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review: Academically Adrift
Jun. 16th, 2011 11:01 amIf we're so smart, why aren't we rich?
The most obvious explanation is that American college graduates are not well educated: "from 1992 to 2003 the percentage of college graduates proficient by various literacy measures was relatively low, and by two of those three indicators competency declined (prose 40 to 33 percent; document, 37 to 25 percent; and quantitative, 31 percent at both time points)." How much would one expect an illiterate college graduate to be worth?
...full-time students don't spend very much time on academics when in college, down from 40 hours per week in the early 1960s to 27 hours per week today. Time studying fell from 25 hours/week in 1961 to 13 hours/week in 2003.
With ever more Americans going to college, why aren't incomes becoming more equal?
Much of the growth in statistical income inequality within the U.S. is attributable to three factors:
(1) we decided to give most of our new wealth to a handful of people on Wall Street,
(2) the SEC prevents public company shareholders from influencing top executive pay (instead determined by the CEO's golfing buddies on the board), and
(3) we decided to welcome a lot of poorly educated immigrants into the U.S.
How does learning vary across majors?
The authors of Academically Adrift quote Americans going back to the 19th Century saying that education will be the great equalizer for the children of the poor. ...this belief turns out to be false. The more educated the parents, the better the college student will do.... Students whose parents have a bachelor's degree will, at the end of two years of college, score only about as well as freshmen whose parents have a professional or graduate degree. Students whose parents never went to college will graduate with lower scores than freshmen whose parents are doctors. [[aphar: no wonder: given that intelligence is largely heritable, college has already done everything it could to equalize the population; statistically, kids of two doctors are smarter than kids of school dropouts]]
solution: go to online colleges
read the whole review
The most obvious explanation is that American college graduates are not well educated: "from 1992 to 2003 the percentage of college graduates proficient by various literacy measures was relatively low, and by two of those three indicators competency declined (prose 40 to 33 percent; document, 37 to 25 percent; and quantitative, 31 percent at both time points)." How much would one expect an illiterate college graduate to be worth?
...full-time students don't spend very much time on academics when in college, down from 40 hours per week in the early 1960s to 27 hours per week today. Time studying fell from 25 hours/week in 1961 to 13 hours/week in 2003.
With ever more Americans going to college, why aren't incomes becoming more equal?
Much of the growth in statistical income inequality within the U.S. is attributable to three factors:
(1) we decided to give most of our new wealth to a handful of people on Wall Street,
(2) the SEC prevents public company shareholders from influencing top executive pay (instead determined by the CEO's golfing buddies on the board), and
(3) we decided to welcome a lot of poorly educated immigrants into the U.S.
How does learning vary across majors?
The authors of Academically Adrift quote Americans going back to the 19th Century saying that education will be the great equalizer for the children of the poor. ...this belief turns out to be false. The more educated the parents, the better the college student will do.... Students whose parents have a bachelor's degree will, at the end of two years of college, score only about as well as freshmen whose parents have a professional or graduate degree. Students whose parents never went to college will graduate with lower scores than freshmen whose parents are doctors. [[aphar: no wonder: given that intelligence is largely heritable, college has already done everything it could to equalize the population; statistically, kids of two doctors are smarter than kids of school dropouts]]
solution: go to online colleges
read the whole review
