“Oxford and Cambridge to move away from ‘traditional’ exams to boost results of minorities”, the Telegraph reports.
Top universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been given the green light to move away from “traditional” exams in a bid to boost the grades of minority groups and poorer students.
The elite British institutions could move towards more “inclusive assessments” such as open-book tests or take-home papers instead of in-person, unseen exams in an effort to close the grades gap.
However, the plans have been criticised for potentially “dumbing down” university courses for students.
The approach was unveiled under proposals, known as Access and Participation Plans, which universities must release each year as per their registration conditions to show how they are helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As Katharine Birbalsingh – the head teacher of a very successful school most of whose pupils are from ethnic minorities – said, the idea that black and brown people cannot achieve unless we make exams easier is “utterly revolting racism”. For most of a lifetime, the educational establishment in the English-speaking world has been assiduous in keeping pupils from those groups they consider to be oppressed safe from the momentarily unpleasant experience of being corrected. No tests they might fail, no red ink on their work. Even the idea of the existence of objectively correct answers has been denounced, lest someone oppressed get the wrong answer and feel bad. With equal care, they are protected from ever seeing someone less oppressed get a better score than they did. The upshot has that these pupils have been kept safe from education.
Education should be a pleasant experience overall. Human beings, especially young human beings, love to learn. But in their own games, or when learning a subject they truly want to master, children do not flinch from putting themselves in positions where they might fail. They instinctively know that the route to success involves climbing over some jagged rocks. Unfortunately for most of my lifetime kindly teachers across the English-speaking world have striven to keep all children, but especially black and brown children, on the soft grass where nothing can hurt them – forever. Almost the only place in school where these children experience public failure is on the sports ground. Not surprisingly, sport is one of the few areas where disadvantaged children frequently grow up to succeed.
First it was just the kindergartens and the infant schools where the wee ones had to be kept happy all the time. Then it spread to secondary schools. Now the sweet-smelling fog has reached the colleges and the universities, where the students are – chronologically at least – adults.
…thus increasing the vexation of all those in non-minority groups who see others getting an easy ride.
And once the recruiters of big businesses start imposing their own exams there will be many potential students who will seek other ways to get ahead than university learning.
University has turned into a grift. It was bad enough when it was “universities” which were little more than FE colleges, but if Oxford and Cambridge fall, then there is no point to any of it. Proof once again that government corrupts everything it touches.
The current education industry is made of, and exclusively serves, vampires.
Students – whether they be little kids in public schools or big kids at college – are no longer the center of the process. It no longer matters what changes education makes for their lives. They are there as cash generators for purposes of financing the union members and the fellow travelers.
The students are there to provide the blood to be sucked.
The “teaching” industry has finally decided that they no longer even need to pretend that they’re there for the purpose of providing an education to the customers. By dispensing with the one metric that might allow for judging the quality of their own work – testing – they have made it clear what is important to them.
And it isn’t the students. It’s the blood.
oxbridge graduates are grifters, an incompetent and morally degenerate elite.
Not a coincidence that three of the five least trusted professions in the UK are dominated by oxbridge graduates;
Politicians (78.1%) 27% oxbridge
Journalists (37.7%) 45% oxbridge
Car salesmen (27.4%)
Telesales (23.6%)
Bankers (22.8%)
Because that would take work and they don’t realy care, they just want to use them as an excuse to reck society.
Isn’t this just apartheid with a frock on it’s cock?
One important concept: testing doesn’t just interrogate student learning.
It also tracks teacher performance.
@DiscoveredJoys January 28, 2025 at 4:13 pm
My understanding is that when American companies administered aptitude tests for potential staff, that was deemed racist/discriminatory etc. against the uneducated and/or lower intelligence individuals so they were forbidden to recruit based on competence by legislation.
They got around this by requiring Degrees for any and all entry level jobs. Once Degrees were devalued by dilution and this exact kind of “all must be winners” attitude, the Companies upped the anti again to require a PhD/Doctorate. So it is indeed true that the vast majority of jobs do not require a Degree or the attendant waste of a number of years that could be spent earning a living nor the cost of the Student Loans/fees but the laws of unintended consequences (or, Government meddling) will come back to bite.
