Should weaker students be kept from getting into college?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Ogre: Good policy. I couldn’t believe how many incoming freshmen in my first year of college signed up for pre-med. Seemed like it was about 50% of the entire class. I shudder to think of some of those kids being doctors…
[/QUOTE]

It’s not just pre-med. A lot of majors at my uni have a “weed-out” course that is designed to be difficult. The thinking is the same as at Ogre’s university: If you do not do well in that course, you will likely not do well in most courses.

My own department (Communications/Journalism) has a required course that is designed to be an introduction to media writing; that is, writing for print, broadcast and public relations. There is a required competency exam during the course; the exam covers basic grammar, spelling and writing. Failing the exam means the student must change majors. The logic is that our program is so writing-intensive that a student unable to grasp the basics of English cannot be expected to succeed either in school or professionally. Considering that some of the writing samples I’ve seen from people trying to get into the major are pretty damn bad, I’d say it’s a great system.

Robin

22

To concur with a couple of posters above: I teach in all three levels of California’s college systems (a community college, a Cal State, and a UC) and the way things are configured now seems to work very well, for the reasons cited above. If you are a weaker student, you can still get access to a world-class university education, but you’re going to have to work for it and prove yourself.

23

[QUOTE=Manatee]
If you are a weaker student, you can still get access to a world-class university education, but you’re going to have to work for it and prove yourself.
[/QUOTE]

But if you can prove yourself in a world-class university, then you are not a weaker student, surely?

I thought the OP was more concerned about situations like here in the UK, where the government has set itself an arbitrary target of having 50% of schoolkids become graduates, and is obsessively turning universities into throughput-optimised factories that risk losing their funding if they are insufficiently inclusive (i.e. if they insist on decent grades at any point).

24

[QUOTE=F. U. Shakespeare]
My brother is a math professor at a large state university, and he says that over the years, reduced admissions standards have made things worse for everybody.

He has to teach remedial material to the students who aren’t prepared, which means he has less time to spend teaching the students who are prepared.

And the unprepared ones aren’t being done a favor in the long run – they’re out the tuition, and often in debt for it.

[/QUOTE]

I’m a student at a low tier State University - one with fairly open admissions policies.

The first two years of the program were mind-bogglingly easy for me - they were much more difficult for some of the other students. But I saw professors do amazing calisthenics in order to get everyone out of class with a C- or better - open book take home finals. 10% of your grade for showing up - 10% for “gimme” assignments - and another 20% available as extra credit. Tests that were curved so that my 93% became 106%. My favorite refuge of “making sure the inept pass” - the team project.

Now we are getting to the end of the program and the coursework has become more difficult. Its built on the material we were supposed to learn earlier. And if you didn’t learn it earlier, the professors would have to be Cirque performers to get you to pass - they are still working hard to make sure that if you had even a glimmer of understanding of the material they taught you’ll get a C-, but they can’t compensate for a kid who really should have failed the pre-req.

So now we are in the situation that there are a number of students who have spent three years worth of tuition dollars in the program who will probably never graduate.

We would have done most of these people a much bigger favor to have failed them early in the program. They would have changed majors or changed schools or determined college wasn’t for them rather than wasting three years worth of tuition.

25

Yes, I interpret Pliny’s ‘Gallia’ location as Wales.

We in the UK have seen a peculiar phenomenon, lowering standards of entrance and lowering standards of evaluation of degrees.

I am all in favour of getting the best out of everyone, but I fail to understand the benefit of spreading things so thinly that nobody benefits.

Actually the best thing I have seen in the past few years is a friend of mine who is a joiner.
He took a job at the local CFE and is busily converting unemployable thugs into useful craftsmen.

I also reckon that ‘teaching’ should be a form of National Service, at the age of 35 everyone should be compelled to teach - mostly it is just moulding and motivation.

26

[QUOTE=FRDE]
I fail to understand the benefit of spreading things so thinly that nobody benefits.

[/QUOTE]

I think the ‘idea’ is that since people with degrees earn (or used to, anyhow) more than those without, if everyone has a degree then everyone will be wealthier, as if by magic.
:dubious:

27

[QUOTE=According to Pliny]
When I went to college, the assumption was that only those who were the smartest deserved a higher education, and would get state support if they had little money.
But weak students also pay taxes, or at least their families do. So is this a form of elitism, with the weak students families getting stuck with the smart kids’ bills?
[/QUOTE]

Certain kinds of elitism, IMHO, are a good thing. The real world is a competitive place.

