. Hah.

And while we’re at it, we’re going to thumb our noses at the trade regimes we’ve spent sixty years putting in place, subsidizing a pet industry that the Chinese would otherwise dominate in a free market?

Meanwhile, extend our educational infrastructure. So many young people are out of work that they should be using this time to improve their skills and capacities. Expand community colleges. Enlarge Pell Grants. Extend job-training opportunities to the unemployed, so they can learn new skills while they’re collecting unemployment benefits.

Outside Detroit, which was in its death throes before this crisis got underway, education and training isn’t the problem.  We’re not less educated than we were eighteen months ago. We’ve got Harvard MBAs out on the streets now.  We’re going to, what, send them to learn a trade?  Caulking windows, perhaps?

Finally, accelerate universal health care.

It always comes back to that, no?  It’s the Democratic Party’s version of cutting taxes.  It solves everything, dontcha know?

For years, there’s been talk of a wave of Baby Boomer faculty retirements that would finally break the logjam that has made it difficult for newly minted PhDs to find jobs. The waiting continues:

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”

Oh, and those old guys who were going to retire?

The anticipated wave of retirements by faculty members who are 60-something is likely to slow as retirement savings accounts and pensions wither, administrators and professors say. That means that some students who have finished postdoctoral fellowships and who expected to leave for faculty positions are staying put for another year, which in turn closes off an option for other graduate students coming up the ladder.

This particular set of issues was unpredictable but, alas, the general trend was.  Even once the retirements finally happen, it’s unlikely that they’ll be replaced with tenure track hires.  Rather, there will likely just be more people on the adjunct track.

There are, I hasten to add, ways of making a living other than teaching college.

UPDATE: There’s always law school, you say?   Not so fast.

Photo by Flickr user stitching gremlin under Creative Commons license.

Matt Yglesias challenges Lisa Schiffren’s assertion that “The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians).”

Matt counters, reasonably enough, that guys who move furniture for a living work very hard and that “even your basic retail employee needs to be on her feet for hours and hours at a time while ‘executives’ [sit in] comfy chairs.”

There’s no doubt that many low paying jobs require a lot of physical effort.  Indeed, most of them are more physically demanding than most of the jobs that pay very well.

On the other hand, as Matt acknowledges offhandedly, those jobs have very low barriers to entry.  One doesn’t study hard for four years of high school, four years of college, and three to eight years of professional schooling to become a mover or a stockboy or a stenographer.    That’s a lot of work that’s generally put in while deferring income that those who took lesser paying jobs were earning right away.

Another key difference is that people who schlep boxes for a living don’t take their work home with them.  They’re not thinking about better ways to get a piano down the stairs on the weekend or stressing about how much packing tape they’re using on the drive home.

Of course, we don’t pay people based on how hard they work any more than we grade students for how hard they studied.  Ultimately, it’s about how much value others place on your services and how much competition there is for them.  But the idea that an executive isn’t working hard because his chair is confortable is rather silly.

Photo by Flickr user sanden, used under Creative Commons license.

Joining the College grading expectations debate a little late, Alan Jacobs makes a point most of us glossed over entirely:  even if we decide that it matters how hard the students worked matters, how would we measure that?

Monitoring students on webcams to see how much time they spend writing, or with their noses in books? Even that wouldn’t let me know how much of the time they’re really concentrating and how much daydreaming. Have then hooked up, then, to constant brain-scanning devices, so that I can see what parts of their brain are active, and how often?

More interesting, though, is the bottom line:

That would help a lot, but short of that, I think the only option — and as far as I can tell this is the one that many students want — is for the students themselves to decide how hard they worked. But if we’re supposed to give them grades based on how hard they worked, and they’re the ones who determine how hard they worked, then they’re basically grading themselves. Now that would be a dream come true for me as well as for them, but it’s not really a workable solution. Especially since most students I know have one real criterion for determining how hard they work on an assignment: how late they stay up the night before the assignment is due.

Quite so.

Yes, there are students in every class — especially survey courses taken by non-majors — without the aptitude to master the material.  There are far more students, though, who simply have no concept of what it means to do the required work.

It’s also true, admittedly, that the converse is true:  Many students who get good grades don’t work all that hard, either.   Rather, they have a natural aptitude for the material and/or test taking.  Or they can pull an all nighter and crank out a paper that’s better than most of their peers turn in.

Photo by Flickr user foundphotosli under Creative Commons license.

College students increasingly expect to be rewarded for trying hard, Max Roosevelt claims in NYT:

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement. “I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading. “I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.

