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Who Gets to Graduate?

nytimes.com

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Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#71

Post by bskap »

fd3r4dfresd wrote: post #65
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…

So we should expect that poor Asian kids in Alabama (where Asians are few) don't graduate, correct? Why is that not the case? http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/inte... Asians in Alabama graduate at higher rates than whites do.

1. That's high school. The article is talking about college.

2. I don't see that chart distinguishing anything by income level.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#72

Post by dwaltrip »

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?…

Well, the main goal was to increase graduation rates, so in that context, probably not (the advantaged students already had 90% graduation rates).

What definition of valuable were you thinking of?

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#73

Post by Tyr42 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #59
rlanday wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What kind of things do you have in mind?

Once you know how to study and want to learn, there's a whole internet full of knowledge. Before, things like access to a fancy library, or labs would definitely boost productivity for a successful student. At least for the more theoretical subjects, we have far more resources available to learn from than 100 years ago.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#74

Post by digita88 »

It's interesting because my younger brother and I fared very differently. He had a very low score after high school (I think it was the second lowest score one could get) and never graduated college (despite being accepted for an online degree which he then dropped out). I had a high score in high school, graduated from college (and picked up awards along the way), got accepted in two masters (one of which I dropped out to pursue another masters). We were two years apart and in fact my family gained more income by the time I started college. However I sympathise with this article because not only did I moved cities and am a minority but also because I too failed some subjects in my first year. All you need is perseverance and support.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#75

Post by ihnorton »

frozenport wrote: post #60

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?

From the article:

> It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating.

Selective colleges have the resources to give focused attention to people who can (demonstrably) do the work, but lack the necessary habits and structural support.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#76

Post by kenjackson »

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?…

Pretty much everything in college is geared to those students who aren't failing. What you're really asking is why do we help them at all and instead give even the last 1% of help to those for whom everything is already given?

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#77

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#78

Post by ForHackernews »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #3

further reading on getting dramatically underqualified students to graduate anyway: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?

That site looks like some really dubious ~~white supremacist~~ "race realist" propaganda page.

Some headlines from the homepage:

> Crime and the Hispanic Effect

> Diversity and Excellence: Are They Compatible?

> The Color of Death Row

> Affirmative Action: The Robin Hood Effect.

Edit, also: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classi...

"I had never before heard of La Griffe du Lion. His article was so full of egregiously bad methodology and other mistakes that I at first assumed it was a satire of racist pseudoscience, the sort of thing that might be written for the Annals of Improbable Research or (if you're Alan Sokal) Social Text."

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#79

Post by prostoalex »

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…

It might not be as much "rich vs poor" as "two income vs one income" households. The same New York Times published a pretty long article on this phenomenon in 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-...

In a nutshell, a two-parent family can better shuffle duties of picking up kids from school and practice, assisting with homework, and just be around to have conversations.

Re: Who Gets to Graduate?

#80

Post by prostoalex »

kosei wrote: post #32

Not to divert from the main point of the article, but this is frightening: More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary. It is astonishing that 2/5 of American students can be saddled with huge debts without h…

If you compensate schools for enrolling as many students as possible and don't penalize them for enrolling (and subsequently failing) unqualified candidates, schools will enroll as many students as possible and subsequently fail unqualified candidates after squeezing their LTV (lifetime customer value).

"According to USA Today, the University of Phoenix's Detroit campus has a graduation rate of only 10%, but a student loan default rate of 26.4%.[38] A 2010 report found that the University of Phoenix's online graduation rate was only 5 percent."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix

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