The only mechanism for preventing students from going to college is that a college only has the facilities to teach a finite number of students. It makes sense to only accept the best and brightest of those who apply. The demand for higher education has created so many colleges of varying levels of prestige, cost and competitivness that most people should be able to go to college if they really want to. They just won’t get into Harvard.

28

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
We would have done most of these people a much bigger favor to have failed them early in the program. They would have changed majors or changed schools or determined college wasn’t for them rather than wasting three years worth of tuition.
[/QUOTE]
I’m an electrical engineer, but I came pretty close to going to law school after working for a few years, back in 1989.

In the admissions process, I talked to lots of lawyers, one of whom had graduated in the mid-1960s. On his first day of law school, the entire class met in the auditorium.

“Look around”, the professor instructed them. “See the person on your left, and on your right?”

Everyone did so.

“One of you won’t be here on graduation day”.

Less tuition was spent. But as far as I can remember, in that era, people didn’t make jokes about there being too many lawyers.

29

[QUOTE=slaphead]
But if you can prove yourself in a world-class university, then you are not a weaker student, surely?

I thought the OP was more concerned about situations like here in the UK, where the government has set itself an arbitrary target of having 50% of schoolkids become graduates, and is obsessively turning universities into throughput-optimised factories that risk losing their funding if they are insufficiently inclusive (i.e. if they insist on decent grades at any point).
[/QUOTE]

Sorry, I should have made myself clearer. What I meant was that you can still have access by working your way up through the ranks (going to a community college or a Cal State). Sure, it’s a climb, but at least the possibility is still there. We might tell weaker students “No, you can’t go to a UC. At least, not right now.” And then allow them to prove themselves elsewhere. At least we don’t say “Sorry, you’re not good enough for a UC” and then preclude entry in perpetuity.

30

[QUOTE=According to Pliny]
When I went to college, the assumption was that only those who were the smartest deserved a higher education, and would get state support if they had little money.
But weak students also pay taxes, or at least their families do. So is this a form of elitism, with the weak students families getting stuck with the smart kids’ bills?
[/QUOTE]

There are so many different types of “colleges” oriented towards all sorts of people that the question really is why would you want to ruin that by making post high-school education only for the “non-weak”?

Looking in my area there are institutions like (real public and private schools): Pellissippi State, Middle Tennessee, South College, Knoxville College, Phoenix University (online), Maryville College, National College of Business and Technology, Carson-Newman College, University of Tennessee, Commercial Driver Institute, Crown College, ITT Technical Institute, TN School of Beauty, Tusculum College, Fisk University, etc etc. A wide range of schools, from trade to two-year colleges to four-year universities.

Seems like there’s plenty of class space for whomever wants it, for whatever reason, with a wide variety of institutions. Since the idea, apparently, is to limit education to the “worthy”, the question now becomes: Which ones are you going to close? All except UT and Carson-Newman? What are you going to do with all those guys in mid-career transitions who want Cisco and MSNBC certifications or whatever? Tell them to fight for a spot in the UT computer science program? How does that make any sense?

Perhaps I’m just not getting something here… must be my UGA education, making me unworthy of following the logic laid out in this proposal. :wink:

31

I don’t think they should be discouraged from going to college, I think they should be encouraged to do something different. A year or so after I actually got into a “real” college after transferring from a community college, I sat down and figured out how much I’d spent on school, how much I was going to spend, and the opportunity costs of going to school part time and working part time instead of learning a trade and working full time. Because of various personal problems and setbacks, I’d taken about 4 years to get through the amount of school that should have taken me 2.

I chose welding as a decent semi-skilled labor profession that I would have been willing to learn, took the average wage a welder makes, subtracted training time, and found that, given my lifestyle to that point (living on $8,000-10,000 a year) I’d have had enough money to pay for a moderately inexpensive house with cash by the time I was done getting a BA. Instead, I was going to be getting out with about $20,000 in debt, despite living like a pauper, and my average wage was expected to be . . . about $1,000 a year more than a welder. Whoopdedoo. (Just looked up welding for recent wages. Holy shit! They make up to 70,000 a year! That’s not bad for something that only requires about a high school education plus apprenticeship.)

School isn’t for everyone. Financially, I would have been much, much better off learning a trade and working all that time. Granted, my situation was a bit worse than some, but it’s still a real big eye-opener to realize that carpentry or something like that could have been a better career path. Kids who don’t do well academically should be encouraged to go to trade schools. Alternate career paths should be given consideration alongside university or college for every student. I know truck drivers who make more than I do with my “fancy booklearnin’”.

If you’re going to school because you have a passion for learning, want to be a teacher or researcher or other professional, or want to improve yourself, those are good reasons for going. If you’re forcing your way through school just to make more money, there might be much better ways of going about it.

