Even if your kid is good at sports in high school, gets a scholarship, and excels in college, there’s almost no way they are going to go pro.

Scott Soshnick of Bloomberg tweeted a link today to the NCAA’s official estimated probabilities that athletes in six major sports become professionals.

Only one sport (baseball) had more than 2% of NCAA players go pro.

Here are some of the numbers

• 11.6% of college baseball players play professionally, 0.6% of high school baseball players do
• 1.7% of college football players play professionally, 0.08% of high school football players do
• 1.3% of college ice hockey players play professional, 0.1% of high school ice hockey players do
• 1.2% of men’s college basketball players play professionally, 0.03% of high school men’s basketball players do
• 1.0% of men’s soccer players play professionally, 0.03% of high school soccer players do
• 0.9% of women’s college basketball players play professionally, 0.03% of high school women’s basketball players do

The higher numbers for baseball can be explained largely by the fact that, in addition to Major League Baseball, there are also a large number of minor professional leagues in all parts of the United States. Though the numbers aren’t broken down, I would imagine that the percentage of college baseball players playing for the Major Leagues is about as low as it is for professional football and basketball. Baseball is also unusual in that it was drafting players out of high school, usually into a team’s farm system, long before most other major sports were doing so.

The lesson? Don’t assume little Johnny is going to be set for life just because he’s doing really, really well in Little League.

In what has to be the most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I’ve seen in quite some time, senators in the Arizona state legislature have introduced a bill that would require all educational institutions in the state — including state universities — to suspend or fire professors who say or do things that aren’t allowed on network TV. Yes, you read that right: at the same time the Supreme Court is poised to decide if FCC-imposed limits on “indecent” content in broadcast media are an anachronism from a bygone era, Arizona state legislators want to limit what college professors say and do to only what is fit for a Disney movie (excluding, of course, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. After all, those films are PG-13!).

(…)

he bill doesn’t even require that the profanity be uttered in the classroom, it just generally says that if a professor or, for that matter, a K-12 teacher, engages in FCC-regulated conduct or speech at all, he or she can lose their job. Of course, even if this were limited strictly to classroom speech it would still be laughed out of court as unconstitutional on its face.

(…)

he law not only hobbles the ability to teach about sexuality and other non-Victorian topics, but it also puts teachers in jeopardy for teaching such mainstays as The Canterbury Tales, The Catcher in the Rye, certainly Ulysses, and probably every work by an obscure English writer named William Shakespeare. These days, such a law could certainly make any professor or teacher think twice about teaching Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. And how on earth could you possibly teach a class about cinema studies without showing movies like The Godfather, The Graduate, Annie Hall, or for that matter, Pulp Fiction?

The proposed law would b e unconstitutional for a number of reasons, but that’s not even half the story here. What, exactly, is it about Arizona schools that makes legislators so concerned about potty-mouthed teachers? Things sure have changed since I was in third grade.

Bryan Caplan makes an amusing point in favor of the idea that education is more about signaling than learning:

If I’d failed Spanish, I couldn’t have gone to a good college, wouldn’t have gotten into Princeton’s Ph.D. program, and probably wouldn’t be a professor.  But since I’ve merely forgotten my Spanish, I’m sitting in my professorial office, loving life.

Don Novello, most famous as Father Guido Sarducci on “Saturday Night Live” many moons ago, had a great stand up bit called Five Minute University based on the simple idea that, in five minutes, he could teach everything the average college student would remember five years after he left school:

There’s a lot of truth to this idea. A decade or so ago, I looked back at my undergraduate transcript and noted that I had gotten an “A” in at least one class that I literally don’t recall ever having taken. It’s not simply that I don’t recall whatever it was that I was supposed to have learned (as is true of my calculus classes) but that I had no recollection of who taught the course or ever having gone.

And, yet, I’ve applied for jobs since then when they insisted on a copy of my undergraduate transcript. A quarter century and two graduate degrees later.

