That's weird that the Trump administration is taking on the bump that children of alumni & major donors get in college admission. Oh, wait..
— Bethany Albertson (@AlbertsonB2) August 2, 2017
Another craven reversion to the original Gilded Age, when Ivy alumni like Teddy Roosevelt worried publicly that “our” (their) “best young men” were being crowded out of the finer American academies by grade-grubbing, tenement-raised offspring of immigrants. Young men who lacked the capacity to understand that the true value of the college experience was not mere credentialism, but the nuturing of the “best classical traditions” in an environment removed from the populist fads of the moment. In other words, what we now call networking in a high-value environment…
Trump administration wants to investigate colleges for discriminating against white applicants, document suggests https://t.co/w5xnB03XYF
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 2, 2017
… The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.
The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minority students to university campuses…
Roger Clegg, a former top official in the civil rights division during the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration who is now the president of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, called the project a “welcome” and “long overdue” development as the United States becomes increasingly multiracial…
Mr. Clegg said he would expect the project to focus on investigating complaints the civil rights division received about any university admissions programs.
He also suggested that the project would look for stark gaps in test scores and dropout rates among different racial cohorts within student bodies, which he said would be evidence suggesting that admissions offices were putting too great an emphasis on applicants’ race and crossing the line the Supreme Court has drawn…
Seeking: Aggrieved, underqualified white people willing to serve as plaintiffs https://t.co/YBi4QHWz4w
— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) August 2, 2017
Given the semi-surreptitious release of this “document,” it may have been intended as one of the Trump mis-administration’s trial ballons; they may have wanted to see how bad the pushback is. Or it could just be intended as a sop to their “economically anxious” basket of deplorables, even if many in that group would bitterly reject any of their own kids who betrayed Heartland values by so much as applying to an institution full of soft-handed globalists and probable sexual deviants…
The notion that white folks no longer have a fair shake in America is a big part of Trump’s appeal. Hence, this. https://t.co/aADlqTUR6T
— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) August 2, 2017
Speaking of (theoretically) outdated social prejudices and color-blind admission practices, Vox reminds us “As Trump takes aim at affirmative action, let’s remember how Jared Kushner got into Harvard”:
…Of course few will be surprised that Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, a wealthy and connected developer and political donor, helped him get in. But the details of just how that happened, described in Daniel Golden’s thoroughly reported 2007 book The Price of Admission, remain remarkable to this day.
What Golden found, essentially, was that Jared’s father handed Harvard (a school he did not attend) a big pile of money just as Jared was starting to apply to colleges. Around the same time, Jared’s dad got his US senator to contact another US senator to arrange a chat with Harvard’s dean of admissions.
Happily for the Kushner family, Jared was then admitted. But several officials at Jared’s high school outright told Golden that they found the choice puzzling, since his grades and academic record really didn’t seem to merit it…
Black, white, or brown — the one color admissions officers can always identify is green.
This group of current WH interns pretty much sums up the urgency of ending discrimination against white achievers. pic.twitter.com/zeSp1s9rKh
— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) August 2, 2017
(Remember, such internships usually aren’t paid positions. So these are overwhelmingly people who not only don’t need paid employment, they have enough disposable income to live in one of the nation’s more expensive cities while they accrue invaluable “experience” for their resumes. Because it’s not racism if it’s just that only some people can afford it… )
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
Terminal Preppie by the Dead Kennedys
Ed
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” – Anatole France
Mike J
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Please don’t quote the people that called Jerry Brown a nazi to try and prove anything.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Mike J:
Jello later admitted in an interview around 2010 that he got it a little wrong with Jerry.
efgoldman
My dad was one of the first group of tenement commuters, mostly Jewish (and yes, there was an undefined quota) to go to Harvard from Boston public schools in the early 1930s. The school set up a commuter “house” for them, to pretend to be inclusive.
They damned sure understood the true value of the Harvard education.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: there’s been a very troubling trend in ivy admissions lately with Asian American applicants that rather resembles the way they dealt with Jewish applicants back in the day.
Walker
I read the applications for my university from the southeast. This year I did not feel like I had to do that much affirmative action in my readings. The African American candidates I read were so much better than many of the White candidates. You had Whites who went to some dinky private school that offered a minor smattering of APs. And then you had AAs in the public schools taking advanced courses from the community college. Sure the private school kid might have had (slightly) higher SATs, but after a certain bar, the SAT is useless in measuring college success.
If anything, our experience is the private school kid is so sheltered that they will do worse when they come to our school and get hit by so much competition.
Brachiator
Racist Trump Administration Reveals itself to be Racist. America pretends to be shocked.
His immigration proposal can be located in the notebook titled, “How to change the immigration laws to get more white people to come to America.”
Ann Coulter, among others, pushes for this all the time. This proposal must be giving her more tingles than you saw in Cersei Lannister after she gets sweet revenge against her adversaries.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: While this is true, to a point, what is being proposed is neither intended to nor will it fix that issue. Though it will keep being trotted out as cover.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: wouldn’t surprise me if it got used as squid ink, but it’s a real issue that often gets lost in the shuffle so I thought I’d mention it, is all.
hueyplong
@Brachiator: Well, that disabused me of the notion that there was no such thing as Cersei Lannister Libel.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I thought Stevens was the one who made an ad for the Romney campaign that was so dog-whistley the other high poobahs were aghast, and Stevens had no idea what was so offensive. Not to pee on his tweet. Kudos to him for coming around. It seems to be happening to a lot of conservatives, the shock of trump and their erstwhile (now his) base and their hatreds and resentment. I always took Jennifer Rubin for a rabid, if slightly goofy, partisan, and earlier tonight she was I think in complete agreement with Maria Hinohosa (sp?) on the new immigration bill, and I think a couple of weeks ago she denounced climate change denial. I’ve watched Nicole Wallace a couple of times in the last week, she’s more aggressive against trump defenders than any of MSNBC’s daytime people, I think. And she was a somewhat snide partisan, IIRC, whenever I saw her on TV during Obama’s second term.
Steve in the ATL
Anyone up for a meet up in the concierge lounge at the Marriott in downtown Philadelphia? If so, make it fast–I have an arbitration in the morning and probably should have gone to bed an hour ago.
Steve in the ATL
@hueyplong: are you a lawyer? Because I made the comment at dinner earlier tonight to a lawyer who said “disabuse” that I’ve never heard anyone but lawyers use that word. Would hate to be proven wrong so quickly!
Major Major Major Major
@Steve in the ATL: I’m not a lawyer and I say it, but my parents are lawyers.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: I recommend the sushi place around the corner on Ransom. Also, the gelatoria on the corner 1/2 block down from the sushi place.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: I’ve used it, but (among other things) I’m a criminologist.
Walker
@Major Major Major Major:
So, there are definitely some biases against Asians. But the reasons are not what people think.
The biggest issue with Asian students is that the overwhelming majority of them want to be pre-med (CS is a distant second). You cannot run a top university if 90% of your students are pre-med. So there is a quota on pre-med students, and they compete against each other instead of the larger applicant pool. They know this, so some of them try to hide it in their applications, but tell-tale signs (shadowing a doctor, for instance) still work against them.
Another issue is mental health, which is an absolute epidemic in the Ivies right now. Tiger parenting is culturally popular in Asian families. At our institution, we have a lot of experience that shows that tiger parented students are very high risk for mental health issues. They completely collapse under pressure and eventually require significant counseling. Often these students will say something that indicates tiger parenting in their application essay, and this is a major red flag that hurts their chances for acceptance.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Steve in the ATL: Not a lawyer, pretty sure I’ve used it. Doesn’t strike me as particularly lawyerly. Now, “arguendo”, that’s a lawyer word.
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman: had a fantastic meal (and possibly a few bottles of wine) at R2L. The Peruvian chocolate mousse was trés bon, but will try to hit the gelateria tomorrow.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: That works too.
Steve in the ATL
@Walker: I have heard a lot parents in my allegedly upscale suburb of Atlanta complain that their kids in public schools can’t break into the top 25% of their high school class because of the asians who do nothing but study and play the violin. Most of these kids want to be doctors and almost all of them are academically impressive and so un-well-rounded it’s scary and sad.
Mike in NC
Too bad the Trump administration can’t push for policies to get white people to breed faster. Maybe cash bonuses or tax breaks or even Motherhood Cross medals like the Nazis handed out in the 1930s: gold, silver, or bronze depending how many babies you could pop out for the regime.
Major Major Major Major
@Walker: How do you make sure that, for instance, something which in a wealthy white family would be seen as silly and overprotective doesn’t become disqualifying ‘tiger parenting’ when it’s on an Asian kid’s application?
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman: both the union reps and their lawyer are based in California, so I tried to schedule the arbitration for 8 am EDT but they pushed for 10 am. Bastards!
RobNYNY
The history of Ivy League admissions of the 20th Century is to find a way to exclude highly qualified Jews and admit less qualified WASPS. The Ivies did this by segregating applicants by region (so that applicants from Virginia did not compete with applicants from New York — wink, wink), and by stressing characteristics as athletic skill (a lot easier if you own a team of polo ponies) or leadership (a lot easier if you had a lot of sharecroppers on your estate).
The Ivies have not been mostly concerned with providing a good education for about 150 years. Their purpose is to create powerful people. If you want a good education, go to Haverford or Swarthmore. If you want to become a powerful person, go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, or one of the minor Ivies. Stanford is the safety school (Hoover). Adams, the other Adams, Bush, the other Bush, Carter, Clinton, Ford, WH Harrison (minor Ivy), Hayes, Kennedy, Madison, Obama, Roosevelt, the other Roosevelt, Taft, Trump (minor Ivy), Wilson.
dexwood
@Steve in the ATL:
Way back around 1962, I was taught by a nun who was constantly disabusing of us of one notion or another. It’s been a part of my vocabulary ever since.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike in NC: Gingrich is working on it. He’s the idea guy.
Shalimar
That White House intern picture should be submitted as evidence in every one of these reverse-discrimination lawsuits the DoJ is planning on bringing.
Walker
@Steve in the ATL:
Yep, I read a few of those (Atlanta is in the area I read). The un-well-rounded feature allows us to weed many of them out.
