When my brother worked at UC Irvine decades ago I complained about the lower academic standards for athletes, relative to the performance of the others at their own school. I can see that Cleveland State, which has many students who pass only a few courses and leave, might make an argument that its basketball players with shallow credentials are representative of the whole student body, so what's everyone's problem? He protested that lots of people "belong" to the school who are not students: maintenance and security people, food service, faculty, administration, alumni, and the whole surrounding area, especially with state schools. He felt the athletic teams also represented them. This was an entirely new idea to me, naive but grouchy. Students are the whole reason. Yes, they come and go and are fungible to some extent, but they are not optional.
Since that time I have observed that this phenomenon has intensified. The money that comes with students one way or another is the point. Most people go into teaching because they want to pass on knowledge, so the individuality of students still has meaning to those. But increasingly, students are simply conduits for money, and the other people of the institution, as listed above, are the college.
4 comments:
Didn't "college" originally mean the teachers/clerics to whom the students came?
Sounds like a variation on the "if you aren't paying, you're the product" meme.
I had a conversation with a friend who works for the organization that puts together one of the major school tests, which is essentially an IQ test. He had recently gone through SAT and GRE data for students from every school in America using data mining software. Those are also chiefly intelligence tests.
His conclusion was that (a) college did nothing to improve intelligence: SAT scores correlated exactly with GRE schools, no matter which college was involved. If you are a school whose reputation causes you to draw good students, you'll produce good graduates because the students were good to start with.
However, also (b) because his data only included those who graduated college and went on to take the GRE to go to graduate school, the effect of diversity programs was effectively zero. Students admitted on diversity programs are disproportionately likely to fail out, so they don't affect the quality of the school's graduates. If they weren't already good enough to make it, they won't make it; they'll just represent a waste of time and resources (which is pushed onto them, so they end up $200K in debt with nothing to show for it but one-to-four less productive years in the workforce).
That seems like information that should affect how we approach all this, but it won't. He was told he'd be fired if he published his findings.
@ Grim - so too with K-12 schools. The schools with the highest average SAT's for their seniors were also the ones who had the best scores for the entering students. Wealthier districts are fine with paying more to buy things like rowing sculls and trips abroad and convincing themselves they have improved the lot of their children.
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