Indeed, there are surely courses that I took in graduate school twenty years ago where the information that I still retain is modest at best. And I’m not even counting the requisite stats classes and the coding that I learned for now long-defunct mainframe statistical packages. These were courses that I chose to take in a field that I had tremendous interest and aptitude and yet, over time, most of what I learned has been relegated to bits and pieces and, hopefully, shape my general sense of “what I know” even if I can’t recall particulars.

For that matter, most of the material that I still remember quite well probably has much more to do with my years teaching the material after leaving grad school than from the student experience itself. Being able to spout the professor’s material back to him on a test–integrating it with the myriad outside readings, of course–actually requires much less understanding than being able to explain it to a clueless undergraduate who can’t fill in the blanks on his own.

On the other hand, my hunch is that Bryan remembers a lot more of his high school Spanish than he lets on. In my own case, my conversational German has atrophied so much that it’s embarrassing. Yet, I was surprised that I’d retained enough ability to read German as to be quite helpful in navigating streets, shops, and menus in Holland–which doesn’t use German! While spoken Dutch is, to me, absolutely unintelligible, the written language is close enough to German that I was able to glean quite a bit.

Then again, I’ve long been of the belief that, unless you’re training for a technical specialty, higher education is not about learning the material but grappling with it and learning how to learn. I haven’t had to do

Via Alex Tabarrok. Education image via Shutterstock.

To increase selectivity (one of the statistics that go into U.S. News’s secret mumbo-jumbo formula to produce an overall ranking), many colleges deliberately encourage applications from students who don’t have a prayer of getting in. To increase average SAT scores, colleges offer huge scholarships to un-needy but high scoring applicants to lure them to attend their institution. (The Times story mentioned that other colleges have been offering payments to admitted students to retake the test to increase the school average.)

One of my favorite bits of absurdity was what a friend on the faculty at Case Law School told me they were doing a few years ago: because one of the U.S. News data points was the percentage of graduates employed in their field, the law school simply hired any recent graduate who could not get a job at a law firm and put him to work in the library.

Their other tactic was pure genius: the law school hired as adjunct professors local alumni who already had lucrative careers (thereby increasing the faculty-student ratio, a key U.S. News statistic used in determining ranking), paid them exorbitant salaries they did not need (thereby increasing average faculty salary, another U.S. News data point), then made it understood that since they did not really need all that money they were expected to donate it all back to the school (thereby increasing the alumni giving rate, another U.S. News data point): three birds with one stone!

[...]

As someone who knew a little math, what really drove me bonkers about the college guide was:

(a) the logical absurdity of adding together completely unrelated statistics to produce a single measure of merit—the key point being that you can produce an astonishing range of different results depending  on the relative weight  each component factor is assigned. And there is simply no logical, a priori basis for establishing such a weighting objectively. Do SAT scores count 30% of the total score? 32.2%? 18.78234%? (How about zero?) It’s the classic apples + oranges – bananas/kumquats  = fruit salad approach to statistics, and is completely meaningless.

(b) the fact that the entire exercise was designed to emphasize noise over signal: tiny, random fluctuations from year to year would result in regular changes in the final rankings. Even within its own absurd methodology no one ever dared broach the question of the actual statistical significance of the differences between the “No. 1″ school and say the No. 5 school. In fact, there was pretty clearly none. It is of course ridiculous to think that when Harvard, Stanford, Yale, whoever changed places from one year to the next in the final rankings this reflected any actual sudden change in the underlying quality of the schools. But the only way to keep selling the damned guide each year was to make sure things kept changing from year to year.

What’s amazing is not that the magazine used this gimmick to increase sales or that some try to game the system but that almost all the colleges and universities in America willingly went along with it. I can sort of understand why a 2nd or 3rd tier institution would tout its rankings in some tertiary category (Best value of any medium sized liberal arts college in the Southwest!) as a means of claiming prestige. But what did Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the like have to gain by playing along?

The Nation‘s Dave Zirin is outraged by seemingly conflicting trend lines in university spending: money for academics is tight but money for football coaches is at an all-time high.