Though it is interesting how the politics of extra-curriculars have changed. We no longer want to see people who have a lot of activities. What we want are people who have done a few activities 4+ years that complement their studies in interesting ways. We also like seeing paid work, as that has become so rare among top students.
Shalimar
@Adam L Silverman: We don’t want the thrice-married Gingrich anywhere near ideas on how to get more white women pregnant.
Major Major Major Major
@Walker: I’ve read criticisms that the way ‘well-roundedness’ is determined plays to WASP prejudices basically in the same way the SAT verbal used to, via valuing things like regattas.
ETA: Much like how the ‘culture fit’ determination in good ol’ egalitarian tech hiring magically results in not hiring black people and women.
Walker
@Major Major Major Major:
Tiger parenting is rejected among all races. I have seen it in White families too. It is just more common in Asians.
It has to be really bad and really obvious for us to reject for it. Generally this is an essay where the student says that nothing he or she does is ever good enough for the parents, or the student stresses how failure is absolutely not an option.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: Then you have time to get to Honey’s Sit and Eat for breakfast!
http://honeyssitneat.com/
I’ve been the one in the Liberties, not Center City, but Center City will be near you. I highly recommend the brisket omelette.
http://honeyssitneat.com/wp-content/themes/honeys/menus/honeys_sit_n_eat_menu_web.pdf
Walker
@Major Major Major Major:
We see it as a diversity issue. We do not want all of the students having exactly the same interests. It doesn’t take a lot here. Again, we no longer want a lot of extra curricular activities. A strong Asian student with a single quirky and genuine extra curricular will get in.
Adam L Silverman
@Shalimar: Practice makes perfect!
Frankensteinbeck
Hey, I saw TWO black guys and one who I think was Hispanic! And at least a quarter are women!
I found out about this story by a Lefty I know declaring that Chelsea’s admission means liberals support aristocracy.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I have used ‘disabused,’, but I use ‘blatherskyte’, ‘hullabaloo’, ‘shit kittens,’ ‘equilibrium’ regularly. Writers pick up a vocabulary that is not so much eclectic as deranged.
Chet Murthy
@RobNYNY:
And now they’ve added Asians to that list with the Jews. in the early 80s when I was graduating high school, I was …. academically (very) strong, and otherwise a zero. Spoke one language. No sports. Gee, went to Rice, did well, and then in grad school, played a couple of sports, read a shit-ton of literature, and ended up being a well-rounded person. So yeah, maybe “tiger parenting” is a bad thing. If your kid faced the odds that Asian kids face today, you’d do the same goddamn thing.
Oh, and I ran across my fair share of high-achiever white-boys on full scholarships who flamed-out (one of them came up with an anagram for my name pretty much on-the-spot, he was that …. gifted? freakish? not sure)
This “tiger parenting” is yet another slur against Asians, is all. OBTW, my father wanted me to be a doctor, too. These days, I hear all the doctor parents want their kids to be CS types.
Oh and when I was a frosh (1983) all the upperclassmen were ChemE. By the time I graduated, EE was hot. And the underclassmen were all CS. There are trends. Big fricken’ whoop.
And FFS, do we really need any more “business majors”? Send ’em all to fucken Antarctica to make snow, ffs.
ETA: America needs *more* well-qualified doctors, not fewer! Since the 60s we’ve been importing doctors (like my father). So yaknow, if Asians are raising their kids to be pre-med, it’s a good thing. Not like white people are picking up the slack. ffs.
Adam L Silverman
I’ll just leave this here:
http://jezebel.com/all-the-greedy-young-abigail-fishers-and-me-1782508801
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman: man, that looks tasty! I love breakfast.
Another Scott
@Walker: I really appreciate these comments of yours. It’s good to be reminded that the “common sense” about things like who is “obviously” better qualified to be offered a spot at a university (or any other over-subscribed position) too often isn’t the best choice.
Monocultures are deadly in nature, and they’re deadly for society. Just as we don’t want a 90+% pre-med college, (that’s a fabulous example), we don’t want everyone on the federal bench to be from 2-3 law schools, or 1-2 religions, or 1-2 political organizations. Ours is a huge diverse society, and that’s a great part of our strength. We want a battle of ideas and the truth to win-out, not some permanent elite to sit on their laurels and keep everyone else down.
I also agree that it’s very bad for a child not to experience some form of failure until they’re in college. Failure is part of life and shielding kids from it is dangerous to them and to society. We want kids to be resilient and learn from mistakes, and learn that quite often “life isn’t fair”. What matters is what you do after you fail.
Post more often. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Walker
@Major Major Major Major:
One more thing. Another reason you want well-roundedness is so that there is evidence the students can change majors if necessary. When the student is failing out of the competitive pre-med program and needs to find something else to do, this often leads to those mental health problems that I was talking about. Our school has to have mental health counselors specifically for pre-med students.
Sherparick
@Brachiator: I thought Ann Coulter is Cersei Lannister
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: I thought the food was excellent. Haven’t been there since 2012.
Steve in the ATL
@Chet Murthy:
I told HR never to send me a candidate with an MBA or an undergraduate business degree. Liberal arts or, in case of emergency, hard science.
Steve in the ATL
@Another Scott:
QFT. If Poco flames out, you should be Baud’s VP candidate.
Steve in the ATL
@Sherparick:
Key difference: Cersei is smoking hot; Coulter is creepy AF.
Major Major Major Major
@Walker: I have no problem with well-roundedness as long as it’s done right. I know there’s no actually objective measure here. I wish I could find the pieces I have on this that weren’t written by conservative hacks.
ISTR stories about prejudice playing into the way well-roundedness is determined much like how people felt about, to grab something off the top of my head, the way Hillary Clinton was treated by a lot of people. Anything she did that didn’t fit the monster somebody had been taught she was must have been inauthentic or pandering or just to get a vote, or at any rate it’s just something women want to do anyway so it doesn’t count as interesting. And an Asian kid that seems ‘interesting’ or ‘well-rounded’ is probably just “trying to be interesting to get into Harvard” or what-have-you. Caring for an ailing elder is just something Asian kids do, not an enlightening journey attending to grandma in her final year. Etc. I think these were anecdotes from the Stanford admissions process.
As for stress/mental illness, the essays you describe are indeed troubling, and I certainly hope are few and far between.
There’s a second issue for non-elite universities, which is that “Asian”, when used for affirmative action as a no-extra-points value, is unfair because “Asians” are not monolithic. The children of Khmer refugees should just not be in the same bucket as the kids of some Indian doctors in New Jersey.
Villago Delenda Est
@Sherparick: Cersei was the mother to three children, one of which she loved very very much, the others a bit less. Ann Coulter? No kids.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Steve in the ATL: and Cersei was capable of loving her children. As her brother reminded us, it was her one redeeming feature, along with cheekbones.
joel hanes
@Steve in the ATL:
I’ve never heard anyone but lawyers use that word [disabuse]
I use it, though I’m a computer engineer, but I’m over-read and a bit of a pretentious ass.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve in the ATL: That, too.
Mai.naem.mobile
There is no way subpar student who got into Harvard Jared! will let limits to legacies pass under Dolt45.
Steve in the ATL
@joel hanes:
That has to be good for at least an honorary law degree!
TS
error post
Steve in the ATL
And I have been disabused of the notion that only lawyers say disabused.
SgrAstar
@Walker: That’s so interesting, and tracks with my own experience reading scholarship applications at my alma mater. The essays I read are absolutely gobsmacking; the students are coming from environments that are so disadvantaged, and they are rising like rockets. It’s thrilling to encounter these young students through their essays- it gives me tremendous confidence in the future of California. Our blue state commitment to access and equity confers an overwhelming advantage. We have to fight to expand that.
Major Major Major Major
@joel hanes: The best kind of computer engineer!
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: It is important to remember that Ed Blum, the same guy who pushed/bankrolled the Abigail Fisher suit against UT Austin, is the guy pushing/bankrolling the anti-Asian American admission discrimination suits. That should tell you something.
Chet Murthy
@Walker:
NO. What you want is resilience (at the -most-). Let me tell you my story. I got accepted to Rice in my junior year. I also graduated HS that year, and spend that year and the next, working in food service, with no intention of going to college. Eventually I decided it was too boring to be endured, so I called up Rice and asked them if the admission was still good. They said yes. I went to visit, and the dean of admissions basically told me to show up and it’d all be good. Was I well-rounded? Well, shit, I had great SATs (both sides). But no sports, no extracurricular, no nothing. Oh, and since it was 1983, that was …. *normal*. I suspect that my nonstandard life history helped. But it sure wasn’t about being well-rounded. And my classmates were’t well-rounded, either. They were all nerdy, geeky, and otherwise maladjusted. And for the most part, they turned out FINE. Hell, that generation fricken’ -created- Silicon Valley. They were all strong academically and not much more.
[I remember well the freshman week lecture “so your roommate is a valedictorian -too-!”]
The PROBLEM isn’t overachiever kids. It’s a system that forces all children (with parents of sufficient wealth) to go thru endless hoops and schools, camps, “programs”, etc. So -all- kids (again, wish adequately wealthy parents) to do everything they can do, to “shine”.
The PROBLEM is the absence of sufficient confiscatory taxation, and decent life outcomes for underachievers (for which you need redistribution via taxation, natch). PERIOD.
Absent these changes, it is LUDICROUS to imagine that Asian parents (or any other concerned parents) aren’t going to do whatever they can, to ensure that their children can pass the “bar”. [As my Asian-American grad school classmate (1986) Pat told me, his parents *insisted* he learn tennis, b/c it would look good on the college application.]
This is too long, but I gotta add: when I was a frosh in HS, my family took me back to India for the summer (last time I went). That summer, Skylab cam down. Also, I read in the newspaper two items: (a) a (middle-class) kid to failed his high school exams jumped to his death, and (b) students in college rioted to protest their profs proctoring final exams.
These were signs of a “winner-take-all” society. Look around you in America: that’s what we have here. Don’t go blaming parents for preparing their children for this world, when the -world- is the problem.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Any system can have unintended consequences, and any system can be twisted even if it has the best of intentions.
I feel for college admissions officers. Especially at “good” schools. They have to be multiple applications for every spot. There are pressures to get students who will succeed, get enough students who can pay enough to keep the lights on, get students who are reasonably likely to be donors in the future, and get students who will increase the visibility and prestige of the institution. Plus they want a diverse student body. They want women, they want a broad distribution around the country, and they want a broad distribution around the world if possible.