Aaron M. Brower, the vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered another theory. “I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

Given that I heard the same pleas fifteen years ago when I first started teaching, I’m dubious of the idea that this is something new.  We all had students who felt entitled to good grades on the basis of how hard they thought they tried, because they got good grades in other classes or — and this was always my favorite — because “It’s my major!”

King Banian, a hard-hearted economist, tells students “I don’t grade inputs.”

I have tried to overcome this by telling students they start with zero and must reach certain marks to attain grades. (I don’t use curves for grading.) Never use -2 or -5 when grading. Give +7 or +2 instead. Add, don’t subtract. A dean at Vanderbilt in the article uses the right noun-verb combination: “students make grades,” not “teachers give grades.”

[...]

These students have not been taught correctly. Freshman classes are meant to impart values for learning, and one of them is “you are graded in life on what you accomplish, not how much sweat you produced.”

He was referring to, among others, this quote:

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. [Jason] Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?” “If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

This also caught the attention of my sometimes co-blogger Chris Lawrence, a political scientist at Texas A&M International, who displays a shared bias among many in the academy:

It will come to no surprise to any observer of contemporary collegiate culture that Mr. Greenwood is a kinesiology major, often a refuge for future gym teachers and meathead football coaches who think the education school’s curriculum is far too challenging. “Doing everything the teacher asks of [you]” isn’t A-worthy; doing everything the teacher asks of you better than most other people do it and achieving mastery thereof is A-worthy. And I say that as someone who has historically been a relatively lenient grader.

[...]

Snark aside, I think “consumer demand” by students is a less compelling aspect of the problem—or at least the dimension of the problem I see at TAMIU, which is rather different than the dimension I observed teaching at selective private institutions—than the complicity of faculty and—particularly—administrators in encouraging faculty to reward students for occupying space and going through the motions in a misguided effort to retain students (and, perhaps more importantly, their associated free money from state and federal coffers—the marginal cost of student instruction is essentially zero from an administrative perspective) in college who have neither the interest nor actual need to complete a four-year degree.

I had a similar experience at Troy State, where deans and higher administrators took the position that the students shouldn’t be held to high standards because, after all, they were from rural Alabama and the mere fact they were in college trying to better themselves was a big achievement.

UPenn English prof Erin O’Connor blames “the self-esteem movement” and offers an anecdote:

When I was in grade school (public, Indianapolis, 1970s), report cards were such a big deal. You’d get them every six weeks or so–these intimidating folded documents on stiff colored paper. The teacher would have hand-written your grades for everything from spelling to reading to math to science on them. There would also be handwritten comments directed to your parents on the back, and a place where your parents had to sign to say they’d seen the report card. We had to take the cards home to our parents in manila envelopes, and then bring them back to school the next day with the signatures on them. It was a big deal, all that kid-style accountability.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened–but I would guess it was along about third grade. The format of the report cards changed, and suddenly we didn’t just get a single grade for each subject. We got two: one for achievement, and one for effort. You might get an A for handwriting–but you’d perhaps get a B for effort. Or you might get a B in math, but an A for effort. It could go both ways–and it was a genuine way for the teacher to register both effort that was not translating into a good grade, and a good grade that was gotten without trying.

But I think that subtlety has been flattened out over the years; somewhere along the line, introducing grades for effort has translated into the assumption that effort matters more than achievement, or even that effort is the achievement. Along the way, “effort” has also been diminished; no longer necessarily synonymous with really giving your all, it’s become something students can gesture at, or approximate, by just going through the motions of showing up, more or less doing the reading, more or less completing the work.

Florida International lawprof Howard Wasserman offers the depressing observation,

The story deals with undergrads, but surely the same attitudes have or soon will trickle into law schools. Apparently, the legal writing listserv has been talking about this all day today, with one commentator capturing the issue as it relates to law school: “I think putting in a lot of effort should merit not getting sued for malpractice. What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

I have not yet had a student dispute a final grade on these grounds. But I have had a student demand to know why he received no credit for class participation (which is worth 10 % of the final grade) when he was in class and prepared every day–but never spoke once the entire semester. He did not quite seem to understand that a) you don’t get credit for showing up, since that is the independently required as part of the class; b) it’s not entirely clear that you “participated” in class if you never actually, you know, participate; and c) even if doing the reading were enough, how am I supposed to know that you’ve done the reading if you never speak.

Timothy Burke, a Swarthmore College history prof, is reflective.

