College: A Cruel Hoax For Some

>>>They are more or less well-mannered, hard-working barbarians.

The place I work at would hire someone like that on the spot.

I work at a small state university not far from Texas that fits Professor X's conundrum. The average ACT score is 19. Basically, local students just need to be breathing and able to hold a pencil to gain entrance. Graduate school is similar. Enrollment is declining; troop deployment of the last 7 years has bled us near dry. The smarter students go north to the major state U's.

Our situation would be dire except for one click of recent good luck: international students. Our tuition is dirt cheap and with the entrance requirements reasonable for TOEFL scores, they are glad to be here. Since they mostly live on campus, our "student life" is coming back. Who knew the Caribbean, Nepal, China and India would be sending us their next-to-finest students?

I used to be a Mathematics Professor at an open-enrollment state university. The courses with the most enrollment were, by far, those that were remedial in nature, i.e., those that were covering material that should have been learned in high school. It is fair to say that a majority of those students had no business being in college at that time - they were either not ready to work on their studies (they wanted to party most of the time), or they simply did not have the aptitude for college material. Many of them would have been better off going to a trade school.

For example, my brother earned a BS in business. After graduating he decided that he had no interest in working at a job that required such a degree. He decided to go back and get a technical degree that allowed him to work outside repairing and installing industrial heating and cooling units. He loves his line of work, and has more than enough to do to keep him busy. There will always be a need for people like him who can do what he does (no outsourcing to India here!).

On one hand, Rod, I get what you are saying. We're not all the same, and all the PC-faux-egalitarianism in the world can't change reality. I'm also reminded of CS Lewis' postscript to The Abolition of Man (iirc) where he smites such egalitarian idealism hip and thigh: "Meanwhile, John, who should be reading his Aeschylus and Sophocles, remains seated, bored, while Robert pronounces "The Cat in the Hat Sat on the Mat." (Paraphrasing from memory.) I'm also smart, I guess, by nature -- began reading at two, coasted through high school and college and got all sorts of scholarships without studying. (Please forgive me if that comes across as cocky; I don't mean it to be; just my experience.) Grad school was a whole new ball game, of course.

On the other hand, I'm uncomfortable with the idea that some people are born intelligent and others aren't, that the former can learn while the latter can't. I really think people like Major Wooten's "Joe" may be the product of our crappy education system, which is focused more now on babysitting, social engineering, political correctness and maybe science and math than actually learning how to think, than developing critical competencies in reasoning and rhetoric. (This is precisely why so many people are homeschooling their children in the classical ways or sending their kids to classical schools, where they learn grammar, logic and rhetoric.)

Part of the problem, too, is the decline of parenting that has accompanies the decline of culture. My father-in-law recently retired from teaching and always tells of the decline in students' attitudes over the past 20 years or so, that parents weren't raising their children to concern themselves with anything else besides the fulfilling of their wants and certainly weren't instilling in them a respect for education or a desire for learning.

All that is to say, I wonder if we had a better primary system and secondary system if we wouldn't have so many knuckleheads in our classrooms.

What I'm talking about is the taboo we have against admitting that some people are smarter than others, and the contemporary American disdain for the dignity of manual labor, and the gnostic egalitarianism of US culture, which holds that we create our own realities by force of will.

How did we get here? Is this the result of hyperactive worry about every child's self-esteem when they're still in daycare and kindergarten? I'd make the argument that "modern" parenting and education have a lot to do with this, although I'd put this into the "good intentions with unintended bad results" category.

There was a time that manual labour was considered "good honest work", and I was hoping to hear that in America, it was still thus.

I agree with the substance of this post. Anyone can have a plan, anyone can have dreams and ideals and goals, but people can only rise to the limit of their abilities, and it is a current cultural myth that everyone has the same abilities or can rise to the same level.

In fact, there was a woman featured on the Today Show a couple of months back (or maybe it was the news) who started a "pro-C student" group. I actually thought what she was doing was very positive, because her message was that "C-students" are the backbone of the American economy.

I think there should be more vocational education available. I also think it may be time to consider ending the practice of social promotion from one grade to the next. If we want students to learn, we have to set the bar higher, then, even the C students will be able to feel some pride in what they have accomplished.

To our college instructors/professors posting and reading: do you have a sense for how basic skill levels have changed since No Child Left Behind was enacted?

I ask because one of the things our society will do is face reality (unfortunately, usually only when it's been rubbed in their faces). There is no direct correlation between doing well on a standardized test and abstract reasoning skills, that being the focus of what has been called "classical" education.

Re parenting: The public school teachers I know (my wife has been one for 35 years, and it's she and her colleagues to whom I refer) have been fighting a losing battle to teach those basic skills, only to be faced with the immovable "I don't need this crap" from students and a resounding "they don't need that crap" from their parents.

It's not that the means don't fit the ends, it's that the ends are being defined as how much can I buy with the money "your education" helps me get. It's a vicious cycle (as it were), with employers contributing to it as well.

"free trade agreement" is an oxymoron of the first order - that a schoolteacher said it an indication of the poverty of ideas plaguing this debate. Hilary's pandering (help the little people, with a grand total of $28 dollars, what calculator is she using to do the math on how much it costs to feed and clothe a family of four for a day?) is another.

The currency to measure "flourishing" isn't fiscal, or for that matter proficiency in literacy, its metaphysical.

We need a reckoning of the account balance of liberty - how "free" are folks to pursue happiness with the talents and gifts God gave them? Do our institutions serve public liberty or private gain?

And it begins in the home. When we relocated to the US, my teenage son thought he'd died and gone to Heaven(*) when the assignment grading system was explained to him - first day late, 10% penalty, second day late a further 20% cut in the credit earned, third day late rescheduled date and 50% reduction (or something similarly 'liberal'). In the European School he attended when we lived in Germany kids work towards a Baccalaureate that was considered tougher than the original French standard. If an assignment is late it is null and void, grade = 0, credit deficit, impending flunker!!

* his mother meanwhile had visions of Hell getting him to apply himself...

Part of the problem, I think, is the use of the word "college" to refer to a variety of things that are just not the same. It's reasonable to say that a person of below-average intelligence is not "college material" if we are thinking of Harvard Yard or the spires of Oxford when we say "college." But most community colleges are not "college" at all in that sense. They are trade schools whose purpose is to develop the basic skills required for the lower-level support positions in a knowledge-based economy. If you think about it that way, you have to redefine what it means to be "capable of college."