FWIW, I’m not opposed to things like open book tests or take home tests (insofar as cheating can be managed.) Why? Because that is what the real world is like. No engineer memorizes all the formulae he uses, or fails to use a book or computer program to complete her work. In truth I think exams in the traditional sense are a kind of crappy way to assess capability. They measure test taking ability almost as much as skill in the area of examination.
What I don’t understand is that if they do that in the belief it will help students do better then won’t it make all students do better? Since you can’t do better than an A does that mean everyone will squish up into the upper grades and it’ll be impossible to tell the excellent from the mediocre? I’m sure that is true, in fact I’m sure that is already true.
But BobbyB is right. The mistake we are making is thinking that this has anything at all to do with education. It is to produce jobs for teachers, and satisfying grade curves, irrespective of whether people can read, write or do calculus.
It is definitely possible to give kids a great education on the public dime. Simply allow the people who care about the kids the most, which is to say the parents, to use that public dime to find a place to educate their kids the way they want. Public school in America and the west has been an amazing institution that has definitely been instrumental in raise us from the mud to the shining skyscrapers and whizzing machine world we now live in. But like so many great things has been corrupted beyond the point of reform. The only solution is to shut all the public schools and allow parents to direct education funds. To create a thriving business in education where satisfying the customer, both student and parent, is the primary goal.
And you know who would benefit from that the most? Not my kids. They had a great education in one of the best public high schools in the country. No, who would benefit most would be the kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. Kids of the powerless. Kids of people who have no choices or options. Give the parent at least that little bit of power to give their kids an education and a better life and that whole disadvantaged layer of society would be transformed.
Some states are trying this lite, and it’ll be interesting to see the results.
In Baltimore Unified School district a few years ago there were 4 (not 4% but 4 individual students) who were at grade level math. Let’s be clear, it is impossible to create a system that would perform worse than that.
They are going down the same grim path so many American universities went down.
Walter Williams (born in 1936) used to say that he was glad he was in the generation BEFORE black people started to be “helped” – because that meant people knew his academic qualifications were real.
Think about that – since then people do not know whether the academic qualification is real or is the result of “help”.
Read the dissertation of Michelle Obama (as far as I know we are not allowed to read the dissertation of Barack Obama – but the situation may have changed since I tried to get access to it quite some years ago) – the dissertation written by Michelle Obama is nonsense, just race-drivel, yet it was passed by Princeton, once one of the greatest universities in the world.
Now imagine you are a talented black person – who has written something that really is worth the qualification you have been awarded. People do NOT know that – they think you are like Michelle Obama (and so on). That is the terrible harm that the “help” does.
This gives me an opening to temper what I said above.
There are lots of great teachers, and many many good teachers. There are lots of good school systems. Like Fraser Orr’s kids, my kids went to a great school system.
But teachers have allowed the activists to take over.
I view today’s teaching cohort much as I view the Gaza civilians. They were in the best position to maintain the integrity of their society, and they failed.
They may have failed into better pay and perks, but they failed “teaching”, by allowing things to be done in their names that devalued the profession.
I think that if they could kick 15% of teachers – chosen carefully – out of the profession, public ed in the US could regain its great standing.
But teaching needs to encounter one of those preference cascades similar to the one US politics is undergoing.
I don’t remember who wrote this, but it seems worth quoting in this context:
As i understand from Popper, Plato also wrote something to that effect, back in his days.
It takes a disruptor, such as DJT, to reverse the decline.
Although, disruption does not guarantee reversing the decline.
To Phil B:
United States Supreme Court: Griggs v. Duke Power Co. 401 U.S. 424 (1971) stated:
“Even if there is no discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.”
However nearly all companies shelved whatever internal tests they were using to advance and promote. These were expensive procedures, and now that they had the possibility of legal action, they became untenable. So most companies used the college degree metric as a replacement. I’m pretty sure snobbery had it’s effect, in “how dare this high school diploma yahoo get a salary higher than college educated me”.
This, as always, is just my humble opinion.