Given the grey, budgetary realities that surround a typical state university, these numbers will boggle the mind. According to USA Today, salaries of new head football coaches at the 120 bowl-eligible schools increased by 35 percent in 2011. The average pay has now ballooned to $1.5 million annually. That’s an increase from  $1.1 million. Over the last six seasons, football coach salaries have risen by an astonishing 55 percent. Think about that. In an era of stagnating and falling wages nationally, compensation for coaching a college football team traces a trend line that rises like a booster’s adrenaline during bowl season. It doesn’t matter how bad the tuition hikes, the furloughs or the layoffs might be: the dynamic of paying football coaches more continues unabated.

Presumably, the answer is that college football coaches and college professors are paid from different pots of money and operate in completely separate markets. Whereas professors and administrators at state schools are paid out of tax coffers and whatever money the university can generate from endowments, capital campaigns, and all the rest football coaches are paid out of athletic budgets raised by boosters and corporate sponsors. Whereas we PhDs are a dime a dozen, there are a relative handful of proven winners at head coach.

A little over five years ago, I explained Why Nick Saban Makes More Than Your Kid’s Teacher. Two national championships later, I rest my case. But Zirin notes something I’ve noted many times in this space, too: Alabama is not representative of college football programs, even many of the major ones.

An NCAA report showed that just fourteen of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision schools made money from campus athletics in the 2009 fiscal year, down from just twenty-five the year before. Public universities, particularly in an era of austerity, preach, with a catch in their throat, that the revenue just isn’t there.

Then again, college football tends to make money at the elite level. But, along with men’s basketball, it’s asked to pay for all the rest of the university’s sports programs, almost all of which are revenue drains.  A handful of schools make money from women’s basketball and sports which have a huge tradition on that particular campus. Most, though, have a fan base comparable to a pee wee football league but with much higher overhead.

College presidents still treat football like a prize pig to be protected at all costs despite the fact that more than three-fourths of them don’t “believe that big-time intercollegiate athletics are sustainable in their current form.”

The proof, however, is in their actions. Ohio State University, one of the schools so touched by scandal, landed the biggest free-agent fish, hiring former Florida head coach Urban Meyer for $24 million over six years. At Penn State, after the hiring of New England Patriots assistant Bill O’Brien to replace Joe Paterno, O’Brien fired more than a half-dozen assistants and now the public state college will be paying $4.4 million in severance. This number doesn’t include what will be paid to Paterno or to quarterbacks coach Mike McQueary, who is currently on “administrative leave” as a prosecutorial witness against former assistant/accused child predator Jerry Sandusky. But Ohio State and Penn State, for all the slathered scandal across their campuses, have football programs that propel athletic departments toward positive total revenue. For most schools, this isn’t close to the case. Instead, you get the University of Maryland paying former Coach Ralph Friedgen $2 million to go home and not coach, while cutting numerous teams from the athletic department. But whether a school is generating revenue or taking an awful bath, the coaching arms race continues. Penn State emeritus professor John Nichols, chair of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a faculty group advocating for athletics reform, said of the head coaching wage hikes, “This just shows…the difficulty of bringing (football) into the right proportion, the right balance with the academic mission.”

I was on the faculty at Troy (then Troy State) when it was contemplating and ultimately making the move from highly competitive I-AA (now FCS) program to I-A (now FBS) patsy. Most of us objected but our chancellor, Jack Hawkins, argued, correctly it turns out, that anything between Division III and Division I-A was a no man’s land. That is, once you start offering scholarships and traveling a long way to play games, college sports is simply a money drain unless you’re at the big time level and benefiting from network television deals and all the rest.

The obvious retort is that most schools should either cancel competitive athletics altogether, or relegate themselves to intramurals or very low level regional sports to keep costs down. Essentially, the high school model. And, indeed, many schools do just that.

Many elite universities–the Ivies, NYU, and the University of Chicago, perhaps most notably–have managed to have national and international reputations without big time sports. Then again, those schools had the advantage of being among the first universities in the country. For that matter, they all had big time sports programs in the early days of college athletics before eventually deciding the arms race wasn’t worth it. Even so, most of the great academic schools in the country–Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Duke, North Carolina, etc.–coexist with big time sports.