IF you changed "smarter" to "academically-inclined" it might be an easier sell. Friedamn's idea that we're all going to work on a computer in some information age job is craziness, as are all these trade agreements and uncontrolled immigration. Tehre's nothing wrong with being an ironworker or plumber or mechanic(as my car's brakes cost me $363 this very morning, and I had no problem paying him for a decent and important job at a reasonable price). There's no shame to a decent union or blue collar job, and in fact many pay pretty well.

Further, I hold in my hands fresh for the US Postal Service yet another solicitation from my alma mater, NYU.I have never contributed. NYU for an undergrad now costs over $40,000. There is simply no way that it's worth that. I'm sure the advanced math, writing and psychology seminars and classes I took are still taught by grad assistants from across the globe who barely speak English, just as it was in the 1980s. After all, they work cheap, and when a school's mission has become real estate acquisition on a grand scale, every penny counts. Instead of bemoaning the cost of higher education, when does Congress investigate, as Tony Soprano descibed Columbia, the gansters of Hamilton Heights and their associates in crime? You can create all these loan and aid programs, but they've done little but allow these schools to steal even more at well past triple the rate of inflation from students and their families.

"If she can do that with these poor kids, surely Prof X can do it with community-college adults."

I have taught literacy classes as a volunteer at the local library - it is a long-term, sometime tedious and thankless task. A college (even a community college) needs to be efficient, a course has to be contained in a manageable number of units of syllabus. At issue is why the "manageable number of units" of a dozen or so years in elementary school have failed to equip Americans with the rudimentary skills to soar onwards and upwards into liberty

because we don't teach "to fly like an Eagle" (as noted textbook author Isaiah wrote back in the day) we teach to "buy a ticket on an airplane" ie we manufacture corporatist consumers not truely free entrepreneurs.

Finally! somebody actually said it...out loud, in public! There are less bright people in America!

I have four adopted children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Most of them are turning out to be decent people but they are never ever going to go to college. In reality, they're never going to go beyond 6th grade. The frustration for these kids of trying to find a path in life is enormous. When asked the inevitable "what do you want to do when you graduate?", my 17 year old tells people she wants to take the CNA course and work in a nursing home and they immediately start to 'encourage' her to aim higher. Go to nursing school, get a ROTC scholarship, be an officer....Hello! This kid took 3 years to get through 4th grade math! Is it not bad enough that she has to watch her younger, non-effected sister graduate high school at 15 and finish her first two years of college by 16? Does she need complete strangers to tell her that her goals aren't good enough?

We've created a place where there are few good options for those on the border between normal and seriously sub-par intelligence. If there is no social reinforcement for honest positive goals, where do all the aging boomers think they're going to find nice people willing to wipe their rear ends in the nursing home? Oh- wait. that would be Mexico. Hardworking but not-so-bright north Americans are supposed to live off of government checks and medicate the boredom and humiliation away.

I am not slamming illiteracy per se, but consider that St. Nicholas of Flue was funtionally illiterate, yet as a significant Swiss landowner served as a canton councilor. His advise was sought at the national level when the warring Protestant and Catholic factions threatened to sunder the Pax Helvetica
"A plate from the Amtliche Luzerner Chronik of 1513 of Diebold Schilling the Younger, illustrating the events of the Tagsatzung at Stans in 1481. Top: A priest named Heini am Grund visits Niklaus von Flüe to ask him for his advice to save the failing Tagsatzung at Stans, where the delegates of the rural and urban cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy could not agree and threatened civil war. Bottom: Am Grund returned to the Tagsatzung and related Niklaus' advice, whereupon the delegates compromised. Am Grund is shown holding back a bailiff who wants to go spread the news already"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Flue

In other words, society can function without scholars, but not the other way around or, more presciently for my argument rephrased in folk wisdom terms:

"Don't put the cart before the horse"

Education is a tool, an implement, a vehicle, a means to an end.
It cannot function if idolized, usurping its true end: the human person.

We'd laugh at this, because we have no problem grasping that nature has not endowed all of us equally well in terms of physical strength and capabilities. The nerdling would be able to improve his strength to a certain degree, but to tell him his physical limits are defined only by his desires and will to succeed is to play a cruel hoax on him.

I think this same disconnect between the knowledge-worker "elites" and much of the rest of the population is evident in proposals to raise the retirement age to ease burdens on Social Security, etc. Sure, those of us who spend a lot of time sitting on our rear ends in front of a computer might be able to keep working until we're 70 or so. But what about someone who is a truckdriver? Or who works at a loading dock? Or who works in landscaping or construction? Will these people really be able -- physically -- to keep working at their jobs until they're 70 or more?

reddopto says: "Are Asians just smarter? No, I don't think so. A highly disciplined approach, a more demanding approach could get more out of these students at every level of American education."

Actually, isn't there plenty of evidence that Asians are indeed smarter? Or are we not allowed to talk about intelligence, because then we'll have to look at the other side of the racial "bell curve"?

In any case, I know many Asians, mostly from China and Taiwan, a few from Singapore and Korea. Maybe the smarter ones are those who left their countries. All I know is, they seem on the average very bright, as are their children.

One things is for sure: They have the strongest work ethic I have ever seen. They work very hard, and they force their children to do the same. No excuses are allowed.

I'll let others debate to what extent "g"/IQ/intelligence/cognitive ability is genetic vs. environmental. IMHO, the more important question, from the standpoint of public policy, is the extent to which IQ differences (between persons, groups, whatever) are _intractable_.

Obviously, any genetic component to an IQ difference is intractable without heavy-duty genetic engineering. However, even if we stipulate that most of an IQ difference is due to environment (however defined), the question still remains: to what extent is public policy capable of changing the environment in question? Will economic subsidies suffice? Is cultural change required? Better schools? Changes to family structure? And how does the government go about promoting such changes?

Posted by: Major Wootton | May 9, 2008 9:58 AM

Major, just pass the guy. He is not there for an education, he just needs to get his ticket punched. Whatever you are teaching is probably not very relevant to his vocational needs anyway.

Jason, IIRC the British school system has two or three tracks and the children are tracked at about age 11. The "high schools" the Brisish college students went to were true college prep schools, with students clearly able to learn at a college level.

Eleazer Williams

It is not an issue of what society may need, but what the culture values. We value brains. We do not value physical work.

Charles that is bull. American society does NOT value brains. We value money and power. If brains is how you get it, then it is a mediate good.

