Earlier quoted context omitted.
30
Everyone’s situation is different. It can be done.
Yeah...
U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
321–330 of 506 posts
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one my age can afford a stay at home wife
Most of the stay at home spouses I know come from lower middle class households and they’ve made their lifestyle, living location, and other spending decisions fit their desired work arrangement. Even many of the construction contractors I’ve talked to recently (which is a decent number due to some remodel work) have stay at home wives. What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle and only hav…
> What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle
True, goes without saying. I see most of the time when lifestyle is not even considered making a choice but simply as "everyone does it".
I might turn into most odd person in some sense among friends, colleagues, family/ relatives because I just happen to say things explicitly which makes for weird conversation.
Everyone around me expects these between the lines.
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#323When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college, you can expect that they are going to throttle back once they're away from home with way more free time than is normal. From my kid's experience: she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice…
> When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college, My neighborhood and social circle have a number of high school age children, some aiming for high ranking universities. None of them have these grueling 15 hour day schedules you’re describing. I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM. What unive…
> I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.
Local high school runs 7:30 to 2:30. It's one of the better scoring high schools in the state, so we have some students who commute 45min-1hour to attend here (at least I had friends who did that when I went there).
When I was younger I lived in Albuquerque, and I believe that high school started at 7am, they had staggered start times of 9am for elementary, 8am for middle school, and 7am for high school.
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#324Fwiw, afaik in most Oxford and Cambridge degrees the only exams that count towards your grade are in the final year or the final two years. Everything before that is basically preparation, and the colleges doing weekly supervision and regular mock exams to keep tabs who is on track to pass and who needs extra attention. I've never heard there was a problem with a lack of rigor or recognition for the degrees awarded t…
I did my undergraduate degree at Oxford. My degree class was entirely determined by my performance on eight 3-hour exams in the final weeks of the final term. These covered topics studied in the final two years.
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#325Thinking more about this, I feel a good solution might be to let students decide whether they want to keep the first semester letter grades once they receive them, or simplify them down to a pass/no-pass.
That way there's still an incentive to do good work, and students who do well still get to receive the benefit of keeping the letter grade. Students who do poorly receive the letter grade as feedback, but have a one-off chance to reduce the impact and try again the next semester.
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
The University I went to has like an 80% acceptance rate so it's not comparable, but I was surprised when I got into 400-level CS classes and there were people who didn't know how to program at all. Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write a…
I went to a state school. The quality varied wildly depending on the department. It was very eye opening in the general English/writing classes when encountering people who couldn't read or write above a 4th grade level. The difference between they're, their, and there was like a riddle to some of them. Of course many didn't make it more than a semester or two. That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the…
> ... squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.
Propitiated, in many cases, by the unnoticed run-up of their student loan debt balance.
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
The University I went to has like an 80% acceptance rate so it's not comparable, but I was surprised when I got into 400-level CS classes and there were people who didn't know how to program at all. Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write a…
I went to a state school. The quality varied wildly depending on the department. It was very eye opening in the general English/writing classes when encountering people who couldn't read or write above a 4th grade level. The difference between they're, their, and there was like a riddle to some of them. Of course many didn't make it more than a semester or two. That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the…
> That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.
This seems most likely. If you think of college as yet another extractive business (and you can bet the administrators at colleges think this way), then students that drop out are simply cu$tomers you are failing to retain: Pure lost revenue.
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#328At MIT first semester grades for freshman have been pass/no-record for several years now
For 58 years now.
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you look at real wages vs cost of living and the trend line is down and showing no signs of ever going back up, the question will I be able to afford the resources to survive and have a family, will my kids be able to afford a home, that's the growing uncertainty.
This is widely believed, but not true: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N . There is a real issue that housing is unreasonably expensive in many areas, which we could fix via the innovative strategy of not making it illegal to build housing.
Now plot that wage plot against productivity, or corporate profit, or any US stock index, or as you said: housing costs. Real wages are not keeping up with anything. It's not just housing.
Re: U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
#330The University of Michigan has around a 15% acceptance rate. How is it possible that they’re letting in kids who aren’t ready to do college level work? What are they selecting for?
If you are an old like me, I don't think you can use current acceptance rates. They are artificially low compared to old rates because kids just send so many applications out now.
20 years ago UofM had a 50% acceptance rate, from some light google searching. Apparently they received 115k applications last year vs under 25k in 2005.
The biggest factor is that applying is a lot easier in the age of web applications, common application, and students being advised to send 10-15 applications out. In the 2000s even a good student might apply to 3-5 schools and feel they had covered enough.