Lemme see… minority doesn’t include students of east asian ethnicities.
Isn’t that strange?
Over here in Singapore, it’s well known that chinese and indian students excel academically, with the malays trailing behind by a fair bit. Because of our merit-based admissions systems, for the longest time virtually no malays got admitted into medical school (until we opened a second med school).
Nevertheless, we teachers still do my best. I never cut my malay students any slack, and they’re expected to think and study to the same standards I expect from any other student – chinese, korean, vietnamese, indonesian, or indian.
And though I don’t have any malay students who made it to med sch, some of them still did very well indeed.
bobby b and others: testing tests students, teachers…and the test questions. Think about it from a math/stats point of view: every standardized test given to, say 10,000 students every year in a large metro area, provides 10,000 data points in assessing how well the test questions work. This was the thesis of a stats guy I worked for in the Portland Public Schools 50 years ago. 50 years! Had that profession been focusing on its job, imagine where such analysis of testing might be.
So, yes, a good test tests the students and the teachers and after so much experience with test questions, we ought to have truly excellent tests (another thesis of this guy 50 years ago). In fact, there ought to be a database of test questions on any of the major subjects, at any grade level, from which a teacher could extract questions to tailor a test to measure their teaching goals. And their bosses or the public could devise tests that also ensure the teacher is properly evaluated.
I have not kept up with any of this, but I suspect the field of standardized testing has not advanced much.
O tempora! O mores! I suspect that few undergraduates at my alma mater would now understand what that means.
OK. Cards on the table- as some people here know, I’m an academic at a “research-intensive” UK university.
TL:DR
I kind of agree with a lot of the comments above, but it’s more patchy than you think.
My department still maintains pretty high standards-despite significant pressure coming, in part, from within my university but also from the state.
For example when we fail students (and that’s a gloriously ambiguous phrase-do we let them down or did they just fail and we recognised it?), we know there is a good chance (maybe 50%), that the OIA (Office of the Independent Adjudicator) will overrule us, make us let the student take the exams again, and fine us.
This leads to pressure from within the university administration to always “give them another chance”. This despite rules saying students get one chance to “remedy failure” and then they’re out.
[A side note for American readers; UK university exams are much more formal than most US ones- 2 to 3 hours in length, with questions written months in advance, then vetted, first by a colleague and then by an external examiner (and we’re expected to do some of this for other UK universities). This usually involves significant rewriting and, in my subject, many tens of hours of work. The system is supposed to maintain high standards and also ensure fairness to the students. Of course this does not mean that exams at all UK universities are equally hard (or easy) because we apply a semi-formal mental ranking: if I’m `externalling’ for Oxbridge (which I have done for two 3-year appointments), I expect very hard exams; if I’m externalling for York (still a Russell group member. so supposedly high-quality) then not so much].
The external pressure is very much about fixing a failing secondary (and primary) education system. `A’ levels (end of high school exit exams) are significantly easier than 40 years ago, but harder than 4 years ago. We are selecting the best of those who don’t go to Oxbridge (some of whom could have and others of whom have been weeded out by a very uncertain selection process).
So that’s all background in Maths and Stats. [American readers will recall that we specialise much earlier than in the US, so we accept undergraduates to study Maths from day one].
It’s not so bad except:
1) we have to deal with many students who have survived the secondary system, are able, but undereducated. Most of them were the best in their class, have constantly been told that they’re really, really good and then discover that they are merely quite good.
We’ve always had this problem but now it’s much worse, particularly if they are from a favoured identity group, because they “know” they are the very best, so if we’re telling them that they’re not doing well, or even in danger of failing completely, then it must actually be our fault and the fault of a biased system. I had one personal tutee (stupid term; it just means that I was charged with his pastoral care and maintaining an overview of his studies)- a Brit of West Indian descent- who just scraped a pass each year and could not believe that it was down to him. He became increasingly convinced that we were all racist swine who simply wanted to do him down and graduated (just) a very disappointed and embittered young man.