Grumpy Old Man
>A sound educational policy would include sound vocational and apprenticeship programs. They'd have to be flexible, because technology changes quickly. We should continue the uniquely American feature of not making everything hinge on one test people take when they're 13, but we need to get beyond Lake Woebegon educational policy where all the children are supposed to be above average.

Exactly. I've been thinking about this with regard to scholarships. Poor and minority students who get very good grades can find scholarships.

But, I actually have to wonder if they wouldn't do okay anyway, and the people we should be providing scholarships to are the C students, letting them go to trade school and whatnot.

I went to my 10 year HS reunion not long ago, and I was struck by the fact that most of them seemed okay, even those that didn't do well in school. (Of course, statisically, the ones that didn't do well were probably the absent ones.) They were C students, but because they weren't poor they were able to live at home for another few years and learn a trade, and now they're repairing AC units or doing construction or something and are fine. The important thing is they were able to rely on their family to get them over the hump into self-sufficiency.

Poor people often don't have that. Even discounting the ones that are essentially orphans, they often can't keep living at home while they save up, they certainly don't have any sort of car. They get thrust into the world without any assets and are forced to take the first job that comes along. And can't ever take a breather to learn a trade, or save up for a car.

Eleazer,

Thanks for the clarification. That makes a lot of sense and I suspect that it is a system that could save the American public education system. Unfortunately, it means a new type of segregation, which would not be acceptable.

As to the point that intellectual work is more valuable than physical labor: I think people are getting hung up on a moral meaning of the word "value." I think JohnMcG states the issue perfectly. Intellectual work does not add intrinsic moral value. Work that creates a pipe that doesn't break is worth more money than work that fixes a broken pipe.

The "meaning" we assign to this, the moral weight, is part of the problem that needs to be addressed by the Christian witness.

"Who is blaming the "victim" here? Why call someone a "victim" if they don't have the intellectual ability to engage in higher studies? Do you not share the presumptions of "education romantics"?"

PB - Someone is victimized (twice, actually) when they are badly taught, and then blamed and called deficient for not having learned from the bad teacher. It is not romanticism to state that objective truth.

I also said I wasn't commenting on Prof. X's specific case.

BTW, has anyone in this thread brought up expectations psychology? People tend to live up or down to others' expectations of them. That's not romanticism, either, but scientifically proven fact - and the effect is often quite strong.

What's romantic is the fantasy that human lives, motivations and outcomes can be predicted based on a few simple (and suspect) variables. Yes, intellect probably occurs on a bell curve, but that bell curve is embedded in a culture that acts on us all in constantly, and in the most profound ways. Warren Buffet once famously said that the primary determinant of his success was that he happened to be born in the US in the 20th century - if he had been born in Pakistan (I think he said), he would have probably been a menial laborer.

We have nothing to lose by expecting the best from people - but you have to support them in the quest. Saying you expect the best and then not supporting them is cruel and sabotaging. And the reality is that it takes much more support than most people - esp. most conservatives, in my experience - want to admit to live a healthy, happy, honest life in a society that often gives only lip service to those values, and often acts to undermine them.

Hillary provides an important perspective, though I'll take semantic issue with one of her points.

The vast majority of teachers are not "bad", and it is disingenuous to label the outcomes as results of "bad teaching" without examining the process itself.

Learning is the cooperative effort of the teacher and the student. Each brings a subset of skills and prerequisites to the process. Failure can be from one or both, from one or more skill or prerequisite.

The best teacher cannot teach a student who refuses to learn. The best student can go only so far if the teacher refuses to deliver. There's many an important point in the gray area in between. But most importantly, the extremes do not define that gray area. They simply provide comparison points.

There can be no single general description, so the reader must apply the following based on one's local conditions: there have always been schools that intend no more than to give rote instruction and ability in basic skills. There have always been schools where students have the opportunity to fully realize their potentials in abstract reasoning and critical thinking. There have always been schools who provide a mixture of both (the happy medium, I opine). Politics has intervened, with NCLB being the most recent manifestation of it, to arbitrarily set the balance towards rote learning and basic skills.

Take a look at the "top 100" list of high schools in the country. I'm betting they all have some variation of the experience of the one my children attended, the J.R. Masterman School in Philadelphia: they rejected the district (from the state) standard curriculum (almost going to court to do so) dumbed down and made mandatory in every classroom regardless of student needs, and they continue to prove that students who qualify for admission to their 9th grade graduate with offers to the best colleges.

How well a school delivers its mandated service is up to the local person to measure. Another thing I point to as the poison killing the process is the ridiculous notion that a standardized test can be a primary measure of advancement, and that there is such a thing as good test scores meaning success in a job. The measurement getting lost in the shuffle is "good enough", and one of the biggest detriments to everyone going to college is that competition reduces good enough to something shameful.

"The laborer does create value to society, but not as much as the person who comes up with a system to reduce the amount of labor required."

Ah! A tip of the hat to the self-serving Cult of Management that is the real root of the problem.

Far be it from me to denigrate a truly talented and effective administrator. But it seems to me that there is a correlation between all these kids who don't really belong in college and all the mediocre (and worse) managers who don't belong in management.

I completely understand the frustration of the professor as I am in a similar boat. However, I am not sure that the root cause of students' failure in college is their inferior intellect, although I am sure that explains some of the difference. The challenge is trying to correct a lifetime of inferior education via a system that is not designed to remediate. We are not trained in remedial education and I am not sure that we should be.

But for those who do not have the ability or the desire to pursue a college degree, it would seem reasonable that there are meaningful alternatives for meaningful employment.

I'm reminded of Moonlight Graham's sentence in Field of Dreams: "If I'd only gotten to be a doctor for one day, that would have been a tragedy."

If someone had the talent to be a medical researcher and find the cure for cancer, and instead became a plumber, enven if she became an excellent plumber, it would still be a loss for society.

So what do we as a society do? We "value" intellectual work. We pay intellectual workers more than physical workers, and give them higher social status.

We've made a trade-off -- we've chosen the tragedy of people not cut out for intellectual work wasting time and energy going down a blind alley over the tragedy of someone's intellectual talents going unfulfilled.

This doesn't have to be a black/white choice, and we can probably adjust the degree to which we do this. But I do think that there is value to encouraging people to exhaust their intellectual options before concentrating on their physical options.

