[c0redump]

> What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down.

IMO, this is not the problem, but it’s definitely a problem. I think that we should, in fact, fail these kids. And if they repeatedly fail, they should be kicked out. I know that it’s politically untenable, but it also seems right.

It also seems wrong to me that these kids are accepted in to the university to begin with. It seems to me that there is a maturity gap here. Have these people never had the experience of not getting something that they want because they failed to obtain it?

[butterlettuce]

> It also seems wrong to me that these kids are accepted in to the university to begin with.

Free revenue for universities. Also, when your high school counselors, teachers, and administrators tell you to apply to college or else, this is what you get. When you convince employers to require degrees for middle class wages, this is what you get.

If these professors don't want to deal with illiterate kids, they should put the blame on the group that didn't prepare kids for college while telling them to apply anyway.

[jack_h]

> Free revenue for universities.

Many years ago when I went to university my state created a fund to pay a certain portion of a student's credit hours. This was implemented in my second or third year from what I remember. I noticed that my direct out of pocket cost (or really how large the loan I took out was) never went down from before this program and after. The university was pretty flush with funding though.

[ecshafer]

This is exactly what happened in the US with the federal grants and loans. Universities just raised their prices.

[bilbo0s]

Goes kind of deeper than that though.

How is a college realistically supposed to reject a guy with a clearly qualifying 28 or 29 on the ACT? You're going to have to give a helluv-an explanation for that, because I can guarantee, you do that to too many kids and the politicians are gonna come after you.

The problem is enormous. That kids can pass these entrance exams without being truly literate is what makes this issue so intractable.

To me, the only politically and socially acceptable option is to fail them in their college coursework. We don't do that though. Most students live by the "curve".

[butterlettuce]

Lots of brilliant kids get rejected with great ACT/SAT scores from elite universities, but they look down on those that lack "extracurricular" activities. Simple as that. It pissed me off when I realized that elite colleges would choose a football player over somebody that studied their butt off and did well in AP courses.

[bilbo0s]

Well, that's the other half of the problem. Or the other edge of the sword of easy entrance exams. You get literally tens of thousands of kids that can get that 35 or 36 on the ACT. If you throw in the kids with the 34's it's even more ridiculous. And Harvard has maybe 2000 spots. (But probably not.)

The exams are just not providing enough separation.

[marcosdumay]

> When you convince employers to require degrees for middle class wages, this is what you get.

Yes, that.

Also how did this happen?

And also, middle-school (high-school? what is it called on the US?) children are supposed to be able to read a small text and understand it too. This is one of those things everybody should be able to do, and employers have good reasons to require.

[pc86]

> > What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all?

IMO any professor who doesn't fail a student who deserves it should be fired, tenure or no.

I had a professor who was in a tenure-track role in our math department and he was "brave" enough to fail me (just barely - 59.8 or thereabouts) in his first semester. I retook the class the very next semester and did better than most but it was definitely a wake up call for me about what it takes to actually do well at the collegiate level.

The classes I took in college didn't really help me very much in my career, but the work absolutely did. Whatever your metric of "professional success" is I would almost certainly be worse off if I had just been able to check off a few boxes and get through college without having to put in that effort.

Passing kids who should be failing does them a disservice. Graduating kids who should flunk out entirely does everyone else in society a disservice.

[Finnucane]

A long time ago I wanted to be a engineer and went to RPI. In those days, it was a real pressure-cooker program. A heavy workload, difficult tests--it was designed to crush the weak, and they actually bragged about the failure rate. Later after failing differential equations too many times, I went to the state school and got a degree in English. One of my favorite comments on a paper from a teacher was "You seem to have at least understood the text, which is more than I can say for some of your classmates." It's just gotten worse since then. I've heard similar stories from people I know who teach at the college level these days.

[reverendsteveii]

Everyone wants a competitive system where only the best and most qualified advance and everyone imagines themselves among the best and most qualified deserving of advancement. For the majority of us, in an actual competitive system, that belief will run up against the rocks of reality to some extent. You might be great at something but no one is great at everything except that one obnoxious guy you went to high school with. No one likes to find out that they suck, and the way our system is designed right now where students pick their colleges sets up a sort of "fix the grade or we'll take our money elsewhere" leverage students and parents can use against the institution. With the increasing necessity of a college degree in everyone's quest to eat food and sleep indoors, that pressure is only escalating. Junior being not the brightest knife in the crayon box is a tale as old as human society, but until recently Junior used to be able to limp across the finish line in high school and get a job in a factory and have a life. Not the best life, but a life. Nowadays a job where you can comfortably raise a family without a college degree are dwindling. That means that Junior's ability to make a living is gonna depend on getting a degree, and if Junior can't get a degree through competence he will try other ways to get a degree before he'll resign himself to starvation and indigence.