Plus, they have to worry about being sued by applicants that are turned away.
We all recognize the explicit and implicit biases that our K-12 educational system has. Differences in funding levels, quality of facilities, quality of teachers, and even the difference between someone who has gone to 4 schools in their life compared to someone who has gone to a dozen or more because their parents were moving every year or so. I don’t think we want the only people who get into college to be those who take the SAT every year from 6th grade on and who have after-school tutors to help them in all their course work.
Yes, good grades and good test scores are important. But they’re not enough, and they shouldn’t be enough, IMHO. Just like cutting a $2.5M check shouldn’t be enough, either… :-/ There have to be ways for students who have promise to get a great post-high school education even if they’re not superstars and even if they don’t have MOTU parents.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amaranthine RBG
@Major Major Major Major:
Absolutely.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/affirmative-action-battle-has-a-new-focus-asian-americans.html?_r=0
If admissions were race-blind, there would be twice as many Asian Americans in Ivy League schools.
Penalizing the best and brightest is repulsive.
Chet Murthy
Aargh, it looks like my comment got eat-ed? Uh, help?
Walker
@Major Major Major Major:
This is the source of the 4+ year requirement for extra-curriculars. We use that, together with the student essay, to judge it for authenticity. Is it perfact? No. But honestly at a certain point I feel like admissions is just rolling the dice anyway.
This is absolutely true. My university goes very aggressively after first-gen students (I think we have one of the highest first-gen numbers for an elite institution, but I cannot verify that right now). Those Asians are often our primary source of first-gens, as first-gen hispanics generally do not even bother to apply to us.
Divf
@Frankensteinbeck: “disabused” is part of my lexicon (as is “lexicon”). I’m a math geek and a great fan of SJ Perlman, and “deranged” is a pretty apt description of my vocabulary as well.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
An attitude I’ve noticed, online and in real life, is this derision for any other college degree that’s not for a STEM career, is a waste of money and time. Like Gender Studies or a Theater & Art degree. Not everyone’s cut out for STEM and not everybody wants to make a ton of money. They want to pursue their own dreams.
This is coming from someone in a STEM program.
Adam L Silverman
@Chet Murthy: It went into the trash. I’ve dug it out.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: It tells me that scoundrels will sometimes appear to be addressing legitimate issues in order to work towards a nefarious goal or settle a different score altogether. As @Walker just noted it’s much more objectively clear in actual affirmative action cases that the monolithic ‘Asian’ designation doesn’t work. I get that any system which intentionally advantages somebody, must intentionally disadvantage somebody else, but one should try to minimize the most egregious instances.
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: That pisses me off to no end, full disclosure, I have a BA and MS and work in tech now.
Walker
@Another Scott:
The applications get pre-read before I see them (I am a faculty reader, not a admissions officer). I don’t even get to see them unless they have 2100+ SATs or something that really stands out. And then I still only have enough slots to take 20% of what I read. I cannot imagine what it is like at Stanford and Harvard with 6-8% acceptance rates.
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman:
More discrimination against asians–this is outrageous!
tobie
Never forget the biggest affirmative action program at US colleges and universities: the geographic distribution requirement. Most schools try to make sure to get students from every state and/or every county in a state, and this emphasis favors rural applicants over urban and suburban applicants. No one ever talks about this when railing against affirmative action but the biggest beneficiaries are rural (white) Americans. By a long shot.
Walker
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Ironically, because of that quota issue I mentioned earlier, being non-STEM dramatically increases your chances of getting into an Ivy these days. You are just above the bar and want to be a Classics major (and we can tell that this is not ruse hiding your pre-med plans)? You are accepted!
Steve in the ATL
@tobie:
Good lord this is a true statement about so many things….
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: I’m not trying to do so.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: I’m part Asian.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: Huh?
Mnemosyne
@Frankensteinbeck:
I sometimes have to stop myself from using Regency Era slang in conversation with normal people.
Chet Murthy
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Goku, I don’t want to be harsh here, but: No STEM person who lacked familiarity with the Western Canon would be acceptable in polite society. They’d be treated as if they picked their nose. The “canon” of Western science is (at a minimum) evolution, Newtonian physics, calculus (let’s say differential and basic integral) and basic statistics & probability.
I’ll go out on a limb here, and say that most non-STEM folks couldn’t even answer the life-or-death question:
The correct answer is “get retested” and not “oh god my life is over” (or even “oh god, I’m infected”) But to reason to that answer requires a basic understanding of probability. [protip: “conditional probability”]
So no, when STEM folks look down on non-STEM folks, it’s b/c -we- know how to write grammatically correct sentences, and some of us read _War and Peace_ basically straight thru. But those non-STEM folks think the Earth is flat.
tobie
@Steve in the ATL: I know. The vote of, say, an Oklahoman counts so much more than a New Yorker; the Oklahoman receives more in federal support than s/he pays in taxes; and his/her children stand a better chance of getting into a good school than a New Yorker. This is not fair.
Chet Murthy
@Steve in the ATL: AAHAHHA. No, against logorrhea-suffers. Also bad writers who make too many paragraphs!
sm*t cl*de
@Frankensteinbeck:
I have never seen ‘blatherskite’ spelled with a ‘y’ before so it is therefore incorrect.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy: Actually, the correct answer to that question is “oh god, my life is over.” The respondent is a human, not a robot, and the question asks you to imagine what DOES go through one’s mind, not what SHOULD go through one’s perfectly spherical frictionless mind in a vacuum. An English major would be able to suss that distinction out!
Another Scott
@Walker: (My kingdom for a preview function!)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chet Murthy
@Steve in the ATL:
It’s relatively clear that that’s why I got my NSF fellowship to grad school. B/c came from shit-kicker Texas small town.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chet Murthy: Well done.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Please disregard, I misread something you wrote. I saw a not that was not there. About time for me to rack out.
Mnemosyne
Also, a relevant sketch from “Mitchell and Webb.”
Steve in the ATL
@Chet Murthy: I was shocked by how many of my kids’ classmates were getting into Columbia and NYU and getting rejected by the University of Georgia. WTF? I suppose their belief that that metro Atlanta kids over over represented at UGA indicates a similar belief that their endowment is too large!
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman:
Well that explains your martial arts prowess!
#totallynotaracist
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy:
Wasn’t the noisiest of those guys in the recent flat-earther Times profile an engineer?
Adam L Silverman
@Chet Murthy: Best piece of technical writing I’ve read in the last five years was the section the FAA rep (an engineer) wrote up for the Palestinian security sector report I worked on/contributed to/edited. It had zero errors. Was clear, easy to read. Actually a joy to read and I know very little about the topic he was covering.
Chet Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
M4, again, I want to not be harsh here, but: this is (again) why STEM folks sometimes react with derision towards those who aren’t STEM-trained at all. Yes yes, everybody has that FIRST reaction of “oh I’m fucked”. But the question is, what happens next? And does that “next” require the intervention of a trained professional, or can the patient reason it out for themselves?
I have talked with folks who simply couldn’t do the math to understand that a -single- positive meant *nothing*.
Mnemosyne
@Walker:
Back when I was a wee lass, I had several friends whose parents would only pay for college if said friend majored in what the parent wanted them to major in. One was a very talented artist who was getting a degree in environmental engineering, because his parents would only pay for him to get an engineering degree, and he couldn’t afford to go to art school on his own. Another one was the cinematographer on a graduate student film I was a PA for — he had gone all the way through Harvard Medical before he was in a position to go to film school instead, like he had always wanted to.
It’s not always the kid who’s at fault for the non-negotiable major.
Divf
@Steve in the ATL: since Asia extends from Tel Aviv to Tokyo, Adam’s claim admits a broad range of interpretations.
Chet Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
Hey man, it was a *metaphor*. *grin* And I -do- know that there’s a strong correlation between “trained as an engineer” and “creationist”. Much stronger than “trained as a scientist” and “creationist”.
Walker
@Steve in the ATL:
Atlanta is a hyper-competitive environment. It and the NC research triangle are the source of some of the strongest applications I have seen.
Also, NYU is a much worse school than UGa or Georgia Tech.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy:
No, the question was
If you’re gonna be pedantically dismissive of arts majors, you’re gonna get people being pedantic at you about your writing.
ETA: @Chet Murthy: Reagan was wrong (obviously)–the scariest words in the English language are “trust me, I’m an engineer.”
NoraLenderbee
@Chet Murthy: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I’m an English major, and I write and edit technical manuals for a living. I take lots of garble and jargon and chunks of mud and dung balls from STEM people and turn it into understandable English that people can actually use to learn a product. There’s so much of it that I have many, many colleagues doing the same thing. Do tell me more about the STEM Renaissance men who write rings around the ignorant dumbass humanities majors.
Adam L Silverman
@Mnemosyne: All majors matter!!!//
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
Uh, speaking of “conditional probability,” that answer is going to be very different for an IV drug user who picks up extra cash on the side as a prostitute than it is for a monogamous housewife. I never did better than a B- in any science course and even I know that.
And I managed to figure out some years ago that the Earth is not flat, despite my lack of a STEM degree. Go figure.
Adam L Silverman
@Divf: We’re talking more like Mongolia, but sure we can include Tel Aviv as it is in Asia Minor.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Chet Murthy:
What does this have to do with my comment?
Science is important and everyone, whether they major in a STEM field or not, should be educated in major scientific theories like evolution. That’s what General Course requirements are for; to create a well-rounded individual.
The main thrust of my argument is the disparagement of the Humanities as worthless simply because you likely won’t make as much as a STEM grad. It also comes across as elitist. Not everybody wants to be an engineer or has the innate ability to be one.
Adam L Silverman
@Walker:
But the bagels and pizza are better.
Chet Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
A mind not trained in probability will be unable to reason from “aids test positive” to “gee, what’s the false positive rate”. I remember back in grad school, a news article about a man who jumped in front of a train, after getting a -single- positive AIDS test result.
So no, I’m not being pedantic here.
Divf
@Adam L Silverman: And let’s not forget the Himalayas for your Yeti relations.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
And you know for sure that he didn’t have any major risk factors — like being a gay man who didn’t use a condom during casual sex, or an IV drug user, or a hooker, or a hemophiliac — because … ?