My grandfather never finished high school

He worked for his whole career as an inventor for Brach's candy company. He was the first person there to think of making an egg-carton type box (on a tiny scale) to hold chocolate-covered cherries so they wouldn't be crushed in shipping--and then he designed and built the machine that made those boxes. He was also one of the engineers on the project to build the machine that stamped messages on candy hearts.

He used to brag that he had a lock on his office door--only on *his* side, and Mr. Brach himself had to knock before he could come in. The company respected my grandfather's talent, ingenuity, commitment and hard work ethic--and if they ultimately benefited from his various patents, he knew that they would take care of him in his retirement, which seemed like a pretty fair trade to a man who remembered the Depression.

I know my grandfather could have finished high school--it was economics, not lack of ability, that made him drop out early. But would he have gone to college? Should he have? He worked with college grads, and sometimes found the disconnect between their theoretical knowledge and their lack of practical experience amusing. The kid without a degree, but who could rebuild a clock by the time he was ten, would have done better in my grandfather's company than the college grad with the highest GPA but little of that curiosity or hands-on experience.

There are young men and women out there in high schools who have talent, real talent, in fields for which no degree should be necessary--but these days, a degree is necessary for everything, and the ability to pass college-level academics is the gate through which all that talent has to squeeze. Is it really the right thing, or the best thing, to make an expensive and academic-oriented "ticket" the only means for entry into the world beyond unskilled labor?

I agree with much of what JohnMcG and Marian said. Some find real value in community colleges. One of my students dropped out of high school as a sophomore, dallied in drugs, took up a trade, ran a business. At twenty-seven, he decided to enter community college. He graduated last year with a doctorate in clinical psychology. He may be the exception, yet wouldn't it have been a shame if he had never had the opportunity?

i went to a high school that was funded by the state for some of the brightest students in the state. every year they have to fight for funding and every year legislators make the argument that since the kids are already so smart we don't need to help them at all. but that isn't true. People of all strengths and abilities need support just in different ways. I think it is naive to think that everybody has what it takes to become albert einstein, but it is also criminal to think that albert einstein can only come from certain types of people. education needs to be overhauled and we need to get away from the anachronistic system of local standards for schools and try to make our early
educational goals standard across the country. we need to give kids in high school more of an opportunity to train in skills that gives them the ability to provide for themselves in the real world. we will never be able to outsource our plumbing to india.

In short, there may be such a thing as a natural individual limit on academic aptitude, but I don't think we've found it yet.

Still, this isn't Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. For every "natural" with high ability, there's likely to be a fool, and a passel of mediocrities in between.

Our culture is in thrall to the cult of credentialism. Someone can be fool or a criminal but if he has a BA, MA, or JD next to his name then he is the font of all wisdom and knowledge. Nonsense. Education is not experience.

My mother has a handy-man who's worked for her for almost 25 years. He joined the Army in World War II, learned radio electronics and can still build or fix just about any gadget you can think of. Taught himself to play drums and ended up playing with some of the jazz greats on the west coast. Liked the idea of flying so he built his own glider. Thought he could make better furniture than what was available at the stores so he became an expert carpenter, creating some of the most beautiful tables and chairs I've ever seen. He never made it past the 8th grade. Give me experience and curiosity any day.

A single mechanized street sweeper could have replaced 300 of them. But the Indian gov't wants to keep *truly* physical laborers employed, because there would be nothing else to do with them otherwise.

Suetonius tells a similar story about (I think) Vespasian. Someone came to Vespasian with an invention that would, I think, help assemble columns. Vespasian turned it down on the grounds that it would put people out of work. (Of course the Romans had an economy built on slave labor, but that's another story.)

***

CB,

My grandfather dropped out of school two weeks before graduating from the 8th grade. He really was a self-made man, and I can't shake the nagging thought that, for all my credentials, I'm not half the man he was in many ways -- certainly I'm much less self-reliant, and much less savvy about money.

Rod, But we don't hear stories about people who were told they could become anything they wanted to be, but who in fact didn't, because they never really could.

Yep. The Black Swan problem of silent evidence: our inability to account for what we cannot see, in this case, those who fail and thus never tell their story. But we hear over and over about those who win.

Franklin, thanks for your perspective. I agree that bad teaching happens within a context, and most teachers mean well and try hard. Teaching and other human service work is so devalued in our country - that's one problem. You really have to be at the top of your game to be a good teacher, and you have to avoid letting your own or your organization's "baggage" interfere with the process. Hard to do, and many teachers (or professionals in any field) don't even understand that that's part of the job.

rr - good on you for defending community colleges. community colleges are great. the WSJ recently ran an article on which colleges Fortune 500 ceo's graduated from; most did not come from the ivy league, but from state schools, and some from community colleges.

btw, I contradicted my own thesis when I said that human achievement can't be reduced to a few simple variables. It kind of can, as the Warren Buffet story illustrates. When and where you were born are key variables that can determine your success; raw intelligence - far less important. In fact, as a former business journalist, high tech journalist and current coach, I can assure you that high levels of intelligence and creativity are often **inversely correlated** with success." Discipline and perseverence are the key qualities. I think any teacher would agree. (Of course if you're intelligent, disciplined, and persevering that's best of all.)

But all of these terms are badly defined, another problem with the whole Bell Curve crap.

In fact, as a former business journalist, high tech journalist and current coach, I can assure you that high levels of intelligence and creativity are often **inversely correlated** with success.

One thing I've noticed is that the very definition of "success" is often dependent on class and economic background. For example, my idea of "a good job" is something intellectually challenging and engaging that makes use of my talents and interests, and pays me enough to enable me at least to pay my bills and have a bit left over.

But I've known a number of people (mostly older, by now) from working class backgrounds who define "a good job" as something that comes with a hard hat and a union card, and that's pretty much it. Others define "a good job" as something in one of the higher-paying professions. By their standards, I've never had a good job. But I think I've been lucky enough to have several good jobs, as I define the term for myself.

(I first noticed this years ago when the mothers of some female friends and acquaintances of mine would ask their daughters if their boyfriends had "a good job", and I could tell by their reaction what they meant by "a good job", and it was frequently different from mine.)

If "high levels of intelligence and creativity are often inversely correlated with success," perhaps that says something about how different people define "success". If you define success primarily in monetary terms, that's one thing. But a lot of the people you describe as having "intelligence and creativity" might define "success" in somewhat different terms.

Who decided that "success" = "makes lots of money"? (For that matter, who decided that pushy, aggressive, driven people who can't sit still are "type A" personalities? That certainly isn't type "A" in my book; I try to avoid people like that as much as possible.)

