[cmahler7]

>The author is saying that a lot of people that don't need algebra end up failing it, so if we remove it from their curricula we'll raise graduation rates. That's the end goal

This is what's wrong with our education system. Who cares if anyone is actually learning anything, get those useless metrics up!

[bsder]

> Who cares if anyone is actually learning anything, get those useless metrics up!

Employers seem to disagree with you about the usefulness of that metric.

When being able to get a job depends more on what piece of paper you have than what knowledge you have, that is no longer a useless metric.

[flukus]

If we're going down that path, why not just print out the relevant bits of paper for anyone that asks? For a small fee of course. We can end the race to the bottom and go straight to the finish line.

[bsder]

Take this up with the employers, not the students or the colleges.

Students and colleges are responding rationally to what the employers are demanding.

[flukus]

That was largely employers responding to previous rounds of dumbing down. If they couldn't fill positions with college graduates then they wouldn't be requiring them.

[bsder]

No, this was caused by employers abdicating their responsibility to actually interview and/or train people and instead taking "college graduate" as a proxy (mostly for "willing to sit in a seat and swallow bullshit").

Of course, once they made "college degree" a proxy, everybody on the production side responded correctly and reduced into to its core essence as you said: "pay for this piece of paper and who cares about quality since an interview won't test me anyway".

If it actually mattered, the most rational action is for employers to either 1) interview people without college degrees or 2) train people without college degrees. The fact that neither of these is occurring tells me that the employers aren't really that bothered by the current situation.