Adam L Silverman
@Divf: Same side of the family.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
I’m so sorry everybody for unleashing this on you all
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: We’ll deal with you later. Sleep with one eye open…//
eclare
@Adam L Silverman: Started out pre-med at Emory University in Atlanta, graduated with BS in Accounting from the University of Tennessee, now a CPA. Plans change.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy:
Was this perhaps in the 1980’s or early 1990’s?
Also, I believe you’re misstating an HIV test as an “AIDS test”.
Chet Murthy
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
(1) “{Physics,Calculus} for Poets” teaches nothing. In college I earned spare cash tutoring that thru the school.
(2) There’s no eqiuvalent “English for {Engineers,Physicists}” (or at least, when I was in college, there sure wasn’t).
@Mnemosyne: Indeed you’re correct, and this depends on an understanding of the nonuniform distribution of traits in the general and sub-population(s). Again, something that most people not having any education in probability would …. fail at miserably.
Whereas being able to write moderately grammatically correct (let’s say “comprehensible) sentences is a skill we all must possess to graduate high school.
OK. I’ll stop.
Divf
@Adam L Silverman: One of my favorite young colleagues is Kazakh. He has a central Asian cast to his features, but speaks English with a heavy Russian accent.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I know what you mean, we had the same thing going on when I was in school too. As a liberal arts undergrad I can say it really pissed me off. I actually was told I got into my alma mater on the strength of one essay. I told the story of being questioned by some incredulous adult who learned I’d been taking summer school classes at a good university in Sanskrit. “What are you POSSIBLY going to do with that??” he said, and I responded, “die happy,” and turned and walked away.
And now of course I’m an engineer, so go figure.
Adam L Silverman
@eclare: Traitor (I’m an Emory grad).
Adam L Silverman
@Divf: They’re interesting folks.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy:
There was when I was in college, and being unable to find an open spot in it two semesters running (it was a requirement) is why I do not currently have a degree in industrial design.
eclare
@Adam L Silverman: Good for you! I will admit my most interesting class in college was Russian Lit at Emory.
? Martin
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Actually, they need to be educated in the validity of scientific thought. Anyone, and especially any college grad, should be able to read a headline and have a decent sense of whether it’s bullshit or not, even if they know nothing of the topic. You can discern that just from how the topic is presented. Debunking the notion that hundreds of thousands of illegals voted in the last election requires extremely little understanding of electoral theory and just a little bit of an innate understanding of how statistics work. Just being able to do critical thinking from general knowledge gets people as far as we really need them to go. From that point, the major scientific theories come along for free.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
And yet I — a person so terrible at math that I couldn’t even manage to pass the remedial version that was supposed to be a requirement for my arts degree, so they let me waive it — was able to puzzle that out.
So perhaps a formal education in science is not actually required to understand these things if the person has a good liberal arts education that allows them to read and understand other people’s summaries of such things, yes?
Walker
@Chet Murthy:
Actually there is. It is called Technical Writing and it is an ABET requirement for engineering students because they are all so bad at writing these days.
Adam L Silverman
@eclare: It was a good place for me. But like everywhere else it is not always a good fit for everyone. It is good that you found the place and the major that made sense for you.
Chet Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: Whoa! Goddamn! Really? That’s ….. amazing. Seriously, I had no idea post-secondary education had degenerated so much. Crrrrrikey.
The only degeneration when I was in college was that engineers took “regular calculus” where math majors took “honors calculus” (where we learned about e.g. functions continuous everywhere and differentiable nowhere — useful stuff like that). Otherwise, engineers took all the same stuff that physicists & math majors took. And of course, we were in the same english, history, and phil courses as those majors.
Adam L Silverman
@? Martin: I hope you’re not expecting this to happen in the US? (I wish I could use sarc tags for this…)
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Chet Murthy:
But how much would a poet really need to know about calculus or physics? Hell, high school covers them well enough so that most people will understand their importance. It’s not like they’re planning on becoming physicists or mathematicians. It makes sense to have different tiers for majors vs non-majors.
eclare
@Adam L Silverman: Appreciated the experience, but yeah, it is important to be able to figure out if something isn’t working and adjust accordingly. Important for everyone.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
It turns out that my Cinema-Television Critical Studies BA is actually quite handy for reading critically about other topics. Who knew?
@Chet Murthy:
When I was an undergrad, engineers didn’t have to take any liberal arts courses. They were exempt from the core curriculum. It was not uncommon to meet engineering students — particularly electrical engineers — who hadn’t taken an English course since high school.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@? Martin:
Critical thinking is definitely something that should be taught explicitly as early as middle school. Unfortunately, educational curriculum, speaking out of my ass, is largely controlled at the local level. University is supposed to teach critical thinking. I know nursing teaches it along with problem solving pretty explicitly.
? Martin
@Chet Murthy:
Oh, there definitely is now. Engineering education alone is a proper discipline, and technical writing, presentation, and team communication are all considered ‘English for Engineers’. I run over 40 sections of that a year. We cover everything from UX documentation to how to write a 510k submission. As engineering problems have required more interdisciplinary effort, communication has emerged as a pretty critical area.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne: You can’t get your engineering programs accredited without liberal arts any longer.
Walker
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Many liberal arts majors don’t take calculus any more. Universities now have alternate math courses for liberal arts majors that focus on things like (discrete) probability or mathematical reasoning.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman:
I’ll take your word for it Sheriff Silverman ;)
Divf
@Chet Murthy:
Like Brownian paths and fractal boundaries? (ducks).
Seriously, Rice was and is an interesting place – much less stovepiped across the math, science, and engineering disciplines than is customary in the US.
Chet Murthy
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: [aargh, i said I was stopping, why aren’t I stopping?]
@Walker: well-educated (in my experience) technical folk would find it abominable that an engineer or scientist didn’t get a proper education in the liberal arts — economics, history, english, a bit of philosophy. So no, the idea that there’s a different “tier” for non-majors, is classic “we don’t need to know that stuff”. And you end up with people who don’t actually know anything about physics, calculus, or biology. Nothing. B/c engineers (not to speak of physicists) learn a whole heck more than newtonian mechanics and differential/integral calculus. A shit-ton more. -That- is where the “tier” should arise.
[without any good evidence] I’m wondering if these examples of engineers being taught nothing of liberal arts is happening at schools that I might not … (cough) (tread carefully) respect completely. B/c if it happens at schools of which I have a decent opinion, I’ll get ill. Then again, MIT no longer teaches Scheme in 6.001 (Python? really?) so the rot has already set in.
Major Major Major Major
@Walker: This is true, we’re helping develop one at work actually.
@Chet Murthy: You think a couple classes teaching engineers how to spell is a degeneration of the curriculum?
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Teaching critical thinking is not a super well understood discipline, AFAIK. The approach that they took in my education was problem-based learning, which we did in every discipline every year in high school, which I thought was pretty effective, but I don’t know how well it scales to, say, a larger, poorer district.
Mandarama
@Chet Murthy:
There is at my university; I’ve been teaching English to engineering, physics, bio, neuro, math, pre-med, pre-law, and econ majors for twenty years or so. At my own tiny alma mater, I dutifully took physics, psychology, math, etc. even though I had known I wanted to study literature since I was in the 4th grade. A core curriculum made me think; it makes my students think; and I’m really hoping my math-obsessed older kid picks a college with a broad core requirement.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Walker:
I know at my university (nursing major) I didn’t have to take calculus. Actually, I’m having a hard time remembering. I know I had to take a statistics course, which was pretty easy. For nursing, the basics suffice for stuff like calculating med dosage.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy:
The onion on your belt is getting kinda stinky at this point.
ETA: I hear they let you run code on your own computer nowadays too.
Ksmiami
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: no offense either but many many quants and stem engineers have entered the financial sphere and instead of building stuff, they created algorithms that crashed markets and wiped out a significant amount of wealth.
Major Major Major Major
@Ksmiami: That just means that some people are assholes.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Ksmiami:
No offense taken. I’m a nursing major.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: I hear FORTRAN IV is where it’s at, man.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chet Murthy
@Divf:
I’ts only been 30 years, I bet I can dredge it up! (not). The example of a function everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable was due IIRC to Bolzano & Weierstrass. There was that entire 19th century(?) movement to put Newton’s calculus (which was all hand-waving) on a rigorous mathematical footing, based on Leibniz’ (correctly mathematically grounded) work\
But (uh) I think I remember one that’s continuous at 0, and not differentiable there:
f(x) = x * sin(1/x)
And it generalizes to a function with N derivatives, but not the N+1-st derivative:
f(x) = x^n * sin(1/x)
but I could be wrong about that, and it’s late enough I’m not going to look up and apply the chain rule (b/c too lazy and olllld).
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
I’m guessing that programs like the one at USC in the late 80s-early 90s are why.
Now they’re switching everything so it has to go through the business school and include a business focus. Even art students are being shunted through. It’s really bizarre to see.
Divf
@Major Major Major Major: re: critical thinking. It was possible to do that kind of curriculum at Berkeley during my UG years but you had to make it up as you went along. One example was a friend from college who had an individual major entitled “Social Awareness in the Sciences”, which consisted of equal parts math, chemistry, and rhetoric. He ended up pursuing a career teaching broadcasting at a junior college (music and radio was his real passion).
Chet Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
“functional programming” is a different way of -thinking- from “object-oriented programming” and one cannot properly learn it in Python. Whereas, one -can- learn OOP in Scheme (after all, some of the most well-respect OOP systems were originally written in LISP and Scheme) (and many people have done so). And that isn’t onion-on-a-belt syndrome. The mania for teaching students OOP *first* (and nothing else) is a blight on computer science education.
[Also, FP has nothing to do with “ruby closures” and other gibberish. A relevant key phrase might be “accumulating parameters”. Those who know what that means, probably understand what FP is; those who do not, do not.]
Now, fair is fair: today’s equivalent of COBOL galley slaves don’t need to know FP — they learn whatever is in vogue. But MIT was -supposed- to do better than that. it was -supposed- to teach you how to think.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Mnemosyne:
Emphasis mine. That’s not a good sign.
Edit: this is getting above my head, so I’m going to bed. Goodnight!