From the movie Holiday Inn (sorry, it's from memory):

Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds): You remind me of my father. He was just a man with a family. Never amounted to much, never wanted to. But as long as he was alive, we had plenty of eat, and clothes to keep us warm.

Jim Hardy (Bing Crosby): Where you happy?

Linda: Yes.

Jim: Then your father was a very successful man.

In fact, as a former business journalist, high tech journalist and current coach, I can assure you that high levels of intelligence and creativity are often **inversely correlated** with success.

One thing I've noticed is that the very definition of "success" is often dependent on class and economic background. For example, my idea of "a good job" is something intellectually challenging and engaging that makes use of my talents and interests, and pays me enough to enable me at least to pay my bills and have a bit left over.

But I've known a number of people (mostly older, by now) from working class backgrounds who define "a good job" as something that comes with a hard hat and a union card, and that's pretty much it. Others define "a good job" as something in one of the higher-paying professions. By their standards, I've never had a good job. But I think I've been lucky enough to have several good jobs, as I define the term for myself.

(I first noticed this years ago when the mothers of some female friends and acquaintances of mine would ask their daughters if their boyfriends had "a good job", and I could tell by their reaction what they meant by "a good job", and it was frequently different from mine.)

If "high levels of intelligence and creativity are often inversely correlated with success," perhaps that says something about how different people define "success". If you define success primarily in monetary terms, that's one thing. But a lot of the people you describe as having "intelligence and creativity" might define "success" in somewhat different terms.

Who decided that "success" = "makes lots of money"? (For that matter, who decided that pushy, aggressive, driven people who can't sit still are "type A" personalities? That certainly isn't type "A" in my book; I try to avoid people like that as much as possible.)

From the movie Holiday Inn (sorry, it's from memory):

Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds): You remind me of my father. He was just a man with a family. Never amounted to much, never wanted to. But as long as he was alive, we had plenty of eat, and clothes to keep us warm.

Jim Hardy (Bing Crosby): Where you happy?

Linda: Yes.

Jim: Then your father was a very successful man.

Hillary Retting, I can assure you that high levels of intelligence and creativity are often **inversely correlated** with success."

Your assurance of this "inverse correlation" is not comforting. All metrics point the other way:

1) A meta-analysis involving 32,000 subjects found cognitive ability dominates for even entry-level job performance at 0.54, higher than any other metric, even job try-out at 0.44.

2) There is very strong correlation between income and IQ independent of family background or wealth.

3) IQ even correlates to health, crime, gros state economic production, divorce, chance of survival on the battlefield, and even government effectiveness. More often than not, when considered against all other factors, it's the dominate one.

4) New ideas and creativity have always been dominated by the high IQ set. This is a no-brainer. Most modern Nobel Prize winners have an IQ above 150. Historical greats were not of average intelligence. Modern rough estimates: Goethe 210, Pascal 195, Newton/Voltaire 190, Michelangelo/de Vinci 180; Darwin/Bach 165, Rembrandt/More 160.

Here is a quote from Socrates,,,,,loosely it translates:

If there is no wood, there can be no fire.

Sam,

Do you have a source for that? I'd like to look up the Greek.

I think their are cultural disparities and economic disparities contributing to varied success in school. Race is determined by appearance, not genetic testing, the more we look at the genetics of race the more we see it's a spectrum with much overlapping among and diversity within the perceived races. And I don't know why we should take a few genetic traits that code for appearance and assume that tells us anything about genetics that affect the mind. Especially when we haven't correlated any genes with an abundance or lack of intelligence.

These students really have no choice. You can talk about trade schools and blue collar work all you like, but there's very little that can't be automated, outsourced or just purchased from overseas companies. If you have the skills of a semi-literate farm worker from Northern Mexico, you are going to end up competing with him for a job, one way or the other.

As for native ability, I'm sure there are some truly limited people, but that's not what we're talking about here. Your example is in fact wrong. If the spindly nerd worked out enough, he would end up with muscles to do the job. He wouldn't be Mr. Universe, but he'd manage. This is exactly the situation most members of the human race have been in since the beginning, and nerds didn't die out do to inability to compete.

By the same token, these students you are talking about aren't mentally impaired -- they are mental couch potatoes, who've never exercised their brains since childhood. Asking them to do something intellectually difficult is like asking a 350 pound sedentary person to run a marathon. They wouldn't get through the first mile without collapsing and deciding it was impossible. And without some training, it is impossible!

What I think is needed is some way to get these people into mental shape, *before* you dump them into college classes. You aren't going to make up for all the deficiencies of their education, and their lack of mental exercise, just by trying to get them motivated. Any more than a bit of cheerleading would get that 350 pounder through the marathon.

I think it's wrong to just write them off as dunces though, and pointless to put them all through trade schools. There's a limit to the number of trades people we need too.

When radiology can be outsourced ...

As a college instructor, I can't say I entirely agree with you Elizabeth Anne. If there's a problem with Prof. X, it might be that he has high standards for his students -- standards that they aren't used to living up to, because no one has asked any real work of them before, or has told them to put down the video games and turn off the TV until their homework is finished. As for the chair not being happy with the results, academic administrators are often focused merely on outcomes -- the number of bodies passing their courses. Whether the students really deserve to pass is often not an issue. Yes, he knows his student make-up. He also knows that the dean and the administration are simply looking at the raw numbers, and knows that his life as a dept. chair will be easier if warm bodies are processed through his classes with "PASSED" stamped on them. Having a large number of students failing classes is a bureaucratic problem; the possibility that all those students failed because the *deserved* to often isn't taken into account, and is considered irrelevant.

At the same time, however, it is possible that Prof. X and the institution where he teaches may simply be a bad fit. They may not really want instructors who will really challenge the students and not just shepherd them through classes.

But I agree with the person who said that, by the time students get to college, it's often too late to do anything for them.

This is a very interesting conversation, lots of interesting posts. I feel for Professor X, desperately trying to make up for a failed school system in his community college courses. But something is off about this whole debate. Has anyone here ever heard of the Principles of Adult Learning here?

I give workshops all the time in my job to people looking to enhance their job-related skills so that they can move up in their fields and career tracks. The participants usually exhibit a spark once it's established how this is relevant to not just their paychecks, but to better performance in their jobs, because while there are morons and "barbarians" out there, most people actually want to be good at what they do for a living.