2) The administrators are increasingly politicised (almost always left of centre, often total ideologues) and increasingly they can, partially, override our academic judgement. Moreover they can direct our students to all the indoctrination that’s available, or even require that they attend training courses on the stuff [you know what I mean].
3) Many of the other students are in departments which are deeply politicised: the studies departments, English, History, Sociology [although, surprisingly, Politics is more mixed even though it was a senior academic from that department who sold Senate on the notion of decolonising our curriculum, the ratfink b*stard. I had a very amusing discussion with him about 4 years ago when I kept telling him that maths did not have cultural differences within it and he couldn’t believe it].
Turning back to the reported “decision” from Oxbridge I think we don’t know what this actually means. Cambridge (my alma mater) is sadly more corrupted than Oxford these days. It might well mean it, it might not. Fortunately these decisions often have to go before the Regent House, which is composed of, amongst others, all Fellows of the university (that’s every academic, including the ones with only college posts. The number would be about 4000). They can, and often do, frustrate the wishes of the executive.
Oxford has been doing much better, IMHO, in recent years in the face of this cr@p. It is ultimately governed by Congregation (very similar composition and size to Regent House), and they are starting to establish a bit of a track record for identifying the sort of sh*t up with which the majority of them will not put!
In brief, the situation is bad, but quite a few of us still have some standards and some desire to actually teach students some good stuff.
This is only slightly OT. Of course on of the key effects of Deutsche Physik was to enable mediocrities to rise to the top of the academic tree for purely political reasons.
Yes Snorri – President Trump is trying to reverse the decline of America, and you quite correct there is no guarantee that he will succeed – indeed the odds are vastly against him.
In my lifetime two Presidents have tried to reverse the decline of the United States – President Reagan, partly successful and partly not successful, and President Trump – all the rest, Democrat or Republican, have gone along with the Collectivist agenda which Americans (rightly or wrongly) call “Progressive” – both in economic and cultural matters.
And in my lifetime only two British Prime Ministers have tried to reverse the decline of the United Kingdom, of British society, Margaret Thatcher, partly successful and partly not successful, and Liz Truss (Mary O’Leary) who was savagely smeared by the establishment (even now sheep like people bleat “Liz Truss crashed the econmy”) and removed after a few weeks.
I do not believe it is likely that the United Kingdom will recover – for example, watching Prime Minister’s Question Time shows an obsession with more regulations (falsely called “rights” or “protections”) in the “Employment Bill” – which will mean that even more people are “economically inactive” (not officially unemployed – but not working and living on benefits), and even more government spending. With the Liberal Democrats being, if anything, WORSE than the Labour Party. And there is an unofficial deal between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats – they pretend to be enemies, but, in reality, they usually unofficially cooperate at election time to prevent vote splitting. Both Labour and the Lib Dems concentrate their election efforts against the Conservatives – very rarely against each other.
The “right” (for want of a better word) in the United Kingdom, are split (between Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage – who appear to be barely on speaking terms) and in a First Past the Post voting system – that means neither party can win. Without cooperation between the Conservatives and Reform there is no chance of election success – not even in July 2029 (the likely date of the next General Election) – especially as welfare dependence will be even worse by then, anti election fraud measures will have been weakened, and demographic change will have proceeded further.
If they go for easier exams, it will boost the numbers of people who used to pass as well, leaving exactly the same proportions.
Before: 100 applicants, 18 white people pass and 2 black people pass, wah wah 90% are white!
After: 100 applicants, 36 white people pass and 4 black people pass, hey, what? 90% are white!
In these sorts of discussions, I often revert back to one of my favourite Heinlein quotations:
“Pick a savage so far back in the jungle that they don’t even have installment-plan buying. Say he has an I.Q. of 190 and Peewee’s yen to understand. Dump him into Brookhaven Atomic Laboratories. How much will he learn? With all possible help?
He’ll learn which corridors lead to what rooms and he’ll learn that a purple trefoil means: «Danger!»
That’s all. Not because he can’t; remember he’s a supergenius – but he needs twenty years schooling before he can ask the right questions and understand the answers.”