The problem is that most college presidents want to maintain or increase the profiles of their schools. That’s what drove Hawkins to move Troy to the big leagues: a hope that it would put his school on the map. In Troy’s case, it likely worked: the school has a much higher national profile–which is to say, people outside Alabama are now aware that it exists–than it did as a I-AA football power. Similarly, who had heard of Boise State before its recent run of football success? Or Texas Christian?

Probably a better example is the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which grabs the nation’s attention for two weeks every year. How many schools that nobody ever heard of suddenly gain national recognition each year by winning a game or two during March Madness? Even established schools with strong academic programs report huge boosts in applications after a successful tourney run.

The bottom line is that college presidents see sports, and football in particular, as the easiest way to market their schools. Asking why they’re spending more to lure successful coaches while they’re cutting core programs is like asking why corporations are spending more on advertising while they’re laying off workers.

Hat tip: Margaret Soltan

ESPN’s Georgia Bulldogs Football blog (“Report: Georgia hit with minor violations“):

Believing members of his football staff weren’t being compensated satisfactorily, Georgia coach Mark Richt unknowingly violated NCAA rules by paying them out of his own pocket.

Richt’s payments to several staffers were among a series of secondary NCAA violations uncovered by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a standard open records report released Tuesday.

According to the AJC report, Richt’s actions broke NCAA rules on supplemental pay. But discipline was limited to letters of admonishment from the school to Richt and those he made payments to, as well as additional rules education, the report said.

[...]

Georgia’s investigation into the matter determined that Richt made several impermissible payments:

• To former recruiting assistant Charlie Cantor, $10,842 over an 11-month period through March 2011.

• To former linebackers coach John Jancek, $10,000 in 2009 after the previous university administration declined to give Jancek a raise when he turned down a coaching opportunity elsewhere.

• To director of player development John Eason, $6,150 in 2010 when his new administrative position called for a salary reduction after he stepped down from an assistant coaching position on Richt’s staff.

Richt also paid a total of $15,227 when the school — citing “difficult economic conditions being experienced by the University” — refused bowl bonuses to 10 non-coach staff members: director of sports medicine Ron Courson, video coordinator Joe Tereshinski, strength coaches Keith Gray and Clay Walker, football operations manager Josh Brooks, high school liaison Ray Lamb and four administrative assistants.

He also paid a five-year longevity bonus of $15,337.50 due to tight ends coach Dave Johnson when he took a job at West Virginia in 2008 just short of his fifth anniversary coaching at UGA and $6,000 to fired defensive ends coach Jon Fabris in 2010 when Fabris was unable to find a job after his UGA severance package expired.

According to the AJC report, Georgia did not consider any of the payments to violate NCAA rules at the time because they were made with knowledge of the athletics administration.

I’m gratified that the NCAA has displayed the good judgment to treat these as technical violations rather than some nefarious scheme to gain a competitive advantage. But it’s a shame that a little human kindness on the part of a highly compensated head coach, rectifying obvious inequities, is against the rules. Then again, since the whole college football system relies on the services of unpaid “student athletes,” it’s not surprising.

Penn State Assistant Coach Mike McQueary is, as far as we know, the only independent witness to the alleged child abuse committed by Jerry Sandusky. In the Grand Jury Testimony that led to Sandusky’s first arrest, McQueary describes seeing Sandusky naked in the showers at the PSU athletic facilities with a young boy, also naked, and performing a sex act. That description, and the subsequent lack of action by Penn State authorities were the center point of the furor over the charges when they emerged last month and led in part to the end of Joe Paterno’s nearly 60 year coaching career. McQueary’s story appeared to develop some holes shortly thereafter,though. He was reported to have told friends that he had “stopped” Sandusky and gone to the police, neither of which were in the Grand Jury’s report. Additionally University Police have denied that any report was ever made to them. Now, another story has emerged that seems to have McQueary telling a different version of events to his father and a third-party who was present when McQueary went home that night:

STATE COLLEGE — Minutes after Mike McQueary says he stumbled upon something between Jerry Sandusky and a boy in a Penn State shower in 2002, he went to his father’s State College home seeking advice.