Perhaps these community colleges/trade schools could look at teaching the traditional educational canon differently.

Elizabeth Anne: "Witness the fact that his chair is unhappy with his results"

Rod quoted Professor X as saying his chairs never complained about his results.

"...and the contemporary American disdain for the dignity of manual labor.."

While, I agree that such disdain exists, I think you are over-simplifying. A major reason Americans view manual labor arises from the fact that manual labor sucks. The reason people prefer white collar jobs isn't simply because they pay significantly but because they are far more enjoyable.

For example, your emphasis on false egalitarianism is duly noted and applies just as much to jobs as it does to intellect. Not all jobs, or all types of work are created equal. Some work is more enjoyable then others. That's why people go to college--to get a "good" job.

After all, few people want to be at a McDonald's drive thru or a cashier at Wal-Mart. People do those jobs because they don't have any other choice.

This is one of the most enlightening articles I've read in ages, and I want to really thank you for it.

I'm a bookish type in my late 40, as is my wife. I'm educated to Masters' level, have been toying with a doctorate for the past couple of years, and have written a couple of books and various papers. We have two daughters, 14 and 10, both at what is considered a good private school.

The 14-year-old is a lovely girl, but wouldn't know intellectual work if it hit her across the head with a bound volume of the Summa. The other day my wife and I guessed that in her four years of high school, she has borrowed no more than 5 books from her school library, and none from our municipal library. I have never seen her sit down and read a non-fiction book. If we can force her into a museum on our travels she will sit in a corner while we look around. Her cultural literacy is minimal to nil.

After a recent debacle involving a term paper on the Merchant of Venice, in which she signally failed to even address or acknowledge the question, while insisting that this didn't matter as she had at least written three or so pages on the play, I contacted her English teacher to see how he thought she was performing.

He's quite happy with her work. True, she has no idea on how to construct an argument, and she struggles to precis original texts, and after a solid week of going over and over the Merchant, she still couldn't succinctly tell me what it was about, but - and I assume his response is based on experience of the British education system - she'll still get a high enough mark because everyone else's work is so much worse.

The beauty of your article was it allowed me to see - and it shouldn't have been for the first time, but, alas, my naivete knows no bounds - that 'education' in our time has little if anything to do with learning, and everything to do with processing. Ideally, I'd imagine (or at least hope) that my daughter's school would want her to learn the skills needed to interrogate a text, to form her own opinion, just as it would want her to recognise within herself the value and beauty of knowledge for its own sake. But if these things aren't going to happen, the school is quite willing to neglect its role as a place where we can become human, and instead wink and collude with a simulcra of that unfolding, so long as it meets the standards of the education authorities.

But what also struck me in the piece is the need for people like myself to recognise that my daughter is not me, and that she needs to find her own place. Which isn't easy, needing to calibrate the subtle differences between intellectual capacity, sheer laziness, and teen fog, but I don't think I'm helping her any if after weeks of intense coaching on, say, The Merchant, she's no wiser at the end.

What this means for her education, I don't know. I'm not inclined to take her out of her school, but I'm not fooled by her school's Pollyanna-ish approach to her progress, and I wonder where the resources are to best help her find that place. The whole schools/careers set-up now appears geared to make students think they're learning when they're not, as you note, and this therefore requires the elaborate structure of mediocre tertiary study to jolly them along.

The problem is, I have no idea even where to guide her. (My reactionary side says Agricultural College, but a vision of Paris Hilton just entered my head...)

David, UK, that's a beautiful post. Thx for posting it.

I'm a college professor. The "Bell Curve" is nonsense. I've taught all across the racial spectrum and have seen Asians underperform and African-Americans excel, and vice-versa.

I read the rest of Professor X's article when my Atlantic Monthly arrived yesterday. While his goals are admirable, and his frustration understandable, I was struck by one of his anecdotes, which I'm going to summarize from memory, as I don't have the Atlantic in front of me.

His student, "Ms. L.," was assigned to write a research paper on a "historical controversy." She wanted to do it on abortion. He, correctly wanting to avoid being handed a paper on the pros and cons of the controversy itself, pretty much told her (and I hope I'm getting this right) that he didn't think there was an actual historical controversy about abortion, just controversy. She ended up doing a paper on gun control that was basically what he didn't want: an issue paper on the pros and cons.

But I have to say that I don't understand what Professor X means when he says there is no "historical controversy" when it comes to abortion. Maybe because I'm teaching at one of the the most pro-life universities in the country and I've had to read many student papers on abortion, I'm aware of texts going back to classical times referencing and encouraging or stigmatizing abortion. Is it possible that Professor X has his own blind spots? In his situation, he's going to come into contact with people whose learning approaches are often emotive--they follow what interests them and their learning spokes out from that central hub.

But he teaches at night, when he's exhausted and the students are exhausted. Most of these students have to take these courses to advance in the workplace. But do they actually learn anything that makes them do their jobs better? Why can't they just be trained in the workplace? If we would separate certifying and credentialing from the actual business of education, we'd all be better off. The certificates, the credentials and the diplomas would have greater intrinsic worth.

David J. White, i like that Jim Hardy's quote (also from memory!) goes on with "I hope I can do half as well."

My sadness is that i acknowledge the radical difference between the fact that the high schools of my grandparents' day only educated 10% of the young people, while today we're, wrong-headedly or not, keeping 94-8% of them in schooling rather than shunting everyone after age 15 into the workforce. I would not go back to 1908.

But my son, doing top 10% work today, does not know or understand or can express himself as well as those graduates did. This is a loss, but balanced by the gains for those other 80%.

And when it comes to why public education costs so much more than it did, keep in mind that we did not even try to educate most of our disabled and developmentally delayed children until 1974 and much after in many areas. That's an honorable expense.

Yet i keep coming back to the fact that the top 10% today couldn't compete academically with the grads of the only 10% days. It's a challenge, but where to go with it? (Nota bene -- by 1960 or so, we were up to 50%: TV is a major index, but not the prime cause; the difference is in keeping that last third in the classroom that never used to be there until after 1975 ff., changing discipline, standards, and atmosphere for everyone.)