? Martin
@Walker:
This is a bit oversimplified. The UCs have a quite high percentage of asian students and they’re pretty evenly distributed across majors. There’s a bit of a bias toward premed and engineering, but not as much as you’d think. The most common majors for international students from China is economics and other social sciences because they’re disciplines that are relatively rare in China (which is very heavy on engineering/medicine).
The bigger dynamic is a difficult one to convey. Virtually all college admissions among household name public universities is evaluation in the local context. That is, if you live in a rich neighborhood with well funded schools and lots of educational opportunities (SAT prep, APs, all that) then you will be evaluated as if you had every opportunity at your disposal. If you live in a poor neighborhood that lacked those things, then you will be evaluated as if you had few learning opportunities. The reason for this is that since state and local governments are unwilling to distribute learning opportunities fairly among communities, the universities need to compensate. If those learning opportunities even out, then the evaluation evens out. If those learning opportunities widens because wealthy communities vote against diverting tax revenues for education and instead choose to create private foundations to make up the shortfall, but only for the schools that they feel are deserving, then the evaluation will diverge, and the students benefitting from the private foundations will be evaluated more harshly.
The bottom line is that public universities believe that have a mission to serve the entire state population – race, class, geography, and so on. Even if you toss everything else out and go for geographic diversity – admitting proportionate to population in each county, for example, you’re pretty much going to get those other items for free. There are lots of ways to do ‘affirmative action’ that are completely bulletproof to USSC. The courts can hardly argue that a public university shouldn’t adhere to the same concept as equal representation in voting.
So what parents don’t understand is that sending your kid to the most challenging school isn’t necessarily giving them an advantage in the public university system. More likely you’re setting them up for stress, and getting no better than the same outcome as if you sent them to a merely good school. That is, you’re better off graduating in the top 10% of a good school than the top 20% of an exceptional school, because we’re going to aim to skim off the top, say, 15% of every single school in the state.
The problem we see with asian families that hurts them is that they tend to invest disproportionately in getting kids into those best schools. A lot of that is due to carrying habits associated with the gaokao (similar systems are common all across asia), where your opportunities derived from a straight up objective measure of each student. In that kind of system, the most challenging school was a definite advantage, but we don’t do it that way here. We want the best students in the environment in which they live, good or bad. So that means we’ll take a student who took 4 out of the 5 AP courses offered at their school ahead of the student that took 8 out of the 20 AP courses at theirs. The former student took greater advantage of what was before them than the latter. To the latter student, that feels unfair. But our argument is that if you swapped those two students Trading Places style, the latter student likely would have only done 2-3 APs at the former school, and the former student 15 APs at the latter school. It’s just nobody gave the former student the same opportunities as the latter, so we have to adjust for that. But because asian households tend to push so hard into communities with really challenging schools, they tend to undermine their own goals without realizing it.
The point about mental health is a valid one. Those high achieving schools tend to destroy students. If you chart dropout rates against overall school achievement, it’s a U shaped curve. Lots of dropouts at the low end, but also at the high end. They get burned out. The sweet spot is probably around the 70th percentile. Good education with less stress.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
So, just to be clear, you think I should have been forced to learn calculus so I could write screenplays? I dropped out of trig, FFS.
Divf
@Chet Murthy: Weierstrauss’ function – there is a nice discussion in Wikipedia, including the relationship to fractals.
Chet Murthy
@Ksmiami:
There was a lovely screed written by I-forget-who (Mandelbrot?) back in the late 90s, about how these “financial engineering” curricula (ISTR he was particularly brutal towards NYU) taught quants how to “plug-and-chug” without understanding anything about the conditions under which their formulae and equations had meaning and predictive power. I can’t remember, nor (for sure) do justice to the awesome beauty of that beatdown. But basically yes, armies of financial engineers destroyed our economy using those tools, just as engineers built the Tacoma Narrows bridge. In both cases, they didn’t understand the math & science.
And sure, after that, the fin eng folks didn’t understand economics or society. But before all that, they didn’t understand the FRICKEN MATH. You can probably search for “mathbabe” (ex DEShaw) for great writing about how insane some of these folks were. Mandelbrot had great work — probably retrievable with the keywords “fat tails”.
Yarrow
@Chet Murthy:
Are you aware that medical school admissions are to a certain extent restricted by the number of post-medical school residency positions available, and that those in turn are managed by the federal Graduate Medical Education program? The GME funding has been capped for a decade and even though medical schools have increased their admissions, those graduates may not be able to find residency spots. We could increase the number of residency positions available and do all sorts of things to increase the number of home-grown doctors but we don’t. So we import them.
Just saying parents should encourage their kids to be pre-med so we don’t import doctors shows a lack of understanding of the wider issues surrounding our medical education system.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy: Oh, fun, let’s debate functional programming on the internet again.
Mnemosyne
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Nope. It is not. My spouse was getting heavily recruited by USC to go to their MLIS (library science) school but it, too, is now part of the business school and has a business focus, so he chose San Jose State University instead. (It was much cheaper, too.)
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Why, SJSU is a fine MLS institution!
No One You Know
@Chet Murthy: Doesn’t have to be about the math. That’s only one way to establish the outcome. (I went from STEM to non-STEM.) I hated what I experienced as inflexibility and functional fixation. There’s a right answer in the back of the book, or the prof’s head. Period. I found STEM sterile, in the way most utilitarian things are.
So the answer is, do it again, simply because the consequences are so determinate: the humanities grounds us pretty well in “the road not taken.” And all the forks that follow.
YMMV.
cheers.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
Yes it is — one of the only two accredited ALA-schools in California right now. USC has not gotten accreditation for their new-and-improved program, but they tried to assure G that they would totally be accredited by the time he graduated. That was another reason he passed.
This area is pretty much dominated by UCLA grads (because geography), but more and more SJSU grads are getting jobs in these parts.
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne:
And yet, Mnem, you (by extension, thru your membership in our society) think that -I- should have been “forced” to read Shakespeare in high school? Look: what I’m trying to get across, is that for a scientist/mathematician (and I’m a constructive logician/computer scientist), the idea that somebody doesn’t know trig, -should- be for a liberal arts person, as if somebody doesn’t recognize “Brutus is an honorable man”.
But it gets worse: I’m assuming you know the difference between the Darwinan/Mendelian version of evolution, and that proposed by Lamarck (which was wrong, and which led (IIRC) to Lysenko’s insanity in the USSR)? And then there’s the recent resurgence of epigenetics, which appears to resurrect Lamarckism (but not really)?
You can say “well, I don’t need to know these things to get along in modern society”. But I could say the same of Antony’s eulogy for Caesar, right?
Oh, heck! Look at that recent controversy about staging Julius Caesar in NYC! And the way that so many people didn’t understand it. NO educated person would (erm .. “should”) defend the position that a well-educated person can avoid reading/understanding at least some subset of Shakespeare’s plays. There’s a well-established “canon”.
And yet, you’re saying it’s OK to not even understand trig? Really?
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: I was always surprised Berkeley’s wasn’t accredited.
Chet Murthy
@Chet Murthy: I should have added (re: evolution) that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries right thru to today there’s been a well-documented effort to use Darwin’s work to justify various social theories — “social darwinism”. A proper understanding of evolution is critical to understanding why such “appropriation” just doesn’t work at all. So again, an example of why a proper understanding of -science- is necessary for one’s role as a citizen.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
Yes, I know about all of that, because I’ve read several books about eugenics and other issues related to the century-long debate over nature vs. nurture and how genes affect human development. And, shocking as this may be to you, I was able to read and understand those books and how genes work without needing to understand higher mathematics.
Because it turns out that understanding evolution and genetics doesn’t require any mathematical ability. At all.
? Martin
@Chet Murthy: Right. Engineers need to deal with in-house issues like ethics and economics, but they also need to deal with politics, social reaction to their work, and so on – particularly if they are entrepreneurial.
One of the unacknowledged keys to Apple’s success is that they bring a unique angle to a tech company. They aren’t usually inventive ahead of the market. They tend to be late to markets. But what they are uncannily good at is gauging that sweet spot for where public acceptance of an invention lies. That’s innovation – getting an invention into mass adoption. And that’s all social science. Its understanding how consumers see a new product, what kind of job the product needs to solve in their life to get them to embrace it, and so on. That’s why they can come out with a product a year or two after someone else and just consume the market – they’ve worked out those cultural/social elements that elude almost all other tech firms. One way you can see that is that Apple generally doesn’t care where you graduated from or what you studied. You don’t need an EE degree from Stanford – a comparative lit degree from a mid-tier state university is fine. But they want to see how you think, how you view the world around you, how invested you are in solving the kinds of problems they’re trying to solve. They are pretty much the opposite of Google and almost anyone else in the bay area in terms of how they recruit people. They get more than their fair share of top tier engineers and computer scientists, but they hire a surprising number of garage hackers without degrees or degrees in liberal arts that are fanatical about solving some problem or another. It would be nice if more companies took a comparably broad view of hiring.
The main problem we see with liberal arts courses for engineers is that the courses are mostly shit. They tend to be cheap, easy courses with no real critical thinking or opportunity for application. Good liberal arts courses will challenge engineers to think about the consequences of AI, of self-driving cars (economically, ethically, to society, effects on inequality, etc.) and so on. Those tend to only get developed by the engineering programs. Similar problem for the other sciences, for health disciplines, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with learning about Maslow, but it’s way better in a context the student is likely to find themselves in.
smintheus
@Major Major Major Major:
That trend dates back at least to the 1970s if not earlier. My mother, who had a high-level administrative position at an Ivy, commented at the time about the well-known resistance of the admissions director toward admitting Asian Americans.
It’s not entirely without logical basis, which complicates the issue of discrimination. Asians notoriously tend to major en masse in a small number of disciplines, partly because of parental pressure, so they present a special problem if you’re trying to maintain a balanced university curriculum.
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne:
Right right. *agreed*. My point was that biology is -also- a STEM field. And again, it’s shocking how many people are well-educated in (say) French Revoluionary History, and yet know nothing of the foundations of biology.
ETA: My point is: it’s not just about -math-. My original list was: newtonian physics, calculus (diff, some integ), evolution. [note: no maxwell, no einstein, no quantum, no chem, no molbio, no CS.] All well-settled stuff in the late 19th century.