I enjoyed an excellent secondary education which taught me an amazing variety of facts in all sorts of fields, all ready to be regurgitated at examination time, and fundamentally-useless to me ever since, except maybe some of the languages. But the most-important thing it taught me, probably as a result of all that useless book-learning, was how to learn – how to start at point A and learn your way to point B. I liken it to the timeless process of teaching soldiers fundamental principles of combat by what seems like pointless discipline and useless square-bashing.
Tests and examinations are less about showing what you’ve learned than about showing that you know how to learn. Lowering standards or eliminating examinations in order to increase the participation of this-or-that group merely ensures that you will get more participants who may want to learn, very much, but have never been taught how. And you end up with participants who, as in the example Clovis Sangrail cites, have not been taught how to learn, have often been told they have learning when they do not, and as a result, become disillusioned and angry when they are run alongside those who have been, and do have, and end up falling behind in comparison. This may be the cruellest outcome of modern state education, which used to the the surest and least-discriminatory way for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to improve their lives.
llater,
llamas
@llamas
This! A thousand times, this. It’s wicked, destructive of the individual and a civilisation killer.
Also
I always used to say `You can’t teach someone how to learn in the abstract. The only way people acquire the skill of learning is by learning. This is probably the only reason why learning classical languages (as against what some of their users wrote) is a good idea.’
@llamas
Tests and examinations are less about showing what you’ve learned than about showing that you know how to learn.
Although I generally agree with you on most things, I don’t agree here. Tests and examinations are entirely about what you learned, and that is why I’m not a huge fan of them, at least in their present form. That isn’t to say I don’t think students should not be assessed or that students from deprived backgrounds should be artificially boosted. Rather I think there are much better ways to assess students. For sure, in my field of computer science, having students do projects, write programs and analyze programs is a much better assessment. In vocational education settings assessing their ability to do the work in the normal settings of the work is a far more effective measure of a students’ ability. The artificial setting of a hard core, time limited, constrained external knowledge test does not, generally speaking, meet that standard.
Again to use my area of expertise, when writing programs it is absolutely normal practice to look up the answer on the web or ChatGPT and then adapt the answer to a specific situation. That is what programmers do every day. But of course with a test type assessment that would be called “cheating” and would get you expelled. This is the very essence of “what have you memorized” rather than “how can you apply the skills you have in a normal environment.”
I was one of those kids who was “good” at tests. In the UK where I went to college they are far more oriented to testing than this sort of continuous assessment which I seem more in US schools, or at least that was true of my experience and my children’s experience. But I think a lot of kids have trouble not with the learning and skill acquisition, but with the utilization of those skills in a highly constrained artificial environment like a test. And I think that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are probably much disadvantaged here because the lack of rigor in both their personal and crappy school life and their lack of access to resources like tutors, practice test books and so forth, does further disadvantage them.
FWIW though, I do think standardized testing like SAT or MCAT are a decent measure of scholastic potential. Mainly because the tests are fairly easy and fairly unconstrained. For example, SAT does math to about the level of Algebra I (the most advanced questions are very basic trigonometry and very basic complex number questions), and the reading comprehension is set, in my opinion, at about 8th grade level (which means “ready to enter high school” for our non American friends.) This is a pretty basic standard to measure for ability to survive college.
But more advanced testing I think is fraught with challenges, and more project based, real world assessments are much more accurate determiners of competence in a vocational setting.
I wonder if “testing” might not be a very good way to determine if 7th graders are picking up on basic algebra concepts, but an overly-simplistic way to try to gauge the proficiency of 24-year-old grad students.
I don’t think we can discuss the merits of testing without acknowledging that there are appropriate places for testing, and also less appropriate places.
I’m not sure how I would test graduating philosophers or programmers or MBAs, but I do believe that testing KIDS as they learn kid things is a valid concept. I certainly want to know which teachers’ students cannot multiply or divide at the end of their year with them.
To those unfamiliar with how elections campaigns work (for my sins I have been involved with them since 1979 – but other people do constructive things with their lives) there is a big difference between a “paper candidate” and an election campaign that a political party is actually fighting to win.