I just posted about this the other day. To the people who say that this is the "teachers fault," let me tell you that you are WRONG. You have no idea what you are talking about.
I've been teaching in the poverty stricken areas of Los Angeles for over 20 years. All of the kids are told that they are college material. More than half drop out simply because they CANNOT pass Algebra, even if they take it five times. Of course, IDIOTS blame the teachers.
Tracking is a "racist" word, manual labor is for illegals.
Let me tell you, we are in BIG trouble as a country.
Most of the students simply do not care about learning. They care about IPODS.
Maybe 30% of the kids are actually college material, have both the intelligence as well as the curiosity to succeed in an academic environment.
We are failing the other 70% by pretending that they will become doctors and lawyers and professionals.
As a white person I do not dare utter such opinions in any school cafeteria in the inner city.
We had a black on brown riot in one of our schools this week, students totally out of control. And yet, teachers are blamed for the test scores. Unless you have been there in the trenches, you should shut your mouth before criticizing any teacher.
Like I said in an earlier post, the tough kids might blossom in a shop class, but for the most part the shop classes are gone. So, what is that poor frustrated kid supposed to do if he simply CANNOT pass algebra? He turns to gangs and drugs, he unites with other misfits who are equally filled with despair.
The shop classes saved my life in high school. My parents were both alcoholics. I took woods, metals, welding, photography, electronics, printing...every shop class available. I had no taste for academics at that time. Every summer I could land a job right away because of the skills I learned in those shop classes. I ran with a tough crowd of guys, mostly motorheads. A wood shop teacher took me under wing and showed me how to do professional level woodworking.
I did eventually go to college. The irony is that most of my high school buddies make more money than I do!
So, I agree that it's a cruel thing to insist that every kid should go to college when it's obvious that some folks are not cut out for it.

John wrote:

"I give workshops all the time in my job to people looking to enhance their job-related skills so that they can move up in their fields and career tracks. The participants usually exhibit a spark once it's established how this is relevant to not just their paychecks, but to better performance in their jobs, because while there are morons and "barbarians" out there, most people actually want to be good at what they do for a living. "

That's my experience. I teach physiology, which is widely known as a difficult course. If we were really encouraging hopeless cases to enter college, I'd expect it to show up in my classes at an open-enrollment college, with a good number of nursing majors who are the first in their families to attend college, many students with GEDs, and high enrollments in remedial math courses.

A lot of students do fail my classes -- yet I've almost never met one who's *unable to learn* physiology. They might need to take the class twice, to put it off until other issues in their lives are resolved, to seek tutorial help or learn how to compensate for learning differences, or to adapt their study methods, but most students who don't pass try again, succeed, and go on to pass their Nursing Boards.

It doesn't require extreme intelligence to do college-level work. What it takes is determination, effort, and the advice of people who know what kind of strategies can help. It also helps a lot if the instructor and students agree on what it means to really know the material and why they need to know it.

Pat Bowne

When I asked whether there might not be messages and values in such works, messages that could encourage young people like herself (and anyone else for that matter) to think more deeply about what it meant to be a human, and how we relate to other humans, and that it was therefore important to her to look beyond just trying to 'find the right answers' and actually engage personally with the text, she flicked me off - that wasn't necessary to pass the coursework, she countered.

My straight-A, college graduate daughter would say the same thing exactly.

Before she got her degree at her prestigious, high-ranking college, shouldn't someone have figured this out about her and put a halt to this whole charade?

It doesn't require extreme intelligence to do college-level work. What it takes is determination, effort, and the advice of people who know what kind of strategies can help. It also helps a lot if the instructor and students agree on what it means to really know the material and why they need to know it.

It takes good memory and more than rudimentary literacy. Most contemporary colleges do not teach how to reason, and that is a real defect.

"here I am at 31 with an undergraduate degree nobody wants that qualifies me essentially to dig ditches"

who says that college is supposed to prepare you for a job? College is for education. What you do with that education is up to you. I graduated from a fine southern university with a decidely useless degree - History, along a smattering of courses in political science, biology, German and others. I also played on a collegiate team for 4 years and ran a business for the school (a bar actually). After graduation I went for a Masters degree essentially because everyone else I knew was headed to some sort of graduate education. This degree was double useless. yup! another history degree. But I enjoyed it and got good grades. My real education came with my first real professional job. And ever since then I've move ever upward.

College (and later graduate school) taught me how to think, how to research, how to analyze and how to reach a defensible conclusion. It was and still is the basis for my career. I pity today's students who head off to school who want to obtain a degree in a specific profession. What happens if that profession doesn't work out? Are they prepared to step back, and rethink what they want to do? I doubt it.

the best advice I can give someone coming out of college is the same advice that Yogi Berra gave "when you come to the fork in the road take it."

College is about learning how to learn.

Steve

"Further, I hold in my hands fresh for the US Postal Service yet another solicitation from my alma mater, NYU.I have never contributed. NYU for an undergrad now costs over $40,000. There is simply no way that it's worth that."

Case in point: MIT now offers its entire curriculum online for free. You can do as much or as little work as you choose, interact with faculty or not, even (sometimes) interact with fellow students. Theoretically, if you did it well enough and long enough, you would end up knowing everything an MIT grad knows. But would that qualify you for a job requiring an MIT degree? No, of course not. So, since you can get all the knowledge for free, what you are paying the big bucks for, obviously, is the credential. Which gets more expensive every year.

And which leads to what I call the "education bubble." A large number of people are defaulting on student loans (for which the Supreme Court in its wisdom has now said the creditors can levy on Social Security benefits!) because, like some real estate these days, the education the loans bought is not worth the money borrowed to purchase it.

I gotta side with the people above that say if the majority of Prof. x's students are failing, the problem isn't the students. Witness the fact that his chair is unhappy with his results: chairs are generally not stupid. They know their student make up.

See, here is the the problem. We are letting the furniture tell us what to do. Where did this chair get so smart?

Maybe someone has gotten to this point already, but what isn't addressed in the article is the business of higher education and its complicit academics.

These students who "are not college material" nonetheless find a college to attend. The standards problem is on the intake, but academics work hard to get their advanced degrees and will do about anything to be employed anywhere in higher education.

The genuine "cruel hoax" is that even those who graduate from many such colleges find their degrees completely discounted. We need to be honest that only college degrees from a handful of universities are taken seriously. A history degree from Yale is more likely to get you a job at Morgan Stanley than a business degree from WaWa State. Let's get real. The real hoax isn't that "college is for everyone." The real hoax is that a college degree is meaningful when its not from an elite institution. Yet we keep the mills running largely for the professors and administrators they employ.

Charles Murray (the surviving author of 'The Bell Curve') was given three consecutive days of WSJ op/ed space for essays on that which Professor X concludes. The essays are good reading, even if one does not agree. January 2007 I think. KA.

