Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Why High School Rankings are Meaningless: article

In my experience...university liberal studies classes freshman year...2-3 exams, one or two papers depending on class. How you learned the material for the exams up to you. LOW volume...read, study how you see fit on your own time table.

High school AP class (in 1983)...many smaller assignments (in addition to reading and retaining the material out of the text book, we had assignments out of Annals of American History books to read and summarize and compare writings from there) and many tests but it took all year for me to learn how to write high quality essays on exams. But she did not require tons of outlining and note cards and assignments that I hear kids have to do today (high volume)...we were supposed to read and learn the material using whatever method we found helpful.

My math classes in high school and my math classes in college were very similar because someone clued me in to the fact that the evening class was more like a high school math class in that it had less than 30 students in it. The other sections of the class had giant lecture twice a week by the professor and then small group sessions run by a grad student and I know I wouldn't have liked that.

Only difference, college...he didn't collect homework but you were still expected to do it, high school they did. So same volume but no penalty for not doing homework. College grad student teaching me had an accent and was an extremely fast talker and I had to pay REALLY close attention because many of his words sounded very similar. Kept me on my toes.

Just started reading College (Un)Bound by Jeffrey Selingo, who is the editor at large at Chronicle of Higher Education.

He makes the point that there is a credentials race. The rankings are deceptive and a game to rack up money. Ch-ching.

Far worse, Selingo says that the lack of rigor at colleges and universities today affects everyone and that no one mentions what students actually learn. Gulp. Pretty damning. I knew it was bad since I used to teach as an adjunct at a community college and state college before I had ds7, but still I thought the swanky selective, prestigious schools had a different caliber of students than I did. Well, not necessarily, I'm sad to say. This is a bleak picture to be sure.

I haven't finished the book yet or even half of it, but I would recommend reading it to parents here. He book has three sections to it, including a section on the future. Selingo has spent more than 15 years at the Chronicle of Higher Education so I would say he's quite reputable and knows what he's talking about with higher education.

For those of us who went to school in the early 80s (or earlier), you might be in for an eye opener on the state of higher education today (or not).

Good advice, cdfox. Selingo makes some very good points.

Here's a nice National Law Journal about law school from a law professor, which is basically the college problem on steroids.

I was glad to hear that my cousin had just graduated from Penn State with $100,000 in loans. She may yet follow in her mother's footsteps and become a prison guard (union, of course).

What is occurring is that prospective students are now recognizing that we reached Peak (Private) Lawyer in 2004. This problem has not yet really become apparent to the average 17 or 18 year old prospective college student:

"With the decline in jobs in private practice, the average starting salaries for all law school graduates has declined from $85,000 (for the class of 2009) to $74,000 (for the class of 2011). The median salary now hovers even lower, at $60,000 per year. To further compound problems, the largest entering class on record — those students entering law school in the fall of 2010 — are graduating this spring and entering a highly saturated legal market. Only 55.7 percent of their immediate predecessors found full-time, long-term jobs as practicing lawyers.

The current situation is politically combustible. Despite average debt loads in excess of $100,000 per year, nine months after graduation approximately one-third of all law school graduates do not have full-time, long-term professional jobs — the minimum desired outcome of virtually every student who enters law school.
Arguably, law schools are the bleeding edge of the growing problems facing all four-year colleges and universities: ­growing tuition and debt loads in combination with flat or declining earning for graduates.

The six-figure debt loads of unemployed or underemployed law students make them the poster children for a system of higher education that is rapidly on its way to becoming unsustainable. Sallie Mae, the government -chartered lender for higher education, is having difficulties selling its bundled student loans to large institutional investors, prompting concerns that the federal government is financing a student loan bubble that is destined to burst."

http://m.law.com/module/alm/app/nlj.do#!/article/980887792

(Debt which can no longer be discharged by pretty much anything but... death. )


Figured I'd add that part, since it's a huge part of the overall picture at this point.

Well, yes, Howler Karma. Couldn't agree with you more. Selingo makes the argument too that the tuition and cost to attend college/university is a huge part of the overall picture. In fact, that comprises 1/3 of the book or more. Of course, the entire system is unsustainable as it currently is.

Selingo argues that colleges and universities are often fudging the financial aid part or engaging in deceptive practices to court students and bring money in. It's really appalling and scandalous.

Selingo also points out the findings from a groundbreaking study in the 2011 book, Academically Adrift, and how the lack of rigor at colleges and universities is essentially destroying higher education. Selingo writes, "this study found that students spent 12 hours a week studying on average....Most didn't take courses that required them to read more than forty pages a week or write more than twenty pages over the course of an entire semester," from in College (Un)Bound, page 26.

Geez, if this is the case, my ds7 spends more time and effort and produces more 'results' from unschooling/homeschooling than college students. At least with ds7 I can assess what he is actually learning and how. I have oversight. I fail to see how parents of college/university students pay such horrendous tuition bills without some kind of quality control.

Because college is about what amounts to paying union dues in this day and age.

The education happens on its own and is really irrelevant at this point in the ongoing decay of higher education.

I'd be very interested in hearing from other people about this idea.

I went to college in the mid-1980s. I attended a Seven Sister college.

Here's a sample of my workload:

• No multiple choice tests, ever.
• English or other humanities classes: anything 200-level or up required at least one 20-page paper as well as shorter papers. There was a lot of reading (hundreds to thousands of pages per semester).
• Even some mid-100 level classes had us reading thousands of pages per semester. The papers were shorter, though.
• Exams were essay based. You typically picked x out of n questions to answer.
• Science classes: all had a lab component.
• You had to write lab reports every week.
• Exams were problem-based (same for math classes), though some questions asked for the general idea about [insert topic].
• The college had an honor code, and from what I could tell, people took it pretty seriously. But maybe I was oblivious.

That's a broad overview that leaves out some areas, but gives the general idea.

For people who finished college before 1990, what kind of college did you attend (small college, CC, big uni, public/private, etc.) and was your experience like?

For people who finished college more recently, what was your academic experience like?

Val, I graduated from a school of a similar type to Seven Sisters in the '90s and that sounds about right, although I do remember multiple choice tests in intro psych and possibly the intro geology class I took (not coincidentally, I'm sure, these were also my biggest classes). Intro psych was too easy--one of just a couple of classes like that. The other that was too easy was intro to computers, which I shouldn't have taken, but took to get out of taking math (we had a quantitative skills requirement). My school had an honor code to the point where there were no proctors at any exam. I never observed a single violation--doesn't mean there weren't any, but I never saw it, and I never, ever heard anyone talk about breaking the code.

I could have spent more time on my work, but I spent a lot. I definitely had hundreds of pages to read a week, and some of it was horrifically dense literary theory and that sort of thing.

I do think the science majors were working harder than I was, though. But I read really fast, and writing papers is easy for me.