The 'Education' Mantra

"One of those words that many people seldom look behind is "education." But education can cover anything from courses on nuclear physics to courses on baton twirling.

Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of American education, whether in the schools or in the colleges and universities, is closer to the baton twirling end of the spectrum than toward the nuclear physics end. Even reputable colleges are increasingly teaching things that students should have learned in high school.

We don't have a backlog of serious students trying to take serious courses. If you look at the fields in which American students specialize in colleges and universities, those fields are heavily weighted toward the soft end of the spectrum.

When it comes to postgraduate study in tough fields like math and science, you often find foreign students at American universities receiving more of such degrees than do Americans."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... 09799.html

Everyone acts like getting a degree is the secret to success. Degrees in hard sciences probably are- a degree in Liberal Arts, Sociology or 14th century English Literature are not likely to land you a high paying position. Sometimes learning to wire or plumb a house makes more sense. Not everyone is cut out to be an oncologist or astrophysicist.

neptunechimney wrote: "One of those words that many people seldom look behind is "education." But education can cover anything from courses on nuclear physics to courses on baton twirling.

Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of American education, whether in the schools or in the colleges and universities, is closer to the baton twirling end of the spectrum than toward the nuclear physics end. Even reputable colleges are increasingly teaching things that students should have learned in high school.

We don't have a backlog of serious students trying to take serious courses. If you look at the fields in which American students specialize in colleges and universities, those fields are heavily weighted toward the soft end of the spectrum.

When it comes to postgraduate study in tough fields like math and science, you often find foreign students at American universities receiving more of such degrees than do Americans."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... 09799.html

But education is not just formal. Experiences are educational too. Yes, perhaps because there is more emphasis and value placed on formal education from the very beginning and less of a feeling of entitlement?

chickaree wrote: Everyone acts like getting a degree is the secret to success. Degrees in hard sciences probably are- a degree in Liberal Arts, Sociology or 14th century English Literature are not likely to land you a high paying position. Sometimes learning to wire or plumb a house makes more sense. Not everyone is cut out to be an oncologist or astrophysicist.

Amen to that. Our youngsters need less parental and society pressure to go to University. Unfortunately, it is no longer cool to be a cabinet maker, plumber, or welder. disciplines like those and countless others will continue to be in demand and as fewer and fewer take up the road to become skilled craftsmen, supply and demand will give them their proper reward. Those run of the mill LA degrees will become the skilled craftsman of today, with few finding good employment because there are so many of them.

I work in a college.

In my own opinion, somewhere between a quarter and a third of what we do is more fad driven than education-driven.
(Ward Churchill, to give an example)

I think some of the bigger problems are coming from the Social Sciences and Humanities. In these fields, professors are bored with the fundamentals (nobody wants to teach basic writing!). Shock fills the classroom faster than scholarship.

Here's the wild thing - pysical science is driven by the search for fundamentals. Arts, social science, and humanities are all doing their best to escape fundamentals.

I don't think the day is far away when students turn in papers using textiing language, instead of clear, articulate, prose.

Considering the high school dropout rate is 45% it is not surprising that the quality of education that the graduating 55% receive has slipped. The few that go to college would include quite a large percentage that would require remedial education.
But I cannot imagine that a kid would go after a science degree if he/she required remedial courses. Liberal arts, yes. Most likely a teaching degree or social studies.

I don't know where you are getting your statistics from, (since they are unsourced...but I can guess.)

Who Is Dropping Out?

Overall, far too many students are not graduating on time with a regular diploma; low-income and minority students fare the worst in the dropout epidemic.

Each year, approximately 1.2 million students fail to graduate from high school, more than half of whom are from minority groups.

Nationally, about 71 percent of ALL students graduate from high school on time with a regular diploma, but barely half of African American and Hispanic students earn diplomas with their peers. In many states the difference between white and minority graduation rates is stunning; in several cases there is a gap of as many as 40 or 50 percentage points. A sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old coming from the highest quartile of family income is about seven times as likely to have completed high school as a sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old coming from the lowest quartile.

www.all4ed.org/files/GraduationRates_FactSheet.pdf

As usual, your stats only tell half of the story...You have a 71% graduation rate OVERALL, but if you break it down to poor and minorities, then yes, it can be in the 45-50% range...

Source..........Denver Post for the last 10 years. This paper constantly repeats that the graduation rate is 45%
Don't you read the paper?

Perhaps that's the rate for DPS? CDE reports:

Using a new formula established by the U.S. Department of Education, data released today at http://bit.ly/i0SQfJ by the Colorado Department of Education sets the state’s “on-time” graduation rate for the Class of 2010 at 72.4 percent.[\quote]
http://www.cde.state.co.us/communicatio ... drate.html

major bean wrote: Source..........Denver Post for the last 10 years. This paper constantly repeats that the graduation rate is 45%
Don't you read the paper?

No, actually I don't read the Denver Post because I'm not in the Denver area all that often right now... Perhaps they are referring to the graduation rate in Denver? (as opposed to nationally?)