Just glancing through the comments, I hadn't seen comments about the supply and demand for manual skilled labor or even that long lost word craftsmanship. I have a BSME and have done well in the engineering world with medical devices and many patents. However, it's my opinion that there are too many white collar workers and not enough skilled folks in the trades. It also seems obvious that the trades: plumbing, carpentry, electrician work, automotive and the rest are pretty much safe in economic turmoil.

The average young male (or female) can barely change a door knob, much less overhaul a car or repair the electrical wiring. When all of us Baby Boomers get older we'll still need our cars repaired and our handyman work done even if the economy stalls. I would recommend that folks learn a trade even if they go to college, and maybe even consider the radical notion of becoming a craftsman in a trade, even if they are intelligent. Heck, maybe because they are intelligent and can look at the big picture in our society and see a glaring need. This country is in need of telented and skilled craftsman and it may even be the case that they will make a comparable living or possibly even better; and maybe some that can speak English. I've always been grateful that I was raised as a handyman and have a lot of carpentry skills. I've met a few excellent builders who seem to have done at least as well financially eventhough they may not have had the impressive salaries. The good carpenters can build their own houses as well and build some real financial equity. I plan on teaching my sons how to build their own houses and I think it wise to start with small ones; maybe just a cabin. With no or little mortgage there isn't the great need for a high salary.

Why not have smart people do hands on work as well. How many Dilberts can this country sustain inventing new BlackBerries for more white collar workers? Eventually we may need to get back to the basics of food, shelter, water, energy and basic health needs. If times get tough, the Blackberries, flat screen monitors and other hi tech gizmos aren't really going to matter much.

In my English teacher days, I occasionally got flak from the Department for insisting on teaching grammar in English 102, where the emphasis is supposed to be on writing long papers. But, prerequisite or not, teaching English 102 without grammar to students who don't know grammar is like training people to run the marathon who haven't learned to walk yet. It just can't be done. And believe me, telling the brass that these students don't belong in this class will get no results whatever.

Marian: That may or may not be the case. Nonetheless, I do not hold the teacher in that case responsible for students not having done the prerequisite work sufficiently. That's on the students and whoever their previous teacher was. What you're saying is that that English 102 class is really 101.5 in practice, or something like that, and another course down the road is going to have to be 102.

At the same time, one hopes that the curriculum is coordinated sufficiently that teachers are aware of what students coming from a prerequisite course will and will not know and will plan accordingly. I can think of a three-semester sequence I took where I had the same professor for the first and third semesters, and a different prof for the second. At the end of the first semester, the professor said bluntly, "Whatever the guy next semester tells you, it's wrong. Do it my way because it's right and it works." At the beginning of the third semester, he told us, "I already know that you don't know everything you would have had I been your teacher last semester, and while it's unfair of me to expect that wouldn't be the case, I don't care. The burden is on you to get where you would have been, and to do so quickly." That, in my view, represents at least poor coordination of curriculum, if not outright unprofessional behavior on the part of this particular teacher.

Richard

Advice to younsters thinking of making a career in IT: the browser-based technology market is thoroughly saturated. Demand training in mainframe technologies, and learn Cobol and batch processing. We "dinosaurs" are fast approaching retirement, and our numbers are already unable to keep up with the demand.

Cobol programmers make the best lovers: we invented flow charts. ;-D

Rod, my husband's and my lives were a portrait of this situation just last year. I'm a white-collar worker with some college education. I went only 2 years. My husband is a blue-collar worker who went to trade school, but he's not employed in that trade. He worked 22 years for the same company that shut down and moved to Mexico. He studied for awhile with the prospect of going to college. He did well in English and other studies, but fell short in the higher math department. We studied even harder, but he eventually lost his enthusiasm and confidence about it and gave up. He didn't want to enter college and have to take it there and possibly fail it anyway was his response. He said he had zero tolerance for it at middle age. To a degree, I understand what he's talking about. I did learn a new trade to be independently employed and am happy I did, but I enjoy learning subjects of my own choosing, and mine was just such a situation.

My point is that college isn't for everyone, no matter what their age. People have different tolerance levels and demeanors. Whether you have a negative or positive self-image has something to do with it too, I think. No matter how much I encouraged and aided him, my husband just didn't have a "can-do" attitude. I don't fault him at all for it. I'm just happy that he's now happy with his new occupation.

I think at the core of a lot of people's uneasiness with saying someone is not college material implies that there is an inherent "elitsm" to having a college degree. That this is somehow Charlie's Golden ticket. As many of us with college degrees can attest, this is more often than not, not the case.

As far as Blue Collar v. White Collar and which is more essential, I give you an illustration by Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In "Mostly Harmless", one of the Hitchhiker Series, Earth has to be evacuated and they put two ships off into outer space to find a new world to inhabit. On one ship they put all the genius or "White Collar" workers, those with more cognitive skills. On the second ship they put all the blue collar workers. By some freak accident the Blue collar ship is destroyed and the white collars finally find a planet. They create a great new world but are eventually wiped out because there was no phone sanitizers/janitors and a disease ran rampant among them, killing them all.

Heh, satire? Maybe.

I live in a state which offers full tuition/books scholarships to students who graduate from high school with a B average (they must maintain this average in college to continue the scholarship). The result of this legislated scholarship has been the inflation of grades in high school because no teacher wants to be the one to keep the student out of college (never mind that they are unlikely to succeed at the college level). This practice is apparently continuing in college, based on peer-reviewed papers from other students that my English-major son has brought home. I have seen essays written by college junior/senior level English majors that have been appalling; shouldn't you be able to write a coherent paragraph by this time?

A side result has been the abundance of administrative paperwork created for the registrar, financial aid, and bursar's office of my son's institution. He is legitimately on the scholarship, but because the paperwork load has increased exponentially, he has had to jump through extra hoops almost every semester just to get his funds released. (The one notable exception was the year he attended an engineering school -- the level of difficulty weeded students out efficiently on its own.)

One would think that these students receiving inflated grades would be in for a fall once they enter the working world. Sadly, I think that this is not true. In a day of quotas and low expectations, they will be likely be able to continue drifting along, while customers and coworkers pick up the slack or learn to overlook.

dragon: "we will never be able to outsource our plumbing to india."

I'm an inventor and entrepreneur. When I hear someone say that, I start thinking "Hmm, what if..."

gopher