The Lib Dems do indeed put up candidates against Labour – but the Lib Dems are, mostly, not really trying to win, they are mostly putting up “paper candidates”. But against CONSERVATIVES – the Liberal Democrats fight like crazy to win, even when they were supposedly in coalition with the Conservatives under David Cameron.
The Reform Party and the Conservatives do NOT have the unofficial understanding that Labour and the Lib Dems have – basically Reform and the Conservatives are cutting each other’s throats in election campaigns.
This is one (one of several) reasons why the “Woke” (far left) trend in Britain is unlikely to be reversed.
Whilst Kemi B. and Nigel F. continue to be have such bad relations, the situation is going to continue to get worse – so we can kiss Oxford and Cambridge (and a lot of other British institutions) goodbye.
Only a year ago the historian Dr David Starkey was saying that the House of Commons was the last “non Woke” institution left in Britain – and he was probably correct at-that-time. However, now the House of Commons is overwhelmingly dominated by “Woke” people (Labour, Lib Dem and other far leftists – and the Lib Dems are, in some ways, actually worse than Labour).
Reform has five Members of Parliament. 5.
Parliament is not going to roll back far left doctrine in Britain – not before the July 2029 General Election, and unless relations between Kemi and Nigel change, not after the election either.
What bobby b. said. The first 10 years of primary and secondary education are (or should be) about learning how to learn, and the only way to do that is to learn something, and hopefully, many things. Like mindless discipline and square-bashing, which do not teach squaddies any actual military skills, the process teaches the victim how to approach the acquiring of new skills and new knowledge.
Learning French grammar was absolutely-useless in learning how to speak French, which is easily taught without cracking a single textbook. What learning French grammar taught was how to learn, understand and master a complex rules-based system, a skill with applications far beyond the conjugation of irregular verbs. In the same way, performing complex physics experiments that had been performed a million times before and always with the same results, taught us little about physical principles – what it taught us was the nature of the scientific method, the importance of experiment and rigorous testing of hypothesis – skills go much further and wider than simply observing Millikan’s experiment for the n+1,000th time.
Only when all of these basic skills have been taught and learned can one move on from secondary-school teaching to advanced learning that’s typical at undergraduate and graduate level. That’s the essence of the Heinlein quote. And the only way to verify this basic level of learning is by regular, rigourous testing – testing which is designed to fail those who have not learned enough. Fail in this basic grounding and it doesn’t matter how smart or intelligent someone is – they don’t know enough to ask the right questions and to understand the answers. I thank my lucky stars that I got the education I did – it must be like living in permanent handcuffs to want to understand something and yet not have the tools to be able to.
Once you have those tools, then things change. Of course, all of my engineering exams were open-book – it would be a stone waste of time, and dangerous in the real world, to expect me to recall flawlessly the formulae for hoop stresses in isotropic materials. But it no longer matters that one cannot recite the formula from memory – what matters is that one knows there is a formula, which formula applies, where to find it, and how to do the math to apply it. As the level and type of knowledge and learning changes and increases, so the methods for verifying and challenging that knowledge and learning will also change.
llater,
llamas
To add to Clovis’ points, as I also work at a UK university.
The number of students we get – and therefore the fees we are paid – is largely based on the results of a few student surveys.
If the recent graduates say this university is a great place, lots of people want to study here and we get lots of money in fees.
Make the exams difficult and the pass marks high – lots of people will fail, give us a bad rating on the surveys, and we get less students and less money next year.
One of the areas of, modest, success of the last government was education – especially at secondary level, but there was also some action to defend Freedom of Speech in British universities.
All that is now going to be thrown away under the new government elected in July 2024. People think the leftist agitprop in education is bad now, and it is bad now, but it is going to get vastly worse – education is going to fall apart in the United Kingdom, at primary and secondary level and in universities. It is tragic, utterly tragic.
@Gingerdave
To add to Clovis’ points, as I also work at a UK university.