My personal sensibility shifts a bit from year to year. I’m not terribly consistent in my internal understanding of what I’m doing when I grade. In general, I tend to imagine the B as the default grade, and an A as a grade that says, “You did something considerably better than ordinary”. The C means, “This is really not as good as ordinary work”. Failures are either, “This is dramatically worse than the norm” or “You blew this off, and I can see that you did”.

I freely confess that I tend to have a slightly different understanding of how this scaling works out based on my understanding of what a student is capable of. The more I’ve graded a student, the more I form an expectation about what they can do. A student who has done consistently excellent, original work for me is likely to draw a much more negative reaction from me for doing ordinary work than a student who has done fine, decent but undistinguished work consistently. If I graded blind, I suspect I’d still have some pretty good guesses over time about the identity of writers, but maybe that would help shake up some of my assumptions. I’m weighing trying to do that next year for the first time.

Among non-academics, TNR’s Michelle Cottle seems most worked up by the report.

While I understand the self-defeating doubt that we’re trying to short-circuit here, there are, practically speaking, lots of ways to fail–much less fail to get an A. One of those is by not having much of an aptitude for a particular area of study. Not all of us are equipped to be rocket scientists, economists, or playwrights, just as not all of us are equipped to be actors or professional basketball players. If anything, a student who tries really, really, really hard at something and still repeatedly falls short might benefit from realizing that his talents lie elsewhere. (As could the rest of us: Not to state the obvious, but I don’t want a brain surgeon who graduated at the top of his class because he had perfect attendance. I want one who is an artist with a scalpel.) Go ahead: Aim for the stars. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do something. But if you actually try that thing and it turns out that you’re not so hot at it, don’t whine about unfair grading. Acknowledge that you have major room for improvement and decide where to go from there. The sooner kids learn how to deal with failure and move on, the less likely we are to have a bunch of whiny, fragile, self-entitled, poorly qualified adults wandering around wondering why their oh-so-stellar efforts aren’t properly appreciated in the real world.

Bruce McQain also gets on the “self-esteem” bandwagon.

When little Johnny gets a trophy and a party for being on a 12th place Pee-Wee Baseball team – the very same reward the first place team gets – why in the world wouldn’t he correlate “effort” with “result”? In his case his effort landed him the same rewards as the first place team. So 12th is just as much an “A” as 1st to him, isn’t it? And he gave his all to end up in 12th, so that just has to be good enough, right?  Multiply that over a 18 year life time and it isn’t difficult to understand where this sense of entitlement comes from, is it?

Surprisingly, Megan McArdle, the world’s tallest female econoblogger, is sympathetic to the students:

I’m of two minds on this.  The purpose of a grade is to show mastery (or not) of some volume of material.  Is it fair to set the bar higher for me than for someone who isn’t as capable?  Or vice versa?  Is it fair to send the signal to employers that I wasn’t up to scratch even when I did objectively better work than some other student?

Maybe.  After all, one of the things that employers and graduate schools are presumably looking for is ability to exert oneself consistently.  Still, doesn’t this penalize students who develop a relationship with a professor?

Jacob Levy, a McGill political scientist, thinks much of this is “overwrought.”

[I]n any field of endeavor, “But I tried very hard!” is the first response to being told that you didn’t do a good job. It’s not strictly speaking relevant, but it’s part of how a person defends him- or herself, and tried to redeem his or her standing in the eyes of the other person. If you really make it the grounds of an appeal of a grade, of course, that’s a silly mistake. But the mere fact that you can find some undergrad sentences that express a sense of desert and entitlement doesn’t mean that there’s some new crisis wave of such things.

[...]

[A]t the end of the day: I like undergrads, and in my experience they try to do well. To the extent that they don’t understand what it means to do well, I think they respond well to having it explained to them. Making fun of them, by name, in the pages of the New York Times doesn’t seem to me like the way to go. Neither does the Allan Bloom/ Harvey Mansfield approach of elevating “Kids these days!” into social criticism.

I think that’s largely right.   Professors were almost invariably excellent students, for whom their subject matter came easily and who were enthusiastically interested in their field of study.  They were not, therefore, typical undergrads.

Further, as Burke notes, there’s a wide disconnect in grading practices from professor-to-professor and department-to-department.  While that’s life, it’s also incredibly confusing to a teenager trying to get decent marks and figure out how the game is played.   I was a much tougher than average grader, holding to the idea that “C is average, B is above average, and A is excellent.”  But, when most professors are grading on a curve with B as the default median and A merely an above average grade, it’s not entirely unreasonable for students to be frustrated wtih the inequity.