32

[QUOTE=JohnT]

Perhaps I’m just not getting something here… must be my UGA education, making me unworthy of following the logic laid out in this proposal. :wink:
[/QUOTE]

For a Dawg, you certainly can write well! :wink:
-Yellow Jacket who sometimes wishes she’d gone to UGA

33

[QUOTE=JohnT]
Perhaps I’m just not getting something here… must be my UGA education, making me unworthy of following the logic laid out in this proposal. :wink:
[/QUOTE]

Should have gone to Georgia Tech like me and monstro. :wink:

If college is supposed to be about delivering top-notch educations to intellectually deserving minds, then more attention should be directed to making college harder, instead of just making it harder to get in. Maybe I’m biased towards this view because my alma mater was big on weeding out slackers; if you were a “weak” student, you would not have survived there for long. You either needed to be super smart or very determined and disciplined, or have a balance of these traits. And that’s why it has the reputation that it has. Getting in was a walk in the park relative to getting out. The college itself was the utimate determinant of who really belonged, not SAT scores. The latter just got your foot in the door.

This is not to say that admission standards are meaningless. It’s just I think we often forget the real purpose of admissions standards. They are used as a means of selecting those students who are most likely the best prepared for college–an experience which is supposed to be a lot more rigorous than HS but very often is not. HS grades and SAT scores don’t tell you who is more “deserving” of a degree. They don’t determine who deserves to land a prestigous, high-paying job and who deserves to sweep floors at Chipotle. The college experience itself is supposed to do that.

If a “weak student” manages to successfully make it through a top-tier school, then the way I see it either the student is not so weak after all or the school is underserving of its top-tier reputation.

34

[QUOTE=MsRobyn]
It’s not just pre-med. A lot of majors at my uni have a “weed-out” course that is designed to be difficult. Robin
[/QUOTE]
-SNIP

I know that at my undergrad (U of Illinois), the most infamous class on campus was Accounting 201 (may have been some variation of 200, but it was the second Accounting level).

The intro Accounting was easy, as many majors were required to take Accy 101. The Accy majors had to take 201, and it was one of those steep-curved classes where 1-5 people got "A"s, and the rest were “not-A’s”.

I saw plenty of people in school with straight A’s, except for that one B or C.

Accounting was one of the more popular majors, regardless.

-Cem

35

[QUOTE=Sleel]
I don’t think they should be discouraged from going to college, I think they should be encouraged to do something different. A year or so after I actually got into a “real” college after transferring from a community college, I sat down and figured out how much I’d spent on school, how much I was going to spend, and the opportunity costs of going to school part time and working part time instead of learning a trade and working full time. Because of various personal problems and setbacks, I’d taken about 4 years to get through the amount of school that should have taken me 2.

I chose welding as a decent semi-skilled labor profession that I would have been willing to learn, took the average wage a welder makes, subtracted training time, and found that, given my lifestyle to that point (living on $8,000-10,000 a year) I’d have had enough money to pay for a moderately inexpensive house with cash by the time I was done getting a BA. Instead, I was going to be getting out with about $20,000 in debt, despite living like a pauper, and my average wage was expected to be . . . about $1,000 a year more than a welder. Whoopdedoo. (Just looked up welding for recent wages. Holy shit! They make up to 70,000 a year! That’s not bad for something that only requires about a high school education plus apprenticeship.)

School isn’t for everyone. Financially, I would have been much, much better off learning a trade and working all that time. Granted, my situation was a bit worse than some, but it’s still a real big eye-opener to realize that carpentry or something like that could have been a better career path. Kids who don’t do well academically should be encouraged to go to trade schools. Alternate career paths should be given consideration alongside university or college for every student. I know truck drivers who make more than I do with my “fancy booklearnin’”.

If you’re going to school because you have a passion for learning, want to be a teacher or researcher or other professional, or want to improve yourself, those are good reasons for going. If you’re forcing your way through school just to make more money, there might be much better ways of going about it.
[/QUOTE]

It’s a good point. In general, there is a shortage of people with skilled trades, and those that have 'em can command top dollar.

36

I think we should scrap selectivity in general and rate colleges based on how well they teach and how hard they are, not on who they don’t let in. People that think they are up to the challenge can give it a shot, and if they fail it’s their lost time and money.

37

But let’s face it. The more stupid kids are in a class, the worse-off the smart kids will be. By effectively inducing inflation in the college’s student pool, you’re lowering the quality for those that are truly qualified. In this case, stealing from the rich to give to the poor is very unfair. (And to put it on a less abstract level: to those of you complaining of idiot coworkers, imagine suddenly having to deal with twice the number of idiots. Same thing will happen to the students.)