There, Dr. Jonathan Dranov, a family friend and colleague of McQueary’s father, sat with the then 28-year-old graduate assistant and listened to his very first account of what he had seen, a source told The Patriot-News.

According to the source with knowledge of Dranov’s testimony before the grand jury, it went like this:

McQueary heard “sex sounds” and the shower running, and a young boy stuck his head around the corner of the shower stall, peering at McQueary as an adult arm reached around his waist and pulled him back out of view.

Seconds later, Sandusky left the shower in a towel.

That account is different from the hand-written statement obtained by The Patriot-News that McQueary provided for investigators when he was interviewed in 2010.

It’s also different than the summary of his grand jury testimony in the 23-page initial grand jury presentment.

In both of those accounts, McQueary says he witnessed Sandusky sodomizing a boy as he stood with his hands against a shower wall.

McQueary says the pair turned and looked at him before he left.

However, Dranov told grand jurors that he asked McQueary three times if he saw anything sexual, and three times McQueary said no, according to the source.

Because of that response, the source says, Dranov told McQueary that he should talk to his boss, head football coach Joe Paterno, rather than police.

McQueary’s testimony, and this apparent contradiction, are important to several aspects of the case. First, as the article notes, it is McQueary’s testimony that formed the basis of the perjury and failure to report charges against PSU Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice-President Gary Schultz because the question of what they knew is what creates their obligation to report the incident to the authorities. Secondly, as noted, McQueary is the only independent witness to any of these acts and, at least with respect to Victim No. 2, the only witness at all since it still does not appear that the police have been able to track down the boy involved in the alleged incident in 2002, who would now be about 19 years old.

The discrepancy between what Dranov says McQueary said on the night of the incident and what is in the Grand Jury testimony is pretty significant, and is yet another example of what I described when the first round of discrepancies became public:

The problem for the prosecutors is that their star witness has now handed Sandusky’s attorney with a gold mine for cross examination that he will try to use to undercut McQueary’s credibility as a whole. It might not work, but it’s going to be a headache for the prosecution who already have to worry about how to protect the credibility of a witness that many people on the jury are likely to look on with suspicion to begin with because of his failure to act.

None of this says that Sandusky is innocent, of course, but in a criminal trial it is the burden of the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, not the other way around. Witness problems like this are not helpful.

Here’s Bachmann:

BACHMANN: I think what you’re advocating for is censorship on the part of government. So the government would prohibit intelligent design from even the possibility of being taught in questioning the issueof evolution. And if you look at scientists there is not a unanimity of agreement on the origins of life. … Why would we forstall any particular theory? Becuase I don’t think that even evolutionists, by and large, would say that this is proven fact. They say that this is a theory, as well as intelligent design. So I think the best thing to do is to let all scientific facts on the table, and let students decide.

And, here’s Santorum:

Santorum: There are many on the left and in the scientific community, so to speak, who are afraid of that discussion because oh my goodness you might mention the word, God-forbid, “God” in the classroom, or “Creator,” or that there may be some things that are inexplainable by nature where there may be, where it’s better explained by a Creator, of course we can’t have that discussion. It’s very interesting that you have a situation that science will only allow things in the classroom that are consistent with a non-Creator idea of how we got here, as if somehow or another that’s scientific. Well maybe the science points to the fact that maybe science doesn’t explain all these things. And if it does point to that, why don’t you pursue that? But you can’t because it’s not science, but if science is pointing you there how can you say it’s not science? It’s worth the debate.

