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Who Gets to Graduate?

nytimes.com

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Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#51

Post by judk »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #46
reubenmorais wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her mom's doubt certainly makes things worse, but I think the mechanism in motion in this case is best described by Eric Raymond's "Curse of the Gifted" [0]. She's smart, intuitive, and hadn't had any trouble in academia before. When things get really complicated in college, everything collapses, and it takes a lot of effort and support to get back on your feet. Having college educated parents helps with the support…

Quick fact check: she's not smart. She's smart only in comparison to the rest of her high school, and the article points out she was admitted under UT's affirmative action program, wherein (for Austin) if you outperform 93% of your high school classmates, they let you in. But the article also points out that she scored the equivalent of a 1030 on the SAT. She's barely above average for the ACT-taking population of Te…

Define "smart".

The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers.

If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#52

Post by judk »

roymurdock wrote: post #23

Vanessa averaged A's in high school but tested a 22 on the ACT: she was the top of her class, but her class was very far behind the students in the rest of the country. Her high school was clearly ineffective and set her up for failure on her first test. Good for her for sticking with it and working through/around/with a terribly unequal system that disadvantaged her from the start. Perhaps instead of an SAT or an AC…

Your incorrect notion of public vs private is a major factor in the college-debt problem in the USA

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#53

Post by judk »

RegEx wrote: post #26
com2kid wrote: post #21

A lot of junior colleges offer more personal instructional programs and are geared more towards helping out first time students. The more interpersonal relationship between professors and students are community colleges seems like an overall better way to transition students from high school to university. Not to mention they are far more efficient to run! Surely one potential solution would be to remove the social s…

One thing I didn't realize until it was too late was that attending community college first forfeits an extremely large amount of potential scholarship money. Transfer scholarships pale in comparison to freshman 4-year scholarships.

That means you should apply for scholarships first yes, then go to CC if the financials don't come through.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#54

Post by brc »

cperciva wrote: post #27

The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, whil…

The most depressing thing for a parent to realise is that a lot of the factors that will determine whether or not their child is successful at attaining higher education are locked in place before the child is ever conceived.

That is - quite apart from genetic differences - your own education level, motivation, attitudes and various other influences are set by the time you become a parent. It's difficult and unlikely that you will change, and your child will begin to be influenced by their environment the moment they arrive. Probably your biggest choice of determinant is your partner, but even that is influenced by all the things already in place.

The only usable piece of information from these types of studies is that, if you didn't graduate, you're going to have to work very hard to assist your own children to graduate.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#55

Post by rlanday »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #45
nl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements: house them together, encourage them to form study groups, provide them with mentors and tutors, meet with them regularly to stress the importance of academic achievement, monitor their progress closely, involve them in research, take away their scholarships if they fail to make a "B" average, they will perfo…

> As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements Well, yes. So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance. Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable?…

It might be the case that the techniques, etc. being taught to failing students were already known to the not-failing ones, so in that case, there would be diminishing returns to having the students who were already doing better do the same things. It is an interesting question though: should we be more concerned with having everyone reach some uniform level of performance, or is it worth investing more resources in the “best and brightest” students, even though they’re already ahead of everyone else? I think it’s important for public schools at the K–12 level to provide resources for above-average students, which shouldn’t be that difficult except for political questions like how to motivate schools to focus on this, and how to justify spending resources on students who are already going to pass the standardized tests.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#56

Post by thaumasiotes »

judk wrote: post #51
thaumasiotes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick fact check: she's not smart. She's smart only in comparison to the rest of her high school, and the article points out she was admitted under UT's affirmative action program, wherein (for Austin) if you outperform 93% of your high school classmates, they let you in. But the article also points out that she scored the equivalent of a 1030 on the SAT. She's barely above average for the ACT-taking population of Te…

Define "smart". The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers. If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.

> The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers.

Not true, it's taken by a self-selecting minority of college-aspiring high schoolers. The SAT-taking population is far, far more representative than the ACT-taking population. In isolation, that actually makes an ACT percentile better than it would appear, but there are other effects around.

In 2005 22 was the 62nd percentile among ACT takers nationwide (21 was the 55th). Assuming ACT takers are mostly representative of the population, this girl is smarter than 55-62% of US high school students, roughly as smart as 0-7% of them, and dumber than the remaining 38%. For a college student, this is not an inspiring figure.

> If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.

No, the top 7% figure is for GPA. And you don't need to overcome anything to be at the top of a group that isn't competing for the position. For any group, there will always be a top 10%.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#57

Post by streptomycin »

judk wrote: post #51
thaumasiotes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick fact check: she's not smart. She's smart only in comparison to the rest of her high school, and the article points out she was admitted under UT's affirmative action program, wherein (for Austin) if you outperform 93% of your high school classmates, they let you in. But the article also points out that she scored the equivalent of a 1030 on the SAT. She's barely above average for the ACT-taking population of Te…

Define "smart". The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers. If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.

She's not "smart" relative to her classmates.

http://bealonghorn.utexas.edu/whyut/profile/scores

Average ACT is 28. 25th percentile is 25. She got a 22.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#58

Post by 3pt14159 »

incision wrote: post #14

For everyone who can't be bothered to read the article: 'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.' --- 'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 p…

IQ is correlated to wealth and IQ is hereditary, so it follows that children from wealthy parents would, on average, have higher IQ than their classmates.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#59

Post by thaumasiotes »

rlanday wrote: post #55
thaumasiotes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements Well, yes. So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance. Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable?…

It might be the case that the techniques, etc. being taught to failing students were already known to the not-failing ones, so in that case, there would be diminishing returns to having the students who were already doing better do the same things. It is an interesting question though: should we be more concerned with having everyone reach some uniform level of performance, or is it worth investing more resources in…

Again, I'm not suggesting we teach normal students to do things they already do. That would be stupid. I'm saying, what if we invested similar amounts of higher-level support? You can hold people's hands at all levels of achievement.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#60

Post by frozenport »

Speaks to the failure of affirmative action. She should not have gotten into this school, but instead went to an easier one where she would have passed the exam. Imagine how bad the second pick students are?
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