38

[QUOTE=athelas]
But let’s face it. The more stupid kids are in a class, the worse-off the smart kids will be. By effectively inducing inflation in the college’s student pool, you’re lowering the quality for those that are truly qualified.
[/quote]

I don’t know why we should treat this like a given. College shouldn’t be like HS. If you don’t have want it takes to keep up, the professors shouldn’t have to hold you by the hand and slow the rest of the class down. My alma mater wasn’t like that (and it was public) so I don’t see why it has to be like that.

And besides, if a school has a reputation for being extremely hard and non-lenient, students who aren’t up for that particular challenge will probably want to go elsewhere.

39

[QUOTE=Malthus]
It’s a good point. In general, there is a shortage of people with skilled trades, and those that have 'em can command top dollar.
[/QUOTE]
But I think that these days, for whatever reason, a trade job is looked down at. I’ve never understood it myself–a guy can make a lot of money quickly and it still takes some specialized training. One of the hoods in the lab had a problem (a wire had frayed apart that kept the sash in place) and it eventually escalated to the point where we had two carpenters (not sure what that actually means at the school but that’s what it said on their shirts), an electrician, and a plumber needed to fix parts of the hood. Oh, then later an HVAC guy stopped by to make sure the flow was working properly. Could I have fixed most of it? Maybe, but it would have taken me at least twice as long and I probably would’ve screwed something up anyway.

Or take being a mechanic. Cars are more complex these days and there are fewer shade-tree mechanics fixing their own cars. My father’s told me stories about working on cars with my grandfather back when he was young. These days, Dad takes the car out to get the oil changed and forget fixing much more than the really obvious. Either he doesn’t have the tools or he doesn’t have the time.

My little branch of the family is heavily academic. It was sort of assumed that both kids would go to college but I have to believe that there wouldn’t’ve been a problem if one of us hadn’t been interested. Now I’m in grad school, my brother will probably be starting grad school next fall, and while I really like what I do sometimes I wonder if something like carpentry would have been a better choice.

I blame some of this on wherever this trend came from that high schools are just seen as a stepping-stone to a bachelor degree and the devaluation of a high school diploma. I took lots of academic classes in high school, mostly because they were required, of course, but I was still able to enjoy most of them. That said, I would have loved to been able to take, say, an auto shop course (and heck, if I had the time, I still would. Maybe after grad school.) Maybe then I could actually find the freaking spark plugs in my car. And I had several classes with people who should not have been in that class. They would have been happier not being there, I would have been much happier if they weren’t there, and I’m not sure why they were there to begin with. (Why do you take a pre-calc course if you have no interest in math?) I’m not saying we should go to those pathing schemes like you find some other places, but anything physical has been dumped in favor of more standardized tests and AP classes.

40

[QUOTE=you with the face]
…College shouldn’t be like HS. If you don’t have want it takes to keep up, the professors shouldn’t have to hold you by the hand and slow the rest of the class down. My alma mater wasn’t like that (and it was public) so I don’t see why it has to be like that.
[/QUOTE]
College isn’t being run like high school – but in too many cases, it’s being run like a business. (At least, it is at the public university where my brother teaches). And you don’t increase revenue by turning away customers (oops, I mean, students).

My brother would love to be able to set reasonable, high standards and stick to them. But he isn’t allowed to: he’s had students who didn’t do any work, all semester long, doing no homework, never coming to class (my brother hates taking attendance, but has to play CYA) and invariably scoring in the single digits on tests. When he flunks these kids, they complain to the chairman, and if that doesn’t work, they keep going higher. The kids have the advantage, in that the higher administrators are more accountable to the notion of the school being run like a business. Keep going upstairs, and you’ll find someone who will make a phone call to the professor and ask for lenience. If you don’t have tenure, you ignore such a request at your own risk.

And then there are the ones who blow the class off all semester, and then show up in his office the day before the final, asking for a review of the entire freaking course. When he turns them down, they’ve been known to complain to higher-ups that he refused to answer their questions. Kids like that are a drain on teachers’ time.

This appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon: it definitely wasn’t the case when my brother and I graduated from the same university where he now teaches math. I also get the impression that it occurs more in the undergrad ranks, and in courses not in one’s major (at least I hope they aren’t graduating surgeons and bridge builders who can’t do the work, but are good at complaining).

It can’t be good for the system to encourage unprepared, unmotivated students to clog up the system for three years wasting their money and everybody’s time.