As with most advocates of this position, Bachmann and Santorum  betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what a scientific theory actually is:

‘A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not “guesses” but reliable accounts of the real world. The theory of biological evolution is more than “just a theory.” It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact.’, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

What Santorum and Bachmann advocate isn’t the teaching of science, it’s the teaching of dogma, not to mention the fact that it would be blatantly unconstitutional. I’d say it’s a good thing that these two have absolutely no chance of winning the Republican nomination but, other than Jon Huntsman and, probably, Gary Johnson, there isn’t a single Republican candidate for President who would have the courage to disagree with them even if they recognize it for the absolute nonsense that it is.

In an era of 9% unemployment, and long-term unemployment higher than America has seen in at least a generation, one would think that nearly any employer looking for people to hire would have little trouble finding someone to fill the position. Indeed, over the past two and half years or so, we’ve all seen numerous stories of thousands of people showing up to fill only a few hundred, or less, job openings in a given city, and job fairs have become even more popular than they used to be. So, you’re an employer and you need to hire a few people, no problem right?

Well, as The Wall Street Journal reports today, that’s not exactly the case:

Ferrie Bailey’s job should be easy: hiring workers amid the worst stretch of unemployment since the Depression.

A recruiter for Union Pacific Corp., she has openings to fill, the kind that sometimes seem to have all but vanished: secure, well-paying jobs with good benefits that don’t require a college degree.

But they require specialized skills—expertise in short supply even with the unemployment rate at 9%. Which is why on a recent morning the recruiter found herself in a hiring hall here anxiously awaiting the arrival of just two people she had invited to interviews, winnowed from an initial group of nearly five dozen applicants. With minutes to go, the folding chairs sat empty. “I don’t think they’re going to show,” Ms. Bailey said, pacing in the basement room.

The rest of the article is unfortunately behind the WSJ paywall, but I think I think the general point is made. Even in an era of high unemployment, there are high-skilled jobs out there that are going unfilled because there aren’t people qualified to fill them. Part of the problem, obviously, is that the jobs and the people aren’t always in the same place. Bailey, for example, is looking to higher people in the Denver area. Now, it may well be that there are plenty of qualified people for these positions in Ohio, or Michigan, or Pennsylvania looking for work, but the workers and the employers aren’t necessarily going to find each other and, mobility for a skilled worker who probably has a family isn’t the same as it might be for 20-something kid looking to find their way in the world. There are industries, of course, where mobility is a way of life — oil workers, truck drivers, and of course the military come to mind — but for most Americans the idea of picking up and moving half way across the country isn’t an easy one to contemplate simply because of all the complications involved in family, personal relationships. and other obligations.

The article also brings to mind a point that has been discussed here at OTB many times over the years, the question of whether a college education really is the best option for everyone. Moe Lane, for one, reads the article as a sign that maybe his kids should go to electrician’s school:

Or maybe it’ll be plumber’s school.  Or welding.  Doesn’t really matter: until people don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to get poorly educated for white-collar jobs that don’t actually exist, some sort of technical training is looking more and more attractive. We’re always going to need electricians and plumbers, and they can improve their minds on their lunch breaks.  Which they’ll get, because we’re always going to need electricians and plumbers.

It’s not an invalid point, of course. In an era when students are graduating from college with Bachelor’s degrees and find themselves looking for work, it’s worth reminding ourselves that not every well-paying job requires a college education. In fact, it wasn’t all that long ago when people went into professional trades like plumbing, electrical work, automotive repair, or carpentry and were clothed with at least some degree of respect. Today, a high school student who said they’d rather go into a professional trade instead of spending four years in college is likely to be told their making the “wrong choice,” even though they could end up making more money than some of their peers who did go to college (try to hire a plumber recently?). While college education seems to get an over-inflated sense of importance, the professional trades seem to have been unduly denigrated. That’s one of the reasons people like Bailey are finding it hard to fill positions.

Jazz Shaw passes along a personal anecdote that emphasizes this point:

Right in my neighborhood there is the son of one of my neighbors who finished high school several years back and went into an apprenticeship and technical school training program for heating and air conditioning. Within six months of graduating high school he had a secure, full time job which is bringing in some seriously good pay and benefits. Yes, the job involves hard work, finds him coming home covered in dirt and dust, and he frequently has to deal with irate, if not panicking homeowners. But he had no outstanding debt and at the age of 25 was already purchasing his first home. As his father tells it, he got a terrific rate on it, putting down a very substantial down payment.