If you're about to type the word "trade school" that's an entirely different debate that I'd love to have with you but trade school, while potentially viable for a single person to fix their own situation, is not the answer to the overall problem at a societal level. We need to either return to a situation where the additional post-secondary training and education aren't required or we need to figure out a way to get people the additional post-secondary training and education.

[pc86]

> trade school, while potentially viable for a single person to fix their own situation, is not the answer to the overall problem at a societal level

Isn't it? Isn't being realistic about your skills in relation to the rest of the world in the current time and place (as opposed to some idealistic past that may or may not have ever existed) a way to "fix this" at a societal level?

Whether or not it's easy or even possible to live a middle-class without starting a business or getting a college degree is irrelevant to whether or not we should be giving college degrees to people who submit this as an answer to a final exam:

> > With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives [sic] we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase [sic] life is short and you never gonna [sic] know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause [sic] sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

[reverendsteveii]

I'm pretty confident I didn't say any of the things you're rebutting.

>Isn't being realistic about your skills in relation to the rest of the world in the current time and place (as opposed to some idealistic past that may or may not have ever existed) a way to "fix this" at a societal level?

"Being realistic about your skills in relation to the rest of the world" is very different from and much broader than "take up a trade". The fact is if everyone who isn't being served by the current higher education system today became a plumber or a carpenter tomorrow the increased supply without a concomitant increase in demand would force the pay for those jobs into the shitter as well and we'd still have an army of the underemployed.

>Whether or not[sic] it's easy or even possible to live a middle-class without starting a business or getting a college degree is irrelevant to whether or not[sic] we should be giving college degrees to people who submit this as an answer to a final exam:

I didn't say we should give degrees to people who can't demonstrate the skills or knowledge either, only that if we make survival contingent on getting degrees people who can't get them legitimately will try to get them illegitimately. People have a distressing tendency to try to continue to live even when the rules tell them that they shouldn't.

[toomuchtodo]

Most parents either are not interested or don’t have the time and resources to provide the at home educational support kids need. Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers). Admins want to maintain the status quo as long as possible; they appeal to parents at the cost of teachers and are in no position to obtain more funding. Therefore, we continue to stumble towards educational system failure.

The domestic educational pipeline to college, broadly speaking, is in poor shape.

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... ("When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a deleterious effect; 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively)."

https://medium.com/@madougherty90/the-hollowing-of-america-h...

https://pudding.cool/2024/03/teenagers/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-happening-to-students

[no_wizard]

>Most parents either are not interested or don’t have the time and resources to provide the at home educational support kids need. Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers).

My central question is what are other countries doing that we aren't? Because other countries aren't seeing such a dire and systematic drop in student's academic ability. Germany being the most notable for how it directs its resources, even though its a fairly rigid in many respects.

I don't get the sense that parents in Europe are overwhelmingly more involved in the schools either, but I have limited purview into that specifically, having only had the pleasure of meeting europeans of different backgrounds (UK, Sweden, Germany most specifically) via work, its a limited subset of understanding, however most of the folks I've worked with who grew up in any of these European countries really seemed to believe in hands off parenting even more so, and experienced it often in kind.

I have one theory, which is that education is highly politicized in the US in a way that perhaps its not in other western countries. This has been happening since the 1960s but it really accelerated in the last 30 years or so.

[rayiner]

You're assuming a difference between the U.S. and Europe that's not there. Looking at the 2018 PISA scores, for example, U.S. 15-year-olds do fine in reading: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi.... Slightly ahead of Norway, Germany, Denmark, and New Zealand.

The U.S. does much worse in math, but I don't know why any of the explanations being discussed here (parental involvement, etc.) would result in good reading scores but bad math scores.

[no_wizard]

I think a far more relevant set of statistics would be post graduate outcomes for students, such as university achievement (including graduation rates)[0]

[0]: https://www.ijbmcnet.com/images/Vol3No3/2.pdf

[xyzzyz]

By this metric, United States is doing very well. Over 50% of Americans aged 25-34 have completed tertiary education, putting us at the 5th position within OECD, well ahead of countries like Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, Denmark, or Poland.

I don't think it's a meaningful metric, though, because most tertiary degrees are a waste of time, and higher university graduation rate can be worse if that translates to more people getting useless degrees.

[s1artibartfast]

Is there any reason to think that these differences are not entirely explained by immigration in the USA?