ETA2: many have written that the greatest achievement of the human mind, is the discovery of evolution.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
Um, you realize that there are entire arts-based books about social darwinism and eugenics, right? Because, again, understanding the social movements of Social Darwinism and eugenics doesn’t require equations to understand.
(The above linked book is okay, but falls apart when he tries to link everything to the Holocaust. It’s just a bridge too far.)
? Martin
@Mnemosyne: It makes a bit of sense, actually. There are so many good programs in California, that differentiating around entrepreneurship or some other angle gives students some new avenues. And thanks to our dipshit-in-chief, California is only more likely to go down the startup/VC route, so having somewhat stronger business skills would be a benefit.
That said, I’m pretty skeptical that the B schools have the slightest fucking clue how to explain success and failure in the current environment. Economists sure as shit don’t know what’s going on.
smintheus
@RobNYNY:
Seriously? Vastly overpriced colleges, full of rich kids with a massive sense of entitlement.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
I challenge you to name some of these people. As part of my liberal arts undergraduate degree, I was required to take three (3) separate science classes. I took Chemistry for Dummies, Astronomy (to cover physics with as few calculations as possible), and gerontology (to cover biology). This is on top of the science classes I took in high school.
So, please, show me the person who received a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts who never took a single science class in college. I’ll wait here while you find that rara avis for us.
Major Major Major Major
@? Martin:
They called it the dismal science, and they were half right…
Chet Murthy
@? Martin:
I graduated college in 1986. At that time, none of this existed. So I can’t really comment on it, except to say that it’s horrendous, and I can only agree 100%, that engineers and scientists should take the same courses that liberal arts majors take. Anything else is an abomination. I took 3 (4?) philosophy courses (read Parfitt’s _Reasons & Persons_ — transporter experiments!) and certainly don’t regret it.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Now isn’t this more fun than talking about cat poo?
? Martin
@Yarrow: Yep. 100% correct. And most GME funding comes through Medicare and Medicaid – so those bills Congress was trying to pass – almost certainly would have cut residency programs reducing the number of students that medical schools would have taken in the future.
If you want doctor salaries to go down, the solution is to educate more doctors. Those residencies pay for themselves if you can really scale them up.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
I only understand one out of those three, and yet I have been able to figure out that the flat earthers are looney tunes because, duh, gravity and seasons.
Perhaps knowing calculus and other math is not as integral to understanding science as you assume it is.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy: Since then, for most schools, people (don’t know who) got upset that engineers had to take all these extraneous core curriculum classes, and now the core classes are… well, when I was in college, there was a math requirement for ‘fuzzies’ but it was pretty light, and the liberal arts core was, literally, two and a half classes. STEM people had an additional “writing in the major” class they had to take.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
I’ll have you know that LAO specifically requested my cat poo story earlier today. It made her feel better about telling her dog poo story.
I’ll let you seek out the thread yourself.
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne:
[I’m sorry, but that phrase “a single science class” is doing a lotta work there, given that “science class” includes “physics for poets”.]
As I said, when I was an ugrad at Rice, (83-86) I tutored (thru the school) students in many subjects: math, EE, physics, CS. And many of my students took {physics,math}-for-poets. They learned nothing of physics or math. Nothing. It was a notorious subject of discussion amongst us engineers (who of course took the standard distribution courses). [sure there were easy courses in the liberal arts, and some engineers took those courses for their distribution …. but those were the -standard- courses in those majors, not specially dumbed-down for engineers.]
So no, I can’t point you at examples — after all, almost all the people I interact with are engineers or computer scientists.
But as I said up-thread: you’re completely unabashed about not even knowing trig, when any STEM person who didn’t understand what “brutus is an honorable man” meant, would be ashamed. And of course, the -fact- of the incomprehension by RWNJs of the well-accepted meaning of Julius Caesar, is a subject of much laughter and writing in many mainstream outlets.
Chet Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
M4, ok NOW I’m hangin’ that onion on my belt, and proudly. I’m horrified.
mai naem mobile
@Steve in the ATL: it could be that UGA took more out of staters to get that sweet sweet out of state tuition. Same with NYU taking GA applicants – to get out of state tuition. There was a piece in one of the lefty publications talking about this. One more way of leaving poorer people out.
Major Major Major Major
@Chet Murthy: That’s an onion I can agree with! ISTR that it was the engineering departments that instigated it.
Yarrow
@Chet Murthy:
That’s a broad and sweeping assertion. Where is the data that backs up your claim?
Chet Murthy
@Yarrow: You’re joking, yes? As I noted above, have you been following the ruckus around the stagings of Julius Caesar, and their misinterpretation by various RWNJs?
So no, I have no “data”. It shouldn’t need data, for anybody who’s paying attention to the zeitgeist: the interpretation of one of the *most* canonical of Shakespeare’s plays is literally a subject of rabid and vitriolic debate in the public square. Right. Now. And MSM sources have pointed out how ridiculous it is, that these RWNJs so thoroughly misunderstand that play.
ETA: Look: there -can’t- be data for that statement, almost by definition. But then, we all study that in … what? Middle School? I sure did, and that was in a bumfuck-nowhere town in North Central Texas with the shittiest school I can imagine (“the mycardium is a wall of muscle surrounding and protecting the heart” ; “the flood actually happened”). And we all learn (or at least, are taught) what the lessons of the play are. Me, I’ve forgotten b/c it’s been so long, but for sure, the fact that brutus and cassius fall on their swords at the end, tells us that there’s something not-so-well-thought-out, about violently overthrowing the government, even with the best of intentions.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
You know a completely different set of STEM people than the ones I know, then. Most of the ones I know IRL have no idea who Shakespeare was and haven’t picked up a fiction book since they graduated from high school. Not only that, they’re proud of it and think people who waste their time reading made-up stories are stupid. Everything you’re accusing liberals arts majors of when it comes to science knowledge is equally applicable to STEM majors and liberal arts knowledge.
And you still haven’t given an actual reason why I need to know trig. Sputtering about how it’s something that all educated people should know because, like, they should, doesn’t cut it.
jl
@Mnemosyne:
trig is fun.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
But as you should well know, the debate is not about the play at all. It’s about symbolism and representation.
Knowing what that line from the play means doesn’t help you understand the controversy, because the controversy isn’t about the play. The play is just a useful object on which to play out our continuing civil war.
Brachiator
@Chet Murthy:
Shit. I’ll say it. This is as dumbass as the new idea going around that every school kid should take courses in programming.
I really don’t know what counts or should count as well rounded anymore. I run across people who know amazing things and who have lived interesting lives and people who have crazy gaps in what they know. I know adults who seem to have read every Marvel comic published since 1985, but who have a fuzzy sense of, say, the Vietnam War, and know only that Captain America fought Hydra in WW II, but didn’t have a clue that WWI ever happened until they read about Wonder Woman.
I think maybe Shakespeare should be required. But trig level drama might be Oedipus.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne:
I honestly can’t think of the last time I’ve met somebody like this.
Orienteering? One of the women in our IT department uses it when she’s doing those crazy marathons out in the wilderness that aren’t on a real trail.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
I hate math, and math hates me. The only math course I managed to get a C in was geometry, and that was because they let us write all of the proofs on index cards and use those during the tests. Without that kind of crutch, I’m totally fucked when it comes to anything above the basics.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Heh. Not only have I read the whole trilogy — Antigone was my favorite — I got to see a pretty cool Pasolini adaptation of Oedipus Rex when I was in graduate school.
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne:
And yet, sputtering is precisely how people defend the Western Canon, until one of those teachable moments arises (like with _Julius Caesar _ this summer).
It seems you’re OK that I should just memorize “it’s a bad idea to violently overthrow governments — you never know what might happen”. No need to actually have read and understood Shakespeare. I mean, who needs that, right?
And he’s not the only example. I think that *every* American should read _The Way We Live Now_ by Trollope. The best history of the 2008 financial crisis ever written. Oh, written in 1875. I’m sure some of these STEM acquaintances to whom you allude could run rings around the idea that anybody should read it — I mean, it’s >100yr old and a *novel*, what -possible- relevance could it have to the 2008 financial crisis. And yet, Mozilo, Bartiromo, and others, are in there (metaphorically).
OK. I’ll stop trying to convince you. It’s clear it won’t work.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
True story: when I was in junior high, we used to go out into the wilds of western Illinois for outdoor education, which was actually pretty awesome. Lots of hikes, learned how to rappel, cool stuff like that.
We had an orienteering exercise one time where we didn’t actually use the compass. Well, that’s not true — we used it once to get started the right direction and then just tramped along until we got to the goal. IIRC, we were the second team to get there, because we didn’t get bogged down by mere directions. ;-)
? Martin
@Chet Murthy: Most general education is now split off from the courses from the major. That is, a GE history course is one that history majors won’t take – they’ll take a better/smaller one. One of my current projects is instituting a policy whereby all GE courses must be good enough for a department to require their own students to take it. Additionally, allowing each unit to offer GE courses from other areas that are set in the context of their discipline.
jl
@Mnemosyne: Sorry to hear that. Sounds like you have some bitter memories. Math doesn’t come naturally to me either. I barely passed math first couple of elementary grades. Then I decided to wood shed it, I think if fourth or fifth grade and I started to understand how you need to think about the subject to do well. I forget why. Both my folks claim to be horrible at math. Maybe I was just contrary, or something.
If you come across some subject that interests you, and it has some math attached to it, and you sense maybe some slight intuition for it, give it a try again.
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne:
oh c’mon. When I mention the -line-, I’m alluding to the entire play, and whether one understands the message (at least, as currently interpreted) of that play. No kidding, I don’t mean “what does this line mean”? I mean, Mnem, I’m not one of those STEM jokers who thinks the liberal arts are useless.
And as I said
not “misunderstood the line”, but rather, “misunderstood the play”.
Brachiator
@Chet Murthy:
Exposing most kids to Julius Caesar bored them to tears, and probably should. I think there is something to the idea that teaching the play at all is a holdover from the old British system which taught Latin and read some of Caesar’s campaign in Gail, and then followed up with Shakespeare’s play. Also, Julius Caesar has no sex. Schools should do a comedy or the no brainer Romeo and Juliet.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
See me at #184. The controversy over Julius Caesar has nothing to do with the text of the play, or understanding the text of the play. The people who are outraged are not outraged over the text, and telling them what the text is will not change their minds, because the text is meaningless to the controversy. The controversy lies in the realm of semiotics, not literature.
