I Am Very Tall

From the WSJ, with some italics added by me:

That’s according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin who are studying people’s attitudes towards nanotechnology, an emerging scientific field that involves manipulating molecules and atoms. They found that just 29.5% of the 1,000-plus Americans surveyed said they thought nanotechnology research was morally acceptable.

Do these people even know what they're condemning?

Hopefully, the US will loosen up its H1-B policies so we can actually get a couple people with real educations into the country.

The NY Times has written more about the state of modern education in the US than any other paper that I know of. I thought I'd take a moment to look at some of the prevailing themes that I've observed. The first is that the US is facing an educational crisis. As reported here and here, an uncomfortable proportion of today's high school students simply are not ready for college. In fact, the latest article states that only a quarter of high school students that took a college preparatory course are actually ready for college work.

What does that mean exactly? The apparent bar is a prediction of whether or not "the students had a good chance of scoring C or better in introductory college courses, based on their test scores and the success rates of past test takers." As with all of these studies, I'd say there's probably a fair amount of subjective fudge room in there, but let's just assume for now that they did their homework and got it right.

The broader case is that there are even more students that did not take college prep classes that are going to be even less prepared. The number of the "less prepared" is fairly significant, with only 54% of the test's participants (ACT exam takers - who takes the ACT anyway?) having taken at least a core curriculum class.

The second theme that's been emerging is the increasing competitiveness of the Ivy Leagues. Anecdotally-driven articles (here and here) describe the lives and accomplishments of students dealing with increasing pressure to be perfectly rounded students. One Harvard interviewer made the following comparative comment:

"What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake.

At his age, when I got hungry, I made myself peanut butter and jam on white bread and got into Harvard.

Some take 10 AP courses and get top scores of 5 on all of them.

I took one AP course and scored 3."

The take-away from these anecdotes seem to be corroborated by the admissions data reported in yet another Times article, which shows acceptance rates at top schools moving down year over year. In fact, the spillover of qualified students is so large that admissions rates at second-tier colleges are now approaching those of the Ivy Leagues from a few years back.


Taken together, what does this say about the American educational system? We have an increasing proportions of high school students that are not ready to college at the same time as we have an increasing number of students that seem to be overqualified by yesterday's standards.

The decreasing proportion of college-ready students can be attributed to either a faltering educational system that has relaxed its standards or a more-inclusive system that is taking in larger numbers of socioeconomically disadvantaged students with less access to educational resources outside of school.

Increased admissions competition can be explained by factors that increase the number of applications, i.e. larger high school populations, higher percentages of students applying to college, and more applications per student (thanks technology!). But this doesn't completely explain why today's rejected applicants outshine the easily accepted from the 1970s. It's not as if there were golden children doing cancer research over the summer that just didn't think to apply to Harvard. Is it a cultural shift? Is it because of an increased number of educational resources outside of school (e.g. Internet, Princeton test prep, etc.)? Or is it a general barbelling of the American educational system, with the spoils increasingly going to those affluent enough to afford private school/residential neighborhoods with good public schools?

[Addendum: Freakonomics posted a cute link on this subject]

An editorial from the NYTimes tells me that today's kids are stupider than they were over a decade ago. Standardized testing apparently shows that only 35% of today's 12th graders are proficient at reading, 23% at math. I'm sure that these kids are proficient at a lot of other things that aren't being captured by these tests. But it doesn't matter! Because if you can't read or do math, then you're pretty much screwed going forward.

This actually has profound implications for our country. Supposing that future generations are all this stupid, than I'm going to have to seriously question their ability to accurately pick out a good Gubernatorial/Congressional/Presidential candidate. Instead, they're probably going to gravitate to the type of people that they would have picked to be high school class president. While those people were sometimes highly qualified, other times, they got the position just because they were popular.

Of course, this assumes that the current population is actually intelligent. Fox's new television show, "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" provides strong (if anecdotal) evidence to the contrary. The name of the show is actually a bit misleading - as far as I can tell, the (fake) 5th graders are actually on the same team as the contestant. That said, everything else is about what you'd expect. It's a trivia show where they ask you questions that you should have learned sometime in grade school (some of it in middle school, depending on your school board).

I will readily admit that the show is not as straightforward as it seems. A lot of it is trivia that doesn't necessarily carry forward, e.g. "What constellation is the Big Dipper in?," and "What is the largest species of bear?" But many of the other questions are incredibly easy. Such questions include, "How many E's are there in the phrase, 'Pledge of allegiance?'" and "What country has the longest border along the United States?" Sadly enough, the contestant answering the first question (who went to college and got a GPA of 3.3) required multiple hints from the host. The contestant answering the second question said, "Mexico" because she'd heard a lot about that border.

The cynical, asshole-ish part of me wants to be in the audience, so I can mercilessly heckle these people. At first, I thought that this was an incredibly petty/snotty thing to want. But then I realized that the "5th graders" were actually thinking the same thing. In fact, if you watch footage of them, they are frequently laughing at the contestants, or blatantly rolling their eyes at their blatant stupidity.

The part of me that's not an asshole just wants to get on the show, so I can win a million dollars.