[whodidntante]

As a country -

We spend 50% more on education than our peer countries, and our outcomes are worse.

We spend twice per person on healthcare as our peers, and our health outcomes are worse.

We cannot build anything (roads, houses, etc) at anywhere near the cost or quality of our peers.

We spend, in addition to our tax revenue, an additional 40% that we borrow, and we will soon be paying over half of our tax revenue just for the interest on our growing debt.

We are not pleasant to be around

We are fat, stupid, broke, and churlish. Not very good marriage material.

[no_wizard]

These are all issues with varying degrees of seemingly personal interjections or non related pieces of information that don’t address nor seemingly relate in any meaningful way about what I’m asking.

If I take this at face value, you believe the US education is failing only because Americans are fat, stupid, and broke and simultaneously spend too much on education for worse outcomes, which contradicts being broke.

Yet there could be no other, more specific reasons such as leveraging education and specifically school boards for partisan purposes? A practice of which that has only increased in frequency over the last 30 years?

[throwway120385]

They often pay teachers really well and they give them a lot of autonomy. In contrast, the US pays teachers really poorly and gives them little autonomy. They also give kids better food, better classrooms, more access to supplies, and more opportunities for enrichment so there is something to reach for.

So if you want to replicate the european system you have to treat education like it's more than just a daycare, and you have to make teaching a prestigious professional job instead of babysitting with math. And you have to pay for it.

[programjames]

I think the primary difference is other countries track their students. Not just in separate classrooms, not a self-selected honours programme, but actually different high schools for people who score higher on the entrance exams.

[noodlesUK]

There are different kinds of autonomy. In every European country I am familiar with there's a fairly rigid curriculum (national or otherwise) that needs to be followed, but there's often a lot of autonomy about how individual lessons are delivered. I think in the US, you might argue that the opposite situation exists.

[kkwteh]

What makes you think that other countries aren't seeing the same decline? In France, as far as I can tell, the situation is similar.

For instance, I've seen a lot of interviews like this https://youtu.be/7Pl4rvZ9amc?si=RMm8B1BmSSdNt0vq

My brother, who is a high school teacher in Canada tells me similar stories from his first-hand experience.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid

One could make the argument that they can't even do anything. They exist at this point mostly because if they didn't, we'd have packs of naked feral 10 year olds roaming the streets and butchering any human they found for cannibalism. Have you ever seen a reddit thread where someone randomly thanks the gods because the kids finally school age and they can stop spending $40,000/year (or more) on daycare?

But, I think, in the coming decades all these problems will evaporate like some nightmare that fades away upon waking... public schools will continue to close at ever-increasing rates as our population rapidly ages.

[milesrout]

If you ask peolle whether they're stressed of course they say they are. But they are objectively living in less stressful times than parents in the years in which young men were sent off to die in the trenches, but their younger siblings and young children still got better educations than kids are getting today. So maybe self-reported parental stress isn't actually the issue. Maybe we need to accept the issue is low standards at every level of education and teachers being unwilling to teach basic grammar, spelling, arithmetic, etc. because they are seen as "old fashioned"?

[toomuchtodo]

If the standards are high, and cohorts can't meet them because they are setup to fail, what will we do then? If we already don't have sufficient resources for folks to meet the bar at scale, there will be nothing for those who need help over the hurdle (remedial help), correct? It's not the fault of the fish when you ask it to climb a tree and it can't. Unreasonable expectations, and all that.

I am fairly confident nothing is going to change (we are not going to suddenly enable parents more time to be involved parents [1], fund K-12 at appropriate levels (federal gov destroying education funding systems [2], etc) and the winning move is to convince young people to not have kids versus telling parents and students they aren't trying hard enough while we give them scant resources and support, based on all available information. Shades of the US parent version of the Kobayashi Maru or War Games ("The only winning move is not to play.").

If you think the problem is teachers or parents in a vacuum, you have not consumed enough data. These are systems problems.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/worki...

[2] https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percentage-of-public-schoo...

[doright]

The people who lived through those times in the trenches tend to pass down their stress to their children if it's not adequately addressed first. Then they get told that because they have it better than their parents, their stress is irrelevant and they need to forge on regardless.

I think this is a multifaceted problem more complicated than just runaway stress, the state of education, or addictive technology. All of these systems feed back into each other to create a perfect storm.

[thefz]

> IMO, this is not the problem, but it’s definitely a problem. I think that we should, in fact, fail these kids. And if they repeatedly fail, they should be kicked out. I know that it’s politically untenable, but it also seems right.

This is an issue with nonpublic education, where there much economic incentive in keeping students in.