Shalimar
@Major Major Major Major: It’s not even more fun to read than talk about cat poo.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
But as I’ve said several times, the controversy has nothing to do with the play itself, or the message of the play. The controversy is solely about the symbolism of the costume design. Telling people what the correct message of the play is will not change their minds, because they’re not angry about the play. They’re angry about the symbols on display.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne: I always loved the Italian title, Edipo Re.
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne:
*cough* precisely. these RWNJ jokers are -not- understanding the play, nor its well-accepted academic interpretation. At. All. It’s Greek to them, eh? And they’ve been roundly criticized in the MSM for this. As I said: if you don’t actually understand the Bard, you -will- be ridiculed. If you merely -pretend- to not understand the Bard (which is, I think, what you’re implying), again, you will be ridiculed.
jl
@Mnemosyne: Math is everywhere, and it is a huge subject. If you don’t feel like you can do it, you need to start with something that you find at least slightly fun and interesting, and keep looking for approaches that appeal to your intuition. For some reason, I find logic, geometry and algebra based topics easier than others. I can visualize them, I think.
Other topics I am no good. Analysis. I barely passed those courses. Too fussy, I can’t visualize the problems. Endless details. I remember there were problems in the book and I’d look at them and say “What problem? What IS the problem. It’s so damn obvious there’s nothing to prove. Proofs! Proofs! We talking about proofs? I don’t need no stinking proof for that.” So then the instructor would get all smarty pants and give a counter example. And IMHO, that was always when pigs fly kind of stuff. Analysis… yuk.
Mnemosyne
Okay, though I do enjoy abstruse debates, I still need to write 250 words of my novel before I can go to bed, and I have to work in the morning. Good night, all!
Origuy
@Major Major Major Major: I do orienteering, and I never use trig. I got all the way to partial differential equations in college and I never use those either. I got my BSCS at UIUC in 1978. I tested out of the English requirement; Illinois called it “Rhetoric”. I could have used a tech writing course, but I’m pretty good with it now. I took three semesters of German and four of linguistics. I didn’t need to take the German because I was in the Engineering school; they also had a degree in CS through the liberal arts school that had more non STEM requirements. I did take a class in Shakespeare and one in Hindu and Buddhist mythologies.
I think some basic statistics and probability should be taught to everyone, along with history and some science.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
The people who criticize their understanding of the play mistakenly think that if they did understand the play, there would be no controversy.
Once you realize that the controversy has nothing to do with the actual play, and that explaining the play to people won’t make any difference at all, then you understand it.
@jl:
I can do the math I need to do for my job. I do a decent job with percentages and I’m probably doing some level of algebra without realizing it since I’m solving problems for a known total.
But for god’s sake don’t tell me I’m doing algebra or I’ll get freaked out and become convinced I can’t do it anymore. Don’t pick at the wound.
ETA: And now I really do need to go write. Good night, again! :-)
? Martin
@mai naem mobile:
That’s not how it works. In-state tuition is a fixed pot. The state legislature puts up money to subsidize, say, 40,000 state resident seats. Once those seats are filled, there’s usually no way to get enough funding to cover the cost of the next in-state student. However, you can get an out-of-state student. The problem is that there are no mechanisms for a state school to ask for out-of-state tuition from an in-state student, even if the in-state student was willing to pay it. So as a result, if the university can support 50,000 students, and the legislature is only willing to subsidize 40,000, then you have two mutually exclusive populations – 40,000 in-state and 10,000 out of state. The out of state didn’t take any seats from the in-state, the university didn’t deny any in-states that could be funded, the legislature is the one who isn’t stepping up to fund those additional seats. I can tell you with 100% certainty that if we could get state funding for our 8,000 or so non-resident seats, we’d immediately and thankfully fill those with in-state students even though the state subsidy is less than the non-resident tuition differential. We’d be giving up money in doing this, but it’d be worth it.
Brachiator
@? Martin: Is it still the case with the Cal State system that every student with a certain GPA is guaranteed a slot at one of the colleges in the system?
Anne Laurie
@Walker:
The Spousal Unit makes a nice living as a technical writer, because he started as an engineering student who loved languages more than maths. That was back in the early 1970s, so he ended up as a competent shadetree programmer who can take the broken jargon younger developers think is English and turn it into something mere humans can understand. And he doesn’t sneer at them while he does it, so they’re mostly very happy to take their projects and problems to him.
If the upcoming crops of engineers learn to write some kind of English all on their own, that’ll destroy the careers of S.U. and a lot of his fellow tech writers. Probably just as well he’s in the AARP demographic…
mike in dc
@RobNYNY:
Uh…no. Just no, to most of your 2nd paragraph. One of those “minor Ivies”, Cornell(my alma mater), has top grad programs in almost every area of study. Stanford nowadays is anything but a safety school. While there is certainly a social power/prestige component to the Ivies, the notion that their academics are no longer “elite” is a flawed one, in my opinion.
? Martin
@Brachiator:
They should, not because everyone should become a programmer, but because the cultural barriers to women and people of color going into that field will be reduced significantly if students themselves don’t see the subject matter as a barrier. People that lack agency voluntarily close doors to their own future (see Mnemosyne’s ‘math hates me’ comment). One important element to getting greater equity is to exposing students at a young age, and throughout their growth to the things that they are most likely to shut themselves out of. Now, of course, this needs to be done well, which is non-trivial, as Mnemosyne is most likely the victim of shitty math teachers here, but teaching programming is incredibly empowering in much the same way that shop classes were – they are examples of permissionless empowerment. If you want to be a programmer – nobody can stop you. You can do that all by yourself – you don’t need someone to agree to your resume. You’re a disabled transgender black woman, and you don’t think anyone will hire you? Fuck them. Be a contract front-end developer or build an iOS app. Be your own employer. You don’t even need to go to college if you’re willing to work hard enough.
When my son was 15 he got a job offer from an engineering firm through the internet. He was one of the first people to buy one of their new microcontrollers and their device drivers were pretty shitty. He wrote to them and pointed out problems and discrepancies in their documentation. Eventually they pointed him at the lead engineer for the project and they started communicating regularly. Over the span of about 6 months my son rewrote most of their device drivers and updated their documentation. Along the way they offered him a job doing that full time for them if he would be willing to relocate to Texas. He came running downstairs asking me what to do. I said – tell them you’re only 15 and you should at least graduate high school first, but that you’d be happy to entertain an offer in 6 years once you’ve gotten your EE degree.
I never taught him any of that stuff. All I did was encourage him, and buy him equipment. He was motivated and he learned on his own. I didn’t even know he had bought the microcontroller, let alone that he was doing pro-bono work to get their new product in an actual shippable state. I was pretty surprised that he came downstairs with a job offer (and a good one at that). Programming allows those kinds of opportunities to happen that so many other disciplines just don’t have. For people that have to work twice as hard just to land an interview, it’s incredibly empowering.
Besides, before my kids hit retirement, we should have general AI. It’s almost a certainty that their career will vanish before they’re ready to retire. The avenue for young people is to have that technical background in programming, logic, etc. but marry it to some problem domain – anything from arts to psychology to whatever. A bunch of programmers that grew up in San Francisco aren’t going to know how to design some autonomous farming equipment – you’ll need some farmers that know how to code to usher that along. We can bemoan this trend but the law of accelerating returns will force us down this path like it or not. (I’ll note that Kurzweil predicted we’d be able to simulate a mouse brain around 2012, and it took until 2015, so perhaps it’ll come slightly slower.) Your best bet is to be on board in some way. A third grader today will graduate college in 2030. We’ll almost certainly have level 5 autonomous vehicles by then, and the more forward thinking companies will be working on integrating computers into devices that can think with the same complexity as that new college graduate.
? Martin
@Origuy: Everyone should learn statistics. Hardly anyone needs to use calculus, but everyone needs to understand intuitively the likelihood that some activity will kill them, or fundamentally how insurance works, or why they should worry way more about driving than flying.
Anne Laurie
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Bingo. As late as my father’s generation (1940s), Logic and/or Rhetoric were regular classes in NYC high schools. (Along with Civics, which would also be extremely helpful to promoting a better class of voter.) But by the time I was skimming the textbooks for my mom’s teacher-certification classes in the late 1960s, it was generally accepted that L/R (and Civics) were “elitist” filters which needlessly punished less textbook-oriented students who would be more productive doing… something else. Either shop or home ec or stenography, for the “non-college-oriented” track; more math or languages for those whom the guidance counselors procured college brochures.
And, of course, even in my otherwise extremely conservative (but working-class-supported) parochial school, parents complained that teaching kids the basics of logic & rhetoric just encouraged girls to talk back and get too ambitious. Everything I’ve witnessed or read since then convinces me that making the average American voter/consumer less educated in how to think is the underlying goal of 90% of pre-college public education — the excuses / labels change, but the argument that Ignorance Is Strength (or Virtue, or Wisdom) remains the same.
Aimai
@Steve in the ATL: i use it quite frequently. Anthropologist.
? Martin
@Brachiator: No. The state is broken up into regions around each CSU. Provided the local campus has space, there is a guarantee to that campus. If you live near Cal Poly SLO, you’re pretty fucked. If you live up in Chico, you’re in good shape. CSU turned away about 30,000 qualified students last year. They could have accommodated them if CSU had a program to offer a seat at a campus the student didn’t apply to.
A new program started 5 years ago that gives a transfer guarantee (campus and major) to CSU for students that have completed an associates transfer degree at any of the 115 California Community Colleges. That’s a rather good deal, btw. It’s a well designed program. CSU just signed an agreement with the state to provide a guarantee for all qualified freshman (GPA/SAT based) that would redirect students to campuses where there’s space if their campuses of choice are full. UC already has a guarantee like that. But UCs guarantee is to any student who graduates in the top 9% of their high school graduating class (California residents only). UC will direct the student to an open campus if they didn’t apply to one. Last year that was almost 10,000 student admissions directed to UC Merced. I think maybe 400 took the offer.
A lot of students in that situation are choosing to go to ASU or some other out of state school that provides in-state tuition for CA residents. It’s a pretty good deal as well.