The point is, there is still blue collar work out there to be done. And unlike many white collar jobs, a lot of it will never be able to be outsourced to other countries, as so often happens to computer programming jobs and others in related fields. Nobody is going to be able to log in to “the cloud” from Brazil and dig a new foundation for your home, wire it up, install the plumbing or put on a new roof. Those jobs will remain here at home.

Indeed they will, and unless we end up creating a technological society where robots build houses and the plumbing, electricity, and automobiles never have to be repaired, they are likely to remain here for a long, long time. It strikes me that this points to an alternative career path not only for people who are sent off to college but might not exactly be a good fit for it, but also those people who graduate High School, or drop out, and then wander aimlessly in dead-end retail jobs. There’s a lot more value and dignity in learning a trade, it would seem, than in stocking shelves or directing people to where the sales rack at Old Navy happens to be. We need the workers, they need the jobs, it seems like the perfect fit.

A recent Business Insider commentary and NYT op-ed seek to debunk Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis that anyone can become great at anything given 10,000 hours of practice.

Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book “Talent Is Overrated,” adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.”

But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

Dave Schuler, whose IQ is almost surely upwards of the 99.9 percentile, says So what?

The highest paid nuclear physicist, whose IQ is almost undoubtedly four standard deviations above normal, probably earns less than the median cardiac surgeon who almost certainly isn’t even above the second standard deviation above normal. The supply of nuclear physicists may be low but the demand is pretty low, too.

Another factor that should be kept in mind. Cognitive development isn’t the only kind. Physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development are all important and, guess what? Individuals with high levels of social development are more likely to succeed physically, cognitively, and emotionally than those with the highest levels of cognitive development and lower levels of physical, emotional, etc.

Quite right. Someone with a 120 IQ who’s attractive and socially skilled is much more likely to succeed in a world where other human beings make judgments than an ugly, socially awkward person with a 160 IQ.

And here’s the thing: Most of these things are largely innate, hard-wired traits that we can influence only at the margins. Sure, we can take advantage of whatever cognitive gifts we’ve been given by reading, studying, and otherwise working to expand our minds. Similarly, we can maximize our physical talents with strenuous exercise, good grooming, and so forth. But we’re operating within pre-set boundaries.

This is all widely understood intellectually but we tend to ignore it operationally. We praise people for their smarts, good looks, athletic ability, work ethic, and social graces far above the degree that they’ve been earned. And, to the extent that we distribute the good things in life based on these largely inherent traits, we have something of a problem. Dave concludes:

For me the bottom line is that for the foreseeable future we’re going to be building a society and economy in which half of the people are normal (i. e. within one standard deviation of median) while a quarter are below normal and a quarter are above normal. Allowing our society to transmogrify into one in which the only people who can prosper are those in that top quarter or, worse, in the top .01% is a society doomed to failure.

Michael Reynolds gets even more depressing in the first comment in the thread. Noting that machines are getting smarter faster than we are, he wonders:

Is there a way to build a society where people who can be profitably replaced by machines will nevertheless be employed? Maybe, but what would be the point? Would it make sense to take the robots off GM’s assembly line? Should we outlaw Siri to save the jobs of people at the Information booth?

[...]

As it bites more into the engineers, radiologists and lawyers it will suddenly take on political urgency, but those people are probably better able, by virtue of IQ, to reprogram for different careers. People in the bottom quarter? Not so much.

I’ve expressed variations of this concern for years. We’ve been replacing massive numbers of low-IQ-required jobs with automation for as long as I can remember. I’d wager that a vanishingly small number of the tens of thousands of people who used to pump gas at the service stations around the country wound up working for Google or Microsoft.

Nor, as Dave points out in another post, is education likely the answer. The college enrollment rate of recent high school graduates is at an all-time high. So is income inequality.

