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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Admission to elite colleges is signaling, not about learning

By David McElroy · March 20, 2019

Apparently, I’m supposed to be outraged that rich celebrities have been buying admission to elite universities for their kids. Instead, I’m basically indifferent — not because I approve of cheating, but because nobody should be surprised.

Haven’t wealthy people always been able to buy their way into things which are “all about merit” — supposedly — for the rest of us? Are we supposed to be shocked that people with money and power (and entitlement) are capable of opening doors which are closed to the rest of us?

I suppose I would be upset if I had ever bought into two myths. But I’ve never believed the same rules apply to everyone in life. And I’ve never believed it really mattered where smart people are educated.

If you look at the “elite university experience” as an elaborate game similar to the Emperor’s New Clothes, it’s hard to be upset that people who see themselves as elites find ways to pay for the privilege of pretending they’re getting fitted for fine new clothes that the rest of us can’t have.

When I was in high school, I scored highly enough on the ACT — that’s similar to the SAT — that most of the Ivy League schools were sending me recruiting materials.

I was naive enough at the time to be impressed, but I never applied to any of those elite colleges. In fact, after the local newspaper offered me a job, I backed out of the scholarship I had to Samford University and went to the local junior college my freshman year. (Working seemed far more educational to me.) And then when my girlfriend decided she was going to the University of Alabama for our sophomore year, that sounded like a great idea to me and I moved to Tuscaloosa.

Economist Bryan Caplan has been arguing for years now that the entire idea of the education system is a fraud as it’s currently conceived. His provocative book on the subject — “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money: ” —  is one you ought to read if you care about the subject. (And Caplan is a university professor, so he’s arguing against his own self-interest.)

In a new article at the Chronicle of Higher Education, an education writer who debated Caplan last year on this subject admits that he’s spent the last year rethinking his assumptions — and he’s coming to accept that a college degree is about “signaling,” not about what people actually learn in their college programs.

In a paper from almost eight years ago, a couple of researchers discovered that if you controlled for factors such as high school GPA and college admission scores, it basically made no difference to go to an elite school, at least insofar as how much money someone later made. If someone with the same GPA and same ACT/SAT score went to a state school, he didn’t make less than someone who went to an elite school.

In dry academic language, the abstract of the paper says, “…[W]hen we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero.” [Emphasis mine.]

A college degree today tells you almost nothing about whether someone is qualified for a job, especially outside of technical fields such as engineering or medical studies. For most jobs, a degree simply tells you that a student has had the tenacity to navigate through the hoops of some university’s system and gotten a piece of paper.

But for the vast majority of people, the things they learn in their college programs mean nothing once they’ve started work. The degree is only a sorting mechanism — telling potential employers that these people can follow orders well enough to go through a bureaucratic process well enough to get a stamp of approval.

That doesn’t mean there can’t be any value to the college experience. Students can gain maturity away from home for the first time. They can learn to be responsible for themselves. There’s some value in going to a place where there are more smart people than there were in your high school and where people come from far broader backgrounds.

All of those things can be valuable. But if a university experience is supposed to provide someone with a preparation for life, the way we do college today is a pathetic solution. (For my non-U.S. friends, I’m using “college” and “university” synonymously, as tends to be the case here.)

So what’s the value of going to an elite university? Do those schools teach some secret knowledge which isn’t taught at the state universities which are reasonably selective? No, they don’t.

If you have a reputation that allows you to attract better students, your graduates are going to be smarter people. But is it because you made them smarter? Of course not. It’s because you started with smarter students and you didn’t make them dumber.

The biggest value of going to an elite university is the contacts you’ll make with other people from elite families. Those contacts will get you job offers and business opportunities that you might not get if you went to a state school. That doesn’t mean you’re getting a better education, though. It just means you’re buying your way into an elite social club.

The university system is a mess in this country. In certain fields — especially technical fields — there’s still a lot of great research that’s going on, but that has little to do with educating students.

If you want to be outraged about colleges, be outraged at how the system has been dumbed down. Be outraged that at major universities — including my own alma mater — athletes can be admitted and kept academically eligible for intensive programs which guide students who can’t even speak intelligently through a dumbed-down curriculum.

(That doesn’t mean that all athletes are inarticulate morons, of course. Quite a number are very smart and their colleges tend to celebrate them for their achievements. But athletes at any top athletic program are admitted using standards which wouldn’t fly for anyone who didn’t excel at their sport — especially those in the money-making sports.)

The elites who have been arrested and shamed for their cheating to get their kids into top schools certainly knew they were cheating. I don’t really have sympathy for them. I definitely don’t approve of what they did. I just view it more like the sort of cheating scandal that might go on surrounding some television game show.

These people are proving their morals and ethics are lousy, but it doesn’t surprise me or upset me any more than it would to find out that old ladies at the local country club are cheating at their bridge games.

Until the college system makes more sense for preparing students for the real world, I find it hard to care too much which rich people cheat their way into which schools. I feel sorry for them that they believe so much of life rides on such an expensive and ridiculous decision.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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