The CA university systems are struggling against volume. There’s roughly 3 million students across the 3 systems. People don’t really grasp the scale of CA higher education. There are 10 US senators representing an aggregate population equal to California’s college cohort.
Anne Laurie
@Brachiator:
Ha, most of my HS classmates were pretty bored by Romeo & Juliet. Now, Antigone — we were all first & second generation Irish or Italian or Polish American, so Grecian levels of revenge & familial feuding was much more exciting for us.
SgrAstar
@jl: Trig Is fun! That’s what’s missing in this discussion. Calculus is a blast. So is 19th century Russian literature. So is General Relativity, which for me was also extremely difficult. Physics is gorgeous! Art history is marvelous. We don’t have that much time on the Blue Marble, so for me it’s all about learning as much as I can. That’s what makes being alive so, so great. My 2 cents!
Central Planning
@Steve in the ATL: Let me disabuse you of that thought. IANAL. And I’m not involved in any sort of law enforcement .
Sister Golden Bear
@Brachiator:
IIRC, the University of California admits all residents who are in the top 9% of their class — although not necessarily at the campus they applied to. E.g. if you weren’t accepted at UC Berkeley, you will get entrance at another UC, such as UC Riverside.
The California State University announced in June that they will now accept 100% of all residents who qualify — although again, admitted to a desired campus isn’t guaranteed. IIRC the CSUs automatically admitted students in the top third of their class.
The Community College system accepts 100% of all graduating students.
Under California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, the UCs were traditionally the research universities and were the only ones to grant doctorates, while the two-year CCs were “education for all,” focusing on both stand-alone AA degrees, and acting as an alternate route into the CSUs and UCs. The CSUs (originally the California State Colleges) traditionally occupied the middle ground, but in recent years increased its presence in the graduate space, and now offers doctorates in a limited number of fields.
FWIW, as a user experience designer — and former Poli Sci major — I still encounter plenty of programmers who deride non-programmers, and who can barely communicate. Needless to say these are the programmers who remain grunt programmers. The lead programmers/programmer managers do get the value of being to communicate well — but most of them are terrible at it. (Maude knows the horrific programmer-written error messages I’ve had to translate from the geek….) My cousin who’s a mechanical engineering manager, still regularly despairs at trying to get his junior engineers to understand that being able to communicate their designs is an important part of their jobs. OTOH, like all-too-many programmers and engineers I’ve met, he’s sure he knows far, far more about non-programming/engineering-related topics than people who are actual experts in the field….
NobodySpecial
Jesus, this place has some MENSA level dickwaving going on today.
Unknown known
My better half did some marking for the “International Baccalaureate” – basically a common test if you want to apply to a whole whack of international universities. For literature, the students read a book of their choice, and do research to build an argument about it. She said you could almost always spot the Americans a mile away, because the argument would usually be about something totally trivial. Keeping in mind that these are the selection of students who want to go to foreign universities (not a random sub-set), she said you could tell they had just been raised in a bubble where not much mattered, and ot much really went wrong. When they had to pick out important themes from serious books, they just didn’t know what serious looked like, compared to kids who grew up elsewhere. They would settle on something glib, and that was often as far as it got.
Being American herself, she found this vaguely embarrassing. She says that in her high school education even stuff like WW 1 & 2 were covered as quaint old dramas, rather than major life and death events where really bad things happened – she didn’t learn about most of that till college or later.
NorthLeft12
These are typical and historical conservative actions over the decades/centuries.
I will give credit to the early and pre-twentieth century cons for not hiding their desire to ensure that only the “right” people were allowed control the wealth and power and have an outstanding education. Our current conservatives continually talk a big game about opportunity and a level playing field, etc., but they are doing everything in their power to prevent that from happening.
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
Thread is probably dead, but…
Familial feuding is at the heart of Romeo and Juliet. And my larger point is to know your audience and have fun. When I taught R and J, the kids didn’t just read the play. They performed it. I played with the idea of Elizabethan stage practice by gender swapping roles. Also had some cool mock sword fights.
..
Haroldo
@Steve in the ATL: And while both are horribly brroken human beings, Cersei is entertaining, whereas Coulter is bog standard boring.
Haroldo
@Steve in the ATL: In part, self-disabuse, I’d say.
Chris
@Walker:
Honestly, yeah. If I do any profiling when it comes to this stuff, it’s that if two people get to more or less the same level who are from completely different backgrounds, the one from the more disadvantaged background is almost certainly more capable – he had to overcome a lot more to get there.
This applies to more than just race and is partly rooted in my own personal experience. Most of the friends I made in college were white, but came from working-class, public-school backgrounds that were a good deal less wealthy than mine. Thinking it over at some point in my college years, I decided pretty quickly that if I’d been born in their circumstances, I almost certainly would not have made it as far as they have – I’m not dumb or academically unaccomplished, but I’m not them. Factor race and gender into it, and that becomes even more true.
Chris
@Chet Murthy:
This a thousand times.
I was listening to one of the aforementioned friends from college the other day, now a teacher at a fairly high end private school in the suburbs and mother of a three year old, talk about what she’d do when her kid reached high school age. And she mentioned that she’d feel horrible if she had to do things like get him a tutor or pay for SAT prep classes, because her own family couldn’t afford that for her and she’s well aware of how much is privileges people based on nothing but parental income, but she’ll do it if she has to, because she can’t not give her kid the best opportunity possible to go out into the world.
And I was thinking the same thing – the real problem is the “if you’re not first, you’re last” ethos of a society that condemns you to poverty or something not much better than it if you’re not one of the “successful” ones because you’re then judged unworthy. (College success is the biggest example: yes, it’s possible to be successful without a college education, yes, there are still non-college careers that pay well, but a lot less than there used to be and they’re still shrinking). What we need is a society where things like getting into college aren’t the pressing need that they are now, because you can work as “nothing but” a cashier or burger flipper your whole life (those Fight For Fifteen jobs that everyone has such contempt for) and still make a decent living for yourself and your family.
ETA: to borrow from an old Sadly, No! article,
One shouldn’t have to be a superhuman paragon of ambition, diligence, good health, and luck to be successful, but that’s what it takes to get out of poverty in America today.
[…]
If we want to end poverty in America, we have to build a society that has good jobs for all people – even those people that Brooks thinks lack ambition or intelligence. People need to see that they don’t have to be the smartest, fastest, hardest working person they know in order to improve their situation. Because that’s what it takes now. If we want to encourage a work ethic, that work has to profit the workers.
Unknown known
@Chris: This is essentially the thesis of the famous book “Rise of the Meritocracy” from, I think, the 80’s.
It has an account of a future world which had engineered a perfect meritocracy where ability is purely what gets you ahead – they do this partly in response to the problem of parents who always use the levers at their command to advance their own kids, no matter their egalitarian ideologies, because one’s own kids are special to yourself. This kicker is that this world is then overthrown by everyone else on the basis that even if the process was in some way fair, the outcome was still that their lives still sucked too much.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Chet Murthy: I’m gonna horrify you even more. I started at one uni in the early 1980s. Civil engineering. Got married, moved to another state. I naively thought that my first school was typical in its requirements. All engineering curricula looked very similar for first two years. We took a year of chemistry alongside the chemistry majors. A year of physics alongside the physics majors. The trig-calc-diff e sequence was the same for engineering majors and math majors. One year of English Comp and one of English and American Lit. Technical writing was a recommended elective in addition to that.
When I was ready to transfer to the local uni here, I finally looked at the curriculum. A civil engineering department that didn’t even offer surveying? No geology? A special physics sequence?!? (I took one of those semesters. My classmates included biology and agriculture majors, but no physics majors. Minimal math.) No wonder the other students in the first class I took there, a statics-and-dynamics course, thought it was terribly hard. We wasted time in that class on acceleration being a derivative of velocity.
Thermo was an elective. So was basic electrical engineering. I was appalled.
Uncle Cosmo
@Chris:
I was one of those kids, two generations back, from a blue-collar row-house suburb of Baltimore where most of us had two parents at home, nearly every dad worked at Beth Steel or FIsher Body or Western Electric or Lever Brothers for good enough pay that moms usually didn’t have to work. By & large our folks wanted better for us – good jobs where we wouldn’t be scrubbing calloused hands with Lava soap when we came home – & they knew that was only going to happen with a good education. So we were by & large instructed to listen up in school, do as well as we could, & not give the teachers any grief. (One of my junior-high teachers told me much later that no one who taught in our community knew how good s/he had it until s/he was transferred out.) My dad had dreams of becoming a teacher until poverty, the Depression, and WW2 intervened – & as much as he held the line on toys for us, he rarely balked on books. There was a lot of pressure to do well – on me, anyway, as the family prodigy – but it wasn’t “tiger parenting.” We still had time to be kids.
Re in-state vs out-of-state tuition, I actually benefited from the reverse whammy: in those days the state of MD gave money to schools with at least X% in-state enrollment, & the arguably most prestigious institution (Johns Hopkins) also had a housing squeeze (freshman were required to live in the dorms unless they lived at home, & there weren’t enough dorm rooms). As a result admission requirements for students (guys only until 1970) living in commuting distance were actually less stringent than for everyone else. I only applied to two colleges, & The Hop was my “safe school” (the other was Hahvahd, which rejected me). It didn’t hurt my subsequent employability that a JHU degree had a (probably unjustified) dime-store-Ivy cachet in every personnel department within 30 miles of downtown “Bawlmer”.
/fwiw
J R in WV
@Mnemosyne:
I have a huge problem with math. But I wanted to major in Computer Science (not programming) and that major at my medium sized state U required 14 hours of Calc, Discrete Structures, linear algebra, I enrolled there at the age of 30, so about 15 years since I took trig in HS, the last math class I took in HS.
It nearly killed me. I spent far more time on calc than any other class ever, in the “math lab” where grad students helped those of us with math problems. I spent 4 or 5 hours a day in the math lab, 5 days a week. I made 2 Cs (pretty solid too) and last semester a B. Yay!
It nearly killed me, but it was necessary. I actually dropped Calc 1 (a 5 hour class) the first time I took it, and took algebra and trig, just to re-lubricate those parts of my brain before hitting Calc again. It worked, and I was good at what I did (mostly systems analysis, building needed data structures for complex data.) and enjoyed my career, for the most part.
Anyone who is smart can learn what they need to in order to accomplish their goals!