So, what is the answer? Beats the hell out of me. The Occupy movement may be an indicator that people aren’t going to put up with the top tenth of a percent getting fantastically wealthy while the rest of the ship sinks. But I don’t see Michael’s future, where the most gifted do productive work and the vast majority lives on the dole, as socially sustainable, either.

This morning it was announced that the Chief of the UC Davis Police Department is the latest member of the force to be put on administrative leave while this weekend’s pepper spraying incident is investigated:

The University of California, Davis campus police chief along with two officers have been placed on administrative leave amid growing controversy over students being pepper sprayed in the face during a peaceful “Occupy” protest on campus.

As the fallout continues from this incident, a lot of people are demanding accountability from more than just the officers who sprayed the protestors.

The president of the University of California system said he plans to assess the law enforcement procedures on all 10 campuses after this incident.

“Free speech is part of the DNA of this university, and non-violent protest has long been central to our history,” UC President Mark G. Yudof said in a statement Sunday in response to the spraying of students sitting passively at UC Davis. “It is a value we must protect with vigilance.”

Footage of the incident shows officers dressed in riot gear in front of a crowd of protesters. You can very clearly see one of the officers dousing a line of students with pepper spray at close range.

The students sitting peacefully with their arms intertwined were protesting in support of the overall Occupy Wall Street movement on Friday.

Two officers were put on administrative leave over the weekend. Monday, UC Davis said in a new release that the campus police Chief Annette Spicuzza, who apparently was on scene during this incident, has also been put on administrative leave.

One gets the impression that this isn’t the last head to roll over this incident.

Since then I have learned (as noted in another post) that the events of Friday had been preceded by police violence (with batons) against peaceful protestors on Tuesday, which in turn inspired students to continue their protests).  As such, the Chancellor and campus police were acting in  a fashion that any reasonable observers could have seen was likely to escalate the situation (which it has) rather than deescalating it.  These events suggest that, indeed, it might have been wiser to let inertia win out, rather than trying to force the hand of the students.

Another fact hit me a little while ago:  next week is Thanksgiving Break, which is a week during which college campuses become ghost towns.  While some dedicated occupiers might stay during the holiday, the odds are quite good that a lot of them would have abandoned their tents for the chance to go home to family, food, and football (indeed, the families in question would likely have been more persuasive in getting their children to return home than the police have been to date).

Beyond that, in consulting the UC Davis calendar, the Fall Quarter is about to be over.  Classes end on December 2nd, and final exams are over on the 9th.  Again:  college students tend to very much like vacating campus for the holidays.  Even if some of the occupiers are die-hards, the rest of the student body (i.e., the audience for the occupiers) isn’t going to stick around (meaning some substantial amount of the incentive to occupy will be gone).

While it is reasonable to assume that some of the occupiers might stick out the holidays, it is highly unlikely that large numbers would do so.  Just let these things run their course—it is a wiser policy than bringing out the batons and the pepper spray (especially since those actions appear to have motivated the occupiers, rather than having dissuaded them).  And while it does not get as cold in California, it is the rainy season in December, and in general there are a number of reasons  to think that time could solve the occupy issue better for UC Davis than police action.

At a minimum, there are now more people upset with UC Davis than was the case before the week started.  As policy/administrative moves go, Davis Chancellor Katehi laid an egg here.

The key photo is here which is a 1000 words that utterly undercuts police claims that the pepper spraying was an act of necessary self-defense on the part of the officer.

h/t:  Fallows.

Let’s stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful protest against other people’s rights to go about their normal lives, and the rights of institutions to have some control over their property and public spaces. Without knowing the whole background, I’ll even assume for purposes of argument that the UC Davis authorities had legitimate reason to clear protestors from an area of campus — and that if protestors wanted to stage a civil-disobedience resistance to that effort, they should have been prepared for the consequence of civil disobedience, which is arrest.

I can’t see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we’d react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We’d think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That’s what I think here.

Indeed. 

That anyone would hold US police to a lower standard than they would those in an authoritarian regime is most disturbing.