Not a super smart guy like you and Clovis, however one of my customers is a moderate size college (what we call a “junior college” here which is basically a college that issues credentials up to, but not including Bachelors’ degrees). They do things a bit differently. The ability of the college to get government funding, loans and grants is based on the college performance in terms of the ability of graduates to get jobs in their fields of study. Although I’m not really a fan of the whole government funding part, I think if you are to measure the performance of a college, especially a vocational college, this seems to be the correct way to do it. It is a balance between successful graduation (where success = “getting a job in the field of study”) and failure to graduate rates.
There is an argument that college isn’t about getting a job. But I think only people who work in fields that are useless for getting jobs actually make that argument. The idea of a “liberal arts education” should have gone out with the idea of the Grand Tour, to which, in my opinion, it is rather related to.
A friend of mine runs a school of cosmetology in which girls get certified in various beauty related skills and licenses. These women spend a few thousand dollars and get a qualification that will provide for them for the rest of their lives. I’d rather my daughter had that qualification than a “degree in English literature” even if it didn’t encumber her with $150k in debt.
FWIW, I think American college system are a disaster. There are only a few degrees that is is really worth getting at an American college. The exception though is the junior colleges and tech colleges which are really doing an amazing job. There is huge competition in that space and that competition is focused on producing graduates that get good value for money and great careers. They are focused on getting the results that students want (not grades, but well paying jobs), and doing it in a way that accommodates the students needs and at a price they can reasonably afford. I would not send my kids to an Ivy League if they not only give him a full ride, but actually paid me for the privilege.
If I hear one more land use acknowledgement, I think I’ll do a war dance. (Is that a culturally inappropriate thing to say?)
I brought up “land use acknowledgement” and so I can’t resist further comment. What is a land use acknowledgement? It is basically a statement saying “We acknowledge that the land this college was built on was stolen from these native people. We are going to acknowledge the theft but we aren’t going to do anything about it. However, we feel very righteous that we acknowledge the crime, even if we continue to profit from it.”
It is kind of like the descendants of war criminals saying “we acknowledge that all this artwork and pile of gold was stolen from German Jews, and we think what they did was terrible”, but not actually giving the artwork and gold back to the people from whom it was stolen. Eating caviar paid for by the theft with your friends thinking what good, woke people you are for your honesty.
I mean I don’t agree with the premise about stolen land, but the deep hypocrisy and dishonesty built into it even if you accept their premises, is jaw dropping. But of course they do it not because they care but because it is a shibboleth to acknowledge their own righteousness, or a magical incantation to absolve them of their imagined sins.
And the only way to make it worse is for them to jam it down the throats of ignorant young people whose education they are entrusted with.
@Fraser Orr
Being “book smart” is wildly overrated IMHO. I’d rather have a beer with my electrician than most of my colleagues and I’d better trust their advice on most subjects [see William F Buckley Jr].
We used to have polytechnics in the UK. These were “higher vocational schools” (in the broad sense, so they’d teach accountancy, nursing and such topics) that educated up to degree level. Many did a fantastic job. Oxford Polytechnic, for example, used to run what was widely regarded as the best architecture degree course in the country.
Then they all developed envy and wanted to be universities. Now we have the ridiculous situation of good polytechnics which have morphed into outrageously bad universities rather than taking pride in their substantial achievements and their difference from traditional universities.
We need to train a small number of academics. We need to train a lot more people how to learn. We need to train most people in useful skills. Everybody could do with acquiring a certain ability in critical thinking.
The system most of the Western world currently operates gets these priorities badly wrong.
Frasor Orr.
Yes indeed – and the last thing the left want is for land to be “handed back” to individual “natives”.
As that, individual land ownership, would be even evil “capitalism” – like that which produced Vice President “Indian Charlie” Curtis – who was a member of an Indian tribe and whose first language was not English.
What the left want is “Democratic Socialism” with the land being controlled by democratically elected Tribal Councils which will provide benefits and “free” services – for example the 1934 American Act (and that is what the New Dealers wanted for the general population of Americans, the Indians were just the group they could get away with, even back then the aim was “you will own nothing – and you will be happy!” you will be happy, or you will be punished).
Those who think that Democratic Socialism is a good thing – should visit Pine Ridge and other Reservations, then they can observe the results of 90 years of Democratic Socialism – indeed subsidised Democratic Socialism.